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How The Grinch Stole Veteran's Day / How The Grinch Stole The Japanese High School Cultural Festival's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Community Choice | #35 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
We all know the Grinch despises Christmas, and seems to like doing weird gas-based stuff (?) to terrify Whos on Halloween, but what about other holidays? HitlersaurusChrist's How The Grinch Stole Veteran's Day / How The Grinch Stole The Japanese High School Cultural Festival shows us yeah, he really ain't down for them either, having the player ruin each with a series of minigames.
There's some really nice Grinch visuals here, and they're a highlight of this entry. They're well rendered and seeing the Grinch in different situations or just looking smug as all heck is a great payoff. I also appreciate the vocals for the rhymes, but they're a little slow and drawn out which can make ya wanna skip through 'em.
I think there's some good gags + commentary being hit upon in the Veteran's Day portion, but the execution doesn't work very well for me. The intensity of the different minigames, culminating is straight up gunning down soldiers, feels over the top and sort of unpleasantly edgy. If the actions and anti-Whoinism were more wrapped up in Seussian whimsy it'd create a better satire and grounds for humor. By referencing American nationalism / issues so directly and bluntly instead of using more elaborate and silly stand-ins, it feels like a missed opportunity for cleverness. Geisel had some really strong (and straight up offensive!) political cartoons back in the day, so using those as a baseline to set tone would have been a great approach. I did like the cultural festival content a bit more conceptually, laughing at some nice jokes embedded in the dating game portion, but it was sadly unfinished and buggy in the judging build.
Another issue is that the minigames don't feel robust or engaging enough that I want to return to them and try for a higher score. For concepts like this, I feel like the ideal is for gameplay to be so engrossing that players sort of get carried along into horrible acts only to suddenly realize the nastiness, straight up atrocities they're committing. Being able to light yourself on fire and then burn the flags in the wheelchair minigame pushed in this direction, so seeing more opportunity for escalation within the minigames would have been great.
Probably my biggest complaint is... Where's Max?? There's so many primo gags ya could pull off with Max sort of half-heartedly helping the Grinch or just being along for the ride. The idea of Max handing the Grinch ammo / retrieving the fallen eagles Duck Hunt style with his big goofy grin in particular feels like a missed opportunity. He's a really nice offset for the Grinch's intensity and is sorely missed here!
Issues aside, I do think this hits an interesting space and would love to see da Grinch mess with more holidays. There's just something so satisfying about him spitefully ruining things people enjoy haha.
Elevator pitch
Two mediocre sequels to How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
Describe how your game adheres to the theme
Did anybody ask for a Grinch sequel? I sure didn’t.
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I played the fixed up version instead of the judge's build. The Veteran's Day game started off tame enough with a decent set-up and the disrespect the flag minigame but by the end it seemed pretty extreme. It's not that I think these are things that can't be joked about, it just felt that it was leaning more towards simple edginess rather than a set up and constructed joke. I think it may have been a better idea to have the Culture Festival just happen first because it's much less extreme in its humour. That way people would see more of the game and be perhaps eased into the Veteran's Day jokes which for some people are just not going to land. I found most of the game funny and enjoyable, but a couple minigames were too simple to be carried by the joke, like the concert part of the Culture Festival where it's just holding down one button with little else and two dissonant audio files playing together. The PUA conversation minigame was funny in the right way, being obviously stupid and making fun of it. The shooting game on the other hand doesn't really provide a punchline other than "you're shooting the troops" which is what I'm talking about in my earlier points. I really liked the drawings of the Grinch et al during the cutscenes as they were expressive and nicely stylized. It's always fun playing your games in these jams and I look forward to the next one.
To be honest I had horrible writer/designer’s block this year, so I’m really glad you enjoyed the writing despite the lack of gameplay.
In hindsight you’re definitely right about the shooting minigame. My original concept was “what’s the most anti-Veterans Day thing you could do?” In the original he straight up steals all the Whos’ presents and stuff, so I felt like I had to match that somehow. But I think I went a bit overboard with not enough payoff. I also had no idea how to wrap up the story, so having the Grinch not learn a lesson maybe sent the wrong kind of message.
When it comes to the culture fest, I also think it should have been first but I ended up not having enough of it done by the original deadline. Then when there was an extension I thought I could finish it the next day, but I spent too much time trying to make the concert minigame, which was going to be a rhythm game involving shouting insults and throwing garbage. I had no idea how to make a rhythm game in Fusion and wasted most of my time failing at it, so I cut it in the original build and took the lazy way out in the final build, opting to recycle a screaming “feature” that I’d used in an intentionally bad Sonic parody game.
As an aside, my original plan was to do a third “book” that was How the Grinch Stole the 2018 Awful Jam” featuring cameos from previous jam games but that didn’t get past the design stage.
Thanks a bunch for the feedback!
Reminder: A fixed, completed version of the game with fixed sound, complete narration and all the minigames is located here!
This was much more fun than it had any right to be! Clever, funny writing.
The games themselves were simple but mostly effective. The one I had the most issue with was the maid cafe one where it felt like the hit-box for giving people their not-orders was extremely fussy.
I was also terribly confused by the dress-up game as it didn't really feel like my input beyond giving the boy clothes did much of anything.
It's also a pity that the sounds weren't finished in time.
Thanks! Did you play the broken version or the full version? The version posted in the comments section has fixed sound, cutscenes, full narration, and the concert minigame.
The hit box on the maid cafe one is actually the speech bubbles, so as long as you overlap them it should work. In hindsight it was kind of a bad idea.
The different clothes in the dress up minigame just change the audience reactions a bit with the exception of the t-shirt which gives you extra points.
I played the judging build, if that helps.
Ah, dang. That ones broken. If you enjoyed it I recommend playing the full thing.
Very funny concept, with very funny art, but the meter of the poetry had me pulling my hair out
MAXIMUM DISRESPECT
Yeah... I started out writing everything in proper poetic meter but decided halfway through to make something that just sounded Seuss-y when read as narration. That was also before I realized I can’t imitate the Grinch narrator at all.
A fixed, completed version of the game with fixed sound, complete narration and all the minigames is located here!