V. nice music

Wow, I just clicked the jar and it worked. Boggles the mind that it is java and just ran so easily. What framework did you use? Version of java?

Only non-compo framework is Swing, really. I made an (albeit not quite complete) emulation of two parts of the Sega Master System, the VDP (video) and the PSG (sound). Yes, I even implemented the I/O ports for each.

I *love* the music!

Nice implementation. I hope you create some more games using this "emulation framework".

It's a shame you didn't create a scenario where you actually had to use the enemies as weapons. As it is now it's not a very central part of the game mechanics :=)

The musics were awesome, and technically it is impressive (emulation ftw!)...
It ran a bit too fast on my system (not sure if that was meant), and I suck at platforming, but I got to the end of level 1...
The drawback is that the "enemies as weapons" isn't really part of the core gameplay mechanics...

Love the music. I thought the enemies were a bit too small compared to the size and speed of the player though. Would be nice if you had some control over where you threw the enemies.

It shouldn't run "too fast" on your system, it's supposed to run at 50 frames per second and there's something to scale it - however, if it goes faster than that, then please let me know.

Works fine for me by just running the jar. The ability to jump on and then throw enemies wasn't obvious to me for a while. Also, I don't like the fact that it's often impossible to see far enough ahead to know what's next; thus I had to make a few leap of faith jumps. Music and animation were fun.

The graphics, the sounds, it's like being hugged by wonderful childhood memories :')

As for the game, I thought picking up and throwing enemies was a fairly obvious solution to the theme, and I found it easier not to bother picking up enemies anyway.

The real star of the show is the Master System style though, and although that in itself doesn't really have much to do with the theme it is still pretty awesome. Mega kudos for that ;)

I quite liked the design of the initial level - I liked how spacious it felt.

The music was awesome! I left it running in the background for a while just to hear it playing :)

The level was fun, but I just jumped straight over enemies and didn't bother with killing them or throwing them. It was so uselessly uncontrollable that there didn't seem to be any point.

I'm impressed that you managed to write the emulator and still have time for a playable game afterwards.

Currently the site is a little buggered at the moment, so unless you happen to have an SSH account with them and are able to rip directly from my home directory, you'll probably want this mirror, generously donated by Grieve.

http://thegrieve.co.uk/headtrauma/

The music is truly wonderful =)
I liked the main character animations.
Nice that you used the compo to build an emulator thing. Was hoping to see more actual "game" here.

I'm rating you one in community since while you did have alot of posts, most of them were rants about how everything gamedev enviroment sucks.

Music volume is seriously too high.

It would have been nice to have some sort of checkpoint.

I don't know what goes into writing an emulator but I imagine that can't be easy under compo deadlines.. pretty bizarre thing to pull off. Dug the chiptune. Do you write other tunes too? What did you write that in?

As far as the game goes as others have noted there is little reason to try to throw enemies into others and the throwing arc is very hard to aim anyway. I mainly just avoided them all. The way the screen has a large border is a little strange too and often made me think there were no platforms in a particular direction only to discover them. The graphics were fun though. I liked how my torso wasn't connected to my feet.

Cool oldschool style. The music was great. As for the actual gameplay, I thought it was really hard to actually hit the enemies since the arc you throw them is so steeply upward, and it actually seems like it doesn't matter which way you're turned, the enemy will fly the same direction, which was weird. Probably just a bug though.

HybridMind: I used SchismTracker to write the tunes, and then converted them to .vgm using it2vgm.py (which was originally made for this competition tbqh but I think I have a version on my web space - a version should be available in the non-memoryimagesource jar file, as well as smspack.it, although the periodic noise is an octave too high).

If you have the normal .jar file you can take a peek at the source .it files, they're quite big uncompressed to work around a limitation in the .it format wrt "Amiga" slides.

And yes, I write other tunes, there's a stash of them in /~greaser/mods/ although I can't guarantee that I've moved all the other stuff out to the "others" dir or something. .it files are best played in SchismTracker, .xm files best played in XMPlay or MilkyTracker (if I have any in there), .mod files should also work in XMPlay or MilkyTracker, .s3m files should be fine in Schism although I have an s3m player coded in Python, .rad files are done in Reality ADlib Tracker (in DOSBox) and can be played with adplug, .a2m files are done in Adlib Tracker 2 (using FreeDOS) and will probably require that you emulate ADT2 in DOSBox or something like that (adplug only plays the older formats). .vgm files can be played with the in_vgm plugin for WinAMP, also Audio Overload does the format too, although if you're using a unixy system with OSS then /~greaser/stuff/vgmplay.py.txt could do, or maybe audacious (which i THINK uses VERY similar code to in_vgm).

Hopefully I didn't make a too large wall of text.