It seems to me, that, ever since I joined the community, the standard and the quality of games keeps on rising. Just take a look at Gunner 3, Triumph! War 2039, Eternal Daughter, Red Feud, Terminal Orbit. All these games have an extremely professional feel to them, and are also fun to play. But therein lies the problem. As a new, revolutionised game comes out, it sets the new standard, and seemingly any game which isn't as good will just not cut it any more.

This is the reason why newbies have such a hard time establishing themselves in the community. They may make fan games, or perfectly playable games, which just get deemed as "crap" because they have poorish graphics or use the standard Clickteam engine. Generally, it takes a new guy to the community a good year or so before he is accepted as "one of them". It took myself a little longer, because I had a bad attitude towards anyone who said my games were rubbish. Which, in effect, they were.

But now, times have changed. I know my own games aren't crap now, because I've picked up many things since joining the online world. I even know what a platform engine is! But we're heading off the beaten track a little here. The point is, graphics aren't everything. Hell, the engine isn't everything either, although customised ones hugely improve the gameplay experience. Red Feud, I'm talking about you. You little devil, you. Red Feud, in my opinion, is one of the most under-rated games in the community. It has lousy graphics, and when I first saw the screenshots of it, I thought "I bet this game will suck, I'll download it and laugh at it."

See, there, even I made the mistake of judging a game based on looks. It's stupid. I had never heard of Being The Game before either, but the general quality of it just shines. Then take Air Pop Neo. It had amazing graphics, but the gameplay was very lacklustre, very repetitive, very boring. I downloaded this the moment I heard Chris Och had released it, only to be sharply disappointed. Hype, it seems is nearly always a bad thing. And I was naive enough to believe the game would be really good.

The bottom line of this article, is "don't judge a book by its cover". Try out everything you see, you may be pleasantly surprised.