Matt McFarland  - Score: 3.00

HorizShootiz starts you off with some good music! But let’s talk about the game-play.  You shoot these blue balls with sticks coming out of them and sometimes you get power-ups.  They're kind of like an obstacle of some sort.  As you fly along, you run into these little red ships that jerk up and down and steadily move to the left, firing bullets at you.  You can pretty much destroy them and dodge the obstacles without a problem.  The pace in this game is rather slow, despite the entire goings on.  These yellow tank thingies also come in later, but they can't be destroyed.  When I reached the boss, I noticed when I hit it explosions would appear at it's Y coordinate, but at the X coordinate they would appear in the middle, this is probably because I upped the resolution to 1024x768 and I turned the shaders on.  The boss really was destroyed by me doing a blitzkrieg.  It shoots bullets straight up, and lasers too.  All ya gotta do is just absorb the hits and shoot it because it's hit points are low.  I beat the game at my first try, and I felt that the game was pretty buggy, and the level design was just thrown in there.

Neil Yates  - Score: 3.00

Fired up this game and my immediate thought was something along the lines of "this isn't anywhere near finished". What I mean by that is the creator managed to make most things work on a technical level, but then seemed to have not bothered with tweaking the game-play or fine tuning the graphics. The game basically plays like a brick with an annoyingly slow ship that fires bullets so weak that the only enemy you can really kill without maximum upgrades are the starting 'blue blob' enemies. The enemies have no special attack patterns apart from 'appear from front at random height' or 'appear from back at random height' which makes for a rather dull game. The level is way too long (a flaw of a lot of these entries in my eyes) and it takes forever to see a new kind of enemy. So basically you shoot the first kind of enemy, not really killing even 10% of them, repeat this over and over for about a decade and then you are 'rewarded' with a new kind of equally dull enemy, only this time your kill ratio drops by a factor of ten. The graphics in this game are quite bad, but I'm not really going to take them into account, even with the best graphics in the world this game couldn't get a better score (from me at least).

Sean Doherty  - Score: NA

I could not get this game to work…

Matt McFarland  - Score: 1.50

Treasure hunters is an underwater cartoony game.  I liked the fact that you could select a ship and it had different attributes and even a character behind it.  After the game starts however, is when it suffers.  Although the controls seem pretty solid, its the collision detection that threw me off.  Often times I wouldn’t be touching a fish but I certainly felt it.  Also, the final boss, a huge eel, just didn’t do it for me.  I didn’t find this game fun, and most of the time I just found myself bored picking off fish that fly at me.  I did think the puff-fish were pretty cute however.  But really, all it is, is shooting down an obstacle course.  They don’t shoot at you, and there is no dodging really even needed.  All you have to do is shoot them out of your way...

Neil Yates  - Score: 3.00

Treasure Hunters has some nice cartoony graphics and from the start it looked very promising and well polished. You have a choice of three characters each with different statistics. Unfortunately once you get into the actual game it rapidly goes down hill... actually it just walks off the edge of a 2000 ft cliff. It is then clear that the game is far from finished as there are no effects at all, when something is destroyed it just disappears, when you collect a coin it just disappears and when you die it just flicks instantly to a 'you lose' screen without any death scene. How hard would it have been to make a basic explosion? As well as that your main weapon is not only puny but incredibly slow firing which makes for a rather slow and boring experience. At least the background moves fast which I always feel is a good way to make a shmup more exciting. The enemies barely have any sort of special attacks to them and there is little variety to the levels. Overall this game could have been good if some of the time spent on the menu had been put into the actual game-play.

Sean Doherty  - Score: NA

The game will not start on my machine.

Matt McFarland  - Score: 2.00

This game you play the roll as a butterfly who means BUSINESS!!! You're shooting down some bouncy frogs, avoiding turrets because they cant be destroyed, and destroying huge bees that rapidly shoot bullets at you.  This game is awful.  I didn’t like the DEBUG display in the upper left corner (lets see, polys, um distance, etc?) Well - that would have been OKAY, but the game-play is where we suffer the most.  Your bullets go through everything, hold the CTRL key to fly really, really fast.  Also, the enemies disappear sometimes, not sure why.  You can beat the game by a step by step process. Meaning, you go to a section and there is a turret, then there is a weird looking huge frog that just jumps up and down repeatedly.  Stay still and shoot it and bam its gone (no explosion, it just vanishes!) then you end up running into giant bees that fire fast bullets and its almost impossible to dodge them.  Your best bet is to just wait for them to appear on the right, and shoot them down before they even see you.  Then this boss, a HUUUGE mosquito that shoots very fast bullets right at you constantly is what this all builds up to.  I just felt like this game was an entire rush job, and I also felt like it was very, very buggy...

Neil Yates  - Score: NA

Got a nastly looking error message on startup.

Sean Doherty  - Score: 2.00

I had some trouble getting the game to run.  However, adding a new DirectX 9 DLL to the game director I was able to play the game.  Basically, you play the role of a Butterfly that shoots and dodges as you try to progress though the level.  On my machine, the game has not very bright and I had a lot of trouble actually seeing what I was doing and whom I was fighting.  On the bright side, the level "background" graphics for this game are really level done.   Also, there were no issues with the sound and the music seemed to fit in with the level.  However, the game play wasn't really something that I enjoyed.  Maybe if the game wasn't so dark on my machine I would have felt a bit more positive?  Overall, the graphics have some potential but I would probably try to alter the game play to make it more fun.