This is my winner's post for the "Review a Gaming dApp" contest that was run and completed last week by Hive account@oracle-d and Hive account@dapplovers (and Hive account@stateofthedapps). Due to a glitch in the Condesor front-end at Hive account@oracle-d... the date of the contest was extended, which meant that all the original review posts were past payout, meaning that upvote prize for winning would have to be placed on a separate winner's acceptance post instead.

For my entry into this contest, I had reviewed the CelerX/Ethereum based game Fish Jump. CelerX is one of a number sidechain solutions for the current scalability and transaction fee problems on Ethereum and especially how they impact upon gaming which is a model that requires multiple small transactions to be written to a blockchain. Needless to say, this is quite problematic and destructive from a user point of view, and the problem is only exacerbated during times of high network congestion when transaction fees (gas prices) are required to rise in order to be included in the next block of transactions.

During my time writing for Hive account@oracle-d, I've covered quite a number of dApps with various use cases... ranging from the DeFi (Decentralised Finance) space through to the gaming. As an avid nerd with a crazy interest in new use cases and new technologies... I've been interested in crypto and most importantly, it's potential to revolutionise or streamline existing real world systems. For me, these potential outcomes are the thing that is most important to me... the money and speculation is a distraction and a sideshow as far as I'm concerned. Writing these reviews for Hive account@oracle-d has made me focus and improve my review and technical writing, to the point where I feel confident in my technical writing and the ability to potentially pursue it as an alternative career choice!

During my time on Steem, I've done quite a bit of writing... rediscovering a skill and interest that I had long forgotten about. My day job as a violinist means that I'm rarely writing... mostly communicating via a much more abstract and ephemeral form of language!

Anyway, the process of writing a review for Hive account@oracle-d always begins with a perusal of the various dApps in the featured category. Most of the blockchains that are featured on Hive account@stateofthedapps are chains where I have an account with some value attached to... so, I won't have to do much in the way of filtering by blockchain... and the ones that I don't have an account presence... I can easily purchase some of the appropriate tokens with STEEM (via Bitcoin on Binance or Bittrex) to fund the production of a properly researched and experienced review.

Sometimes, I have the good fortune of having already experienced the particular dApp... in this case, Fish Jump was a game that I had played a good deal of during a stress testing of the CelerX ecosystem that was being run by Binance... I have to say, there were deep flaws in the economic system of the CelerX ecosystem.... such that I don't think that it has long term potential as a proper versus gaming platform... as a sidechain, it works decently well... but the game reward structure is not conducive to long term growth and user retention.

The actual game itself was pretty simple... nothing to write home about... it's not really something that I would recommend to others... the game is actually quite annoying after a short while... with only the prospect of winning some crypto being the only draw.... but as I have mentioned, I think that over the long-term... most players will end up losing crypto.

So, in the end... an average game on a decent platform with a flawed economic and user retention model. However, for me... the practice of using and experiencing a platform and dApp combined with the opportunity to write an in-depth review and hone my writing skills is the main thing that keeps drawing me back to participating in the dApp review contests by Hive account@oracle-d!

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