Honestly I expected this contest to be flop in the beginning, but now I'm speechless.
Heres my review on the entries:

Brain Crab
Very feature-rich mod, but its awfully hard to put it to good use due to its limited movement and fragility.
The whole unit would work better as a cannonfodder spider bot scout than a brain unit and instead of the field thing, it could work better with a small directed red laser gun.

Drop Crab
Large, impressive but clumsy in action. Fun to fly and crush stuff with, but something seems missing in it.
Probably an attack feature of some sort or better toughness and additional controls.

MC6A6
Really cool, I liked the effects and its functionality in beast mode. The crab part could have been better since the gun was horribly inaccurate and useless overall. Also whats with the angry readme file?

Teleporty
It was already released. But still its fun to use, but very overpowered. You can spawn a whole armed squad virtually anywhere in the scene.

Mobile Turret
This one had a nice feel to it and good effects. I liked this one, but the movement failed badly. It kept falling over and the jet was too weak and way too short for any good use, but the gun felt nice even though it was a modified annihiliator laser.

Nuka Drone
Pretty simple and generic, but it works great. This one has some nice effects.

Technologies
I liked the sprites on these, made them really stand out and they looked pretty good to me.
They functioned very well, but I never understood fully how the scout can carry stuff.
But still, thats one badass armored tanks mod.

Xenobiology
Very nice. Gets my vote, I absolutely love this mod and its effects. Even though all it does is make a scene populated with pretty flowers that shoot seeds that grow into more flowers, it actually gives a really nice feel in the game. The sprites are exceptionally wonderful too. Looks like violence is not the only way to win haha.

BOOMCrab
Not good.

Yeah. Not only is it already released, but it's premade. It has to be made FOR the contest, AFTER the contest starts.

Yea, sorry. No worries though, I'll just not count any votes for it.

My vote goes to dropcrab. The MC6AC crashes CC when I go to change.

If the Brain Crab could latch onto heads, and then jump to pop them off, it would be perfect.
Also, a little more durable would be better too.

Drop Crab was also cool. Didn't work as well as it should've (he could've used lua to clean up the walking).

The molecular thing was cool, but you couldn't change back, so all it did was lag if you didn't want to use it.

Nuke crab was good idea. Been done before, but well executed nonetheless.

Teleporty was really cool. Whatever about the not being a crab thing, it's still cool.

The plants were cool until the seeds they shot didn't make more.

Brain Crab was pretty meh. It's kinda cool but not an original idea and functions poorly.

Drop Crab is pretty nice and would really benefit from a better abductor, walking, and maybe a weapon of sorts. It's a neat idea, but too many issues to get my vote.

The Press C crab is pretty neat. The crab part does what it should and so does the glowy bit. Overall a good product but the crab part is pretty generic and the transformed state reminds me a lot of that thing in the Halloween Mod Contest (if functioning %1000 better).

All of the exploding crabs were pretty blah. Overdone idea with really really mediocre explosions.

Teleporty thing I've seen before and I don't know how it connects to crabs.

Pew pew annihilator crab was ok. If it was sprited better, moved more stabily, and wasn't so OP, I'd strongly consider voting for it.

The tank things were kinda blah. Really unstable and immensely ugly and nothing unique.

The plants were neat. Novel idea and ok functionality. They manage to reproduce somewhat adequately. If I knew the rules to it I think I'd like it more.

Plants get the vote anyways.

The 'BEAST' was noteworthy, though it wasn't really original.

Nuke crab was fun to use, but the explosion was underwhelming.

The plants, on the other hand, were interesting. Needs some improvements, but I like it. Got my vote.

Sigh. The poll has it's results visible. At least you can't change your choice, can you?


Teleporty could have well been egilible for the contest,
had it not been a lowly scummish attempt at scoring with a mod you just found lying on your HD.

The theme was ACrab, a crab class actor. Crabs are just the most usual type of ACrabs.


Generally speaking the entries werent very imaginative.
Maybe if ACrab was renamed to AQuadro (Actor with 4 limbs)...

The plant didn't actually do anything besides distracting the AI and taking an enormous amount of wounds.
Idontgetit.

Nuka drone was mostly cool except for the fireball spam.

M.C.6.A.C.K.G.H.E.H.BSDJNG suffered a bit from overhype, the blue thingy was crashy as hell.

Drop crab was pretty cool, but could've used some polish.

Brain crab would've been a lot more cooler if it had had custom legs/base.
It wasn't very convinient to test with the activities I use...

The rest was Meh.

Original theme was "non-standard size ACrab" that would have cut out a good deal of these...

Maybe I've misinterpeted the point of these contests, but the word "contets" kinda means figuring out the best, not getting truckloads of triviality. If you want to get good mods out of these, make them yourselves.

Still, a bunch of the entrants were good.

Thats kind of rude to say that when people are actually doing their best in the contests and you come in and say "pfft, crap stuff, you guys suck I'm awesome". If you're wondering about the quality of some entries, its reason is the limit of the involved modders skill combined with no real prize to fight for. Thats why its so light-minded and more directed with everyone having fun instead of a bloody battle of epic skills. Now don't be an ♥♥♥hole and appreciate the gems people made as they intended them.

In short: Prize and skill, insufficient.

Honestly, there are several good, fairly clever mods here that were made on a time-limit and with a constrained theme. ACrab was the theme, and all of these are ACrabs. The whole cleverness to this contest is that they don't all look like crabs. In short, you're wrong, and this is indeed a good 'contets'.

I've of the opinion that the contests generally tend to pump out sub-par work that is rarely touched on again, rather than well polished thought out and lasting mods that continue to see update.

Aside from the obvious time restrictions I think the reason behind this is due to the highly limiting themes.
ACrab may sound general but it's actually quite specific, not to mention the most buggy actor in the game.

Sometimes I wonder why there is a theme at all, and why not just have an open-ended contest to judge the best mod made within a certain period of time, be it an actor, gun, mission, etc. That in my opinion would let modders do what they want to do, and thus churn out better work vs. "Well how can I make a Crab cool?".

My two cents.

Also, my Zeppelin from MC:3 has not been touched since.

I don't disagree that they're of generally lower quality, but I don't think they're terrible. They're people's B-Side work, stuff they wouldn't ordinarily create but do so because there's a theme to focus them. It's not like a life or death contest, but it is fun, and I certainly think themes should be kept just for focus, like I said. Otherwise, what's to stop people from just releasing stuff they're been working on but hadn't released at the time? If nothing else, themes put everyone at the same entry point and make it about as fair as it can be with people of differing skill levels.

How about this:
theme: Anything

But really, you people are just horribly spoiled with all yer packs and collections. Back in the older days these mods would have been considered state-of-art collosal projects with a whole fan base supporting them afterwards. You spoiled brats can't appreciate stuff any more, period. Except for Djinn, he's cool.

Considering how the last few went I've sort of lost faith in state-of-the-art collosal projects backed by the entire fanbase community.
Especially as for some reason I don't even seem to be able to download the most recent ones any more.

The Xenobiology addon is definitely my favourite here.
I remember someone proposed a similar but much more abitious project a while ago with organic dropships depositing eggs that hatched into crabs which eventually matured into rockets and then dropships again (before the age of lua too), too bad nothing came out of it.

The original purpose of the contest was to energize the modding base and hopefully introduce and motivate up-and-coming modders to produce cool little mods to get them started.

The first, not sure if that ever happened, we're in the middle of a modding downturn (symptom of a larger forum downturn I think).
The second has definitely happened, I've seen several names in the past contests I've never heard of. True, not winning names, but participating. Participation is everything. Some of the newb participants have gone on to mod more and now have become decent, productive members of the community. Perhaps not the best modders, but certainly participating.

I think that's a success.