Icy Tower was the first game I played that was built with the Allegro library.

At the time I didn't even know what allegro was(it was a good 4 or 5 years ago now). Someone was playing the game beside me in a computer lab and it looked fun so I downloaded it for myself. I remember being impressed with being to completely customize your character with your own graphics.

Fenix Blade is another game which seems very well done to me.

It's been said before but my 2 cents:

I think the reason that a lot of allegro games aren't very good or polished is simply because alot of allegro members are either coders, artists, or musicians. Seldom is someone more than one of those, and very rarely is someone all three. That being said a typical project will require some form of collaboration which does not seem to work so well for some reason.

Geez, that makes me feel old. I think mine was Mookie's Quest (at least, that was the game that made me google for Allegro, hitting the old depot and the announcement of the new depot here).

No I'm pretty sure the fault does not lie with allegro. I think the guys that make the crappy games wouldn't have made anything better no matter how good the tools were. They're just newbies, or as in the case of hacks they just don't give a * about quality as long as there's a working game. Like when I threw up Spheres of Doom in a nights hacking. That's a bloody crappy game but it works perfectly and fulfilled my vision for that particular project.

I can't find the site that got me started with Allegro. It was a Windows game which, I believe, was loosely-based on Herzog Zwei. For some reason I think it had something to do with apple, or mapple, or something odd like that.

Allegro isn't at fault here. It's the programmers. An inexperienced carpenter isn't going to make the best house in town, no matter what tools he has. It's called learning, everyone has to do it before they get good at something. And practice. Many Allegro users are beginners at programming, just learning how things work. They won't get it right on the first try. But it isn't Allegro's fault, Allegro has all the tools needed to make quality games. I'm certainly not going to sit here and blame the library because I haven't made anything that wasn't crap, I know it's because I'm still learning, not because my tools suck.

I basically don't release any of my work unless it could be mistaken for a commercial SNES game. Granted that's a rather nebulous qualification, but there are certain standards that while difficult to list on paper are nonetheless tangible while playing a 16 bit era game.

I find it neither realistic or reasonble to hold anyone other than myself to that standard, so that's how it goes. Not everyone worships the fat pixels like I do.

When I review an Allegro project I take the entire game's presentation into account and I expect there to be a level of professionalism in the game's actual design. I'm not looking for eye candy or trivial features that may look good as a bullet point yet fail to enhance the overall experience. There are some beautiful games here that I'd rate poorly because the games themselves play like ass; conversely there are some graphically modest games that have excellent gameplay, and I'm not adverse to handing out high marks under those circumstances. Occasionally there are projects that look wonderful and play just as well... those are rare indeed.