zortharg's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Puzzle Freak]

Geez I HATE the "what's different about these 2 pictures". A LARGE portion of the left side of the image is CUT OUT of the right image! I kept clicking on stuff that wasn't there. You've got to show pictures that are at least the same size and are over the same area.

Why does my IQ keep LOWERING when I solve puzzles correctly? It did it 6 times in a row just now! It was up to 172 and then I got another of the spaceship puzzles like in the game orbox and I solved that very fast yet it lowered to 166. The dice game and the 4x3 memory test later, both of which I won, and it was down to 155. Then I won the tower of hanoi, and it lowered to 148, and then I won a maze level, and it was 146! Does the game maker actually know that higher is smarter? Or is it so stupidly designed that if I get an easy puzzle, it lowers the IQ even if I get it right. Would it raise my IQ if I got a "hard" puzzle and failed at it?

And a SWITCH? That's a WALL OUTLET. Geez, you need a better description than that anyway, a switch could be a pushbutton switch or a toggle switch or a slide switch or a dip switch or two dangling pieces of wire for crying out loud.

Of the puzzle games that aren't just NP complete crud:

How to win the tower of hanoi (the one with the donuts):

Label the pegs A B C. You want to move them from A to C. Start by moving the top donut from A to X. If there are an odd number of donuts, X=C. If even, X=B. Let Y=C if X=B, and Y=B if X=C. You put the next larger donut on Y. Then move the small donut on X to Y. Now there is a stack of 2 on Y and X is empty. Then you move the third largest donut from A to X. Then Y to A, then Y to X, then A to X. Now there is a stack of 3 on X and Y is empty. Then continue this; move A to Y, X to Y, X to A, Y to A, X to Y, A to X, A to Y, X to Y, which leaves 4 on Y and none on X. Every time you end up with a stack of size n on X with nothing on Y, or a stack of size n on Y with nothing on X, you move the next bigger donut from A to the empty peg, and then just perform the same series of actions to move the stack of size n on top of it to produce a stack of size n+1 that you used to produce the stack of size n. Naturally this is an exponential process, since it takes 2A+1 moves where A moves were needed to produce the stack of size n. Basically, whenever you want to move a stack from one peg to another, you look to see whether you want to move an odd number or an even number. If odd, you move the top one to the destination, if even, you start by moving it to the other one.

The stupid dogs (aka lights out. But with dogs):

Oh, you silly, silly game author. You made a lights out game on a n by n square where n is an even number. That's just sad. All you need to do is, start from row 2. Click the dogs which cause all the dogs on row 1 to be standing. In other words, just click the ones on row 2 which are adjacent to the ones which are sitting on row 1. Then go to row 3. Click on the ones adjacent to the ones which are sitting on row 2. Then click on the ones adjacent to the ones sitting on row 3. Done.

The water glasses:

The solution to this is to the Euclidean algorithm, what repeated subtraction to find a quotient is to long division:

Solution #1:

Step 1: Fill the middle glass with the big one.

Step 2: Pour the middle glass into the little one.

Step 3: If the the little glass is full, empty it into the big one and goto Step 2.

Step 4: If the big glass doesn't contain the desired partitioned amount of water, goto step 1.

Step 5: Pour the little glass if any into the middle one.

Solution #2 (the inverse of solution #1):

Perform solution 1, just switch every occurrence of "little" with "middle".

You eventually win. If the size of the middle and small glasses are relatively prime. If they aren't, there's no solution unless the small or medium glasses' capacities are equal to the volume of water you want (in which case it's a really easy problem).

It's Die Hard.... without a vengeance.

All these games, they either have design problems or they're classic problems that everyone already knows about or should know.

[Earth Prime]

A unique game. But it needs to have some black space ABOVE AND BELOW the Earth! Because plenty of times there would be an approaching UFO or asteroid and I never even had a chance to click on it until the last second since it wouldn't even be on the screen and of COURSE the impact point of the asteroid will just happen to be right as soon as it is on the bottom of the planet, a quarter of a second after it gets on the screen. It's frigging space. No up or down. They should be able to defend the poles as well as the equator! So it shouldn't be harder to defend up and down than left and right just because it's inconvenient for you to make a game with a 1x1 display aspect ratio.

Satyre responds:

Thanks for the feedback. I'll change the impact points or the aspect ratio in the next update, to let the player defend the planet better.

[TheCube]

A cute little game. But I don't think anyone is ever going to get the upper level achievements. My score was #1 in the top scores (so far - the thing is over 2 weeks old so it's not like this is the first day) and I only got to level 10 in that (and that was after beating my own score after already being #1 in the top scores), so what are the odds anyone is ever going to get to level 25? I can hardly imagine how dense the "kill" boxes will be by 20. Of course I could have gotten much farther if I hadn't been trying so hard to get the green boxes. About that too, giving 60 points for the green good boxes and no points for anything else except for a SLOW time-based count-up is no good. It basically makes getting the green boxes the single solitary objective, at the beginning of the game, even of higher priority than avoiding the red ones. I like the deal with the puzzle pieces. It makes it a tough decision whether to get the second piece and clear your damage or wait for one later when you're more damaged but still alive so that it clears more damage. Kind of like how I used to avoid getting all the health kits in doom because by golly, it's a waste if the +25 boxes give me anything less. So I'd run around with 30% health or something, just because if I accidentally ran over 2 of them they both would be fully utilized. But that's just the sort of fruitcake I am.

I don't know what the deal is with upgrading prestige is. Based on the medals, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was something that appears at level 10 and that it is the key to getting to higher levels (like 25) and I would have noticed it if I hadn't been constantly distracted with avoiding red boxes and getting green ones. But THEN on the main menu when I was NOT playing, the "speed level" box kept increasing from 3 to 4 to 5.... up to 10, and the + button did nothing until I got to 10, and then when I pressed the + button it set it back to 3. So I'm guessing it's probably NOT the key to getting to higher levels. It's just some fruity strange thing to let you set it back to a lower level in some sense after it decides you're really good? It's a mystery. According to the author comments, I just upgraded my prestige. Great. I'm prestigious. But the instructions need to SPECIFICALLY say what the properties of this are. What is significant about it? Is it significant that it set the max speed from 10 back to 3? Etcetera.

[Abduction]

I guess no matter how stupid a movie or a game or a story is, someone is going to steal it. At least the alien ship didn't turn into nyan cat at the end. It just was a waste of half an hour, over which you had to constantly move up and down manually because UNlike in coinbox hero there's no upgrade to have AI NPCs hit the target for you while you go get something to eat and finish the game for you. Oh no, you have to keep pressing up and down - and the target amount of 400k is outrageously much more than even the max value of the gems so that taking an absurd amount of time is inevitable. You just needed one fewer level of "power" and for the target to be 50k. Also, there is absolutely no point to upgrading grandpa, it doesn't matter how slowly he goes or what he's driving around if the gems fly around FOREVER and there is no limit to how many are on the screen, because they will eventually hit him unless you're actually near winning the game. Also the granny's stamina is hardly affected by the upgrades, in the sense that the maximum rate you can hit the ship hardly goes up a blip by upgrading all the way from the beginning to the end, but I guess the first few stamina upgrades are worth it.

[The Binary]

Argh! I don't have the patience for this. Although I'm impressed by how many choices you get and how the number of possible paths just blows up, it's annoying to restart the whole game with the same text over and over again and I just haven't developed the interest in the story to keep it up for long, it's annoying enough doing that when it's not a text based game but when I have to read a bunch of stuff to even determine for certain that I've gone and restarted the whole game from scratch, it's hard to tolerate.

You know what it should do? It should develop a graphical tree to show you what states of the game you have navigated to, and clicking on the nodes you have visited will bring up that particular state.

[Trollface Launch 2]

Don't you all get it? Of COURSE the super secret upgrade that you have to save up so long to get was going to be something meaningless! It's a TROLL game!

But that aside, though I am inclined to roll my eyes and say "I shouldn't be surprised" to see that the maker of trollface quest and pixel toilet/rocket toilet/rocket toilet 2 would combine them, it really is not as good as them. Pixel toilet, a virtual trip down the rabbit hole of magic mushrooms and rocket toilet 2, an excellent and funny time travel adventure, have an advantage over this aside from their sheer style: they can actually be WON! This CAN'T. You just buy all the upgrades and no pat on the back. No goal. You just keep going as long as you want with nothing special happening to denote the game has completed. And that's not in the spirit of trolling. That's just sloppy. But I can't justify giving it less than 4 because it's still pretty funny. Besides, I just gave something 2 that I really wish I had given 0 now (the stupid video about everyone's attributes being just like RPG games), so I gotta give this significantly more because it's still cool.

[Cat Astro Phi]

Hard to believe this game came from the same maker as "chickaboom". They have nothing to do with each other and this is so SO much better. But there's a mystery here, it says it was uploaded at the end of 2010 but I'm POSITIVE I played it in 2009! Because I know where I was when I played it, and I haven't lived there since August 2009. And this game really sticks in my mind, it made quite an impression on me. Are my wires crossed or was it existent somewhere else before being put on Newgrounds? Or maybe it was removed from Newgrounds and put back up? Or did my computer reach into the future and let me play a game that didn't exist yet?

Rotten cat, ha ha. Mine would never betray me like that. But then she never acted like a stereotypical cat in any way. NOT lazy, always running around the house at top speed so noisily she sounded like a hoofed animal, rather dependent, not just aware of other people's feelings but empathic to a possibly pathological extreme, and not even affected by catnip.

[:the game:]

Whew. That took a long time. Very intellectual. Especially liked the math and logic thrown in there like the iterated prisoner's dilemma (you should have said it was the iterated prisoner's dilemma and not the regular one or else I wouldn't have started with "rape"!) I wonder how this got 4th place daily but 5th place weekly. November 2, 2008 must have been a hell of a competitive day for flash games, 3 things considered better than this that day but only 1 over the rest of the whole week.

[MasterMind - NoF version]

In what sense is there a "progress to higher difficulty levels"? I am at level 23 and it stops getting any harder once it gets to 6 colors, it just stays at 6. It needs to announce I've won at some point or keep getting harder.

Darnit, you know what I'd like to see? A mastermind game where you can choose freely the number of colors to choose from (so not necessarily 6 or less than 6 but anything between 2 and 256 maybe!), and the length of the code (so not necessarily 4, but anything between 2 and 256 again), and the number of guesses. Or better yet, for it to actually estimate the number of guesses you should need to determine the combination given the number of colors and the length of the sequence, and actually give you recommendations on what would constitute an "easy", a "medium" and a "hard" game under those parameters. Now THAT would be something NEW. And it would not even make it harder to create! Except for the utility where it recommends numbers of guesses for different skill level, that's combinatorics and information theory and it's probably NP complete. But a game that just allows the user to set the parameters like that wouldn't be hard to make.

But hey, at least it doesn't have any horrible bugs like the last one I just played a few minutes ago. This, it works the way the parker brothers game works, it's just not very interesting or fun to play, especially what with the mistaken notion of what constitutes an easy and what constitutes a hard skill level.

Nope, I think the only reasonable mastermind game is the one on armorgames based on the mastermind animation - which amazingly enough seems to be designed for newgrounds but it's apparently not here any more. Weird. What's great about it is its atmosphere.

Ima let you in on a little secret though. If you give me 8 turns and 6 colors and a length-4 sequence, I will never lose. In fact I'll never lose if you give me 6. So an infinite number of levels with 8 turns each is not getting to a higher difficulty level. If I have time to think. I learned that on the armorgames one (only just learned this last week that mastermind is an actual board game, now it makes sense, that the maker of the mastermind videos would make a mastermind game, to make a pun out of it).

[mastermind v3]

Guess 1: blue blue red red. 1 correct color in right place.
Guess 2: blue green green red. 4 correct colors, 2 in wrong place.

Impossible. If the colors in guess 2 were correct, then there would have been 2 correct colors in guess 1.

At this point it's a crapshoot, since all 1296 combinations have already been eliminated.

Guess 3: green blue green red. 4 correct colors, all in wrong place. Ok. Can I at least assume the 2nd and 4th colors are green then?

Nope.

Guess 4: blue green red green. 4 correct colors, 3 in right place. At this point I'm guessing I can assume there are 2 greens, a single red and a single blue, but it's anyone's guess where they are.

Guess 5: red green blue green. 4 correct colors, 3 in right place. Should I even still be trying?

Guess 6: green green red green. 4 correct colors, 2 in wrong place. So much for being confident of it being 2 greens, a red and a blue.

Guess 7: blue green green green. 4 correct colors, 3 in right place.

Enough. Let's throw in 3 bs guesses for 8-10 and see what it claims the code was....

which is blue green blue green. It should have said 2 correct colors, 1 in wrong place straight from move 1. It should have said 3 correct colors, 1 in wrong place on move 2 instead of claiming all 4 colors were right. Amazingly enough, I had guesses where I had 2 out of 4 colors and it claimed all 4 were right, and there was guess 1 which was 2 out of 4 and it claimed there was only 1 correct, so it's not even just one single bug in the logic, it's at least 2.

Conclusion: Epic fail. The original definition of epic fail: screwing up something simple. This isn't a SMALL error. An occasional inconsistency that might actually add challenge to the game - which would be an interesting idea, a mastermind game where the one who chooses the code acts like a rotten child and lies a little bit here and error. But no, this is a huge whopping error or series of errors that totally ruins the foundational function of the game because calling something 4 out of 4 when it is 2 out of 4 means that the information it provides to the player hardly correlates at all. It might as well be just random guessing.