zortharg's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[A Ghostly Journey]

It's too much. I'm tired of this game. It's the same thing over and over for too long. And I don't even know whether I'm doing what I should. The first time I played it, I saw I had the option to go in the Church and I did. I possessed priests and chained guys on the wall and got tired of the game eventually and quit. Then I came back. The second time, I didn't go in the Church, but instead I went into the portal outside it, and I went somewhere completely else and many, many levels later, I was not getting back to the Church, I didn't end up going in the Church at all. Should I have gone in the Church? I don't know. Other branching options occurred too. Was I supposed to choose one? I don't know. It's just too tedious. Back in the old days when the internet was not commercialized or even yet named the internet, and my video game experience was an atari 2600 or commodore 64, I would have killed for this game, but that's because the games back then were largely even more tedious. I don't like to do the same thing over and over again without any end in sight when it isn't something I like in the first place.

[Cyroad]

Ehh. A lot like "missile game 3D". If it took 20 frigging minutes for it to build up to a speed which is actually competitive. And was designed to give me motion sickness. Also, I hate hate hate how the whole background rotates counterclockwise when I go to the right and clockwise when I go to the left. If I want to be seasick, I'll jump off a building. Or try to sleep in a moving car. Or play indestructotank. But I don't want to be seasick, you see.

[Velocity Wings]

Well I'm bewildered at the origin of the exuberance toward flappy bird. Actually I never even heard of it until after the guy removed it. Not that I have ever used a smartphone anyway. After all, it's just another in a long chain of functionally identical games. Just like Canabalt. You run until you die. There's nothing new or innovational about it. And then a bunch of games like Robot Unicorn Attack became popular on the coattails of Canabalt. And Canabalt wasn't even the thing that originated the idea, virtually every one of the old atari 2600 games from 25 years earlier had the same theme, you play until you lose. Missile command. Centipede. Space Invaders. Yar's Revenge. Pretty much the only game where you DIDN'T play until you won was Adventure, and NOT following that theme was considered innovative then! Back then, it was exciting to play a game where you could actually win it, now there's a complete about-face. Canabalt now, that game isn't about the game itself, or the idea of running until you die. That game is all about style. Atmosphere. The end of the world/evacuate earth theme, with the awesome music. Flappy bird has none of that. No atmosphere. Did the flash version I played even have music? I don't even remember.

But that said, THIS game is actually pretty good, given the circumstances. As good as it could be. Procedurally generated from a small set of pending blocks of level maps. And it IS a little bit innovational, because your score isn't directly proportional to your distance, but rather the number of rings you collect. So there is a trade-off of taking risks for bigger performance despite not traveling a greater distance, it isn't merely surviving as long as possible with nothing else mattering. So certainly better than flappy bird the game itself, which I had the displeasure of playing on bored.com in flash form after I learned about the game's existence after it made news for being removed from the isomethingorother app store. I played that thing a few times and got to 14 pipes surpassed and said "ok, so I beat 10 now, that's good enough, been there, done that". This, I got 176 on my second try and though I'm not all that inclined to see what I can do with extensive practice, I can say it's a lot less annoying than flappy bird and it wouldn't be such a dreary prospect to play it for a while. A pity. Aren't I supposed to get an extra life when I get 100 rings? Ha ha. Only if the bird was actually sonic I guess. Oh no, I know what happened. Sonic had sex with the flappy bird. And THIS is the misbegotten offspring. Eww. Argh. Well, as we all know, Robotnik has a bird fetish, at least for chickens. And chicken eggs. Apparently. So on the plus side, he'd probably get along better with this thing than sonic.

I'm just surprised at how mediocre my performance is compared to the best. Generally I'm in the top 1% at least for games like this. I get 30k+ frequently in Canabalt, 40k+ is not impossible - I'd say my half-life is about 5000-6000 meters (so 1/2 the time I play the game, I get to 5000-6000 or more, 1/8 of the time I get to 15000-18000, 1/64 of the time I get to 25-30k), I'm on the top 5 of kawaiirun, I'm possibly the only one ever to win Give Up with 0 deaths, I'm flagrantly the top score in Pause Ahead as a 0-death speedrun, but it's hard for me to imagine getting a score in the THOUSANDS on this with any amount of practice. I wonder if there's a general strategy that some people have hit on which I'm not thinking of, which decreases the risk and makes playing for extended durations more sustainable.

I also like how the music isn't heavily reminiscent of sonic game music. What can I say, I lost interest in the whole franchise in 1995, I'm amazed it was continued on with so many later gaming generation games later, and anime series I'd never consider watching, so it's a good selling point with me to diverge from sonic in any way, while possibly mocking it a bit.

[DeathHouse]

At this point, I think pitergames is the best thing to happen to the internet since homestarrunner. And since we all know homestarrunner.com is why the internet was invented. Not the purpose in mind, but the ultimate goal of it. Sure, folk will tell you otherwise, but they're wrong. But back to pitergames. Nothing else is like his games. People will try to make pretentious artsy games and try to make themselves look like something special, but this is the only one who succeeds. Pixeltoilet and time toilet 2, and trollface quest (but not so much trollface quest 2) truly, truly stand out, but this is perhaps the best physics game ever. Plus I LOVE how he uses his trollface quest voice as the narrator in this too. It is kind of disappointing that there's no easter egg that comes about from killing all 215. See if you can get your total score over 400000 like me hoo hah.

[no-one has to die.]

The only thing that's actually great about this is the choice of music. Which is awesome and complements the topic well. All you people rating it up super-high are looking at it through rose-tinted glasses because you're drunk on the premise and that shields you from seeing how mediocre it is in every way, its writing, its execution, and the actual "puzzles" to solve.

So first of all, this "game" isn't actually much of a game. The "puzzles" to solve are trivial. Trivial even to a regular stupid person. They might as well not be there at all. It might as well be clicking on the different branches of the plot tree to see the different possibilities, without the bogus facade of interactivity there. Or maybe just a straight up video with nothing to click on. Providing very minimal interactivity I suppose simply distracts most people from seeing how sparse this thing is. As a game, it's trivial, and as a work of science fiction, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

Then it's frankly pretty predictable. As soon as Troy indicated he knew things that he couldn't know unless he not only killed the guards but set up an elaborate and contrived series of well planned deathtraps all through the building, knowing ahead of time everyone who would fall into it and where they would be, I suspected, and as soon as he said "you never believe me until it's too late", I knew, that it was a time travel story. And I was way ahead of the alternate universe explanation of the souls going away leaving the dead bodies behind when going back in time. The only thing I was wrong about was that I thought Troy would turn out to be "Visitor" back from the future. Though that guess was out the window when he said "I knew the security code because I heard you read it out" instead of "no sense lying any more now that it's just us 2 left now, I'm you from the future". That's the way I think it might have gone to be a marginal improvement. But no, instead I get some nonsense about disembodied consciousnesses being sent through time.

And about that. A "consciousness" is not some mind-body duality separate thing from the brain which is not a physical object, a brain's memories are a consequence of the actual arrangement of its actual physical atoms. There's no aetherlike soul substance to send back in time to transplant into an alternate universe version of the same body without sending the atoms, and if the abstract arrangement of the atoms was sent to the earlier atoms of the earlier brain without sending the atoms themselves, still, the memories being changed would still entail a change in physical objects. And as you live and breathe, the atoms in your brain are not just moved around but replaced by other atoms, and there will not be the same number exactly, or of the same type, so it wouldn't even be a matter of rearranging the atoms that are there to make it like the brain of the future version of the person. Bad science, not much of a game. Sorry. 2.5 stars.

To anyone who is reading this, you might look up the "quantum suicide" thought experiment. This inclines me to think of that. Basically it has nothing to do with quantum mechanics (or suicide, though it involves death) or quantum mysticism, it's the anthropic principle applied to your own consciousness. That's the only way I think something like this might be able to go to be something new and unexpected. Quantum suicide investing: be absolutely resolute to killing yourself if you lose your money. And you will always win. Heh heh. Other people will see you die, but you will always find yourself in a universe where all your bets win, and you will end up with all the money in the world. Now there's a strange and new plot idea.

I did "Troy end" first. I guess that probably makes me a psycho, to save the one claiming to be the killer by default.

[Peg Jumping Game]

Anyway. I was actually kind of looking for the peg game on a bigger board. This is coincidentally the same exact size and geometry of as in the currently most recent flash release of the prequel webcomic (http://www.prequeladventure.com/2014/03/aggy-extrapolate/). I came from there to here because I was actually thinking I'd find something else but nope, the same thing. Though I like how I can choose which peg to start missing at least, at least that's different. But really, it would be nice if you could also choose a board size or even geometry as well (you've got hexagonal geometry - perhaps other tessellations should be options). The solution I came up with is - well, in that you're constrained to have 11 be the one removed to start with - but you jump 2-7, 9-8, 4-3, 14-12, 5-9, 13-11, 6-10, 15-13, 12-8, 2-3, 10-7, 4-3, 1-2. That isn't the only way, there's symmetry left to right, and then the first 4-3 can also happen before 9-8 (do it on the 2nd move), or after 14-12, or after 5-9, you can put it off as long as right before 12-8 (do it on the 8th move). The 13-11 can also be done earlier, as early as the 3rd move, or the 4th, or the 5th or the 6th as it is. 7 viable choices for the first 4-3 and 4 for 13-11, but only 20, not quite 28 because 8 of them were counted twice, and then reflection symmetry. There are therefore at least 40 different ways to do it starting from peg 11 missing. It simply needs a bigger board. I wouldn't be able to examine it so exhaustively with my puny damaged mind if there was an option to play it on a bigger board.

FORTUNATELY, this one actually works. One of the peg game search results on newgrounds doesn't work at all. And it's fairly simple, and it does have ONE option, choosing the peg to start removed. That doesn't make it completely trivial to try all the possibilities of the game. But it'd be a lot cooler if you could change the size and geometry.

It's amazing, how atypical I am in terms of taste. I find these things that no one else has played or commented on in the better part of a decade. I would have thought there would be others like me but apparently not, everyone else just does what's popular at the moment, I'm the only renegade. It seems that way at least. August 26, 2006, the last comment. If I could go back to then.... wow. Well, why stop there, I'd pick 10 years before that if I had my choice of times to go back to and undo. Maybe a month before that. July of 1996. Yeah. Nothing that went really really wrong for me happened until after that. Anyway. First comment in a long long time. All I wanted to say there.

[PEG!]

A new variation, I'll give you that. At first I thought there was no solution, and then I discovered that you can jump the pegs adjacent OR diagonally. Which makes it have too MANY solutions, really. I have some criticism though:

1. The statistics at the top of the screen, the "wins=, game=, loses=" (and by the way, losses is spelled losses) do not work. It's just blank for me.

2. I don't like how it has to reload that obnoxious trumpeting intro every time you start a new game. It should be VERY fast to start a new game or reset the board.

3. The perspective is awkward. Showing the board at a weird isometric view to make it look 3 dimensional, and at an awkward angle, is bad enough, but since you can jump adjacently or diagonally, it only becomes more awkward.

4. You might as well allow the user to choose a board size. It would be as simple as entering in a number at the beginning of the game which could be changed whenever the board is reset. If you're going to make a simple game, you might as well throw in all the gimmicks you can, which wouldn't really make it that much harder to program. I suppose. 11 pegs, 13 slots, that's kind of small. But if I could change it, that would make there be more to the game. As it is, if I beat it once, I beat it a million times, since it's always the same and so simple I wouldn't forget what I did to win.

[Day X]

What are you talking about P2scount, it's totally obviously a ripoff of "Don't Look Back". The game play, the premise, the way you fight and the appearance of the enemies and the way they are animated, even exactly what happens, where you proceed forward, go fight a boss, and then backtrack, it is all exactly the same. The only difference is he turns into the devil at the end instead of turning out to be the ghost who's following himself after traveling back in time, or whatever that was supposed to be. This thing has no purpose for existing, it's redundant.

[Give Up]

You want to know about frustration? First note you can't submit your score on newgrounds, you have to play it on armorgames, you wouldn't even know there was a high score list if you stayed on newgrounds. But what's REALLY frustrating about it is that if you actually win it in 0 deaths, it CHANGES it to a 1! What a troll! I frigging EARNED that 0 death listing, and perhaps others listed as having played it in 0 deaths did as well, who knows which of them were 0 and which were really 1. It took me many hours coming up with reliable plans for each level and then to play it all the way through perfectly, and then I was DENIED my little trophy even though I did it! THAT is frustration.

Other than that, it's definitely Mr. Cooney's (jmtb02) best game in my opinion. I just played through it again right now, 6 months later and I actually died 17 times (and as I recall the first time I ever played it, it was 98), so it's not like riding a bicycle, a vague memory isn't good enough for perfection. Though it's nowhere near as hard as "the world's hardest game", that I've never finished at all, it's annoying because there are points where you have to perform repeated actions with perfect timing or restart the whole level and so while harder than this, I like the style of this.

[Escape Run]

I get to the end and a big screen comes up that says "error" in red, "unable to load high scores". No wonder there are no times in the high scores. But it took me 4 minutes and 47 seconds, if anyone cares. Any of you pathetic simpletons, who say it's impossible. So the controls suck. It's nothing I can't deal with, so when he's going down a hill it only SOMETIMES responds to pressing up by jumping, frigging deal with it, it doesn't make the game too hard to win in a small amount of time. The game sucks mind you and the high scores don't work, but don't you go and whine about it being too hard when I won it in under 5 minutes on my first try.