zortharg's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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 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.

[Pause Ahead]

Very nice. I really like it when there are games that truly are unique. I have seen SOMEthing like this somewhere before, where you pause the game and it's important to how it's played. Other than humbug 2. Something which was more similar to this. But I can't quite place it. Still, it's something pretty new, whereas there's a billion copies of other things out there. Like launch games, or shooters with upgrades you buy from the money you get from the monsters you kill, and it kinda makes me angry when something becomes popular on the coattails of something else, like Robot Unicorn Attack riding on the wake of Canabalt (which itself wasn't even an original concept, its greatness was all about atmosphere and that awesome music that complemented it so well) - so I wonder if a ripoff of this is inevitable now. Speaking of ripoffs, I see the logo for askiisoft looks suspiciously like the character in that tower of heaven game that was a less aesthetic knockoff of time fcuk so I suspect this very game maker isn't innocent of that himself. So few new ideas out there.

Wish it was longer though. And harder. But then I am a master at this sort of game; to me, calling it "hard" is overstating it a bit. It sure was a heck of a lot easier to do it in 0 deaths than "Give Up" was. And armorgames has a bug in its scores so that for some reason, the "0" turned into a "1" the next day! The world's hardest game on the other hand, is aptly named, I've never made it through that in any number of deaths, but some of done it in 0 somehow. Somehow I did it in significantly less time than anyone else (so far). Most likely because the game didn't really interest people so much that they invested a really big amount of time into optimizing everything. I made several mistakes after all, I know under 2:20 is possible if I hadn't messed some things up, and as much as I'd like to think I'm the best, of course I'm nowhere close. And it needs a way to generate your own levels maybe.

There ought to be a mute button. I like how the music is unlocked and you cal play it and even skip to different points in the songs. But there ought to be a way to turn off the sound. I like to play these games while listening to audio shows and the music is pretty decent, but fact is, if I want to hear what the people are saying, I gotta turn the sound off on the game.

VenomPhenix you just have to understand its modus operandi; the sequence of things you do to beat it. Know that, and it won't be a matter of how to beat it, it'll be how fast you can beat it (35 seconds is what I got but I know it can be less because I didn't light up the 3 statues in the first volley). First, you and your double must stand on the 2 censors - kinda like the things in the movies where you need 2 people to turn keys at the same time to launch nuclear missiles. Then you light up the 3 statues with fireballs that rain from above in triplets. Then you just survive. To do it in as little time as possible, what you do is you land on the left censor and you stand there for as long as possible until your double arrives. Then, you move to the right and get over to the right censor, pausing as little as possible (so that your double only just barely steps off the left censor right after you get to the right one). This is because pausing it makes your timer keep going but the boss sequence makes no progress; it takes a certain amount of time to complete and all you have to do is survive and pausing it only adds onto that time. Then the 3 stone statues each have to be hit by the fireballs from above. They come in 3s. With extremely judicious use of the pause, it is possible to get to each one fast enough so that you can get all 3 with the same volley but I never managed to do it, or at least I didn't want to risk messing up the 6 minutes (in real time) I invested in doing the game up to that point to try something so tricky, so I took care of the rightmost 2 statues in the first volley and then the left one with the first fireball of the next volley. Then the vertical columns of fire go to the right and the third one stops in the middle and turns around, and then they go to the left, and when it turns around, you're done. To minimize the time spent paused, only pause just for as narrow a window of time as possible as you pass through the fire as fast as you can go against it and then unpause.

He sure has a big mouth in the title screen. Oh well, nothing else to say.