A perfect example of something where it's not as good as before when you add lots of features and complications. I sure hope if there's ever a canabalt 2, adamatomic doesn't do to it something like this. Also the controls are extremely nonresponsive. Damn, now I'm reminded of the first one. I got within just a few feet of getting first place on the high scores on armorgames, I was like 10 feet away, and never quite took first place. Meh, who cares.
But I like the remix of the time bandits music, from when god's big floating head is chasing them (in level 2, the one with the cave).
Yet another game which is basically isomorphic to flipping a coin and winning if it's heads, which exists solely not for its function as a game but as an excuse to gruesomely tear little animals limb from limb. Maybe if you could see the next 5 crocodiles, you could plan ahead when you'd get to the next one in order to set yourself up to be safe continually, but it's all rather like canabalt when it's being its most unfair, where you don't know whether the next gap is going to be short enough to jump if you hit the next box until you've already made your decision whether to hit the box, and then you hit the box and then sure enough, it's too far to jump, or other such things. Yay. I can guess!
Seriously though, think about the most successful continue-until-you-die type games. Canabalt, flappy bird, robot unicorn attack. Or the old games of that type from the early 80s and late 70s, space invaders, pac man, asteroids, missile command, etcetera. None of them are about showing blood and gore when you eventually lose. There are people for whom that's a plus to be sure, but it can't be a coincidence that none of the highly recognized successful ones are that way. Not that the rest of the game itself is any good, that's what you need to fix most.
Son of a BITCH! Extreme level 25 is hell itself. Shit just got REAL there! I wonder if that (or 26) is the last one. Because it seems to me that time time step between computer moves as the level went to 25 did not decrease geometrically, it's like it went from 1 second to 2/3 second to 1/3 second and so what would be next, 0 second? Would it simply complete every move possible until it decides it has no beneficial moves, all instantly, at level 26? I don't know. Because I can't frigging beat level 25! I'm almost inclined to wonder if there's a trick to provoking it into a position where it doesn't matter how fast it moves, it simply can't do anything and you can take your time taking its pieces. That's kind of halfway how I beat level 24. Levels before that I could move several times before it moved once so any strategy was not even an issue. Level 24, with this touchpad, the computer could move faster than I could, but I still won on the first try like all the others, though it wasn't quite so easy, I did it by getting one single king and coaxing it into positions where it was too scared to move any more and I could pick off the remaining ones with impunity. But level 25, I just had no control, it would move in on me so damn fast and I try to force it to do a jump which I then jump back but it would jump and move again before I could take the thing back.
Bar none the only reasonable checkers game on newgrounds. Mind you, I played it 4 times and it gave me no challenge on the highest level, and it REALLY isn't programmed with a satisfactory challenge on suicide ("giveaway" as you call it. I remember once I asked someone if they wanted to play suicide in a chess club and he said "sure, you first", ha ha), the thing there is, it's WAY better to have 2 pieces against 1. The AI simply tries to lose pieces at every opportunity, but it's not who loses the most pieces right away, it's who loses the last piece (or runs out of moves, but that never happens) who wins. And if you have more pieces, you have more power, even if what you use the power to do is to lose pieces. So with 2 pieces against 1, I can set it up so that I lose them both yet the one piece can't approach me. The game unfortunately is not programmed with this in mind, it simply forces you to take a piece whenever it can.
dylanoeo, you obviously don't know how to play checkers, don't complain about it playing by the rules, you dimwit. You might just as well complain when playing a chess program that it forces you to protect your king when you're in check, or that your pawns can't turn into kings when promoted at the last rank, or that they can't move backwards or diagonally when not taking a piece, or that they can't take pieces directly in front of them and not diagonal. Sigh, you left that comment around the time no time to explain first came out. No avail there.
Well. So I went to we-are-1.net and based on that and the content of the game, it looks like you went from being an atheist to someone who believes every crazy thing ever thought up, all at the same time. I suggest you watch some atheist experience shows, they're on youtube, though apparently you've watched qualiasoup videos already and that didn't get through to you, so maybe it's no use. Though I would take the atheist experience people with a grain of salt. They go too far with their skepticism on some fronts, dismissing certain things too quickly (like the guy at the end of the March 16 2014 show who wanted to talk about quantum suicide, something I think makes sense - I give it a good 20% chance of being the way things are) and defining things like belief and knowledge in too rigid terms and they tend to mindlessly fall for the "atheism+feminism" duo, rather than just "atheism", like a bad politician strapping on the laws he wants passing to the bill everyone else wants to pass. So they're not without their own brainwashing. But they will show you what exactly is wrong with certain types of thinking, like arguments from ignorance and confirmation bias. And Jeff Dee is the BOSS. He's the best. Just search "Jeff Dee tirade" or something to see some of his best stuff.
Surely that isn't The-Swain, the maker of mastermind, who did that part, surely it was this gregloire person.
I see you've been watching that movie "Strange Days". Yes, nothing gets by me. I was tipped off by the girl named "Faith" he is to meet. Ha ha, funny that it was set at the end of 1999. The amazing world of "tomorrow", where we have mind recording. But you're making the same mistake they did, setting the time to be so near in the future. 2018 and 2020 will come and go and no amazing mind recording technology will be anywhere on the horizon then any more than now. But of course, Faith represents the original meaning, doesn't she? Namely the enemy of "Stan". Really? Faith is the enemy of the devil? Ruh roh. Hopefully this game won't turn out as I suspect it might.... what's next going to be thrown at me, a pathetic disguised form of Pascal's Wager? We shall see. So far, reminiscent of those "choose your own path" books where you skip around based on choices you make. Starting with a nice quiz at the beginning. Which kind of reminds me of the standard Christian ruse to distract from their foundation of wanting to torture forever everyone who refuses to join their hate group; that any transgression, no matter how small, deserves eternal torture, while no matter, however large, is forgotten when using the get out of jail free card of joining their evil cult.
So I got ending #6. Went back and got #10. Yep. Paints a clear picture:
A fruity new-age reinterpretation of biblical crap. With the usual ideas steeped in ignorance that ancient people knew something that has since been lost, and weren't even more ignorant than now, and since the further back you look, the less you know about that era of history, the lack of knowledge on it bolsters that belief. But no. They knew less, all the way back to when they stopped living in trees.
Thank you for the bluntly honest review! I am always interested in discussing these matters as directly as possible. And more than anything, I believe that each person should search for the truth for themselves and always do their own thinking. So please just know that I am 100% in support of you seeking the truth for yourself and sharing it as you see it within this review. It does not bother me at all if we have some disagreements!
First, I just want to say that I actually saw the movie "Strange Days" for the first time about a week ago. So it did not in any way influence the writing of this story, but yeah, there are some really uncanny similarities! The anime "Gurren Lagann" has a lot of similarities too, and I only saw that right after I wrote this. Something similar happened with my last story -- people commented that it was like "The 13th Floor," which I also hadn't seen. But I will be the first to admit that absolutely nothing in this entire story is completely original. Every creative impulse has a source. Every idea has an outside inspiration. Also, yes, "this gregloire person" is responsible all viewpoints and creative impulses expressed within this game.
I will Google Jeff Dee and see what he has to say on these matters -- thanks for that lead! I consider it a big win for my own level of consciousness whenever I can disprove something that I currently believe, so trust me when I say that I appreciate listening to alternate points of view.
I am having a difficult time understanding some of your other criticisms. I understand your rejection of my current beliefs, but I'm having a hard time with understanding your objection to the message of this story, since I wrote it when I believed the same things that you do now. I certainly did not believe any "fruity New Age biblical crap" when I wrote this -- I just believed that religion was detrimental to our society, and I wanted to speak out against it.
I think you're maybe oversimplifying things a little too much when you say "Faith is the enemy of the devil." They're kind of friendly rivals in the story more than anything. They have a deal to stay out of each other's way (revealed if you snoop around at the bar), they exchange friendly words if you convince Faith to heal all the children in the hospital, Faith asks Stan for "family counseling advice" during one scene in the library, and Stan rescues you and Faith on the flying saucer if you agree to take Faith's psychedelics. They have opposing goals, but they're not openly at war with each other.
When I was writing this story, it was actually my intention that all of the characters are "evil" in their own ways, but they all have their own reasons, and nothing is ever black and white. This story was originally based on a novel, and in that novel, Faith's character was actually 3 different characters, and 2 of those characters were antagonists. So I definitely did not intend for her to be the good guy here. My greater intention was actually to show that she's holding back humanity. If you press the red button on the flying saucer and look for Angelo afterward, this is spelled out very bluntly -- Stan says that she jumped from the ship (a "leap of faith," you might say!), and she'll no longer be holding humanity back from exploring the universe by suppressing knowledge of the mathematical formulas for interstellar space travel.
So yes, "Faith" here does, in some ways, represent the lowercase-f "faith." But I did not intend for this to be a positive depiction of lowercase-f faith. Faith, after all, is the enemy of human culture in this story. Stan says that "faith is very dangerous" in the iDream retailer, and he tells Faith to "listen to reason for once" in the alien bar -- the dialogue in the story has a fair number of jabs against faith as a general psychological concept. My intention, also, was for Stan to not be black-and-white evil. Stan actually helps the children in the hospital, and he has only pure intentions for liberating the human race. When I wrote this story, I actually had a more positive view of Satanism than I did of Christianity, and I wanted to highlight the empowering elements that the devil represents ("Lucifer," after all, means "light bringer").
I am a little confused about the points you're making about Pascal's Wager. I HATE Pascal's Wager! I talk about how much I hate Pascal's Wager on we-are-1.net. And in this story, when you meet God (through the bar-snooping path, not the hospital path), and you tell him that you're religious, then you select the option for Pascal's Wager, this story has a tirade against how dumb that philosophy is. So I'm a little surprised that you interpreted this story as being in support of Pascal's Wager logic, if that's what you're saying.
I am also not sure what conclusions you are drawing from endings #6 and #10. What clear picture is being painted? I honestly don't see the connection between the content of those endings and the following paragraph of your review...
Please feel free to send me a private message over Newgrounds because I am legitimately interested in continuing this conversation and understanding the points you're making. And, again, please accept my sincere gratitude for sharing your views so bluntly and honestly. I hope that this is something you continue to do throughout your life! It's always important that beliefs are challenged (including mine!), and we really do need more people like you in the world.
What a hideous game. But I managed to suffer through the whole thing, music and all. But what if I don't want to survive the zombie apocalypse? What if I want to be one of the zombies?
Final score 301235, 225 clicks and 11 minutes and 15 seconds? What the hell, I know it took me longer than that. Must be one of those deals where it's not the ACTUAL time that passes but each second is like 2 or 3 seconds.
The only problem I have with it is that the one where you get them to dance because it's the 60s, that just seems a little bit too random and arbitrary to me, even for this. And I REALLY didn't get level 16, where you change the scoreboard to Canada winning.
Beautiful as always piter! If I hadn't just decided to give up deviantart because they tried to load a virus on my compute, I'd send a PM to the guy who made the original trollface image and tell him about your games. But someone else can do that, now that I have seeded the idea.
But now I'm going to have to look to see if I missed 2 of them, because I knew about trollface 1 and 2 of course, but suddenly it's 5? Unless you're counting stupidella and maybe another. OR you could be, oh, I don't know, TROLLING me by calling it trollface 5. I shall have to see if there was a 3 and a 4 now.
Eh. It was too much trouble and frankly not interesting enough to go back and shoot for other endings. Yes, I get it, it's all bickering between two beings, one who fancies himself the devil, one god, and they may actually be the same person, who's got a split personality Hitchcock psycho going on with himself. BUT to me, that's not really thought provoking. I like the terminatoresque music in the super-annoying level at least. I guess it goes to show, if someone's going to cause the end of civilization through a robot apocalypse, it's best not to let the person to do it be a bible thumper. Not that a bible thumper could bring about the end of civilization via a robot apocalypse, mind you.
What, ANOTHER one? Now don't get me wrong, I'm the one who flagrantly set the speed record in pause ahead, to an extreme that no one is EVER going to break, so this is coming from someone who could potentially have an appreciation for a game in this style, but it's still virtually identical to valley rule. I liked the part where you sleep in the different beds to go to the differently colored worlds though. That part was good and different. And at least the pools are black this time, having a girl jumping around, avoiding pools of white liquid is, er, how should I put this, interpretable in.... ways. Yeah. Sure are a lot of cat variations in your work though. First a cat man (with a hideous permanent wide open grin on his face), then a girl with cat ears, and then now a cat. How about a robot next time?
Boswell255 - how HARD is it for you to hit the "up" arrow key and dash up without accidentally hitting the left or right buttons. If you had trouble with that, I wonder what you thought of the square you had to collect after the corridor of spikes on the ceiling and floor.
HOW is this a new game? I played this game AGES ago. Maybe it was uploaded months earlier on armorgames?
But what a letdown anyway!
Seriously, you're NEVER going to top infectonator world dominator. Or even come close to it again. That game is the most epic waste of time OF all time (and I completely mean that in a good way). The premise was epic. The music was epic. And for some reason that goes really far in a game IMHO, there are certain games that would be good without their music, but the music really puts them over the edge. Other examples being Canabalt, Pixel Toilet, No One Has to Die (though it doesn't really count as a game) and the older PC games Doom/Doom 2(1993-4) and Ascendancy (1995). The music enhances the original drastically. And the dancing Michael Jackson triggering the 8 bit Thriller music, oh that was the coup de grace! I can only imagine that if Michael Jackson could be resurrected as a zombie, he wouldn't do the typical douchy rich snot thing and would not sue you over using his likeness, because it was just so goddamn AWESOME (and because he was the best zombie in the game). He would be PLEASED to be included in such a work. I might even say.... heh heh.... he'd be THRILLED. Get it? Yeah, I know, I suck. And of course the "news" function was a nice aesthetic touch. And making fun of corporate icons like ronald mcdonald and colonel sanders was also a nice touch. Friggin' mcdonalds, I hate you so hard. Anyway. Be PROUD you did all that. But make no mistake. You're not doing anything interesting by riding the coattails of your earlier masterpiece! It's not a fun game on its own accord, it's like a zillion things that came before it. It doesn't help it much to have a variation of that awesome music (ALL the music, not just the rendition of Thriller, was awesome) thrown in, that just looks CHEAP to me, it's just sad really. You know. Kind of like the Star Wars prequels and supposedly pending post-sequels which hopefully will never happen just like Ghostbusters 3 and The Last Starfighter 2. Is that what you want. To live up to the standards of George Effin' Lucas???? No I don't THINK so! So stop riding on variations of this same premise. It's tired, and it's insulting to your earlier great work of epic timewastingness. Be proud of what you've done, but don't milk it like this.
Wow, I put in the name "Dumface" and it totally pegged me based on it on the first try! That may not be much of an impressive feat though, it could just show a dumb looking face no matter what I type. But "Evilface" certainly matches too. "Zortharg" isn't too bad. Wow, either I've just gotten lucky here or it's some kind of impressive AI here to seed a face from text. I think I just got lucky. But if I gave the "fate machine" full 5 stars, despite later deciding it wasn't worthy of it, I ought to give this at least 4.5.
Kawairun 2 
Sleeping On Crocodiles 
3 in One Checkers 
God's Assassin 
ARSE Man 
Trollface Quest 5 
Perdition 
A Kitty Dream 
Infectonator : Hot Chase 
Facist!