zortharg's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Hyper Pixel Man]

Goddamn I can't handle #35. I know I have to get on TOP of the array of boxes to get to the right but I can't nearly manage it. How many of these damn levels are there? Well this is too hard for me. Way harder than "give up" for instance.

Pixelulsar responds:

You were so close! There are 36 levels so you only had 2 left.

[The Valley Rule]

Pause Ahead revisited, anyone. She's even got cat ears. Or really unkempt hat hair as bad as mine. I can't quite be sure. And the same sound effects, and same look, though different rules for special abilities. Which you acquire much like in Robot Wants Kitty. Did you have anything to do with Pause Ahead, or is that just a consequence of a rather standard way of generating a game, or maybe this is just deliberately an homage (which I'm inclined to think, because of the cat ears)? I had a hell of a time finding the 4th park bench to sit on. Or whatever those things are. They look like benches to me. But nope, the 4th one is DOWN, not UP. Not much for an ending though. Just giving your contact information? It needs some dramatic ending animation for crying out loud.

Raiyumi responds:

Pause Ahead is indeed an amazing game.

The girl has cat ears covered up with her hair (because I failed making cat ears).
But the guy who did the music/sound worked on Pause Ahead. :)

[Where's My Cat]

What a disgusting old woman. Always jibberjabbering that mouth when she's completely alone, you don't even bother with having a nose, and can't help but just in general going around being disgusting and looking like a caricature of some kind of ape or Gerald Ford but with more cellulite. And OH, the poor vampire. Oh Trevor! They got you! You just wanted to sleep with your arms around a kitty, you're not such a bad guy, but some horrible witch with no nose who looked like Gerald Ford had to come along and stake you. Oh, Trevor, we're gonna miss you. The good times we had together. Good times.

And that MUSIC! AURGHH!!!! HORRIBLE music! God damn this music will just follow me in my head now, won't it! Anyone playing this, you can't mute it from the main window, but when the game starts, click on the symbol of the wrench in the upper left and you can mute it. Naturally I can mute my whole computer but that's annoying to have to turn it back on later if I remember to do that.

[Canabalt]

It's all about the atmosphere. And the music. The dark, dark atmosphere. The end of the world. Why are exploding jet engines falling from the sky? Why are giant robots battling in the distance? Who were the engineers who designed all these collapsing buildings, and can they be sued? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? The world may never know.

One of the few games that can actually give me the shivers with the music, I'll say that, if you listen to it on the right speakers on the right computer. And if it's decently loud. Actually I can only think of one other game that can do that. Ascendancy. The music for the Minions. Though that one I guess beats this because this'll only do it if I have the external speakers connected and have the volume way up, whereas the Ascendancy Minions music once made me double over on soft volume. But I may have also been having a seizure at the same time, one can never be completely sure about these things.

I regret never successfully recording a game when I got to 40k+. The farthest I ever got with a screen recorder going was 35890 meters and that was only a horrible tiny little window that didn't capture the whole story. I got 39050 once with it going but it crashed. Too much RAM needed by it or something. I also took it as a challenge to make a shitty fanfiction. Which is up on deviantart, if anyone reading this is a glutton for punishment and hasn't been tortured enough lately. It's kind of, shall we say, hard, to come up with a backstory that isn't completely retarded for WHY this man is running indefinitely along rooftops during the apocalypse, or why he can run in excess of 100 miles per hour. Just clark kent on a morning jog to the daily planet, tee hee. But then the fall shouldn't kill him when he misses. He does kind of look like Clark Kent. The Michael Jackson rendition of Clark Kent, that is. It's too bad Michael Jackson is dead, Michael Jackson playing Clark Kent would be hilarious, I'd definitely go see that Superman movie, even if it was directed by Michael Bay, which any real Canabalt movie would inevitably have to be, especially with the giant robots in the background. Or I could get one of those camera hats, and make my own 1st person canabalt movie. That would be a hell of a suicide method, run and jump along rooftops until I fall and die. I bet it'd go viral. Too bad I'd not get to live to see the results.

[Cave of No Return]

What a cheesy version of the game! In the version I played before, which is an executable file I run on my computer and not a portal window in newgrounds, you LOSE IMMEDIATELY if you miss a jump. There's no stumbling and then recovering from it. I mean for crying out loud, you don't get any get out of jail free cards in any versions of canabalt. You screw up, and you DIE! No debating it! So I'm disappointed to see an alternate version of it here where that is the case. I wonder which was made first.

I even made a recording of me playing it, incidentally getting a score which you would almost certainly never, ever match even if you were to play this game continuously for the next 100 millennia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alETAUY6gt0

That there is the REAL version of the game. No second or third or 4th chances. You trip and you die.

Good music. Memorable at least. I'd have recognized it after any amount of time.

Also the controls are rather nonresponsive. I press up and there's a good chance it'll ignore me and I'll have to press up again, and same for pressing down. Ha ha, I only got a score of 18383 on my first try after not playing the game for a year and a half, shameful. I guess the nonresponsiveness probably had less of an effect than the cheesy lenient rules. Looking back over that youtube upload, I see now most of my personal high scores I see were in the upper 20k's in the original version but those were of course my best games and I tried for probably 100-200 games before I got past 30k and discovered there was no 5th background phase, just more of phase 4, on average I'd probably get 20-22k, but I would expect to lose pretty fast being out of practice now.

What the hell is this crap about me playing a little girl, it telling me I just got penetrated when I lost, and the game being rated "E" for everyone though? Do you even understand what ratings are for? That should get it at least a "T". I mean, I don't give a damn, I'm just saying, that's a creepy thing to say in general and it's not "E" material. Kind of like that video mocking ebaumsworld which ends with the screen shot of topless girls from some japanese porno game, being rated E as well. It just gives me a chuckle seeing the E rating.

[Vegeta's NOM NOM]

About as boring as the last game I reviewed, but in a completely different way. GOSH, I feel SO POWERFUL, hitting the space bar over and over again. I deliberately lost when I got over 100 lives. If it doesn't declare me having won after that, nothing will do it. It got pretty ridiculous there. Once you get to level 26, the consecutive balls are such a tiny amount displaced that they're just pretty much on top of each other, and it's REALLY noisy. As if the sound clips from the DUBBED anime droning on wasn't bad enough, it's hardly any better when it gets drowned out by more and more pervasive pac man sound effects. And you don't dare click on the SPEAKER volume setting in the lower right corner of the system tray to silence the madness, oh no, not unless you concede to losing the game. Which I was perfectly happy to do before long.

If you actually CARE, you can keep it going pretty damned easily just by hitting the spacebar with TWO DIFFERENT FINGERS so that you can just alternate between one and the other rather than hitting it intolerably indefinitely with one over and over again. Gosh, such an amazingly intellectual game strategy you need there, I should dye my hair blonde and fill it with hair gel for figuring it out.

[Pixelo]

Meh. The same exact kind of run-length-code based game as armor logic 2 again. Who cares about a redundant game. It has no purpose for existing. And what the HELL is with the sheer QUANTITY of levels? Do you think that's going to make up for QUALITY? And you have to solve SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO MANY easy levels before you can unlock the "medium" and even see what ONE of them looks like! I count 15 levels per screen and 11 pages. But the last page is missing 4 so it only contains 11. That's 161 levels. On the EASY level. Before one single "normal" is unlocked? I'm not going to directly say that it's less exciting than watching someone drool, but I would just as soon watch the movie Napoleon Dynamite all the way through and then count the total face value of a large stamp collection.

Also you should rename "flower" in "easy" as "anchor" because that's what it looks like, not a flower.

[Kitten Cannon!]

I vaguely recall playing this at some point. It's weird seeing the young people leaving comments below like "I can't believe this is 8 years old!" Yeah kiddies, take a look at today's date right now. Remember that date. Because there will come a day when you encounter someone who hasn't been born yet who will be cynical the current year was even a real year. There will come a day when some commercial product which doesn't even exist year, they will look at it and say "oh, I remember THAT, I used THAT when I was a REALLY little kid", or even "oh, I think I've heard of those, but I don't know what it's for, it was before my time, I can't believe the nonsense the old fogies had to put up with back in the olden days". Oh yeah, 2005, gosh that's SO LONG ago, I can see how you can look back at it with such NOSTALGIA for your CHILDHOOD days. You haven't any right to claim to not still be at most halfway out of childhood now if you were a child then.

ANYWAY, it's not really an impressive launch game. Since there is absolutely ZERO element of skill or strategy. I look at the "upgrade" type games with disdain (oh come on, you kill zombies in the middle of the desert with no one else around for a bagillion miles and somehow they drop money when they die, which you can use to "buy", oh, say, the ABILITY to reload your gun faster? Really? Who the hell sold you THAT?), but at least it isn't just stupidly pushing a button. What's next, a game where you just hit the button and it randomly either says "you win" or "you lose"? But I'll give it 3.5 stars just because there is another reason one might play it, which is just to virtually torture a small animal, and I guess that's interesting on its own accord to some people. No wait, screw that, after saying that, I've changed my mind, I'm going to give it 2 stars after all. That's being generous.

[Kill the Flea!]

Ok, I have to give it a 5 just because the comments below are nothing short of outrageous. The one right below actually comes to its defense and apparently is criticizing someone ELSE who claims it has excessive violence.... but goes on to give it 0 stars. The one below HIM says he won't grace it with criticism.... and doesn't even know how to spell criticism. Frankly this deserves 4 stars out of 5. But I've got to fight the damage of these idiots. Goddamnit why are you people so stupid? Were you born that way or was it an acquired talent?

It is what it is, it's not exciting, but it's basically "Where's Waldo" but with a flea, and it delivers all that it could have. But hey, it's a pre-9/11 flash game, there aren't even a lot of those, so it deserves a little leeway just for pioneering in the art. Plus it's POWDERED TOAST MAN! And if you ever watched Ren and Stimpy, you know, Powdered Toast just doesn't taste right unless Powdered Toast Man farts in the room before he leaves.