zortharg's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cat Fling]

High score 84625, getting into space and 6x each time with 44 rotations and 31000 score in the top throw, and at the end, the cat is the same amount of beaten up when I just set him down again all 3 times and scored only 75. I wonder if it's any different if you get to 100k.

When he's just sitting there on the hill, I don't WANT to throw him. All but one of the neighborhood cats around here, sure, they're a bunch of rotten cats that crap on my porch at 4 in the morning because they know I hate it, and keep a distance of 40 feet from anyone who tries to pet them (not that I WOULD want to at this point, but when I first moved here). I'd want to throw them. But this cat, with a "I'm a nice cat" look on his face, sitting on the hill, before you pick him up, I just want to scratch behind his ears darnit.

But it's not a real cat and for the purpose of the game, I might as well score as many points as possible.

If you don't have a stinking touchpad and tiny, tiny close together keys on a ridiculously tiny keyboard and a computer that you hate, the way I do, and actually have a decent amount of control over when your computer acknowledges when you let go of the mouse button, note that he loses rotational momentum whenever he gets to the left or right sides of the screen in flight. So to maximize rotations, let go when the velocity is purely vertical. Also, of course, moving UP as fast as possible. Maximizing the upward velocity of course increases the duration. And of course having a maximum ACCELERATION to the right at the moment of release (supposing you toss him clockwise - and I don't know if it's my bias, but it seems to work better that way), but also the VELOCITY to the right or left should be as close to 0 as possible.

Goddamn, why am I obsessing over details of optimization strategies for a game with such a detestable premise. By golly, it could at least have an animated opening sequence that starts with the introduction story that this cat shit all over your picnic, or snuck into your house while your garage was open and killed your own pet, or something. As it is, it's just attacking him for no reason. But of course it's not a real cat and it's not excessively gory about it and as others below have pointed out (unless I just didn't get a high enough score), it gives the concession to the overall vulgar premise of the game that it shows the cat at the end very much alive, just unhappy and moderately injured but not in a crippling way. I'm gonna pretend that a little girl THEN found him and dressed him up in miniature dresses and pushed him around in a little stroller and kept him close forever and ever and ever. Yay. Happy ending. And then when he gets old, she builds a robot body for him. But his cat brain interacts with the electronics in the robot body, turning him into a super-intelligence that assumes the role of a cat god who punishes cat throwers the world over by mutating their DNA and turning them into cats themselves. Gotta have a twilight zone ending there.

Well, it's a simple game. Not an amazingly great game, but there's nothing that earns a low rating from me like an overly complicated game that isn't amazingly great to make up for it.

[Run Red Run]

It's weird, these myplayyard games are like they're 90% weird cartoon, 10% game, and yet they're playable. Though not to as great an extent as "Mr. Fox", which looks friggin' like an actual felix the cat cartoon. You know, I think it's more fun a premise to make the big bad wolf into the good guy. It's not too far gone a cliche yet to visit old fairy tales - or old video games - and retell them from the other side. Having the 3 dragons from Adventure be the good guys, trying to stop the square from bringing the gold cup into the yellow castle, because it's some kind of doomsday device or something, now that would be a weird fanfiction.

I can't really get comfortable with these controls though. The gameplay is too frenetic and too much is going on for how little effect your actions as the player have on what's going on.

[Shape Shifter]

It's ok. Kinda if Dr. Seuss made an indy game. Seems more or less a clone of transmorpher though. Well, at least unlike that, I could stand to get all the way through this. Though there are some goofy bugs in it, as those below me have pointed out. You should get rid of the double and triple jumps altogether, it's too strong an advantage.

It reminds me of a mathematical problem I encountered once though. A witch has 3 machines, a rationalizer, which turns a rat into 3 dogs and a cat OR 3 dogs and a cat into a single rat, a categorizer, which turns a cat into 2 dogs and a rat OR 2 dogs and a rat into one cat, and a dogmatizer, which turns a dog into a cat and a rat OR 1 rat and 1 cat into 1 dog. The witch has a cat, as all proper witches do, but wants more cats without ending up with dogs or rats left over. Rats and dogs are unbecoming of witches. Is there any way to do it?

[Haunt the House]

Some of the achievements don't work. I certainly got all the lights swinging at once, and it didn't get me that. And based on the title "shoot for the moon", I'm guessing that's get rid of them without a single suicide, and I did that once, and it didn't work. I played this game last halloween and did it in less than 10 minutes but I hadn't generated this account with newgrounds at that time, I played it on armorgames. I wonder if I need to do it in under 10 minutes to get the secret achievement then. Pity, since I did that exactly already.

This game needs an update. There needs to be 1: a possibility of killing EVERYONE. There are certain individuals who are absolutely recalcitrant about surviving. You can chase them in maximum panic mode from the very top and they'll never jump - and after a point, they'll REFUSE to go up to the top floors in any case. 2. a possibility of possessing the PEOPLE. 3. SCARIER actions. Seriously. Not creative enough. I want to be able to possess a person and have him rip his own head off and for little hands to reach out his eye sockets and turn into little chainsaws or something. You know, something that really would scare the shit out of someone. 4. These people, they have very strange priorities about what they call scary. Seriously, bats coming out of the chest in the attic is terrifying level 3, and scare them super much, but the walking flying table with the animated walking legs is only level 2? What's wrong with these people? If I was in a room and the kitchen table started walking around like an animal and levitating, I would find that way scarier than bats coming out of a dusty old chest. God, and these people are often so oblivious, I'm like having a bottle of shampoo or something in the bathroom levitate right in front of this blasted kid's face, with the hand coming out of it over and over again, and he's just distantly staring forward with a dumb happy look on his face. Dum de dum, oh, nothing interesting in THIS direction, I think I'll turn around now.

ALSO people often commit suicide when there are NO WINDOWS. They just take a dive into the air in the middle of the BATHROOM and disappear. Also, I've seen them jump to their deaths when they weren't even at the maximum panic level - and also walk out of the front of the house when they weren't scared at ALL. Just casually walk away and the counter of the number of people goes down by 1. But it's such a good IDEA for a game. That's why it needs to be done better.

Also the music is great. Canabalt. No time to explain. And this. Among the best and best fitting Indy game music ever.

[Back in Time - Part 2]

Huh. I suspect the maker of this game wasn't really old enough in 1994 to really get it very well. For one thing, I don't think even in 1974 could you get a frozen yogurt with unlimited refills for a dollar. Actually I don't know if there was frozen yogurt available like that anywhere in 1974 so maybe not, but no way could have have got it for a buck. And 1 dollar coins in circulation? There was the susan b anthony dollar and the eisenhower dollar in the 70s and no one used either one really, and then I don't think until the sacagawea dollar which was like 2000 were there dollar coins again. Also how did he play the video game if he didn't have any money? And what was with those games. He should have been playing I don't know, mortal kombat 2 or something in any self respecting arcade. Friggin pac man, that's like 1982.

But it's ok. I'm not a fan of the animation. It's weird. Dat ending, heh heh. Friggin spice girls. No way they could take over the world in any alternate timeline. Maybe the beatles could have made a comeback, if you want a british band that not everyone hated, maybe that one. Except for Lennon who was long dead by then.

[ConcentricHolic]

I absolutely have no idea how to come up with a strategy to beat these puzzles. I eventually seem to be stumbling into solutions just by dumb random testing. The exact opposite to the type of puzzle I'd want to solve, which is comprehensible but not easy to stumble into a solution by dumb luck. But it's ok.

[Make Everyone Okay]

Huh. Base 3 lights out. I wonder why no one else ever thought of that before. Unfortunately that means that if you are wrong about the starting row, you're going to have 3^7 permutations to search through. That's a goddamn lot. And so I'm stuck on #9 now because I was wrong about the starting row. Which isn't quite 3^7, it's 3^4 because it's obviously symmetric. Still, that's 81 permutations. The "music" is annoying the hell out of me too now so bah.

0x6a61686e responds:

Holy hot damn, you got really into it. I hadn't considered the mechanics of the gameplay that deeply, it started as an experiment and evolved a bit from there.

I noticed a lot of similarities to a Rubik's cube, in that you're sometimes left with "incomplete" crosses by solving their neighbors in the wrong order. I stumbled across a couple "algorithms" yesterday for two incomplete cross shapes that basically amounted to adding the crosses you removed too early back for long enough to solve the incomplete shape.

Also, sorry about the music. It was done quickly after already posting as an update based on some feedback. Didn't put much time into the arrangement at all. :p

[Dog-B-Gone]

Well, it does what it does. For whatever use that is. Back in the day, I'd generate sounds of a given frequency using GWBASIC using the sound command, and it went up to 32767 Hz. But you can only get so much out of a computer's speaker. Which is why once I used a big 2 inch piezo disc designed for use as a high frequency transducer, with a high voltage signal generator I made to make a 23 kHz sine wave. It was loud enough that even I could hear it, at that frequency. I turned it on near a cat, which then hissed at me. But I don't really know how annoying it was, the cat hated me anyway so it might have hissed either way. As for the neighbor's dog when it starts abarkin' at 2 in the mornin', a bloody sound weapon is not good for long range, for that I need to shine a laser pointer in its eyes. To me now, this just reminds me of the damage I have received from being run over by a car, since my left ear is deaf, and constantly generating the phantom noise of nails on a chalkboard, and my right ear can easily hear 18 kHz, although it's almost swamped out by the phantom noise I'm hearing on the left.

You know, really, rather than a choice you pick from among 5 buttons, there should be a field where you just enter in the frequency in Hz. that you want. So if you want 20 kHz, you enter in 20000.

[The Towers of Annoy]

Supposing it starts at 300k and counts DOWN as seconds tick by which is how I suspect it scores it, that means that someone who got 295k supposedly beat it in 5 seconds. Which is BS. I'm borderline superhuman myself. no one can do it in 5 seconds. No one. So I'm confident the top 4 of the top scores are cheats of some sort. Though POSSIBLY it could be the result of a laggy computer, if it determines seconds by ticks in a counter in the game and not the cpu time or something. Maybe that's how they cheated, they set their system clocks right before doing the last move, or something like that. And then it suddenly drops down from 295k to 282k. I can believe that someone did it in 18 seconds if I did it in 24 (my score is 276k) after going at it for 10 minutes with this rotten computer (and I hate the controls, the ASD buttons, what the hell), so supposing that is the first REAL score and all the ones below that are REAL, then I just got 5th place. And first place, for so far in 2014. Yeah ok I can settle for that. If I made use of the fact that you can go from the right column to the left column by pressing right once instead of left twice, or from the left column to the right column by pressing left once instead of right twice, I could have shaved off a few more moments if I got myself into the habit of doing that instead of hitting the button twice to go the long way from one side to the other, and a few more milliseconds to seconds with some more practice, if I really tried.

I like the premise for the game. And the bullhorn as the starter sound, it's fitting.

[Towers of Saigon]

What the hell, there's no game here. I've pressed every key on the keyboard and clicked everywhere on the screen. The only thing that does anything is clicking "theta.freehostia.com" at the bottom and that puts "Welcome to the Theta Games Home Page" on the screen - no, not navigating to a new webpage via firefox, I'm still on the towers of saigon newgrounds page, this is still within the game window! And then the only thing is "puzzlescript" and then it tells me "PuzzleScript is an open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine. " and prompts me to make a game or do the first steps to making a game. STILL within the original game window. I try again to reload the whole page and once again I'm at the thing which only responds to going right back to the thing which now is looking like an integrated development environment. I have a suspicion that's not what I'm supposed to do. But it's the only thing that does ANYthing.

ThetaG responds:

Sorry you couldn't get the game to start - I just tested, and it worked for me. After clicking in the frame to give it focus, you can press X, Space, or Enter to start the game.