zortharg's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[You Deserve a Princess]

I found the gameplay tiresome and I've lost interest. Normally I wouldn't even bother to log in to leave a review for such a thing but the reviewer below me said such a dumbass thing that I had to. Here I thought I was about as anti-feminist as they get, I think those who call themselves feminists are just bigoted man-haters if they're women and brainwashed brainless drooling buffoons if they're men, but WTF! DragonZander.... the goddamn knight busts into her lab while she's performing scientific experiments of some sort (hats off to her for apparently being interested in science despite ostensibly living in the dark ages by the way), living on her own, and demands that she drop what she's doing and immediately fall into his arms and become his property, and then tries to kill her when she refuses to drop what she's doing and comply with his outrageous out of the blue orders. Is YOUR idea of what she's supposed to do in that situation that she should yell out "praise Jesus, I will now do what my gender is supposed to, and I await being swept off my feet, take me mister knight who I've never met before, TAKE ME and bang me hard and keep me barefoot and pregnant until I am old and ugly at which point you can find yourself a younger, prettier princess!" It's not about whether a woman can do anything a man can do, it's about whether she should be his goddamn slave.

So if you like the game, fine, but don't construe it to be some anti-male oppressive propaganda vector, you piece of crap. Well, to be fair, I didn't play it that far because I DIDN'T like the game, I climbed some walls with her chain and navigated around a while and found the necessary actions to proceed to be too persnickety for my taste and quit with never getting to a boss or anything, and for all I know, some dialogue later comes which I too would find objectionable, so maybe I should insert my foot into my mouth, but all the same just from what you said, I can tell you're definitely too far on the opposite extreme. Actually for the record I'm not even sure I'd agree with the things you said to try to save face and look politically correct. They shouldn't be equal in the workforce. Especially for manual labor intensive jobs, or jobs where taking a 9-month leave of absence would cost the company greatly - and in that case they should be allowed to sign a contract in exchange for no wage disparity, agreeing to not reproduce. So even in the things you said to save face, you botched it.

[ultimate flash sonic]

What's the POINT? Yes, a lot like the original game. Almost creepy it is so much like it. But that's not a good thing. It's played too damn straight. Such a HUGE amount of effort obviously went into this. And for what? To make something which if not identical to a good half dozen games made 10 years earlier, have incidental differences. Imagine if I wasted 5000 hours designing a digital wristwatch. There are only a bajillion digital wristwatches already out there, so who cares if someone makes another one. Better to design, oh, I don't know... well, if I knew that I'd be rich :). But if you spend I don't know how long, a year, making something like this, you are suppressing your creativity to make a clone of something else. Supposing you have creativity to suppress.

The motion and bouncing dynamics are a little different from the games from Sega, but who cares, really. I stopped playing sonic the hedgehog back when Doom came out, because it was a better game. (and not many people play doom any more either. It was superceeded by Duke Nukem, Quake, Halflife, Halo, etc.) Why go to such trouble to make a game which is barely anything other than a duplication of something that wasn't really all that cool to begin with? At least make a shitty, simple game that's ORIGINAL rather than an overly complicated one that's nothing new. It's kind of like the mentality behind a painting that's indistinguishable from a photograph, of a subject that actually exists and would easy to take a picture of. Might as well just take a photograph. Might as well play a sega genesis game from 1993ish. And I'm not going back to that.

[Stock Market Trader]

Take a look at the image links. No one can predict random numbers like I can, wouldn't you say? I managed to more than quintuple the capital as it was falling to less than half its starting value, with selling short not even a choice!

http://s2.postimg.org/c8prrpct5/stock_1.png
http://postimg.org/image/9emme9amt/

http://s27.postimg.org/7aiz0lern/stock_2.png
http://postimg.org/image/imvkidngf/

http://s30.postimg.org/d9dbo4vhd/stock_3.png
http://postimg.org/image/7xyf3f9el/

http://s12.postimg.org/wyewd107h/stock_4.png
http://postimg.org/image/855ccdh6x/

Or should I say, no one can predict the future like me, when it doesn't matter. Or maybe I can in any case, I'm just subconsciously a glutton for punishment. The last time I touched the real stock market, I lost 20% of my money in less than 10 minutes. Pretty impressive, wouldn't you say? USUALLY you have to at least wait until the next DAY or at least a WHILE later to manage that level of loss. But nope. It only took me 7 minutes.

Improvements for the game:

1. make selling short a possibility. And buying on margin for that matter. I know why you didn't. You didn't want to add the complication into the game of having margin calls.
2. options. Make options available. Now THAT would be fun. Call and put options. I can help you with the mathematics of it if you want.
3. make it more obvious that it's a random walk. The idiots below me commenting think it's important that more than 1 stock be available, because they don't understand what this program is doing. Throw the stupid people a bone. Also please make sure that the mathematics are done correctly. It needs to be a true random walk on a logarithmic scale. That means, if the price is 1.00, the next price a few milliseconds later should be determined by a random number with a mean of 1.00. I suggest price one timestep forward into the future is (current price)*(1-x+2*x*rand), where x is a parameter of your choice that determines the volatility, and rand is a random number generated uniform over the interval of 0 to 1. That way there won't be any way to beat the market on average. Perhaps that is what you do already. I'm suspicious that you do. But if it isn't, that's how it should be.
4. Go ahead and make more than 1 stock available maybe. It would make the display more complicated. But just to show these people that it doesn't actually make any difference. If they're smart enough to eventually get that lesson. Program various correlations between the stocks, and make the correlation matrix subject to change.
5. Put in "news releases" to accompany the changes in price. Let the "fundamentals" traders think there's something to be told from the talking heads, which make up the explanations to fit the data after the fact. You know, if by chance the stocks take a dive, a newswire will appear at the bottom of the screen that says something like "breaking news: stocks dive on bad economic report from China" or if just one takes a dive, "breaking news: XYZ corporation faces costly litigation after...." and then the explanation could be that their drug fails FDA checking if they're a pharmaceutical company, or that someone found a finger in their burgers if they're a fast food company, or that they got ahold of insider trading if they're an investment firm, or whatever, or "XYZ corporation share price down on sales less than expected". And similar stories if it's up. But make it look like something that's relevant to the future, even though it's really just a reaction to what happened already.
6. Allow limit orders. And possibly stop orders. Don't just have a big green buy button and a red sell button.
7. Allow the volatility to change. For there to be periods where it goes up and down faster. Or slower. Or not at all, when the market is closed. But not too long with that. That would be just a psychological element, it wouldn't add any utility to the simulation.
8. A pause button. Time to enter in specific orders based on the current state of things without it constantly changing super-fast.
9. Spreads and commissions. A difference between "bid" and "ask". And you also lose 5 dollars per trade. Just to make it REALLY a losing proposition. And the spread (difference between bid and ask) should be especially large with the options, if you have them.

I love the choice of music. It's PERFECT. And yes, the game is almost perfect, despite your claims to the contrary. The only one like it I've found. And it's much how I envisioned I would make it. Which is a good sign for it, ha ha.

[Batty]

Bugs in the "upgrades": the one that slows down the ball should NOT be able to be nested. I got that upgrade and it slowed it down, and great, that makes it easier. But then I got another one and that made it INTOLERABLY slow. The one that makes the paddle wider sometimes also PARALYZES the paddle! I couldn't move! If this isn't intentional, fix it. If this is intentional, then get better taste, but it sucks.

Also I'd get rid of the gravity term. I notice a small downward acceleration. Just make the ball go in a straight line, and reflect off of surfaces with the usual angle of incidence=angle of reflection rules. Don't put gravity in it.

[Asteroids]

Huh. There are 3 ways in which the - atari 2600 version - is superior.

1. When your ship is destroyed, in the original, it waits until the respawn area (the center of the screen for me, since I would never move) is CLEAR with a MARGIN OF SAFETY before respawning your ship. This, however, makes your ship come back a fraction of a second after it is destroyed, whether it is safe or not. The purpose of this is so that you aren't put in a completely undefensible position right from the respawn and therefore get forced into losing multiple lives just because there was nothing you could do. In short, the next life shouldn't start out completely doomed in the first moment. In THIS version however, you pay this necessity no regard.

2. I prefer the original in that you shoot the big hulks of asteroids and then they break into smaller ones, generally 2, and then you shoot them and they break into smaller ones still. In this version, they just break from 1 hulk into 4 little ones apparently without exception.

3. There were multiple "skill level" settings in the original. It would allow you to fine tune the rules of the game, so that if you break up the big asteroids, the smaller pieces may continue largely in the same direction, or may completely start up with crazy trajectories. That was the most important option. It would make it so that there was strategy involved, you don't just shoot anything, you take out the big rocks and then you take out the little ones because they'll be going in crazy and dangerous trajectories, and try to not hit any other big rocks until you've taken care of all the pieces. Shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot. 5 shots, to take one out from the big to the tiniest. It would be a precision test for me, seeing how perfectly I could let off 5 shots in rapid succession and take out a big rock from start to finish. The specific rules I recall were that there can be 2 active bullets - that is, you can shoot again as long as 0 or 1 of your bullets is still going out. Which means you can shoot much faster at something nearer. Not realistic, but I liked it. It made for a more interesting game, where the power to have the control was greater, if you were good enough. No such element in this version.

Falkor responds:

Thank you for trying it, and taking the time to comment in such detail.

[Fox on a Trampoline]

That thing sure jumps up HIGH by the time you get to the squirrel level. Frigging squirrel level. Who would have guessed that stupid youtube video would get a game made out of it. Though the foxes in that weren't using it as a hunting tool. Now what I don't like about this is that the damn thing just refuses to get the ladybugs especially even when the head passes right through them most of the time.

[Mr Fox]

Heh heh. Looks like Felix had a species-change operation.

Damn, this game is hard. Reminds me of "9 billion miles from Earth", making it look like an old cartoon as opposed to making it look like an old B movie, and yet having it be a playable game. Afraid I couldn't get far enough into it to really be qualified to give it a rating that is definitively good or bad, but I feel because of that, I should give it the benefit of the doubt and give it 4. I guess I could get further if I practiced a little but then the fact that I'm not inclined to, is a good reason to give it a 4 instead of 4.5.

[Zee & The Alien Machine]

This guy is a douchebag and I can't stand to play as him. "I need to kiss all these people's asses because they can further my career and not because they're friends, and because I'm using my behavior as leverage to get them to vote for me". I'm givin' up now, not knowing what the hell I'm supposed to give to the dumb blonde who wants something "strong" and an energy drink mixed together. Apparently it's not vodka or rum, as if rye is any stronger than those. Geez, vodka is basically frigging lighter fluid you bimbo, what would you call stronger than that, you want a cup of gasoline? Tired of jumping through hoops to get something I suspect is going to be underthrilling and totally not worth it.

[Tasty Planet]

Meh. One of those games. You know, this is technically wrong in SO many ways. First off, moving around on the ground or around a microscope slide is one thing, but it violates conservation of momentum for it to just "move" through space. You move by pushing something the other way, and when walking that's the ground, when swimming, the water, but that won't work in space. Also, it makes absolutely no sense that it can either eat or not eat something based on whether it's bigger or not. Frankly if I was bigger than the thing and I ATE it, I would expect IT to eat me from the inside out. Hell, that's what happened with the lab assistant came in contact with it - at that time he was way bigger than it, but then what did it do? It went and ate his individual cells which were still smaller. How come he gets reconstructed into individual cells, but when it comes to a cat or a dog, it's all or nothing, either it's bigger than the whole cat or not. Also, the bullets. Those are some slow bullets the cops shoot. The creature can move faster than them. Why should they hurt it when it bumps into them if it's already faster than them, that means it's already moving against the ground faster than the bullet hits it and the ground doesn't hurt it. And it shouldn't make the thing smaller. And don't even get me started about the ending there.

Well, whatever. What do I expect, I guess. The real reason to downrate it is that it is completely devoid of any sort of intelligent strategy, the way to win it. It's a non-game. A time waster. Nothing to think about, no skill required (just move in the direction of the nearest thing which is smaller than you - but oh it doesn't even stop there, it actually gives you an ARROW to POINT you to it to put your mind at ease as to whether it's small enough). And not the best such "game" around either. I'd defer to infectonator world dominator if I wanted that. At least then I get the michael jackson zombie doing his little thriller dance, that was cool. But I'm done with that turkey. Which means I'm certainly done with this one.