B1KMusic's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pocket Change!]

So a little background. I have 8 years of professional cash handling experience and as of now work as a banker. That said, I don't think any average joe would struggle with it. You learn pretty quickly how to raise or lower the coin counter by X amount while keeping the total the same, so the game pretty quickly turns into spamming halves until you're close and then spamming nickels and pennies to try to raise the coin amount as quickly as possible. At the time of writing, I'm at level 50 and the game is EXTREMELY tedious at this point. It's too bad flash game devs didn't extensively test their games back in the day cause a qol feature where pressing the number row keys to automatically put up a coin would be nice, so I could just spam the 3 key 36 times instead of having to give myself carpal tunnel doing it with the mouse. The game is not hard at all. The timer gets longer with every level so it's impossible to lose unless you literally try to. Just for reference, by level 50, the coin requirements per challenge is 50 - 51 and the timer for the whole thing is about 15 minutes. FIFTEEN MINUTES. I can take a shit, go to my fridge, eat something, play a full round of shenzhen I/O solitaire, watch a youtube video, and still have more than enough time to complete the entire level without even trying. At this point I'm just trying to see how long I can go until either I get so bored that I can't do it any more or a power outage kills the game, or maybe it crashes or something. If nothing interesting happens by the time I get to level 100 I'll probably just screenshot it to document the self-torture I endured and then quit :)

Here's some footage of me playing level 44 and actually trying just so you can see how much excess time it gives you: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1087910133851488306/1110453489622077492/meactuallytrying.mp4

Update: I'm now at level 82. Still going for level 100. That's gotta be a world record.

Update 2: I think I beat the game. I beat level 86 and then the game just completely crashed. This is either from keeping the game open for a month with flash being the unstable piece of software that it is, or the game being unable to handle the timer going so high. Since I did notice it got progressively more unstable and laggy the further I went. Enjoy the pacman level 256 kill screen but for pocket change https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1087910133851488306/1119568707400773742/image.png

details: on level 86, the rendering broke completely. Instead of green boxes on finished and blue boxes for unfinished, you can see in the screenshot that it turns black and white. Also, the game doesn't animate anymore, even though flash will correctly scale things if the window is resized. Nothing is animated, so to see what you're doing, you have to minimize the window and then restore it. Upon beating level 86, the game is unable to finish animating the level end card, so it remains stuck, softlocked there for eternity. Also the timer broke. I did the first 8 challenges and then went to work expecting it to time out cause you know, 10 hours is a bit longer than 25 minutes. But it never did. I had to finish the level when I got home from work. I managed to capture footage of it, too. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1087910133851488306/1119567548996915270/broken-gam.mp4

So I think I can safely say I've beaten the game, and am probably the only person crazy enough to do it lmao.

Edit 2024-07-26: thanks to discord for that new policy that breaks discord media links being used externally. The links are not "unavailable". I popped them into a discord chat and they loaded right up. Here's backups of those links:

1: https://youtu.be/TzWTT0MnKVY
2: https://imgur.com/a/0oxvso7
3: https://youtu.be/svEuLEtqFWc

Note that [1] was autoclaimed, so if they try to make you sit through an ad, first of all get an adblocker, but second of all here's a muted version: https://youtu.be/lfG77SSqGs8

[Bullet Heaven 3 [Prototype]]

I liked it, but after 100%ing the medals, I can say that hard mode is extremely unfair and RNG-based towards the end game. The enemies spawn at a rate so fast and they are such bullet sponges that even with all your upgrades maxed out, it's impossible to kill them fast enough to avoid getting boxed in by bullet patterns that, since they are coming from random screen positions, are undodgable. The last 5 levels I was only able to A-rank by getting lucky. I beat my head against the wall until RNG graced me with good spawn positions and frequent enough shield/power upgrades that I could barely edge out the A rank. It's for this reason that I didn't bother upgrading my health in hard mode. I'd say levels 16 and 20 were the absolute worst when it came to this.

[Crossing the Pit]

I appreciate that this skit appears in the Henry Stickmin collection, in one of the routes of Completing the Mission. Didn't really want to leave a whole review, but NG still doesn't give an option to just leave a comment afaik, so 3/5. Some of the gags are very similar to the others, not bad, not amazing. The score isn't important, so I opted to hide it.

[Breakout]

Simple, short, solid Lemmings-like game. Beat it in about 20 minutes and it was overall a pleasant experience. Shouldn't call it a platformer, though. "Platformer" implies that the player has direct control over the character doing the platforming. Call it a Lemmings-like puzzler and people will instantly know what it's all about.

Also, there seems to be a bug on the last level. Sometimes, the lemmings will turn around at the ledge instead of falling down. I'm not sure why.

[Type Help]

Interesting and meta concept but it doesn't work great in execution. Spoilers follow.

btw I wrote a walkthrough: https://pastebin.com/raw/BrEQNeaA

For one, the ability to edit nearly everything kind of renders the whole game meaningless. After all, I could just edit the starting room's description to look like it says "you win", but doing so feels empty. In a way, editing a golden apple into the room feels like a hollow victory, but not to the same extent.

On the flip side, the editor is not open *enough*. The game has special items and rooms that aren't listed, even though the listing is supposed to show "everything" in the codebase. I'm talking about the mug and anomaly mug, and the ending room you get to after drinking from the mug. None of these things are listed. Not only that, but I don't see a way to modify the behavior of world items, what item IDs they will accept with the use command to affect change, or even how to give a room multiple "states" that it can switch to when key items are used. For example, how exactly does the starting room automatically kick you into the courtyard when you use the wet blanket on the bars? I see no such data represented in the window world item, the cell room, nor the wet blanket item. This is special hard-coded behavior that can't be implemented with the data structures and commands the game provides. If the cmd command was truly open, the player should theoretically be able to remake the base game, type help, from a blank canvas. But this does not seem possible with the tools the player is given, and honestly, I question whether the two included web games were actually submitted by players or if it's just an easter egg.

Edit: as I say this, I notice an 'actions' data structure that I didn't notice before.

So I retract quite a bit of what I said, but this actually raises new problems. The missing items and rooms are still a problem. Anomaly mug has item id 9, but trying to view the item results in the editor saying there is no such item. This is either hard-coded behavior that was overlooked or a major design flaw in the editor itself. You shouldn't be able to lock yourself out of the game's data structures like that. This is like if you had a codebase, and your text editor allowed you to "hide" a function, and in doing so, the function is completely inaccessible from said editor. It's in the file, but you can't see it. You can't unhide it, because to do so would require you to be able to view it, which you can't, because it's hidden. Would you use a text editor or IDE that does that? I sure as hell wouldn't.

I really think that the hidden attribute should be removed entirely. I get that the engine is itself part of the game, but when you can link the start room directly to the end room, I see no reason to even have a way to hide things, and as I discussed above, this only causes problems from the editing side of things.

So if I have JUST ONE takeaway for Nick: remove the hidden attribute from all of the data structures. Its very presence undermines the editor.

Also, from reading other reviews and the responses to them, it seems the `cmd save` command is supposed to save your progress. If that's so, then it's bugged, because it didn't do that for me. It saved the game's *data structures*, so any edits I made to item descriptions, or item/room bindings were still there, but when I loaded it afterwards, it reset me to the beginning of the game. It did not save my progress. Guess I just misunderstood

Edit 2: I saw what Bom said about the reason for hiding some of the structures in the base game, and I raise a counter suggestion: how about a 'warn' attribute that causes the game to warn you if you try to edit something that the dev believes will ruin the fun? This will satisfy the player side by warding them away from something while not completely locking down the data for the editor side.

In any case, thanks for reading my feedback :)

Re (edit 3): sure! I'm working on another speedrun right now to see if I can break into room 5 from the cell window, but I'm running into trouble because the game won't let me use the pot on the window or say a magic word to activate the action. So far the best I have is...well, I'll put it in the pastebin as "even faster speedrun walkthrough"

edit 4: Nick and I had a chat and he's got some improvements coming along. Notably the base game is no longer locked down. You can use `cmd spoilers show` to reveal any objects that are hidden. There are some other improvements in the works, but bear with him. AS2 is a very crusty dinosaur of an ECMA language and frankly it's amazing he got this working at all.

edit 5: I made my own game. cmd web play 3. It has four endings ;)

BoMToons responds:

I appreciate the detailed delve into the game. As you eventually discovered there is an "actions" construct which allows everything you mention. The 2 included games were, indeed, built using the engine, in fact there's a video of me creating the Ice Fishing game using the engine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4w2pZwKqSU

There's a bigger story behind the hiding of the mug and the winning room (this kind of thing is only done in the core game)... it arose from beta-testing where, once people discovered cmd, they just edited themselves into the "win" screen and then expressed disappointment at missing a lot of the game content... it was a hard decision to do the transfer of "power" to the player in a more piecemeal manner, but ultimately, I believe it was the right call.

I really love that you got so deep into the game structure though, and thought through why some content was missing. I hope my explanation makes some sense. And I hope you'll check out the linked video, and I even more hope that you'll make your own game and submit it (since you obviously understand the game pretty well)!

Edit 1: Interesting idea to have the game "warn" the player. I'll ruminate on that a bit...

Edit 2: 'cmd local save <id>' saves the game STRUCTURE into the save slot (by design), but it does not save game PROGRESS (ie: current room, actions that have altered room(s) during the game, or current inventory) - but any default structural data is saved. I'm hesitant to add a lot of spoilers in these comments, so please DM me further Qs and I'll be happy to respond!

Edit 3: I just read the walkthrough, I love the speedrun version! Mostly cuz I hadn't considered that ability, but it demonstrates a deep understanding of the engine! Mind if I add it to the TypeHelp.org website (I'll link to your NG userpage for credit)?

Edit 4: I genuinely lol'd at your game. I hope others enjoy it too!

[POOM]

very impressive mini port, but unfortunately the combined lack of automap, quicksave, and ability to adjust mouse sensitivity, and the slow level load times made my playthrough very tedious, so I just blazed through on the easiest difficulty to make a quick run-through and see the content. I did attempt the cyberdemon fight on UV, but I find it very difficult to control compared to gzdoom--it took quite a few attempts to defeat it. I can live without quicksave, but the lack of a map for navigation and, god, the controls. Between the ESDF movement and the non-adjustable mouse sensitivity. I know it's PICO-8's limitations and you really pushed it to its limit, but still, it's a deal breaker. I feel like these maps would be a lot more fun to play on gz; you should release the maps as a doom WAD ;)

[Santa's Silent Night]

Great for fans of Paperboy and CBT alike. Granted, it's harder and more brutal than both of those things.

[Hexplore]

Very charming and difficult point n click. I somehow sunk 3 days into beating it, speedrunning it, and compiling a video walkthrough of it.

[Snatch the Wench]

This game's really good. I sunk half an hour into it already and got a score of 12k getting to level 20. Lots of subtle little mechanics to exploit. It's actually my favorite of this month's panel, better than even high stakes. GG

[STARSHIP PROTOTYPE]

Beat it in just over 5 minutes according to the in-game timer (and of course the game doesn't give me the achievement, but I don't care enough to make a complaint out of it). This game is gonna need a *lot* of work before you can even consider it to be in beta/early-access. Everything about it is clunky, and it feels like something that could've been put together in a matter of hours. To say this is a rough prototype is a massive understatement, and the fact that this is what you have after 46 versions is alarming, to say the least.

One major design change that needs to happen is the control scheme. Controlling this game feels awful and sluggish, and moving in the same direction as you aim severely limits your options, which results in awkward strategies like flying around a boss and firing weak pot shots at it. Maybe this is the vision you had from the start, but that doesn't matter because *this is not fun*. To fix this, you should change the controls to that of a twin stick shooter. That is, movement on WASD, attack on mouse, or if you're planning on supporting joypads, movement on left stick, attack on right stick (hence the name of the genre).

The attacks are also weak which makes the game get boring pretty fast. Let the player become more powerful the better they play. If you do this and balance it just right, the boss battles could actually be exciting instead of a boring enemy-circling pot-shotting slog. You could remove the ability to destroy projectiles with the added agility thanks to a WASD + mouse control scheme and let the player actually feel like they're being challenged.

Game's too early in development to offer much more criticism. I suggest playing some classic shooters like gradius and r-type, some danmaku (bullet hell) like touhou and ikaruga, and some twin-stick roguelites like monolith and blazing beaks to get a sense of direction here.

Oh, also, please don't tag this as point-and-click. I just saw that in the tags. Point-and-click games are adventure games succeeding the classic text adventure genre, where you point and click, and watch pretty animations of your character walking around and interacting with stuff. Don't confuse tags, please.

Edit in response to Brandy:

Full quote:

> I dont give a shit about your critique on the gameplay because i didnt design it.
> But i got an issue with this dumbass attitude you're tossing around.
>
> First of all, if a medal says you have to beat the game in under 5 minutes then
> OF COURSE it won't unlock if you take more than 5 minutes so i have no idea
> why you made a point of bringing it up like a complaint while also saying
> "but I don't care enough to make a complaint out of it"
>
> Second, point'n'click is a common attribute to adventure games but not
> mutually exclusive. There's a reason we say point and click adventure
> games are the successor to text adventure games. Adventure game is
> the genre, "point and clikc" as well as "text" describe how you interact
> with the game.
>
> Again, i didn't design this game, but don't be a dick to a fellow
> newgrounder (DimensionLord) who started learning game dev
> 3 months ago. By all definitions of the word, starship PROTOTYPE
> is absolutely an appropriate title. Bless the devs on here who do
> iterate their submission, even to version 43
-BrandyBuizel

1. believe it or not, there are actually two achievements on this game. One for beating the game, the other for beating it in under 5 minutes. I was obviously talking about the former.

2. You're wrong on the point-n-click point. Point-n-click has described the adventure genre since *at least* the 1990's and it makes NO sense to use it to describe anything else aside from maybe hidden-object games

3. You won't get anywhere attacking people who give you criticism. Learn to take criticism and fix your attitude before you turn into another Phil Fish.

4. I think you misinterpreted my wording when I said I don't care enough to complain about the achievement. What I meant is that it's no big deal, but I still want you to be aware of it.

5. I don't owe Dimension Lord a damn thing just because he worked hard on this game. Guess what: games take a lot of work to design. And judging by the quality seen here, this is what I would consider an early pre-alpha build. At this stage, it's absolutely essential that you take criticism and work with it. Big companies and publishers have QA teams, but as indie devs, underestimating the value of community QA is a fatal mistake. Again, LEARN TO TAKE CRITICISM. If Dimension Lord has a response to my criticism, he can take it up with me himself without you being toxic to someone who is giving free advice. In this case, the advice is coming from someone who has played literally thousands of games and knows what he's talking about. Sure, my criticism is brutally honest, and it may hurt your feelings, but it is also constructive feedback that if followed will improve your game, and reacting with hostility is only shooting yourself in the foot.

BrandyBuizel responds:

I dont give a shit about your critique on the gameplay because i didnt design it. But i got an issue with this dumbass attitude you're tossing around.

First of all, if a medal says you have to beat the game in under 5 minutes then OF COURSE it won't unlock if you take more than 5 minutes so i have no idea why you made a point of bringing it up like a complaint while also saying "but I don't care enough to make a complaint out of it"

Second, point'n'click is a common attribute to adventure games but not mutually exclusive. There's a reason we say point and click adventure games are the successor to text adventure games. Adventure game is the genre, "point and clikc" as well as "text" describe how you interact with the game.

Again, i didn't design this game, but don't be a dick to a fellow newgrounder (DimensionLord) who started learning game dev 3 months ago. By all definitions of the word, starship PROTOTYPE is absolutely an appropriate title. Bless the devs on here who do iterate their submission, even to version 43