B1KMusic's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Knightin'+ Demo]

This is definitely one of the best, most polished games I've played on Newgrounds this week. It's a Zelda-like dungeon crawler and possibly a rogue-lite. I dunno cause I haven't played long enough to die. But I'm a sucker for this type of game regardless. You've got a buy from me as well as a vote for best of July, as I am on the private voting panel.

Edit: Don't worry, it's fine for me to disclose that. It says "Success! Here are your choices. Print screen and show your friends!" when you finish voting. So for site policy reasons, we're friends now. https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/0fdf1f53db66d6e34b69ee6eb1580e37

I don't usually give 5/5, but I didn't notice any glaring flaws with the game while I was playing, and I kind of bored myself out of it when I brute-forced almost 2,000 solutions (0110... = 1024+512+...) for the switch puzzle on floor 2 or 3. There's 4,096 possible combinations and I optimized my route so it took about half an hour to do.

Anyways, when I buy it on steam and play it, I'll be sure to give a far more thorough and detailed review there.

Wolod responds:

Thanks for the cool review! It's not a rogue-lite. No procedural generation or permadeath. At the moment at least. Standing next to the SexualLobster is an honor. Can't wait to read your detailed review on steam!

[Miner Dash]

Utopian mining meets Canabalt with a crafting system.

...Why? I get that you need to have a use for the ores you mine, but why not just go for a simple arcade thing and give the ores point values instead of shoving a crafting system in? Crafting sucks. It makes every game it's put in more tedious to play. Maybe I'm being a little harsh, but it's one of those things.

Suggestion: give the game two modes. Normal mode and arcade mode. Arcade mode should play like what I was saying above. Get the most score by collecting the most ore. Normal mode would be what the game currently is, since I get that some people actually *like* crafting.

[TentaCat: The Lost Lineage]

Decent, reasonably polished platformer. I have to give props for adding a settings screen where you can change audio levels, graphics settings and controls. However, I do have some gripes with regards to under-the-hood stuff and game design...

* It didn't recognize my controller despite it using Xinput, which is a widely recognized standard.

* The prompts and labels did not change to accommodate my control settings. This can potentially be confusing, e.g. if the player forgot what a certain button was supposed to do. Dev should either use a generic label like "jump button" (which to his credit, he did do in some places), or create labels for every possible key that can be mapped and use the corresponding label for the mapped key instead of hard-coding them. This could easily be done by limiting the key set to A-Z, Space, Enter, Shift and a few other keys, to guarantee that the game won't glitch out, crash or throw an exception if the player sets a non-standard key (since setting a non-standard key would be disallowed; no volume-up to jump, TYVM).

* Skipping text does not work properly. When I press jump twice, I expect it to fill out the rest of the text box and go to the next line of dialogue. Instead, the text keeps going at the same pace, and then completely skips the next couple lines of dialogue after the first one finishes. This is broken.

* I disagree with having a lives system. There is no good reason in this day and age to implement that instead of just having infinite lives and being set back X amount by every death. Dark Souls, Ghosts n Goblins, and Jak and Daxter are some immediate examples that come to mind of games that do not have lives systems (or do, but losing X amount of lives just sets you back slightly more rather than to the beginning of the game as in GnG). I did intentionally get a game over to see what would happen, and to the Dev's credit, they've implemented a Mischief Makers-esque "Let's Continue!" screen, i.e. you can spend fish (points) to continue. I say get rid of the lives system altogether and use the "Let's Continue" screen on every death.

* I also disagree with having enemies respawn while still in the same room. Just...why? Doing this disincentivizes the player to kill enemies, because if they'll just respawn anyway, there's no real point in killing them. If they stayed dead at least until you left the room, you could at least clean the room and then go back and look for the special secret fish without having to be hassled by enemies. I do this in DOOM all the time when looking for secrets.

* Bosses take way too many hits. There's a difference between a genuinely challenging fight and a war of attrition where the boss can just wait you out until you screw up X amount of times. Especially when one tiny mistake or failure to read a telegraph can result in you getting combo'd to death because the boss is constantly on your ass and your jump arc isn't high enough to effectively deal with that. I think the bosses could be better-designed. I only beat sharky because I spammed the bullets so hard that the game glitched and he got locked into his idle animation, such that I cheesed him. I'm totally fine with this, cause that boss cheesed me several times before that. Also, spoilers, that's the end of the game's current content.

* Going further on the bosses, I think it's pretty weird that I have a Zelda-like "X amount of hearts" health system with i-frames (frames where the player is invincible just after taking a hit) while the boss has a Megaman-like health bar with no i-frames. Either give the player a health bar and beef up the enemies or design the bosses to have moments when they let their guard down and can be attacked, such that their health system can be consistent with the player's. One system instead of two.

I hope the dev sees this review and uses my criticism to improve it. The game has potential, (and it's unfinished, so there's lots of room to improve), which is why I'm voting for it in the Best of July 2019 Panel. I dunno if I'm supposed to keep that secret or something, they didn't say anything other than it's private, but "private" doesn't mean the same thing as "secret".

Anyways, good game. You should sell it on steam when you eventually finish it.

PKTORA responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I'll be making some of these adjustments as soon as I can. Once the game has been completed it will be on steam.

[Breakdown]

As a quick preface, the fact that this is a ludum dare entry does not affect the score one bit. I'm judging this as a standalone game.

Breakdown is a game where you throw bones at grey zombies while collecting wrenches, which turn you blue and make you unable to throw bones. To be able to throw bones again, you have to walk into the mound of salt in the focal point of the room. When you collect enough wrenches, the mound of salt grows arms and charges at the door on the north side of the room, destroying it. Bone-throwing isn't the only power that salt bestows upon you. It also gifts you the power of DETERMINATION, as in, every time you touch the salt while blue, it makes a checkpoint so you don't have to re-collect any wrenches. Environmental damage is not affected by a death. If you set off a bomb, the tombs will stay down.

The level design is a bit lack luster, with an overabundance of narrow corridors that guarantee you will be RNG'd by a zombie at some point. I think that this should be nerfed, or that there should be an alternate way to defend yourself, seeing as walking into a long spiral to get a wrench and coming out alive is more tedious than it should be.

The game is also pretty short. I beat it in about 15 minutes, and I have no desire to try for the achievements. One playthrough is enough.

Aside from that, nice job, Rainbow.

[Nonogram FRVR]

I've played from March 11 all the way back to February 11. After 100%-clearing March with all three sets of stars and not getting a reward, I played only the advanced levels in February's set.

Comparing this game to Griddlers Plus (an android app that also continuously updates with new puzzles), and using my own sense of game design, here are a few notes I have:

* Add a dedicated "no" square. While I can "mark" cells, (and I use it quite extensively) it seems to be a "I think the square might be here" thing more than a "I think that a square is NOT here" thing. I say this because it's not visually obvious (like an X), so it can bleed into the background, making it harder to visually distinguished what's marked and what's not marked. Further, if I drag over it, a square fills it in anyway, which is not the desired effect. I expect it to skip over the marked cell for efficiency, not force me to restart cause I put a square in the wrong place.

* The penalty system needs to go. It makes the game too easy. What makes Griddlers Plus such an excellent implementation of Picross is that it's just like picross on-paper, i.e. you punish yourself and there's no omniscient referee telling you if you're right or wrong. If you screw up, you won't know until you're at the end and things aren't lining up, and you're forced to backtrack or restart. It forces you to be careful and logical without guessing. The penalty system here acts like a hint system. Why bother with hints when I can just guess a square and find out right then and there whether it's correct or not? What's to stop me from guessing and memorizing the screen? This is a case where traditional game idioms bite you in the ass, because the beauty of picross is in how one slip up can screw over your entire run. You shouldn't know precisely when that happens. It makes it too easy. That said, I've only made a couple mistakes. And by mistakes, I mean, accidentally clicking a square I knew I wasn't supposed to click because I didn't have enough information to determine if it was a yes or a no. Most of the time, it worked out for me...although I wouldn't know that had I done it in Griddlers--I would have seen that I marked the wrong square and hit undo.

* Along with the penalty system going away, you should start focusing on making "picture" levels in the spirit of picross. A picture that you worked for is much more rewarding IMO than three golden stars.

Perhaps the above two points could be its own game mode. "Classic"?

* An undo button would be nice. The play style I (and many other players) use involves extensive use of "no" squares to map out a column or row so I can quickly find the overlaps.

1 3 1 [ ][x][ ][!][!][ ][x][ ]

The x's are no marks, and the !'s represent the overlap of all the possible positions of the 3. At this point, it's convenient to hit undo twice and make the marks, or to make the marks and then erase the x's manually. Either way, an undo is nice for when you accidentally fill way too many squares and/or lost track of what you were doing.

* Have a finished column or row automatically get filled with x's ("no" marks) and optionally darken them. It makes it much easier to see what's going on so you don't misjudge distances.

* Keyboard controls. Like backspace or U for undo. R for restart. Q for quit. ? or H for hint. Assuming that's what the question mark in the corner does.

* Make the menu faster. It's a little annoying having to sit through the menu animations while I'm already ready to do the next puzzle. There should be a way to skip that, or to automatically jump to the next level on the same difficulty.

Overall, this is a pleasant game. A lot better already than most of the shitty picross games on the play store, and I'd even put it on par with professionally-made picross games like Mario Picross for the SNES. But Griddlers Plus still remains the best implementation available, in my opinion.

[Wickebine Kigyouden]

I loved this game. It reminded me a lot of Phoenotopia in a weird way. Though the castlevania and megaman references are pretty blatant. And that last fight. Let's just say the evasion subweapon is OP. Like, really OP.

Some glitches:

1. In the end-game boss rush, I kept dying if my health went below 5,000. It would become NaN. This is a programming mistake that can easily be avoided by being more diligent with your handling of types. Try using strict type equality (=== and !==) instead of value-only equality (== and !=), for instance. Oh, and use isNaN() to make sure a value that you expect to be a number is always a number. Remember, NaN isn't equal to anything, not even itself.

2. When I defeated Not-Sans, I hit her right before her dialogue popped up. This resulted in the entity being erased, I guess, because after she spoke her dialogue, I couldn't hit her at all (because I already did) and was basically stuck in limbo. I don't really feel like doing that fight again to see what happens when you don't accidentally hit her at the wrong frame and get stuck in limbo, but I thought I'd let you know.

[Walk to the door]

Good game. Solid concept. A bit boring in execution. The reason you get a 4/5 is because level 1:11 seems to be impossible.

I don't know if you are evil or if you just goofed up, but I threw together a screenshot to illustrate the problem I am having. Here are two links to said image, hosted on my dump and on imgur:

1. http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/e5cf22cd5c71e5a799f36166a48d00fd
2. http://imgur.com/YzNhBNT

(As always, be cautious with links, make sure to filter out the random spaces NG will insert.)

I'll PM you as well. Other players beware!

[Galaga REBORN]

Playing both this and the other one, I've figured out what your problem is: controls.

You sit there making the game without thinking about the user or the interface. And when it comes time to create that link, you get excited about releasing the game, and do it in the cheapest/fastest way possible, resulting in terrible controls. In Red Avoid, the problem is the acceleration being too fast, in this game, the problem is that the ship noses right up the mouse cursor's arse making it awkward to move around and aim.

Everything else is decent. It's because of the bad controls that both of these games are unplayable.

[Red Avoid!]

I'm sure others have said it already, but this is WAAAAY too hard to control. The acceleration is impossible to get a handle on because it's so fast, and combined with the precise movement needed to survive, it makes this unplayable.

[Game.Init()]

Interesting concept. And I like the cute little code snippets shown throughout the game. Programmer humor, etc.

Though the character motivation for the GLaDOS-esque creator doesn't make sense -- if you programmed an A.I. to test levels, and fed it an "impossible" level, why would you get mad when it proves the level's beatable? It doesn't mean the AI's defying you, it just means you suck at making impossible levels, to the point where your own cheap level-testing A.I. could beat it with little effort.

It's like blaming the compiler for refusing to compile your code. The compiler's not wrong. YOU are. And it's telling you why.

Obviously, if you are capable of programming an A.I. that can beat levels that apparently you yourself couldn't beat (and by "you" I mean the character that speaks to the player throughout the game), this kind of attitude doesn't make any sense. A programmer with that much experience would instead take it face value to mean the level's not impossible, just as he would look at a failing unit test and take it to mean he accidentally broke something.

Now onto the parts that pissed me off. Or to put it nicer, the "complaints section".

Take a look at the binary in level 21.

01010110_00001011_10010101_10101110
10110000_01011001_10000111_01011011
01010101_101101

(split into bytes for convenience)

In case you didn't notice, the length doesn't divide by 8. It's exactly 9.75 bytes. An impossible number of bytes that no CPU with a word size >= 4 bits would recognize. It's malformed. It's probably random 0's and 1's. I tried zero-padding it on both sides, and both strings came out as garbage.

With left-padding: 15 82 E5 6B AC 16 61 D6 D5 6D
With right-padding: 56 0B 95 AE B0 59 87 5B 55 B4

The right-padded version looks almost like ASCII, as 56 is within the 41 .. 5A (A .. Z) range. But then you get 0B. 0B is a control character. An obscure one. It's called "Vertical Tabulation" or VT for short. Nobody uses this. Nobody inserts vertical tabs in text files. And if I insert that character in my text editor, it renders it as "^K" (K is the 11th letter of the alphabet. 11 == 0x0B). The only contexts the byte 0B would make sense in are data and machine code.

This is surprising, because from a game such as this, where you presumably spent at least more than a month making it, you'd think some research would be done when inserting binary as dialogue. You'd think a programmer would know his binary. You'd think someone could at least find an online ascii-to-bin converter and encode something cheeky like "Hello World" as a binary string. But no, you spammed random 1's and 0's. How patronizing.

This feels insulting to the intelligence of the people who would most appreciate the aesthetic of the game. It's disingenuous and lazy.

Also Level 24. It's a pain in the ass, and not in a good way. There's legitimate challenge, and then there's bad design. I'm sorry, but this level is badly designed. The only chance of getting through it are to time the jump perfectly and reach the white orb. Even if you do reach it, from what I saw, the game will arbitrarily kill you based on weak hit detection rules. Even though I'm not visibly touching the sprite, it still registers as a hit detection, because the hit boxes are bigger than the sprites. When I finally DID beat that level, the first half played out exactly the same as all the other failed attempts, except this time, the hit didn't register for some reason. Even though I was actually _touching_ the spike thing this time. So [not touching = hit] and [touching = no hit]. Good logic.

If you're going to do something like that (i.e. I wanna be the guy), you need to make the hit box _smaller_ than the sprite. Ever so slightly. That way, when you die, you know it's because you really touched that spike, and not because the algorithm is poorly done. That way, you can fine-tune the level to be as ball-crushingly difficult as you want, and it will still be fair. No, really. Load up IWBTG right now. Right now. Go to a spike. inch your way towards it. After enough attempts, you will eventually get your foot inside the spike and still be alive. Kayin knew he was making a difficult game, but he still wanted to make it fair. There's also Touhou. The hitbox is usually 1 pixel in size, at the center of the character sprite. The difficulty comes from there being so many projectiles on the screen that are often bigger than the character sprite, that it's hard _not_ to get hit. To become successful at those games, you have to get a feel for where that pixel is, and un-learn the habit of looking at the enemy while you're attacking them.

So yeah, I consider the hit detection in this game to be lackluster. And to think, you *designed a level* around it. Fine-tuned it. And the result is that buggy bitch of a level.

That's why this level is badly designed.

SO. Fake binary string and fake difficulty. Those are both worthy of a star. Two stars, precisely. Which is exactly what I'm subtracting from the score.