goldenPiGames's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Martian Mayhem!]

Much more engaging than I expected at first.

I should tell you, though, there's a bit of an oversight with the inventory. If you craft a stack of ammunition while you already have that type equipped, you can't ever combine the stacks. If you try to equip the new one, it switches the stacks instead of combining them. If you unequip one, there's apparently no way to combine the stacks, I guess because the game never expected it to be possible to have two separate stacks of the same thing.

masonmcleen responds:

yeah that's an oversight i forgot about. The way crafting works is it puts the crafted item in the first empty inventory slot. the slots all have IDs assigned to them and the first 30 are basic while 31 is armor, 32 is ammo, and 33 is trash. When you craft an item it only checks if one of the first 30 inventory slots are empty to prevent the item from going into a slot it's not supposed to be in. I will fix this oversight in the upcoming update, thanks for reporting it to me!

[Stranded on a Raft]

This is pretty neat in theory, but getting spawncamped by frogs because I can't even sort out my inventory and craft a machete before they kill me, or watching a rock float down and destroy my stuff suddenly, wears kinda thin. Also there's seemingly no way to reenter fullscreen without refreshing the page, and the google doc containing your terms and conditions was removed for violating google doc's terms and conditions, which is deeply ironic.

[Sinful Scoops]

Man, this game would probably be pretty good if the text actually displayed all three lines instead of cutting off the last one. And if the symbol detection wasn't terrible.

BluePinGames responds:

Sorry about the text rendering, it must be a browser specific issue. The game was only tested on Google Chrome due to the constraint of the game jam. I will update it to ensure text rendering works well on all browsers in the next 24hrs

edit : I have reviewed the gameplay on all four main browsers and there doesn't appear to be an issue with the text displaying incorrectly. Perhaps its a setting or more niche browser issues that I can't address. Sorry :(

[Toilet Paper Please!]

I'm giving up on level 13, after playing through a dozen boring levels of the same crap. Despite being themed around toilet """humor""" it's awfully sterile. I've played some pretty bad games in the course of monthly voting but none of them are as plainly uninteresting as this one. Why you expect people to purchase it is beyond me.

[DARK SWORD: The Light of Ainn]

Literally the first thing I did in the game was click the "click here!" button. It didn't work right because you put "linktr.ee/mrdoth" instead of the full address "https://linktr.ee/mrdoth" so it was interpreted as a relative address. I'll admit that leaves an awfully bad first impression for the quality of your code.

The tutorial is lacking. It doesn't teach you basic things like blocking and doesn't provide any sort of repetition or reinforcement to make sure you understand important things like dashing.

The first boss is unremarkable. The idea of switching between melee and ranged weapons to mirror yours is interesting at least. But the extreme delay between attacks conflicts with the vibe I get that this is supposed to be a game where you attack while bosses are attacking. And the sword slam with all the projectiles is disproportionately hard to avoid compared to all his other attacks.

For a game supposedly focused on combat, it's devoid of regular enemies. Apart from the room of useless spiders in the dungeon. Regular enemies and minibosses are immensely underappreciated in the genre. They keep you on your toes, fill out otherwise empty areas, and let you get a feel for the systems and your weapons.

The dungeon's "platforming", if you can call it that, is awful due to the invariable length of your dash. Falling off puts you back to the beginning. Falling off multiple times consecutively due to the janky collision will result in you teleporting back multiple times.

Overall, this game gives off the strong impression of someone who did a bunch of things he thought was cool instead of thinking about why makes those things contribute to the experience. Dark Souls is cool, so you talk up the "brutal boss battles" and do that things with the area names but the areas are devoid of enemies, or, well, anything, I mean, if you're going to have the areas be so completely nothing, you might as toss out the overworld and make it menu-based instead. Limited color palettes are cool, so you made everything grey, black and red, but what they represent isn't consistent and you also have so many particle effects that visual clarity suffers. Screen shake isn't cool and I have no idea why you put it in and made it so excessive even for basic attacks. Teleporting back to the hub after finishing a dungeon or finding some secret is cool, but you made it automatic and unexplained instead of like putting in a teleporter for you to step into, so it's annoying if you want to continue exploring, and confusing regardless.

And, the last straw, it seems the game saved while I was in combat and two hit points down and had a line of bullets shooting at me, so since I can't beat this boss (the nito claw guy two to the north) I am actually softlocked.

[Mimic Lens (Dungeon Crawler Jam 2024)]

I'm afraid I've missed the premise of the game. So, I'm looking for a real thing (cow?) that can be distinguished from a mimic thing... somehow, and to do that I have to solve puzzles? I did the easy one with the torches, no idea about the others. And the audio recordings have useful information maybe? I'm lost. I'm not going to criticize a dungeon crawler game for being a dungeon crawler, I'm an Etrian Odyssey fan after all, but why don't I have a compass, and why is QE turn and AD strafe instead of the other way around?

[Affordable Healthcare ALPHA Ver.]

I have very little idea of what's going on. Virions appear, I click them as fast as I can, sometimes my cursor gets stunned, sometimes most of the screen goes dark, sometimes all my white blood cells get stunned, sometimes all my red blood cells die. There's no health bars, no damage numbers, no opportunities to try different things, no ability to see what's putting in the work, no indication of how much each upgrade does, not even a count of how many of each cell you currently have - and the red on red on red certainly doesn't help that last part. Every attempt at a level starts with two minutes of waiting with occasional clicking before even the first strategic decision can be made. A strategy game is based around seeing the situation and making decisions to respond to it, and I feel like I can't do either of those things.

[Voiceless Demo]

Tutorial is awful. Here's each a mechanic, now here, use it one time before we move onto the next one. "if you are playing as X or Y you can" please, I don't even remember the name of the character I just picked. It seriously needs to be individualized per character/moveset, more spread out, and less filled with extranea like tricks and rails, what even are those

[Wibby's Adventure]

There's a neat idea here but the uncontrollable jumping, one-hit death, short vision range due to screen transitions, losing all the current row upon death, and enemies with an unpredictable hair trigger make it entirely frustrating and unfun to play.

[Dwarf Planet One]

Very neat game. I almost feel like I should be alarmed at how readily my mind accepted these abstract mechanics. I found myself thinking "ah, I see, first I need a green seed, because only it goes far enough to break the bullet-emitting worm out of its prison so I can lure the hungry void to the alligator and take its negative seed" and then I took a step back and realized how completely deranged that sounds.

I've done two of the spirally pocket dimensions (the worm lure and the winding path) but I'm stuck on the third one, the one where you're tied to the beetle. I was able to get to the other side of the second platform by taking the beetle over with a pink seed off another pink seed and then carefully timing my run over with the beetle's movement, but now I can't figure out how to get to the blue ring seed or anywhere else.

Main complaint is that I prefer playing with rotating camera because it looks cool and makes movement easier for me, but that makes it very hard to know which direction things are in. I'd appreciate a compass or something of the sort. Also, I know you've heard this before, but the badges aren't working for me either.

Emrox responds:

Oh wow sounds like you made it pretty far! The beetle level is probably the hardest one - it sort of alternates between puzzles and action challenges, and I think the puzzle you're hung up on takes some out-of-the-box thinking. (Not literally, in case you thought that was a coded hint.)

As for the getting-disoriented thing, don't forget about placing flags! I know it's not a perfect solution but I think it helps.

Update: try closing the browser and opening it again, and logging out and logging back in. If my newest fix works, you should get *most* of the medals you've earned, if not all