goldenPiGames's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pad of Time]

I want to like this, with its promising 2D-in-3D style, but it just has so so many problems. First off, you can't just give it a control scheme this cracked out and not let us rebind the keys. The movement and action feels slippery and unresponsive and bad. The camera is too zoomed in to see anything useful. The tilting and time mechanics are just bad nothings, largely because they can only be used in specific places for no apparent reason.

[An apple a day]

This game severely needs at least some amount of input buffering. It's annoying to be thrown off from pressing the key a moment too early.

[Fire]

Biggest problem with this game is that the resources are completely unbalanced - wood is required for nearly everything yet the one single way to increase wood production requires spending wood. I hate pretty much everything else about this game too but I already spent way too much of my life playing this piece of garbage and I won't spend more of it writing an essay.

ErikSwahn responds:

I agree the management is unbalanced. Too bad the rest didnt capture any interests.

[Fiss the Elf's Puzzling Pin-Ups]

Mostly not too hard but I'm becoming convinced that the level 8 literally isn't possible

[Cross Strike]

My biggest complaint here is that there were two separate occasions that I didn't notice there was a breakable ceiling above because of how the short the screen was. Once after checkpoint 06, I didn't see the shortcut back to the central areas and ended up backtracking all the way through 05 and 04. And again when I missed the way to the flight upgrade near 10, I threw my head against both the updraft shaft to the left and the teeth tunnel to the right before giving up and looking at the map.

Second complaint is that the visual effects are too much and make it hard to see, especially in the flight sections.

Anyway, I thought it seemed familiar, and of course, I remember Radiance Hearts and my complaint about the rotating laser attack. Is the "Lumina" sword a connection or a throwback?

Yword responds:

Sorry about those issues, and thanks a lot for the feedback! :)

(Actually the games are somehow connected, they take place in the same timeline/chronology, Radiance Hearts should be a few thousand years after Cross Strike...)

[Rederic]

It's cute and ir has some cool bits, but overall I find the hitstun and hitboxes feel way too inconsistent and I'm giving up on the third level.

[Robo-butcher]

This game would be much better if it had upgrades other than health, or if it was actually interesting or well designed in any way.

[Aurora]

Very interesting. Have some feedback though.

- The confusing instruction manual is not good, and it needs basic tutorials. You already have to deal with the difficulties of both doing things in machine code, and actually understanding the level itself.

- There's also the inconsistencies of how the inputs and outputs behave differently from other hexagons. I think making the input/outputs different, like being circles, would help clarify that they're different.

- The hexagons having separate sides really doesn't add anything to the game. It's just unnecessary confusion that doesn't allow any additional capabilities. You could replace the "rotate" and "copy" commands with something like hex copy (like "move", but doesn't clear the source).

crow-seeds responds:

Yo, just updated the game to address your feedback. Thank you so much for the feedback, as always!

There's an optional video solution demo in the game now. It used to be only in the description (added the video there like 2 days ago). Currently working on a better demo that's in lore with actual voice and explanations, but a video solution should be helpful. I've also added a toggle to see the instructions in English, though you will still have to code in binary.

Inputs and outputs are now circles as per your suggestion. Circles only have 1 side after all! I've reworded the manual a bit to emphasize their difference too.

Hexagons having different sides is important for iterating and sequence handling. Storing multiple values in a hexagon and traversing them through a rotate used to be a big portion of the game, but ultimately for people who don't have that much programming experience, the concept of loops and iterating was a bit much (especially considering that it's all in machine code!). A lot of the sequence related puzzles were moved to the post-game (Everything level 10 and below doesn't touch on it). Levels like Sequence Reverser, Random Access Memory, List Traversal, Recent Memory Checking are now post-game levels.

Speaking of which, I've added about half of the post-game levels. Some of these deal with sequences.

[Just Passing - Chapter 2]

Holy spark, it's been like four years. I remember playing it back on Kongregate, and being amused by the way the protagonist crossed her arms when she stopped walking. The one part that I needed to look up for help was the liquid, because I didn't see that the gym had another room.

[Endacopia - Demo]

I like the number of things that you can interact with in the background, reminds me of games like Starflyers. The spritework is great. The puzzles are creative and understandable; I didn't need to look up help at all, though I did solve the cockroach only by accident.