qwerty741's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Maple's Maid Service]

i finally got my hands on a pc that doesn't run like internet explorer, so i managed to see how the game's actually supposed to be played. this time it only took me about 20 minutes instead of 200 to finish the game lol.
maple's even squishier than i thought she looked at first, really lovely character design.

decided to scrap my previous review entirely because fishing seems to have been reworked multiple times since.
i'll see if i can try to go for that fabled fish eventually

EDIT: the new "accessible mode" makes grinding so much easier and faster; you can also use the amount of fish caught (ignoring garbage) as an indicator instead of rough time estimate, which is a welcome change considering i used to not even bother catching fish with classic mode to save on time.

also i got blessed. about 30 minutes into fishing grind with the new mechanic and i got my shiny lol. my counter says 68 fish caught, although there was some garbage in-between
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/7ce3440cc7a4c0f3058ac649e9ac10a2

Bleak-Creep responds:

Peti made the original concepts for Maple, with notes like "a friend" in the margins. I made a bunch of different faces for Maple when I was drawing her for myself, but Peti ended up choosing the one that looked most like the original. Hugability always came first. :)

[Pixel Mania!]

it's interesting because it's a "front game" that hides the real game.
i do enjoy the gimmick, but unless you figure it out early you're basically locked out on most of the game.

it does take a bit to get used to the "instant defeat" where the game immediately ends if you lose the chase or get hit 3 times in proto-world, but with how short the overall objective is i can see why that's the case. you could say it's perfectly balanced on that front.

however, i do have some gripes on the last boss fight.
although getting only one shot at it is consistent with the rest of the game, you need at least 10 diamonds just to get an attempt at it, which involves scouring the entire game regarless.
not an issue if it wasn't due to the fight being somehow harder than it seems?
i don't know if it's because the patterns having really narrow dodge windows, or because you have no idea how much health you still need to go through as it's not shown, which give you no indication of progress.

another minor problem i have is being unabled to skip the introductory dialogue, coupled with the really slow text speed. i'd recommend making some changes there if at all possible.

all in all the game's solid and original enough imo, so it's really good work nonetheless

edit: my bad, i keep forgetting these are contest games so they're on a time schedule.

i can understand the need to know the plot;
i was thinking you could make it so it shows all text with a button press so you can manually go through it faster, but i realize only now it's an entire cutscene so idk if that's a thing.

there could be an option that allows you to entirely skip cutscenes after a first playthough? though if you don't make it to proto-world at all that might also not work.
honestly i'm not sure

blit-blat responds:

Thanks for the review, this is really helpful! I was actually thinking to myself last night that the number of gems for the ship should probably be 5 not 10, so you’re 100% right on that front. And probably with the “real” game being too hard find - I wanted it feel amazing and fun when you found it, but it probably could have been sign posted a bit more, and the base game could probably be a bit more engaging!



As for the intro being slow, it’s difficult balance as people have different reading speeds. I also put purposely avoided a skip button as I wanted to people to know about the spaceship and what exactly was going on.

In terms of the boss fight there’s 3 attack patterns - lines of numbers, numbers that are aimed toward the player and numbers that are aimed randomly. For the lines there should always be gaps, the aimed you basically want to move up and down and for the random you’re in the hands of RNGesus! In hindsight, again you’re probably right that an enemy health bar and a continue screen would probably be needed. Truth be told, I was running a bit tight on time to release on Pixel Day, so these features fell by the wayside! Next year I’ll start development earlier! Thanks for playing and for the review! :)

[Gappy]

i prefer the second game but this one's fairly solid too considering there's no wall jumping mechanic.

my only real gripe is that side A is unnecessarily "difficult" due to the boss having a random pattern.
clearing side A is somewhat difficult already because there's two near pixel perfect jumps on 3-3 and 3-7 that are necessary to avoid fireballs;
all things considered that's still fine because the game rewards learning each level to make it through with zero deaths.
however when you get to the boss second's phase and suddenly you're stuck between having to jump to dodge a coin you couldn't delete due to being too high, and not being able to jump because you'd face-plant into a spike ball arch, it kind of feels unfair after putting up with all the previous levels.

i'm probably just mad cause i lost twice to that lol. but yeah glad the next iteration didn't feature any rng, game's great otherwise

[DEAD PETALS]

reading reviews i feel like i'm alone in this, but i absolutely hate the controls.

dashing and especially hyper, which seem to be very much needed, feel extremely out of the way compared to the keys meant for movement.
every time i need to quickly get to them, i get hit a whole bunch and have trouble getting back to moving because of it;
it's vexing enough where i gave up on using either of them altogether, making the whole game significantly more difficult imo.

i don't consider myself that great at bullet hells, but i do enjoy them and i think i'm decent enough to clear a game that's supposedly expected to be beaten 10 times in a row.
i may have simply missed the menu to rebind keys somehow, but if it's not there i'd recommend adding one because it's absolutely needed.

on an unrelated note, while the controls are explained in-game, there's no mention of how "chain multipliers" work.
i'd expect it to increase when killing enemies quickly, but i only managed to get a x10 combo accidentally while i was in hyper mode.
i didn't quite pay attention on how it works because getting into hyper mode in the first place took all my focus, but i'm guessing chains only work while in hyper mode?

edit: i didn't realize i had dodge on right click. still gotta make due with shift for hyper but at least i have movement options now.
turns out it's not the controls and i'm just that bad at the game lol. even with dodge i can't seem to be able to dodge for shit.
skill issue; my bad

sorry i missed the first edit.
yeah i'm moving my hands off WASD to use shift and space.
it's not that i can't physically reach them, i just find it unintuitive to move my other fingers while handling WASD at the same time. it may have something to do with wasd being somewhat higher than shift and space on my keyboard, so they feel like they're "out of the way" and not that easy to reach.

that's why i mentioned keybindings. i'm assuming a controller would definitely be much easier to handle

bandaloo responds:

thanks for playing. yeah, there's no explanation of the scoring in the game; it was a late addition and i wasn't sure how many people would be interested in playing for score. i wrote a bit about the scoring system here if you're interested: https://bandaloo.newgrounds.com/news/post/1332342

i chose shift+space because you can reach them while your fingers are on wasd, but if i didn't hack this together during a jam there would be real keybinding options; sorry if this is preventing you from enjoying the game. if playing with a mouse for aim, you can use the mouse buttons to activate hyper and dash. you might be more comfortable with a controller? that's how i prefer to play.

the 10-streak achievement is just there as a fun thing for people who want to go for it; i was anxious about adding it because i didn't want it to seem like it's necessary to prove you are "good" or anything so i might make it a secret achievement

edit: just to clarify, when you say "every time i need to quickly get to them i get hit a whole bunch and have trouble getting back to to moving because of it" are you moving your fingers off of WASD to hit shift and space?

edit 2: i read your edit; thanks for clarifying! again, apologies there aren't more control settings

[Harvestigator: An IRS Tax Auditing Game]

is the reaction of each farmer to the audit random?
i'm trying to figure out what makes them "pass the audit" but i get a positive or negative response to the audit seemingly at random, regardless of what i'm doing.

for example, i've tried both working properly and purposely failing at my job, but i keep getting different answers even when i do the same thing.
honestly i'm not sure what determines the outcome

edit: i tried simply ignoring everything and it seems to have worked, though i had already done that before while trying to get fired, so i'm not sure what changed.
i must have accidentally clicked something before without noticing.

crow-seeds responds:

Highlighting anything (meaning that there was something wrong with their tax return) fails their audit

[Trivial Trivia: Impossible]

100% is currently impossible to get due to a bug with question 5.
if you answer A or C, it counts as both correct and incorrect, and it skips question 6.
if you answer B or D, it counts as incorrect, and it lets you answer question 6.

basically it forces you to either get question 5 wrong to answer question 6, or it counts question 6 automatically wrong if you answer question 5 correctly.

answer sheet for future reference in case this gets fixed:
0. D
1. B
2. C
3. D
4. C
5. A or C (either count as both correct and incorrect)
6. B (is skipped if the previous question answer was A or C)
7. D
8. A
9. B
10. B
11. B
12. A
13. B
14. B
15. D
16. D
17. A
18. C
19. C
20. B

[Idle Game Maker]

soft-fix for anyone having trouble with medals:
there seems to be a bug related to the turnover timer, which stops the game from awarding medals to your profile even if unlocked in-game. once this bug has been triggered, the only fix is to close the game and start over, as the current game is permanently locked from unlocking medals to your profile.

this bug seems to happen when the turnover time is too short, or gets "past" the saving point (which seems to happen around the 1 second mark). this could be triggered by either squashing bugs when you're close to getting paid, or if your timer is too short in the first place.

the easy way to prevent this from happening is to increase your timer and prevent it from getting it close to 0 in an unnatural way. this is necessary especially when trying to get the 1000 bug squashed medal. the only upgrades that do this are the android and ios ones (mac and windows also decrease your timer, unlike what's written in-game).

basic tips to unlock all medals:
- when starting out, make sure to get to the upgrades screen without squashing any bugs accidentally, just in case.
- upgrade actionscript whenever you're just waiting and not doing anything else, as it's free and it increases the money you get after each cycle.
- avoid upgrading unity, python, mac or windows unless you're going for their respective medals. when doing so, make sure you have enough money to get to level 50 in one go, or have a long enough timer as buffer to stay above the 10/20 second turnover time.
- to get the medals for squashing bugs, the "safest" way is to get javascript to 50, then put all the money you get into ios levels to increase your timer as much as possible, then use that time to squash bugs without going under the "saving point" trigger.
it's recommended to stop squashing bugs around the 30 second mark and go back to the upgrades screen to wait it out.

[Kate's Date]

having trouble figuring out hidden values.
it seems if you pick the 3rd option during the scene with the patient (regardless of your other choices), you completely skip the last scene where you're asked to go home, and get locked into the drunk ending.

leaving this here for future reference:
it seems to get the "secret ending", you need to ignore the patient (second option) and try to go for the good ending.
if done correctly, an extra scene comes up that branches into the secret ending path right before the good ending epilogue.

again, i'm not sure how each choice actually affects the final values, but i managed to get it by picking choices 2-2-1, then all 1 on the date.

also kinda funny, but if you trigger the secret path, pick it, but on the last choice don't commit to it, the dialogue says 0_drunk_ending.json, and then the game freezes on that last scene instead of booting you back to the main menu

BobbertOC responds:

Hey!

The way the choices work in the game isn't very obvious. Although you might be on the same scene you were on for a previous run, because you made different decisions earlier, you might have something different happen to you. E.g. You will never get the phone call during the date if you listened to the patient explain their dream earlier in the day.

Thanks a lot for playing (and finding a bug)! I'm glad you explored it to such a great extent! :)

[Touch Peter]

for anyone having trouble with the 250 medal:
for some reason, no matter how much you try, you can't seem to get it using the newgrounds flash player; however, i got it pretty much immediately using ruffle.

to switch to ruffle, go to your account settings and under flash option, you can choose to enable Ruffle flash emulation, if possible.
you can check that and see if it works, then disable it back afterwards

[HEADSHOT TYPECAST]

good game. a little too hectic when it starts to get into it but otherwise works great.

in regards to suggestions on improving the game, i've found myself losing pretty frequently due to accidentally "mispelling" a word;
more specifically, i accidentally input any extra letter after firing, so it won't accept any other commands since i have to first manually clear the textbox.
would be nice if there was some failsafe measure that prevents you from "mispelling" by only accepting valid commands. if nothing else, at least for the first letter (only accepting C,F,L,R,S as the first letter) to avoid being forced to backspace while you're getting swarmed by multiple entities in a row on the same lane.

tips for players:
- i've found myself having a lot of trouble going right since it's the one that requires the most button presses of all. i bypassed this by copypasting the "right" command while in the menu, then using ctrl+V in-game to make going right easier. that way you only have to worry about going left, and handling the gun. it also helps when you have to quickly dodge something (specifically boulders) if there's space on the right, since it actually becomes the quickest command to input.

- while counter-intuitive, the right mindset isn't to cock your gun before you have to fire, but cocking your gun every time right after firing. that way if you need to fire the gun in a pinch, you won't have to worry about having forgotten to cock your gun. worst case scenario, you might be out of ammo but that can be quickly fixed since the command is way shorter and easier to input.
my general advice is to ready your gun, and every time you need to shoot you FIRE, then COCK, and REload whenever there's spare time. you can also not worry about reloading when multiple enemies in a row are approaching, since you can mash reload afterwards when there's more breathing room to work with. also FIRE is easier to input than SHOOT, but i guess that's just down to personal preference.