FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dinosaurs Attack Collab 2023]

Pretty cool art collab! It is just a slideshow which is pretty plain jane, but it makes up for it with an interesting concept, reactive buttons, fun interactivity in flipping in cards to compare/constrast with the original, and some nice quality-of-life features such as being able to immediately go to the artist's page by clicking on their names. I easily found myself getting addicted at flipping through all the entries: well done!

As a side note, one of the song intro's sounds so similar to the Leviathan raid theme in FFXIV, at least to me if I'm remembering right, maybe it was another raid but it was definitely from FFXIV: wonder if the musician @namosaurus would find that amusing, haha.

namosaurus responds:

Thank you so much for the love, I know nothing about FFXIV but thanks! I'll def gonna check it out!

[The Ghost of the Witch: An Ear-ie Halloween Headphone Adventure]

Wow, quite the interesting adventure game you got here! I unfortunately never experienced one of these so I don't quite get the nostalgia, but as a fan of adventure games like King's Quest, I was down for what this was offering.

I gotta admit, considering I'm a person who needs to put on subtitles for everything and has a severe lack of imagination, I was really worried at whether I'd be able to play this audio journey. And yes, while it was tricky to navigate with a lack of visuals, no text log, and some difficult to parse voices (not so much a problem with the VAs I think, more a me problem with understanding accents), as well as tedious to replay voice lines to get the one bit of information you want, I did nevertheless appreciate the commitment to the bit and greeted the development with good cheer, especially since it was presented with such charm and care.

For the most part I really enjoyed myself with this, but if I did have a substantial complaint, it would be that I was frustrated it had no save/load option: I find it difficult to beat games like this in one go, and with my slow pace, I believe I might take even more time than the estimated 40 minutes. Hoping to beat it at some point, but I'm almost hoping that there is a save/load that I missed in the overly verbose instructions that you could tell me about (or maybe patch in later)!

KittyhawkMontrose responds:

Thanks so much for the thorough and awesome review and for appreciating the commitment to the bit, which, granted, is sometimes a barrier to getting to the adventure. XD

There was a planned password feature (again, in keeping with the bit) but the passwords were overly long. You're right that it's a worthy concession to QOL though. All of the save menu dialog was recorded, so if we do go back, we'll definitely add saves.

Again, thank you so much for giving this so much of your time despite the frustrations. If you do decide to give it another go, there are a few features that you might have missed that help to speed things along! The first is that ALL dialog is interruptible, and there's no need to wait between presses for choices to become available. You can literally beat the game in moments by pressing a "correct" sequence of keys one after another. The second is that most locations have a long and a short description, with the long one always being played when you move from one location to another. By using the '5' key when you move into a location, you can interrupt the long description and hear the short one. Lastly, and this is almost more of an easter egg: try playing the game in a browser with the JavaScript console open. ;D

Again thanks so much for meeting this little novelty on its on terms. Your thoughts are always helpful!

[Hauling Ass]

Quite the goofy game! I quite like the presentation and general comical appeal the game has, as well as the nice touches to certain aspects like the credits and the menu especially, where you made aspects like difficulty selection have a physical satisfaction to them by flipping a switch. Speaking of difficulty, the choice to make it require a more diverse selection of buttons was a much more interesting choice than other typical difficulty modifiers like just increasing the amount of laps and such.

While the general gameplay is somewhat fun, I do feel like its ultimately rather one-note and easily loses its appeal quickly, especially since it is rather dry and devoid of any juicy effects that you think would be present in such a goofy game like this: the most it has is playing a fart sound when you miss a key and it just doesn't feel like enough. I'll admit that I might not be getting the best experience since I'm playing it singleplayer, though.

If I were to be nitpicky, I also found it a bit annoying that we can't use the numpad for entering numbers in gameplay, and I found it a bit odd that, if you lose in singleplayer, it still plays victory music, which should technically only be heard by our opponent while we should be hearing downer music instead.

[MÆRE]

Wow, quite the spooky game! Really impressed me a lot and reminded me of other games like Amnesia (where looking at monsters wracks your sanity but is necessary to determine where they are) and FNAF (having to juggle so many different elements that force you towards taking scary risks). Absolutely loved having to strategize, listening intently with my headphones to determine where the monsters were and therefore when it was safe to glance at areas and regain my confidence. All in all just felt wonderfully crafted in many respects, and not only delivered some great scares in gameplay, but had some stylish poetry intermissions as well, haha.

The only thing that really brought it down for me was that the game was a bit too easy and short, what with its bite-size levels with constant checkpoints for break time: it just doesn't really allow you enough time to build dread and tension and deal with the repercussions of errors in the long-term. I know it's a bit unfair to say since I was technically engaged and enjoying myself, but there was a nagging feeling at the back of my head that thought it might all just be smoke and mirrors without a proper fail state or actually engaging strategy. It's not necessarily that I want it to be hard, but I do want to be properly, convincingly engaged with the mechanics and be fearful of failure, and this kind of lost me there.

As much as I was a little let-down, I still found the experience not only incredibly memorable, but very promising for improvement. I would absolutely love some sort of endless mode where you evade random scares as long as you can for a high score, or some sort of FNAF-style level structure where you need to survive a series of long nights that get more and more challenging as you go.

[Sentient Cleaning Device]

Wow, quite the unique game! Fascinating 'limited perception' idea for a horror game that somewhat reminded me of games like Scanner Sombre or Perception, or many others that use mechanics like camera flashes for lighting dark areas.

While you'd think having to slowly print a black and white pixelated image every few seconds would be incredibly tedious (and in a way, it is) I was nevertheless enthralled at the novelty of navigating the world in such a unique way. Really impressed at the commitment to the bit as well, even modeling certain aspects like how turning while the picture is printing will distort it with new data, and having a great soundscape that helps for determining your location. All in all felt very slick and well-made!

Speaking of the soundscape, the other thing it does well is creating a very spooky game. Never being quite sure what you're looking at or hearing due to the low-quality distortion, worried what might show up on your next picture, and even second-guessing yourself at whether something moved or if it was just your imagination: the game had me on tenterhooks the whole time for some sort of big twist.

If I were to have any complaints, it's that the game did feel a bit short, one-note, and lacking some sort of story with an impactful end. As I just said, the game does a great job at delivering a dreadful atmosphere, and while part of me is glad that it didn't jumpscare me or anything, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't some sort of cool story progression with events like maybe once you're done cleaning and go back to the charger, suddenly you notice the door is now closed, and then you notice the body gone that was there before, and so on and so forth.

But then again, I do kind of like that it just asks questions and doesn't provide answers and still scared me even without destroying my ears, so maybe it actually should be considered a positive that it tricked me into being scared when there was nothing to be scared of? I'm rambling: whatever, neat game!

[Dude - The Deck Swabber]

Hey, pretty neat game! Feels like a legit bootleg NES game that you'd see from some company like Color Dreams or Wisdom Tree. For the most part the game feels pretty well-constructed and delivers some decent sokoban-style puzzles. I was impressed at how some levels intuitively taught certain rules from their layouts, like how sponges work in that they can stop you from sliding (but be careful of the fact that you still push it a tile in doing so).

Now, as much as I liked it, you'll notice that I compared it to bootleg games instead of proper games you'd get from Konami or something (boy, times have changed huh). And that's because it is a bit lacking in some regards:

For one, it is quite a drab game due to a lack of juice. I was disappointed that certain actions like using a sponge on a oil spill just had the sprites immediately disappear: would've much preferred if it produced a satisfying soap bubble explosion sprite and a pop/wiping sound effect. Similarly, it'd be cool if when you finish the objectives of a level, the bucket sparkles or glows in a pleasant way, similar to when you collect everything in a game like Solomon's Key. Little things like that would help to liven up the game considerably.

Another aspect that bothered me slightly was the pace and difficulty curve of the game: it just didn't feel like it was delivering a solid and addictive engagement due to the difficulty suddenly dipping back down at times, lots of puzzles having too much wiggle room, and the game not introducing enough new mechanics or twists. I imagine it eventually gets better, but I found myself getting a bit tired around level 10 or so due to the slow pace.

It's still a nice game, but if I were to be brutally honest, I'd say it is merely nice, instead of being something great or memorable. Not a crime or anything, but it did make me wish for more!

RichardOz responds:

I thank you very much! Regarding the rest, I totally understand the examples you gave and what you said and I personally agree with it in part, I don't agree with it fully because there are two factors about it, the first factor is that the game is a game for NES and that alone means really optimizing everything to the maximum to have a good product, visual effects, sounds and all, the second factor is that although you can do something more elaborate even for NES I couldn't do it because basically I am not a programmer but a cartoonist and animator, I used a game engine which made the development of the game even more limiting, I love to work on the details when I make something so believe me when I say that I did everything I could to be able to take advantage of the game engine to the maximum, you can try the engine yourself.

Regarding the difficulty of the game it was intentional that you had to have easier and harder rooms to detach yourself from the world and experience 30 minutes of carefree play as Dude, he doesn't care if something in a room is too dirty or not too dirty, while whistling he cleans up and is carefree, this let's say was the main purpose, to play and relax without having to think too much, so well-balanced difficulty without rage or anything like that, there is to consider that the game doesn't even have a save so you would have to complete everything in one run and so increasing the difficulty would have stressed the player, which I was trying to avoid
I will play difficult games, but that's not it.

While about the fact that I bored you already at room 10 I am sorry, I will work and study even more to improve my next games, you can already have a look at my portfolio, follow me on twitter or join the discord to stay updated on the next news about Dude - The Deck Swabber and other games

"merely nice" is not so bad for a small game of this scale! I thank you again!

[Cursed Dreams]

I really liked the concept behind this game: going into the dreams of each family member who has their own themed minigame is promising for helping to keep things fresh and interesting with a lot of variety. And I did like that walking around the house wasn't just a vehicle to get to the family members: there were a lot of interesting interactables with fun flavor text for people who want to explore!

But at the end of the day, all of the minigames felt incredibly simplistic, bland, and one-note: sure, there were a lot of them, but it was a real quantity over quality situation where none of them were particularly fun or deep, all of them feeling like they put the bare minimum effort in design. Some of them at least kept things short to match their mechanical depth, but then you had games like the sister's top-down shooter which overstayed its welcome: seeing that I had to kill 100 dolls made me practically quit right then and there. If I were to sum it up, this felt like a clone of Action 52: more games doesn't always equal more fun!

Pitigamedev responds:

Thank you for the detailed feedback as always. I hope one day I will make a game you will 100% enjoy.

[Parking Ticket Mayhem]

Hah, quite the amusing game! I've always thought that if I were rich, I'd love to have a room filled with breakable objects and weapons where I could de-stress, so the idea of creating a rage game is right up my alley. And considering we're on Newgrounds, this feels like a close brother to the Assassin games where you can really get out what's grinding your gears.

At the same time, however, the game was a bit less satisfying than I hoped. While it was amusing to smash cars and even discover that I could smash buildings and shoot as well, the amusement was short-lived as it soon became quite monotonous due to the lackluster feedback and rather shallow world that doesn't allow for much creativity. Even more disappointing was that, after taking the time to smash everything, the only reward afterwards were just more of the same cars falling from the sky to smash once again, instead of something new or game-changing.

I understand this game likely didn't have lofty ambitions or anything and I don't mean to be down on it, but it's a great concept and I would've loved if this game just had more to make the act of smashing more satisfying. More detailed damage modeling, hit-freeze and knockback and screenshake, more explosive effects, charge attacks that absolutely blow shit away to a ridiculous degree, more fun toys to wreak house with: just take everything to eleven, like a modded version of Teardown or Saints Row!

Anyway, hope you're feeling better now that you got it out, haha.

Raccoon-Formality responds:

hey, yeah, i made a comment on your youtube video but i'll just respond here also.

thank you for playing, i really appreciate that and the feedback. I made this game in a week right after finishing another project so yeah it's not exactly my magnum opus.

i am feeling better but i do still have a lot of rage for a continuation at some point. i want to do like a directors cut and release it on steam or something, idk, i'm really just going with the flow.

also, i'm quite new to newgrounds lol, I usually just post my games on itch.io but this one was doing very well on itch so i thought i'd try some other platforms as well. So yeah, i am not very well versed in the LORE of newgrounds lol.

anyways, thank you, have a nice day

[Ruby & Rusty Save the Crows]

Wow, quite the impressive game: legit feels like a real Nintendo platformer you'd find in the wild, down to the great ending credits that showcase all of the monsters you encountered!

I have to admit, I had a rough time at first due to the game feeling overly laggy / delayed / clunky / awkward, a feeling that unfortunately seems quite common with these GB Studio games: I know it's likely an intentional engine limitation, but it nevertheless bothers me as it led to a lot of unfair feeling deaths and difficulty with the controls. To run salt into the wound, there were a lot of those flowers that were hidden behind one-chance enemy bounces that, while understandable given they are an optional challenge, really ruffled my feathers, haha.

In spite of all that, though, I kept playing this game all the way to the end as it just feels so darn professionally made: gorgeous graphics, great level design with so much variety in obstacles and mechanics, a nice balance of difficulty where levels are nice and bite-size while also containing tons of bonus challenges, cool boss fights, and overall a very charming and cute aesthetic. Well done!

[Square Ways]

Decent little arcade game: I like the minimalist and stylish presentation and the bits of juicy effects here and there like how it flashes when you die for example, but while it can be good fun for a bit to maintain your course, weaving through blocks as it gets faster and faster, it quickly becomes old and I didn't feel compelled to play it more than 2 times.

Wish it had a bit more meat to it, like perhaps not only increasing speed, but also changing up the obstacles or introducing new mechanics and so on. It also didn't help that some of the effects, like the zoom-in on turning and then subsequent zoom-out when finished turning, could be a very nauseating back-and-forth when you are making minor adjustments to your turns: it's not a problem for big turns, but those rarely happen.

Also, of all the words you could've chosen for hi-score-keeping, why "higher"? I would've accepted "high" or "highest" as they are both appropriate, but "higher"? It's like you chose the worst option you could've! It is a silly thing to nitpick, but I just found it amusing.