TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Portal Defenders: Fast Break!]

Hey great job Nick and Luis! This is probably the best basketball game I've played in a browser.

I wish I could switch up my players during the campaign so I didn't have to use the same two for ten games straight. If I'm starting a new campaign and I change my mind about which players I want I also wish I the back button just went to the player select screen instead of restarting from the whole intro. Since the only way to change players is to start a new campaign, I also can't retry the later courts easily with new players after beating the game. Maybe there should be a free play mode where you can play on any court.

It's weird that you can't steal the ball or intercept passes so it feels like there's not a lot to do when the other team has the ball. Of course that all changed when I finally played in Seattle. The fish-kicking mechanic made the game so much more fun it was like a whole new game. I wish every court had something like that.

EDIT: After I read some comments, I realized I can attack players when they have the ball. This is surprising since the other team never attacked me. My point kind of still stands because attacking costs boost and so you're still likely going to spend a lot of time not being able to do anything.

[Gooby]

Nothing happened after I killed Puck and Gruck. I can't seem to advance in the game, and there's no suicide button or anything to restart the scene. Seems like a cool game if it would work though.

EDIT: I was able to finish the game using the play button in the right-click menu, so thanks for not disabling that

[Clockify]

Maybe I'm the only one who had this problem, but I noticed that it often didn't load the image correctly when I pasted in the text input and then immediately clicked on the go button. It seems like I had to click outside the text input first so that it would lose focus or something in order for the text to become accessible to the program

[Tidying Up + Secrets of the Sewers]

Found some bugs. (I'll comment here instead of messaging Intrapath)

1. When I first opened the game, I went to the level editor and tried to change the music. I clicked the right arrow and the song title still said welcome, and then I clicked the left arrow and the song title said "UNDEFINED". I've been unable to reproduce this, so it may have something to do with changes in persistent state that now prevent the bug from occurring.
2. Any time you enter the level editor, the song title says welcome and then still says welcome after clicking the right arrow even though the music changes.
3. Clearing save data does not reset the unlocked songs so all songs remain unlocked.
4. When you start a level, it doesn't say which character is active until you press the switch button. It just says "ACTIVE: -"
5. In one of the levels the text box didn't even say "ACTIVE" at all and just remained completely blank for the whole level. Sorry, I don't know how to reproduce this.
6. The level title text changes the mouse cursor to a text input cursor. I suspect this is because the level title can be edited in the level editor.
7. The text input fields in the level editor can't have text selected with the mouse. You can select text with the shift and arrow keys, but the mouse can only be used to change the position of the text input cursor.
8. When you click on a tile type to change your active tile in the level editor, and then click on the main menu button and then click yes, that active tile remains visible over the main menu.
9. The music controls (play/pause and the left button) are clickable when they're invisible in the dialogue cutscenes.

It looks like you're using Flash and ActionScript. Several of these bugs have to do with layers and mouse events, so I can tell you a few ways you can approach fixing them. If you want to cover up your buttons with a huge rectangle to make them invisible, you have to make sure the rectangle is mouse-enabled so it can't be clicked through. If you want to make sure an object can't be clicked on by using the mouseEnabled property, remember that there's a mouseChildren property as well. But I think the best solution is to remove unfocused game screens from the stage entirely by using removeChild.

Apart from bugs, I do recommend including a level select screen that shows which levels have been one-hundred-percented for those players who want to get the medal :)

EDIT: Also there are typos in the dialogue. It says ect ect instead of etc., and some of Capy's lines have a space at the beginning.

Bleak-Creep responds:

I’m sure Intrapath will appreciate the thoroughness of this! Thanks for playing!

[CypherGrid]

While I do like this game, my feeling is that the game doesn't understand its own rules. There's inconsistency in that the puzzles where every clue is used are played pretty differently from the puzzles with decoy clues. I would say the puzzles with decoy clues are strangely harder than the puzzles without even though they come first. The decoys show up in the tutorial, then there are just a few decoys in the three-digit lock puzzle, and then by the time you get to the clock and the map there aren't any decoys at all. I think the issues people are having with priority are largely coming from the puzzles with decoy clues. It's weird to me that the game tries so hard to teach the player about priority when priority only makes a difference when there are decoys and so it doesn't matter after the tutorial.

Besides the main puzzle mechanics of the game, I have a few minor interface suggestions. It would be nice if there was a button to return to the menu in case you wanted to start over or something without refreshing. Also, in the map puzzle there's no need to make the player pick a letter and a number when they should only have to click once on the map itself.

Also I appreciate that the game let me play the ending segment first so I could try seeing if I could figure out the puzzle mechanics myself without the game even teaching me at all, and I did! I'm very proud of myself :P

EDIT: I want to add that I think it's very clever the way you made it so ambiguous who the protagonist is. Sometimes you're controlling Ucogi and sometimes you're controlling the guy but you don't always know which one until after you take an action.

Veinom responds:

Nice observation. The decoys are in the game's core mechanic. And indeed the map and the clock used to have decoys. But I listened to someone who hated them (because "picross doesn't have decoys") and when I "fixed" these later stages... I messed the game up in that regard. Thank you for the feedback, I will add more levels and decoys in the update!

I'm glad you played the game backwards and you still enjoyed it!

[You Will Fall]

I think the third time the game displayed the fake error message it actually did have an error and I had to restart because it was frozen :P

YaenGames responds:

Did you by any chance click on the "Give up" button? In that case... Well that closes the game :D

[Super Plantoid]

As others have said, this game is long enough to need to save your progress when you reload the browser.

I appreciate that you've allowed us to skip the growing process, but I still think it's too slow-paced considering how frequently you need to use the plants. Since there are cases where you need to grow the same plant over and over in the same spot, it seems weird to me that the whole plant disappears just because you picked a berry. The whole plant-growing mechanic makes a lot more sense to me if you can reuse a plant by picking multiple berries off of it without having to grow it again. That's usually how plant-based items work in games.

Also, the player's movement speed seems pretty slow so a running option would be nice

[Nyghtmare: The Ninth King]

I don't know if this is just a problem with the third slot, but I can't load it. It saves correctly and says I'm on stage 2, but when I try to play on that slot it just starts a new game on slot 1. :(

[FART GAL]

Green lipstick and green armpit hair. Nice attention to detail

[Rolus in the Outskirts]

It's quite good, though maybe a bit slow-paced. I'd definitely like to be able to run.