TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Underground War]

Like others have said, it's glitched all to hell. I can't see all the areas when I scroll. The areas seem out of order. Adjusting game speed seems to adjust the difficulty. And in level 9 one of the areas was blank and my guys seemed to spawn on the right side of it instead of the left so I could only see part of them as they died and fell to the ground right after spawning.

And I have no idea what any of the upgrades do. I keep buying them thinking they help but seeing how glitched the game is the upgrades might just make things worse. I don't know how the game is played, but I seem to be beating levels. I don't know what resources I'm using on the units. I don't know why certain units become available at different times. I have no idea what you were trying to accomplish when you made this game.

[Sonic Vs. Mario]

So in your three Flash submissions, you've managed to include Mario, Sonic, Zelda, and Pokemon. Next up are Kirby, Metroid, and Starfox.

[Riddle Transfer]

If you didn't wanna make any more games, why didn't you just end it with them escaping in the spaceship?

JonBro responds:

Because I didn't know I was going to cancel the series yet.

[Fred Loves Girls]

What is this? I'm so confused. Is there like a parade going on or something? Are kids swarming Fred because school just got out? Are they headed for a sporting event or a grand opening at the mall or something? And does everyone in the town find Fred attractive enough to kiss on site? Is every boy in the town gay except for Fred? Or is Fred just kissing everyone because he can't tell if they're a boy or a girl until he kisses them? I don't blame him. They all look like girls to me. Girly hair, girly faces, girly lips. I thought the brains sticking out of the zombies' heads were flowers in girls' hair at first.

[[REVIVE]]

Finally, a game that says it's a puzzle platformer that's ACTUALLY a puzzle platformer. And a damn good one too. The level design is genius without exception.

[One Dimensional Pong]

You start to wonder where you went wrong in life when you find yourself watching a zero-player game of one dimensional pong.

[Increase its size]

Whoa, I love games like this. It really makes you think outside the box.

[Obduction XP]

Like Lockehorn, this is neither a platformer nor a puzzle game, but an arcade skill avoider game. I don't know why no one seems to know what a platformer is.

The main glitch is that when you beat a level with disappearing platforms the next level doesn't load and you're left with an unbeatable glitch level that you just have to kill yourself on. And when I finally beat hard mode, the medal didn't work.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/
19/obductionxp.jpg/

All the same, I think people are being too harsh with you. The game is beatable, and it isn't all that bad.

fliptico responds:

Thank, you are the first to specified the glitch. :)
Thanks for your comment I really appreciate it.

[Lockehorn]

Really? REALLY? You're calling this a puzzle platformer? This isn't neither a puzzle game nor a platformer! It's an arcade skill game. I feel like now you're just trolling me because I've complained about mislabeled genres before.

[Josh Tam Mysteries G2 : E]

Oh wow, I am amazed that I was able to beat this without the walkthrough. It is extremely difficult, but beatable as I have found. It reminds me of Morningstar, which also involves decoding an ancient language. I had to use a walkthrough on Morningstar, but then I wished I had tried harder. So I was determined to figure this one out on my own.

I don't know why those specific items go on those specific slabs, but a sensible player will try placing the items on the slabs and then look around to see if anything has changed. The bottom of the cliff is an obvious place to look since it's a dead end. I realized there must be three items so I was able to figure out what the third item was because I had already found the other two in corresponding places. Once you figure out each slab is supposed to have a different item, you can find the right combination in a maximum of three tries. So RadCarrot is wrong because if you made the slab lower when you put the grass on it then the puzzle would be too easy. There are only three items so it becomes a simple matter of trying each of them and then if one of them instantly locks the slab into place you'd know too quickly, and by the third slab you'd only have one item left.

Then in the cave, there's only one place where you can do anything at first so naturally the player should use trial and error to find the right combination. Once he's tried all 8 of them and had nothing happen, he should then go through them all again but check the rest of the cave while each combination is in place. The door is an obvious place to check, although most players might assume that the door wouldn't open until all three other sections of the cave have been solved somehow. Also, once they get through the door they might assume that those other two places were just clues that were meant to help solve the door puzzle which they just solved by trial and error, so they may be reluctant to go back into the main room later. Luckily, I had a hunch the main room wasn't finished.

The next room in the cave was the part of the game that tempted me most to use the walkthrough. I could see there were 256 possible combinations for the red button and the blue button, which made me very reluctant to use trial and error this time. Thus I agonized over how to interpret the bizarre clues on the walls. Ten circles? But there are only two rows of eight transforming stones for a total of eight stones. I eventually realized that all ten circles must apply to only one row of four, since there are two sets of ten circles after all. It was pretty clear that the pattern on the left wall applied to the left row of stones and the pattern on the right applied to the row of stones on the right. The weird kanji-like symbols didn't make any sense to me so I thought it best to focus on the chains of circles. Why ten? And why were they linked together with either one line or four? Finally I realized that each wall had exactly three four-line links, which divided the circles into four groups. Those groups must correspond to the stones because there are four of each, I reasoned. And so the shapes of the stones must correspond to the numbers one through four. The only question that remained was which end of the circle chain was the left end and which end was the right end. Since there were only two choices for each chain, I was at a point where I could just use trial and error to figure out the rest.

After seeing nothing happen, it was a simple matter of remembering the red and blue lights in the other room and noticing that the two buttons next to the stones are red and blue as well. So I returned to look at the lights, retrieved the colored stones and proceeded to try using them everywhere.

Tricky game indeed.

josh-tamugaia responds:

Wow! A lengthy review! You really deserve a pat on the back for playing through without referring to the walkthrough and also using the cave wall patterns to help decode the stones.

In the first game (G1), the puzzles were easy and the main theme was to give players a horror atmosphere thus I received some complains saying the game was too easy. So in this game (G2), I decided to make a harder puzzle. I never realized that it was gonna become very hard to the point that those people who said "too easy" gave up on this one or complained that there were not enough clues. But I believe I left enough clues so that players can still solve the puzzle without help from the walkthrough, and you succeeded!

Thanks a lot for spending time playing and reviewing the game, and most of all, thank you for proving that the game is solvable even though hard!