guthrie's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dodge]

In what world is this fun? There's no feedback mechanism, the controls are too unresponsive, and the speed of the game is seemingly set to "impossible."

Silva-Thornbrig responds:

because of new grounds work it takes a minute to load properly and it's supposed to be hard thanks for the feedback thue

[Math Booster]

There are some really weird characters that pop up for me in place of some operators. '÷' in particular is coming up a lot and it seems inconsistent as to what it actually means.

More testing is required for this to be Portal material.

[Volcano Explorer]

This is stolen from the Discovery Kids site.

sonyotakukage responds:

Why This Game Is Stolen?

[PÜNG]

Where is the ready button? Is it the red box at the top? I can't double jump that high.

GabeD3 responds:

Yes, it's the red button. The more you hold the jump key, the higher you'll jump.

[4 Axis Political Quiz]

Not bad, but I have a few suggestions:

Most of the responses here should be on a Likert-type scale rather than a simple agree/disagree. You might also want to add a weighting factor for the responses. Right now it seems like every question is equally weighted which is not a great assumption. Just as an example, I don't consider the minimum wage question to be of equal importance to the global warming question.

Did you write these questions yourself? Some of them are arbitrarily worded or confusing when parsed. Some of the questions are not political at all (e.g. flat earth), which was striking.

It would be nice if I could restart the quiz at any point or take it again after seeing the results.

The quiz could also be a bit more visually attractive but it seems like that's not what you were going for when you designed it.

Candlebeam responds:

Thanks for your feedback! I went with a simple agree/disagree model rather than a scale because I personally think people's self-assessments of how strongly they think or feel something tend to be kind of inaccurate; I wanted to force people to take *some* kind of stance, but for example if you say you "agree" vs "strongly agree" might just depend on your mood at the time.

Regarding the questions you said where not political at all: part of the reason I made this quiz was because I was unhappy with the scope of existing political compasses and whatnot - I think there are important factors in determining someone's position on the spectrum that are usually left out. One of these is the primitivism to technocracy scale. For example, I think that most people would agree that there's a significant difference between a secular dictatorship like Assad's Syria, and a theocratic dictatorship like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But what's the factor that makes them different? It's not authoritarianism; they're both clearly authoritarian states. They don't appear to have huge differences in economic politics either. I would argue the main variable that distinguishes them is that the theocracy is significantly lower on the primitivism to technocracy scale. Another example: Unabomber Ted Kaczynski carried out his bombings for political reasons; he was an anarchist, but if he were *merely* an anarchist how could you explain why he targeted universities and airlines instead of say, government institutions? It was because he was specifically an anarcho-primitivist - he viewed technology as the enemy.

So a question like "is the earth spherical or flat?" I would argue actually carries a lot of political weight, contrary to what it might look like at first glance. If you assert that the earth is flat, what does that imply about your views on society? Firstly, if the Earth was actually flat it would necessarily imply that there is a huge conspiracy to cover it up, therefore it can be assumed that the government, the scientific establishment, airline companies, and various other organizations are hugely deceitful and probably actively malicious. Secondly, it means that you approach gathering knowledge and determining how the world works very differently than a more "mainstream" view of things - perhaps, if you believe in flat earth for religious reasons, it's because you think religion is fundamentally more accurate than science. This idea would definitely affect, say, who you vote for in the next election. Anyway idk if you agree with me on this but this was my line of thinking.

[QUIK]

Unplayable on my 1080p monitor. Reduce the size so I can actually see what the hell I'm doing.

[TEthreeS]

This is a really interesting change to Tetris! I would really appreciate a "next block" screen and some slight alteration to how the pieces react when an arrow is held down. It felt like they weren't reacting quite like I'm used to on OG Tetris machines.

Overall I really liked it and this is a super challenging modification of a classic.

Lord-Sazerac responds:

Yeah I know it's needing more love, if I find a little more time for this jam game I'll update it with some of that. Thanks though!

[Octo-cannon]

Way too buggy to submit.

The starting positions and velocities of the mines are seemingly random. This makes it extremely likely that you'll hit one before you have time to react. I would add a check to see if the mines are too close to the player's location before they start moving, or pause at the start and let the player see the velocities before they become unpaused.

If you click outside of the window you can't regain control unless the page is reloaded. Definitely fix that.

DrewJayne responds:

yeah the window thing is a big issue and ill work an the mines but i have no idea how to fix the window thing

[Two Man Hockey]

Even on air hockey tables, there is a little bit of friction. You might think about adding a momentum term that decreases proportionally with velocity.

The puck can pass the halfway mark of the table. That's not allowed in traditional air hockey rules. So definitely include that.

Aside from those points (and they are big IMO), the feel of the game is really good.

smatthews1999 responds:

Thanks for that. I do restrict the paddles from going past the 2/3rds mark when playing a multiplayer game. I'll keep your suggestions in mind.

[Space Explorer]

The trick to getting a good score is to actually make a good game. This protest game isn't a good game, and it's not even really a good protest. So what have you actually contributed?

Avant-Garde responds:

There has been loads of great games that end up with bad scores because the critics didn't spend enough time playing them (e.g. Let it Die - IGN 6.4/10). By saying, the key to getting a good score is making a good game, is just dismissive, you obviously don't have any real say on the matter, hence why you come out with the most generic statement that you possibly could. I'm trying to get people to think about the quality of the industry and how games are produced. This was created in an hour, just to test people's response and see if they got the message. For you to dismiss it so quickly as a "bad protest" and you asking what have I actually contributed, gives some kind of impression that you understood that it was a protest, meaning that my message was clear enough for you to understand. What else do you want me to do hang a fucking banner out my window. It's a flash game, which took me an hour tops. Try not to get too offended.