DiMono's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[9/11 Simulator]

It's funny because I have a sense of humour

But man do those buildings make the game hard in the second half. Don't change a thing, just ...wow.

Kevin responds:

That's the only funny part?

[Recordshop Tycoon]

Serious bugs

Love the game, but there's two HUGE problems with it: sometimes the register will just simply stop ringing up sales. Then everyone in line gets upset that it's taking so long, leaves, and your karma goes straight in the garbage. It happens mostly when fast forwarding through the day, I've found. And frequently at the beginning of the day, within the first 15 customers, which means the remaining 50 are all leaving angry, thus the terrible effect on karma. I assume this has to do with when people get tired of waiting?

Speaking of which, it's dumb for the first or second person in line to get angry and leave. I think that before having someone walk away, you should check whether they're within the first couple, and if so then they stay but don't positively affect your karma.

The second problem is occurring for me on day 89: the game is crashing. In Task Manager, plugin-container.exe starts seriously bloating in memory usage (as in over 700MB and climbing), and the game understandably becomes unresponsive.

The upshot of this is that even though I want to make a serious go at getting a high score on day 100, until these issues are resolved it's just infeasible to make the attempt. So for now I'll get that last medal for buying all 4 properties, and then I'll move on to something else and come back to this later.

Xeptic responds:

Thanks for the review. There seems to be an issue with memory usage after a while. I'll have to take a look at that. Restarting your browser seems to solve the problem, but it isn't a really neat solution.

[Plinko]

Some minor change requests

I'm not going to talk about the purely random nature of it, as others have already done that at length I'm sure. I do, however, have a few more reasonable requests.

1) Could you put all the Continue buttons in the same place on the screen so we can more quickly click through?

2) Since those of us who are after medals will be playing this game hundreds of times, could you have it skip the animated intro on multiple playthroughs? By the twentieth game I'm pretty sure I know I'm playing Plinko, no need to keep announcing it.

3) I keep clicking on the number rather than the phrase that says "the first number is 6." Any chance of making the numbers clickable too?

[Apples in the Tree]

I love this game

I like absolutely everything about this game. My only complaint is how difficult it is to get Ozzy's autograph, but it IS a 100pt medal, so it's not like I can complain. My compliments to the musicians, and to your taste for choosing those songs; atmosphere is a huge thing for games like this.

Merol responds:

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! These guys are AWESOME!!!

[Pixel Purge]

Bugs?

It looks like there's a bug for counting Vessel kills. I've easily destroyed 50 between all my gameplays, but according to the game I've only killed 3. Is there more to it somehow?

Also, even with the skill maxed I don't think I've ever seen a bullet actually pierce an opponent and continue on the other side. So either piercing is broken, which is a bug, or piercing works but the graphics don't demonstrate it, which is a different bug.

That aside, it's a highly addictive game, and you've done very well with it. Keep it up!

EpicShadow responds:

It's rather hard to see piercing visually, but I assure you it's there and fully functional. It's best seen when you have a swarm of the mini grunts come out of a Veseel, then you blow through them all with a piercing bullet.

As for the Vessel kills, I'm 100% positive they work, I've tested it today. You have to actually kill them with bullets, you can't get too close and have them blow up. Them exploding doesn't count as a kill.

Thanks for the review and concerns, glad you enjoyed it!

[Smiley Showdown]

I like it

It's simple enough that you can just charge ahead and play it in about 15 minutes, for some cute little fun. Only thing I can't figure out is what's that last achievement? I assumed it would be "collect all other achievements," but it doesn't seem to be. Author, can you help me out?

[Riskful Thinking]

Fun, but there are two bad bugs

Well, two bad bugs and one that's basically irrelevant.

If you run out of money but still have stocks, your game ends even though you still have assets; it's just not capital. I think the check should be for money + number of stocks = 0, not just money.

The variable type you used for keeping track of our money is too small. As soon as you reach 2,147,483,647 the counter rolls back to less than 0 and you lose. I think you should change the variable type to a floating point, to take advantage of the massive size. Or, look for this happening and give it an ending, like you break the bank and own the casino now. It could even have a 100pt medal attached to it.

And the basically irrelevant one is that if your game ends while you have stock, when you restart your stock is there waiting for you. The stock can linger there for several games, until the company goes bankrupt. I say this one's trivial because once you're on that floor you basically win anyway, even if you go up there with $500, so the stock hanging around doesn't actually make that much of a difference.

Those bits aside, it's a fun little bit of randomness (for the first 3 floors, anyway) to break up the day, and all the games seem to work. And most have rather nice animations to go with them. Thumbs-up.

[Reincarnation: LTETR]

Bug report

I killed the first Reincarny, then went back to the shop to give the dead drunk's bone to the dog so I could get the string. When I clicked on the ball of string, the game froze. The only difference between this time through and when I succeeded at getting the string is that I hadn't killed the first Reincarny yet. So it looks like you can't go back to get the string if you kill him first. I would have reviewed with a 10, but a game crashing bug is a -2.

Also the tenth medal isn't in the public medal list.

Aside from that, the game was fine and the puzzles were about the right level of difficulty. I didn't know you could go another screen left from the soul pinata screen though, so you may want to think about moving that arrow or changing its shading or something to make it a little more obvious; had to go to the walkthrough to find out about the screen there.

[Indie Jones]

Only one major problem

The gems at either side, which are the hardest ones to get to, don't appear on the screen until they're already halfway past you. That means you don't have enough time to react, and can lose your streak through no fault of your own. I'd recommend widening the screen so that you can't be surprised by a gem that happens to be out of your reach and you'll never get to it because you don't have time.

Aside from that, it's a great little minigame with simple controls, and I like it. But in my opinion you seriously need to do something about those surprise gems at the edges.

seanjames responds:

Thanks for the input. My strategy tends to be to return to the center after every gem, which can be a bit of a pain. This game definitely should have been in more of a portrait format. But as you can probably guess, this was done on little time and it is what it is. Thanks for playing and thank you for the review!

[English Pub Pool]

My gripes

Really fun game, I keep coming back to it. But it has its problems:

1) I've never in my life seen a pool table with as little friction as the one in this game has. And I've played a lot of pool.

2) The rails don't seem to take any speed off the ball unless you've spun it in the opposite direction to the angle of impact. Rails are designed to absorb momentum, so all balls should come off the rails probably 40% slower than they went in.

3) Where did you get "break" to mean "number of balls potted in a row"? A break is the shot that breaks open the rack (hence the name). Potting several balls in a row is called a run.

4) Since when is there a rule that says you get two turns to the table after your opponent scratches? I've never heard of that rule anywhere, even among pool afficionados. I'm going to go out on a limb here and posit that you misinterpreted a rule about failing to pot a ball on your first shot after your opponent scratches?

5) When placing the cue ball behind the line after a scratch, you should be forced to shoot the cue ball such that it crosses over the line before hitting another ball. Otherwise there's no point in forcing the ball placement. I shouldn't be able to place my cue ball behind the line and tap in a ball to the near corner.

6) You've given the game the most uneducated pool audience ever. A real pool audience isn't counting shots, they're cheering difficult pots. Given the difficulties of giving them subjective judgment on whether a shot was hard, IMO the audience should cheer under these circumstances:

- Potting 2 or more balls at once without being a scratch
- Single-ball shot where the angle is severe
- Any shot where the ball struck is not the ball that is potted (i.e. combos)
- Running the table. i.e. in a straight pool game, you pot a ball on the break, then stay at the table until it's racked again.

7) Finally, is there a way to turn off the messages that pop up? I've played the game enough to know the rules, and there's no good reason for me to have to click 4 more times before beginning my game, or twice after scratching in order for my opponent to take his shot. Tedium is not attractive.

All that aside, this is still easily the best pool game I've ever played online, and I applaud you for making it. I will keep coming back to it when I need to relax, but I sincerely hope you take my criticisms to heart and use them to improve the next iteration of your pool games.

NipponMonkey responds:

DiMono, I'll answer your points one by one - I can tell you're clearly not from the UK, so I'll try to clear some things up for you...

1) I don't think there is a problem with the friction, I've played on tables with less friction than in this game. There are also a lot of programming issues with ball speeds, accurate collisions and desired maximum distance a ball can travel - I think the balance is pretty good.

2) "Rails are designed to absorb momentum"??? Not in England! The cushions are designed to bounce the balls off losing as little energy as possible. If the ball lost 40% of their energy in the UK, people would find a better table as the cushions are dead! In the game, the balls lose about 15-20% of the ball energy when hitting a cushion - I can't remember exactly.

3) "Break" is an English word for the total score without missing a ball. It comes from Snooker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_
break
"Break" is also used for first shot of the frame.

4) 2-Shots is a very common rule in UK pubs - I'd say played in every pub. We pay by the frame, so the rules are designed to speed up the game, so more frames are played.

You can change this rule in the game:
- Pool Rules->Set 8-Ball Rules

Common English 8-Ball Rules, see rule 6A: http://www.epa.org.uk/oldeparules.php
The official English 8-Ball rules have recently switched to World 8-Ball Rules, but most people play the traditional English rules.

5) Hitting down the table is a rule from Straight Pool only, in 8-Ball you don't play that rule - it's an old rule that has no purpose in 8-ball these days. I didn't add the rule to the Straight Pool mode as I didn't think it was worth the effort of adding this check. Mainly because I don't see the point of it and find it the most frustrating rule ever!

6) Yeah, the clapping isn't great, that's quite a lot of extra code to judge the difficulty of a shot you made, and to judge if you meant to do it or not! I might try to make the clapping better if I make another one...

7) You can't turn off the messages completely. As you play a few of them stop being shown. I just click quickly, it never really bothered me, I might improve this if I get time...

I hope that clears up some of your gripes.

"All that aside, this is still easily the best pool game I've ever played online"

Thanks :-)