Recent reviews by jumbo

Cat Purrtrol: Find All 100! is a very short point-and-click game where you, hence the name, find a hundred cats hidden across a sketch. This game is not really worth your time unless you want to hunt achievements. The developer thought it’ll be a good idea to make one of the clouds a cat, so that’s fun.

EDIT: The sketch is now rendered at a better resolution and is now bounded well. Also, the edgy depictions of the cats were removed. The game is still not that good, but I really appreciate the changes and wish the developer the best!

Easy Game Creator features a very poor user interface, and it makes me more disappointed after giving the free trial of 001 Game Creator a quick try, as its interface is more organized and fleshed out, while this one doesn’t even feature a simple menu to manage characters, battles, cutscenes, and events. All you get is a dialogue box, which while isn’t imminently bad, becomes more annoying when you have to make changes, where instead of using even using something simple – like, I don’t know… a menu? – you have to click a button to go back each option. I am not really sure what stopped SoftWeir from creating a simple menu; I am not saying it’ll be easy or anything, as I know that things in software development is time consuming and never ever be a “piece of cake,” but it doesn’t hurt to try to begin with, especially since they developed software with more robust user interfaces.

Nevertheless, the games you are able to create are incredibly barebones, as all you do is configure templates of characters, dialogue, and simple minigames. Hell, considering that the games you create and this creation software reminds me an awfully like 001 Game Creator, I wouldn’t be doubting that Easy Game Creator is more less a fork. There are a lot of other alternatives that offers you a better experience than this joke of game development, many being free and open source, like RenPy and Adventure Game Studio, and even countless proprietary ones gives you a reasonable and fair way to export your games; all unlike with Easy Game Creator giving you a single export to share your games, and you need to pay ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ no less than $25 dollars for another export, and almost for the same bloody price of 001 Game Creator on Steam… for five more exports. Even paid proprietary game engines, like Clickteam Fusion, GameMaker Studio, and Construct 3, does not charge money for exports!

Wait a minute, is that freaky guy the antagonist? I doubt he’s the protagonist since he’s too uncanny… In all seriousness, Jerma’s Big Adventure is a free action platformer created by a fan of popular streamer Jerma985, where you control the titular, baseball bat welding, and demented Jerma as he navigates though a mysterious cave after a totally hilarious fall joke, fighting dinosaurs and warlocks and cracking jokes for his audience. The game isn’t that long, but I’m sure that if you happened to be a fan of that shpee mate, I think you’ll love this game!

The game features many secrets, lots of funny references, and plenty of fun achievements, as well a PSYCHO game mode, where you make Jerma too horrifyingly for our own good. You can also try to find all of those poetic rats across the map, finding the little ones getting into trouble and the fat one making all of the rules. I heard that you can get a good ending if find them all! But, you didn't heard it from me… Pretty good yet simple gameplay, and I really appreciate the naive controller support. Graphics are nice and kinda silly, and I glad that the developer has a good taste in royalty-free music. Nice fan project and was able to pick up on some of the references. Make sure Jerma is less terrifying in the sequel, petty please!!

I found Code Rivals from the developer, Leandro, suggesting it to people who played Human Resource Machine, another programming game that I had played extensively to the point of speedrunning it, by offering keys. Considering that he stated in his post that HRM had inspired him and his game, I asked various questions about that subject matter as well his future plans of his game. I am aware that he would read this review, so I would be providing more feedback and questions with hopes that he reads it and thus responds in the perspective of taking to him.

My biggest problem is how limited the scripting language could be, particularly in the connection between blocks (Nodes? Commands?) and their inputs and outputs; when you connect an output to an input, that output connector cannot be used for other things. To put this respective, if I want to write a branch that does two different things, like running another branch if true while unconditionally doing something else, I would have to create a duplicate of that branch in order to do something like that. Here’s an example of that problem in flowcharts that I made using diagrams.net, where there’s two problems that functions similarly.

https://lawson2003.neocities.org/media/coderivials/coderivials1.png
https://lawson2003.neocities.org/media/coderivials/coderivials1.svg

Of course, I won’t mind that Leandro would keep this limitation in either of choice or limitations, as well I’m aware that everybody can address this example problem with functions (custom events) or organization (the first activation can be placed at the start and would hilariously eliminate the example problem completely), but this is just an example that I would like to show to demonstrate such a concept. After all, I would think this would help in reducing the amount of blocks and would be better helping people new to software programming and design.

In addition, I keep noticing bugs with the blocks where I can’t place down the block or stop creating connections, which tends to fix itself once my mouse leaves the game’s environment, like pausing the game or switching windows. If you need a demonstration of these bugs, let me know and I would like to get around recording myself causing these bugs, but I cannot promise that I would be able to do that at all since they tend to happen at random. Then again, this could be fixed next week as Leandro had stated in his response to TBF.

Originally posted by leandrro:

lots of things i see in HRM that i dont see in other programming games make me change design, like use saves between levels etc,

Lastly in one of your answers, which I quoted above, I found this one quite vague, particularly in using “saves between levels.” In HRM and 7BH, you can save and load levels by copying their contents as text into your clipboard, which in turn you can paste into a text file to save it for later or to edit its contents and paste it back, but I could be reasonable and might think you never had use this feature before, or you had did and didn’t like how it was handled. Could you care to elaborate what you didn’t see in both games and how did you address it?

That’s my review of the game so far, and I might check the game back and make corrections to my review as it improves, but I cannot make promises. Leandro, I wish you the best of the luck in making Code Rivals and I hope you can maintain a modest fanbase in the process!! If you wish to learn more about visual scripting languages, you can read this English Wikipedia article, and I recommend checking out Flowgorithm, a scripting tool that allows you to create code for multiple programming languages by using flowcharts, similar to your game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
http://flowgorithm.org/

Touhou Fuujinroku: Mountain of Faith is the overall 10th entry of the Touhou series, and based on the early recommend for such short amount of time, you could tell that I really liked this game. In the common Danmaku shmup gameplay (which includes Touhou 10), you move around in a vertically-scrolling map, shooting enemies, collecting pickups, and dodging bullets.

Touhou isn't called a “bullet hell” for nothing, as bullets will cover a big chuck of your game screen though an average play though. The game features four difficulties which are Easy, Normal, Hard, and Lunatic (trust me if you want to avoid this if you're new), and they determine the bullet patterns and boss spell cards. If you managed to beat the game in Normal difficulty or harder without getting a game over, which is a 1cc run, you can see the good ending.

As typical with Touhou, the soundtrack is very great, and a masterpiece alone. The general quality of bullet designs, characters, and writing varies across different Touhou games, and Touhou 10 is not an exception of this rule. Generally, the general content in Touhou 10 isn't perfect, but I promise you that it doesn't disappoint. In conclusion, I recommend Touhou 10 to anyone interested in picking up an action game.

Just do keep in mind that Touhou without installing any community patches is primarily in Japanese, and does not support V-Sync and window scaling. There's a helpful English guide that would help you get some patches installed that helps you play the game with improved graphic features and translated into English. Despite all of this, vanilla Touhou works fine and you can enjoy playing the game causally without these patches.

This collection of Flash games is great, and you should give it a try because its a great and quick way to replay old, yet good web games. This provides a visual and audio overhaul, with a big finale with many fails and endings. Even the playtime is about a hour, if you a sucker for web games, you should pick up this game.

In this series of games, you play as lucky criminal Henry Stickman, a generic stick man with brown shoes. In each path, you given few options (and sometimes limited time). At least one will advance to another path, while the rest are fails. However, fails are fun than completing the game, so if you manage to complete the game fail-free, you are missing out. This game features many references in few scopes, and overall have a clean art style and soundtrack.

While Aperture Tag has moderately fine level design with a very good concept and soundtrack (props to Harry101UK), the writing is very bad, so much that I would have refund the game under a hour or two if the level design is bad too. I have mixed opinions (not sure to recommend the game or not), where I enjoyed some levels and the soundtrack, but I hate writing because it tries to copy the style and humor of Portal's, but fails very badly.

While I have no problems solving every puzzle and experience few bugs (some parts of PeTI is broken), some people had experience bugs and wasn't able to solve some puzzles, making it unplayable for them. So, if you were having this kind of experience, you should refund right away. If this game have more time in the oven, this game would have been better.