GregMustache's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[You Are Disabled]

I hate saying this because I try really hard not to judge this kind of thing, but Asshole Mario didn't really need a preachy message. Especially not one that gets fumbled this hard.

Being frustrated with a disability and the difficulties that come with it is not the same as being so incompetent you'd kill yourself by accident. Real disabilities mean finding ways to cope, finding ways to get around the problems you can't wholly avoid, not forcing yourself to do things the able-bodied way no matter how difficult they are.

I gave up on playing this because, having a disability myself, I didn't really appreciate having a game tell me that it's wrong for people to say I'm a useless, incompetent burden when I am actually playing a useless, incompetent burden.

[Hard Random Quiz 2]

The Impossible Quiz is clever because it presents the player with a familiar principle (answer the question), then subverts it by forcing them to re-interpret the question before they can answer, instead of just blindly obeying it like we're all trained to do.

You're not too far from the concept in places, but you screw it up in the first proper question. 1+1 = ?? is a good one, because the first impression is to assume that "??" is the blank we need to fill in with the correct answer. But then you make ?? one of the multiple-choice options, and still mark the player wrong for choosing it instead of the one at the end of the equation. At that point it stops being a clever logic puzzle, and becomes just an arbitrary means of giving the player the finger that shows you're not clear on how the Impossible Quiz works.

Games like this can be simple because they're built on complicated, interesting ideas, but this one lacks the complicated, interesting part, so it just comes off as lazy.

[Valthirian Arc]

I actually loved this game. The art's pretty crisp, the music is awesome; some people have compared it favorably to Valkyria Chronicles and I agree (although I think this game is actually better in a lot of ways).

The only problem I'm having is one of scale; right around the second year, it starts becoming mathematically impossible to meet the fame requirements within a month and it gets worse the longer the game goes on, especially when you meet the Apprentice and he stomps your party flat with no LP gain at all.

[Wyatt's Torch]

This really should have just been an animation. There's no interactivity, there's no story or characters to get immersed or invested in; in other words, there's no GAME here, and what little game there is, is so sluggish, poorly-paced and dull that it hurts its own message. Worse, it uses such overly-exaggerated caricatures of the debate that it doesn't actually explore the piracy problem at all, it just puts a cliched soundtrack on a cliched scenario and instead of "innocent children caught in the crossfires of war" we have "content creators who deserve to get paid".

On the plus side, though, the backgrounds were lovely.

Skip this, and go play Game Dev Tycoon.

[Skunk Meat]

Cute game, although I think I figured out Vivica:

She's not useless at all. She's awesome, actually!

It's just that she's a clumsy idiot, so all her awesome is entirely accidental. Only use her against UN-infected opponents (she can frustrate and annoy them into going away), and places where she has a chance to cause catastrophic collateral damage (for instance, when there's a giant crane she can accidentally kill people with).

[Snowdrift]

It's a really cool idea, one that I have a special love for because I've had a similar-ish concept in mind for ages but never had a good way to make it happen. But I had a LOT of problems, particularly with the choice of graphics (You can only use an oil lantern but you have torches on the doors and candles everywhere and they never go out; the house is huge and full of shelves but you can't store anything, it's a constant blizzard but you have to go to a somehow-un-frozen pond instead of just melting snow for water?)

I also seem to have run into some fatal glitches; things where the clock would stop running or I stopped being able to move, and I know it says that you can't get an ending until someone knocks on your door three times but I managed to survive for 32 days, but nobody ever came!

Long story short: cool idea, but buggy as hell

[no-one has to die.]

Played it for the story, played it again for the music.