Listen2Reason's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[String Avoider 2]

Difficult, buggy.

It's obvious you spent a lot of time polishing this game, but it's just too hard. Just the fourth level required intense precision, especially with the way the string moves so quickly. Human hands just can't move a mouse that precisely without jiggling it a bit. Beyond that, it seemed to have bugs that made it unplayable. I would just randomly die in a level, and I could see my string's tip wasn't anywhere NEAR a wall. All in all, this game was good for nothing more than a few minutes of frustration.

fwe responds:

I don't understand. Human hands can clearly beat this level as I have, along with every single other level in this game. I wouldn't release this game if it was as buggy as you claim it is. Maybe your 1997 IBM is processing it wrong, or your ball mouse can't handle the precision of such an easy level.

Thanks for the review, though

[Super NG Missile Mastar]

Pretty good.

I thought it was okay. It certainly had a distinctive graphics style that worked well. I don't really like the idea of blowing up "noobs", but whatever...The game mechanic was simple, but interesting enough. I played until I got to bouncing Os, which made it more difficult, so I could tell the game wasn't simplistic. Which is good.

My one big issue was that it took so long to play. The first few levels were pretty much boring because you only had to move once or twice, and yet they each took like 30 seconds of waiting to get through. Oh well.

Casualty responds:

You might be right when you say the first levels are a bit long, but players need time to get into the game and it's way of moving.

Anyway, thanks for the great review!

[Fluxion]

Simple but fun.

I liked this game; graphics were good, gameplay was simple but fun. Did I hear a couple of sounds from X-Com Interceptor? If so, good choice. ;)

The two things I didn't like were that it was kind of slow, and it took a long time to get upgrades. I think both these problems could be fixed if you added more enemies. It's kind of boring to shoot three enemies, wait, shoot three enemies...if you had say six or seven, or even ten, that would be interesting. In the later levels the enemies speed up, which makes it harder, but not less boring! Oh well. Good work, it just needs a little bit more tweaking to be truly excellent. ;)

Fiz responds:

Thanks for your comments!

To answer your question, all the sound effects in the game are original. =)

[Smash 2]

Polished, yet buggy?

Obviously a lot of work went into this, it's extremely well polished, but it seems to have some fundamental flaws...I didn't really understand the instructions, for one thing. The whole point of a "breakout" type game is that you bounce the ball off the paddle, right? So how do you hit it "hard"? The mouse cursor is some odd aiming thing that didn't seem to have any effect, clicking doesn't do anything...For a breakout game it was okay, but there are other games I could play if I want that.

Also, it seemed like level 3 was impossible. I guess that's why you give the player the option to start on level 6? When you start level 3, the ball is completely vertical. This meant it would always bounce straight up and down and would never hit the blocks. Other games solve this problem by having a curved paddle, or a little random factor in the angle so the ball eventually goes to another place. After watching it for about 60 seconds, I moved the paddle away to see if missing the ball would do anything. The game told me this was "humiliating". Yeah, that's real classy, guys.

gel responds:

You move the paddle in the direction you want to hit the ball. Think of it like tennis. You don't just hold a tennis racket still and wait for the ball to hit it. You swing the tennis racket and the harder you swing it, the harder the ball gets hit, right? Same thing in Smash 2. If you want the ball to go left, move your paddle to the left. If you want the ball to go to the right, move the paddle to the right. If you want the ball to go flying really hard, move the paddle up really fast.

I know this is different from classic Breakout style games, but that's why it's a new game and not a total clone.

The "humiliating" message was more for myself, haha. I sometimes hit the ball hard, it hits a black brick, and goes flying off screen. I thought it would be funny to put in that message so I could mock myself every time I did that. I'm serious. I think it would be unclassy to say "you suck" but instead I just stated what I thought every time I screwed up: "Bah! Humiliation."

[Happy Cyclopsland]

Kind of pointless?

I didn't really get this one. First of all, the instructions could have used some more work, it took me a while to realize that W was thrust. If only you had copy-pasted the instructions from the game description (which was hidden under the "read more") and put them in the actual GAME, that would have helped.

Anyway, once I worked out the controls, the game seemed to work well...Except I couldn't figure out what to do! There wasn't anything to fight. I can fly around and shoot, but it didn't do anything! I didn't want to kill any civilians because, well, there was no reason to, and there was also that warning in the instructions about something bad happening if you did. So there was nothing to do. Too bad because the flying controls were kind of neat.

BasV responds:

ARE YOU SERIOUS!? Dude, if you press play, you go through a tutorial BEFORE even playing the game! It displays all the keys right there! You can't miss it!! And DUDE! It sais what you have to do too in the tutorial! :O

[Hearts 1.1]

Difficult control scheme.

First, this game really needs instructions, because otherwise how are you supposed to know that you're supposed to click WHILE an arrow is reloading? All my arrows were going straight down until I figured out that you had to click just at the right moment to start the power charging. Even if there *were* instructions, this would be a strange control scheme, I really don't understand it.

Anyway, the game itself was okay. The best thing about it was its distinctive art design and "feel".

DBarbarian responds:

lol. You're supposed to hold the mouse button down to charge...

[Space thing 2025]

Not bad, though simplistic.

Good for what it was. I think I found a couple of bugs, though; whenever you hit one of those things that kills everything on the screen, it takes away one of your lives. Also, the score doesn't reset when you get Game Over. And finally, what's up with that miniboss? He didn't do anything at all?

Underworlder responds:

the bugs are being fixed right now lol
umm the pods explosion is hitting you
i warned everyone about that
DO NOT GET HIT BY EXPLOSIONS!!!
the miniboss cant shoot yet
do you read comments at all?!

[StarfighterDuel-Gold]

Okay.

It's a two-player Asteroids duel...well, that's okay. But I couldn't find anything about the Last Starfighter movie. Did you hide it somewhere?

RohanDX responds:

You bastard! Why must you make random references to hardly known (yet awesome) movies?
Seriously, though the movie was awesome...There is no secret about it in the game other than the name. I just didn't want to use "Star Wars".

[Great Teacher Onizuka SE]

Good, but incomplete.

It seemed kind of bland and boring. Whatever subject you teach, Calculus or Sex Ed or the (quite cleverly named) Make Shit Up, it always results in the same animation of the teacher blathering on to invisible students. After a while it seemed kind of pointless, just teaching day in and day out. Unfortunately there wasn't any way to recover HP, so I died the third time the vice principal attacked me. I thought skipping class would recover HP, but it didn't; is this a bug?

DAIRYDOG responds:

You must go to the store and eat fish. If you want to restore HP in combat, you must buy fish.

[Heaven or Hell]

So good, it's BLASPHEMOUS!

All right! Anything that makes fun of Christians is good.

TheOtherTruth responds:

Thank you for your review.

Yeah, I'm already getting the hate mail.