HerbieG's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Super Batter Up! Challenge]

At first I hoped that it would actually be a good sports game or something like this, well... I was disappointed. And I was even more when I started to play the game. It is rather not about the skills, it's about luck. And many times the game generates a situation in which it is not possible to hit 2 subsequent balls or hit the ball while avoiding a bomb that is coming just after it. The game is also faulty and has some irritating bugs and glitches. Few issues:
1. The game is not saving progress, so you have to do all bombs, cages or walls challenges in one sitting;
2. In some challenges, especially in Keep it up, although you have passed a wave successfully without any strikes the game fails to send you the next wave of balls and all you can do is to quit.
3. The Keep it up challenge has its own unique bug: very often the player to the right fails to show up for the match, so you cannot play.
4. It can also happen that although you finish the challenge the game won't tell you that you won or won't redirect you back to the challenges select screen, pressing the "back" button is not helping at all, it is not working, so all you can do is to reload the game and if you remember point 1 above - if you for example passed 3 walls challenges you have to do it all over again - extremely irritating.
5. I don't know what's wrong with this challenge, but I had to beat the Alien challenge 3 times before finally the game decided that I actually deserve the medal.
So definitely there are some fields in which this game can - and should - be improved.

CidadeAP responds:

Hi HerbieG thanks for your comments and play time.
As far as the game being about luck I have to disagree, I can beat all the challenges on Gold on my first try, the timings are tough on some challenges but luck is not needed to beat them.

1) Im not sure why its not saving your progress, just checked and it was working but after a while it reset back losing the save progress, I can see why that sucks. Will see what I can do to fix this.

2) In Keep it Up! 2 I have found the same bug and I'll try to fix it in an update.

3) Darn, thats a bug I havent seen yet, do you remember what player you played with or any other details when this happened. Maybe I can find the bug easier with a bit more info.

4) Do you remember what challenge that happened on? Until I fix it you can press Escape to go back.

5) The Alien challenge medal when I tested came up after I refreshed a couple times, not sure why this is happening.

Sorry for any frustration these issues caused for you, it will take a bit of time to figure these out but I will try to as soon as I can. Thanks for playing our game, hope you had some fun with it.

Cheers

[Ultra Trivia - SNK]

Another nice trivia about another big Japanese games company. Some of the answers weren't even easy to find on the Internet ;-) I have to complain about 2 things though - SPOILER WARNING:
1. Question 13: it is a common mistake that people are making by referring to the series of those games, it's proper name is Samurai Shodown, not Showdown, without "w" in it.
2. Question 19: it is a legal issue; if you ask this question in the current way the answer is "currently never". Why? Because at the end of previous year, 2016, SNK Playmore officially and legally dropped the "Playmore" part from its name and its current name is again the SNK Corporation. So you should rather change this question to "When did the original SNK Corporation close?".

FIL1994 responds:

Thanks for the review. I'll have to fix those. I believe their name is just SNK now, but it was a misleading question. EDIT: Your right. It is SNK Corporation.

[Ultra Trivia - Nintendo]

The quiz is ok, but there are too many questions related solely to the release date. Also the game is too much US-centered, there are only few questions about Japan. Why there are completely no questions about the European market?
Also according to Wikipedia - not sure if it is reliable - all 4 games mentioned in the last question were released on Wii U.
By the way, you got a typo in the last question: bors.

FIL1994 responds:

Thanks for the feedback. Europe and US release dates were very similar for the games and systems in this quiz. The last question is which game was not a launch title for Wii U. Thanks for pointing out the spelling mistake. I'll fix that asap.

[Cat Clicker (Fix)]

I promised myself that I will write a guide here about dealing with the problems that the players can meet while playing this game. Well... it will be almost complete. A bit of a shame for the author that did not bother to upload a "less glitchy" version also on Newgrounds ;-)
So... the guide:
1. Better not to play this on Firefox. Not sure why, but when I tried to play this game on Firefox it was failing to save. I was clicking on "save", the game log was saying "game saved", but when I was returning to the game and wanted to load the browser was telling me that "cookies not found". Oh yeah, I ate them, I forgot ;-)
2. Also the medals seem to be not working on Firefox.
3. If you click very fast manually like I was doing the game can start to freeze a bit. Once it even caused my computer to crash and forced a reboot.
4. Loading problems on Chrome: sometimes when you return to the game and want to load a game nothing will happen - don't panic! Reload the game again and try to load now, if still nothing happens - now it is time to panic ;-)
5. Glitching: be prepared for situations in which the game will just freeze. Well, not completely. You will be still able to click the cat and see the falling cats in the background, but that's all. No gains, no buying upgrades and no saving or loading, so... better save frequently.
6. Probably the most important: the medals. Most of the medals ARE NOT UNLOCKING in the moment you meet their requirements. In most cases you will have to save the game, reload the page and then they should unlock. Sometimes you may have to repeat that to make them work. Man, that' irritating...
7. More glitches: if you click on a medal at the very beginning - everything will be working in a normal way, but if you try it at the later stage, I mean after playing for a while the medal menu will not open or you won't be able to close it by clicking on "back". What's more: at this state it is likely that while reloading the page the game will cause the browser to freeze for a longer moment and it can even stop responding. Eventually it should get back to normal after few seconds.
8. Most irritating for me and the reason why this guide is incomplete: the Winner medal. Despite reaching 100 000 many times, clicking Win lots of times, reloading the game many times the game is unwilling to give me the final medal...
So... there are lots of fields on which the game should be improved and I am hereby encouraging the author to do it :-)

SlimeEnergy responds:

Fixed (Removed Glitchy NG Api)

[Life of Baby Bird: The Math Game]

I hope that indeed it will be longer. One thing: since when 99 x 100 is not 9900?
By the way, if you want to receive some solid feedback - make it able for people to send you PMs.

[Road Closed]

I was going to write that I take away the whole star because the game is not working on Firefox - you get only gray screen after preloader, I sent a PM about it, but no answer yet. But the rest of the game persuaded me to take away almost all of the stars.
The game is terrible, even for an effort for mobile devices.
Starting with that: this is an example of a bad trend these days: somebody creates a game for Android and then decides - ahh, what the hell, let's put it on some website with flash games. Like the guy from 2 Stupid Dogs cartoon could say: "Isn't that cute? But it's wrooong!".
First of all it requires to test whether the game is working well on all types of browsers (I already know that on Firefox it is not), on different operating systems, under different plug-ins etc. the second thing is testing the gameplay on all of them and the gameplay on a computer vs a mobile device generally.
And about the gameplay: this is the worst part. Did the author even try to earn all the medals? I don't see it. Many times you are just blowing up an obstacle with a part of the road. There is no rule for targeting. What is even more irritating: how am I supposed to destroy a very low obstacle after a very high obstacle when there is basically no room - no time for hitting it and you always "overshoot"?
If you will be lucky you may get some of the first medals, but expect the rest of them to be removed, because nobody will be able to get them. I only can think that the owners of the slower computers can benefit from it a bit and I am unlucky here.
If the author would like to make it really enjoyable - this game needs to be reworked a lot.

[Sally's Cats]

Just one thing to say: the mid-air control over the cats is just terrible.

[Windows XP Sim]

Actually in comparison to the good old XP it's the Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 that should be called shitty. I was hoping that Microsoft will finish the Windows 9 project, but that never happened. In 8.1 the "system thread exception not handled" BSOD occurs even more frequently than the BSOD in Windows 98. I can't even watch anything on YouTube without being afraid of this to happen. In Windows XP there even wasn't such a thing, such a critical error which would be occurring all the time. Moreover: I got a quad core CPU and under 8.1 the computer is sometimes working slower than my old one was working under XP. About 10: many people say that it is "surprisingly laggy". There is also the functionality. In XP you could fix some things by yourself by entering certain options, settings etc., in current systems many settings aren't even accessible for the user. But of course if somebody is looking for gadgets and pre-installed web games and not pure functionality...
Summarizing: your submission is definitely not showing the true nature of Windows XP :-)
You could also add more options - on NG there are many submissions like this, so you could find some inspiration for that - and try to hide the medals a bit, so they would really be worth those 50 points ;-) This value is likely to be asked to be decreased because of that.

[Vintage Game Shop]

It's a good game but one thing is illogical: why would I pay the expert $10 every time if the clients won't sell me the item for such a low price anyway? Their last offer is almost always higher than the predicted re-selling price.

[KeyCountDown]

Simple but awesome game! Very entertaining and addicting as well. Tons of reflexes required ;-) I only found the medals pop-up a bit disturbing during the gameplay. I would also wish that I could redefine the keys and use more comfortable keys for my right hand, for example it would be good if the game would allow the 1, 2, 3 keys from the num-pad.

tirsod2000 responds:

Thanks a lot! I will see what I can do :)