Grukken's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[You Only Need One]

This game was short as all hell, had annoying music, and an even more annoying hammered in "message" that all indie games need these days, although the message is handled EXTREMELY poorly, being yourself doesn't usually mean that there are 2 groups that either like you or hate you, it is more complicated then that, and being a puppet that can't talk to anyone doesn't help either.

Overall a bad game that needed more effort, but at the very least it wasn't a complete insult to my intelligence, only partially, and that's why I'll give it a star. Just try a little harder next time.

[You Are Disabled]

I gave this game a star for it eerie sound design and decent sprites, but besides that this game is fucking terrible. I got set on "Crippled" which makes you go as slow as a fucking snail for the entire game and has essentially no gameplay really, you just walk forward and when you eventually meet with one of the magic guys they teleport you and say something that I'm sure the creator thought was really clever. If you wanted this to have any impact you shouldn't have just thrown us in to having the disability but playing the first part of the game as a healthy person that had a good life taken away from them, or at the very fucking least have the character SAY something and develop character. Allot of people are giving this game 3 or 4 stars just because it's "raising awareness", what is it exactly raising awareness for? The fact that having a disability is bad? It doesn't even portray being disabled well! All of the people in this game wanted to rape my crippled character for some reason and talked constantly about how much they hated him. People don't just walk up to a crippled people and call them dipshits while stuffing their cocks into the cripples mouth, most help them and are pretty nice about it because they understand that being disabled is tough. This game tries to look deep and meaningful when it is just a huge waste of my time.

[L.I.F.E.]

This game is great, my only problem is that it's too short. I've seen games use this premise before, but not as well as this. For a guy that has only made 4 games this is pretty damn good and I hope that we see more coming from him.

[Alien Splatter]

If I wanted to play Contra, I would play Contra, not some shitty imitation that is only successful because of the nostalgia factor. But guess what, I DON'T want to play contra because that was a 2D sidescroller from the NES era. Don't get me wrong, Contra was fucking awesome back then, an extremely innovative game with tight controls that was fun to play, but now? Now there is thousands of games on Steam and XBLA that did what contra did better, WAY better. They tightened out the kinks of the game, the most noteworthy being that Contra wasn't hard, it was unfair. Enemies were not challenging, but you only had 3 lives, and once they were gone you were done. That's terrible game design and this game followed in it's footsteps.

The game is buggy, on level 2 if you go to the left you get stuck and have to restart and if you are on the edge of a moving green block and it switches directions you will fall. I'm no tester, but I'm sure there's more bugs to the game, that's just the ones I encountered in the short time I could stand playing it. I'm infuriated by people saying how good the graphics are, you do realize that a million indie games use this very style don't you? It's because it's really fucking easy if you didn't know, and this is shitty sprite animating to boot. I will say that the game has merely sub-par gameplay with it's shooting elements, even though they are relentlessly uninteresting. The sound is bad chiptunes that sound the same, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same fucking song throughout the entire game really.

The worst part of this game is it's tag line "If you can't take how hard this game is then go play any other modern game". I'm angry when people think games made ages ago are superior to games now, but when people have the fucking GALL to say that Modern games are easier make me enraged. In the era of Dark Souls this statement has 0 validity. This doesn't even make sense in the creators twisted little point of view, this game was released last month!

In the end, there are games far worse then this on NG, and I don't think it's utter trash, I just don't like how people are praising it for no reason other then appealing to the 90's kid inside of you. The game has nothing new or interesting to offer, and fails at coming close to Contra, a game that it's desperately trying to be. The only Splatter this game is would be the one that a bird left on your car window. It's unpleasant, but once you get rid of it you forget it ever happened.

SinclairStrange responds:

Aww, tis the troll upset that I had a go at his precious COD franchise? Or is the troll upset that games from this era are too difficult? Or is the troll upset that he wasted time typing and think of a useless sentence to try and piss me off? Or is the troll upset that he's got nothing to show in his life other than bitterness and jealousy, while people like me get front paged and daily featured? Or is the troll upset that he's not slept with someone in quite a while?

Or maybe the troll is just a dick, with no life, with no future, sitting alone at his computer thinking of ways to upset people so his can boost what little ego he has?

:). And I thought it was the season to be jolly!