Score: 8

"I agree with the minority of others..."

submission: the Last of the Dashkin

date: December 23, 2009

... in that I think the narration sort of cheapened it all. My favorite part about the previous episodes/stories was the fact that it all seemed like a world completely and entirely apart from humanity, with it's own set of rules and it's own general mystery to unravel - because it seemed nothing about it could be known by a human. But now you're making it seem as if humans/people/whatever WERE a part of it at some point? in my view it ruins the "freshness" of it... the feeling that it is an undiscovered world. And the narration just helps to steal that mystical aspect and mystery away. A human voice is now telling you the story... honestly, it's a bit like coming across what you thought was a deserted island, only to find out as you excitedly explore it that there is a docking port for touring cruise ships on the far shore.

Also, if I remember correctly, Bitey wasn't the only intelligent/sentient/emotional being among the other animals you've introduced. There was a witch at one point, the guy peeing in the stream, and the one gathering the Waterlollies... who all seemed as intelligent/sentient/emotional as Bitey. Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but the narrated story made it sound as if he were the only one with those near-human attributes... and it just led to my mind finding a discontinuity in the story-telling on that score.

Score: 7

"A bug - don't know if mentioned already"

submission: Tetraform

date: December 20, 2009

I simply noticed that the clickable area of the "nuke" seemed to be locked on center-screen... that is, it DID NOT follow the actual graphical representation of the button - the radioactive symbol at the center of the "planet". Easy to test - all you have to do is move to a corner and then quickly place your cursor at center screen - the cursor turns into the hand as if there is something to click... then if you do the same (move to a corner) and mouse over the radioactive symbol, you get nothing.

This may not be very noticeable when there is no lag going on - which may be why you didn't find it in testing.

Also, at first I couldn't understand why some comments mention that the game got difficult. I didn't have any difficulty AT ALL getting all the way through and receiving a score of over 33,000 (which didn't post to the high-scores for some reason, even though I WAS logged in). But, I think the lag had something to do with it... I always had plenty of time to match up ships or tag them to my giant, protruding mace-type-things, etc. The bosses also tended to just fly around a lot and only drop stuff I could use to attack them with at long intervals - so there was a lot of down time, which was frustrating, but again, may also be related to the lag I experienced.

Score: 4

"Real control problems"

submission: Dadgame

date: September 6, 2009

The control system had a terribly awful base pattern of storing every key-press made and then making sure it executed them all even AFTER you decided to change direction, stop attacking, etc. It made playing this extrememly frustrating. For instance I would be running in one direction, attacking, and if I held down the direction key too long, or pressed "Z" too many times, he would continue running in the given direction and attacking even if I was now pressing the keys in the other direction, and no longer pressing "Z". It was,quite honestly, one of the dumbest things I have ever experienced with regard to control in a game. In order to give players the ability to react quickly to situations, you need to be checking for and reacting to only the keys being pressed ON THE CURRENT CYCLE. In this game you seem to be building a queue of keys pressed and executing through them on each processing cycle in turn... and you make sure you never skip one. Which is ridiculous. As I held down a directional key, every cycle would be processing the key into the queue, so that even if I let go of the key, it seemed like it may have still had 20 to 30 cycles worth of presses in that direction queued-up to be executed. Half the time this made it seem like the character had a mind of his own and that I wasn't even in control or playing. It was a mess.

Maybe that's not how the control-processing is setup... but it sure seems like it, and I sure had a problem in a big way, whatever the game's engine is really doing. Reading some of the other reviews, it seems I may have been among a minority of people who experienced problems. And I admit the computer I am currently using may not be the fastest on the draw, but I have never experienced problems like this before with any other game. Flash or otherwise. This game, for me, was a train-wreck.

Score: 0

"Just a few words..."

submission: MM Jesus Rangers

date: August 25, 2009

"Moyea demo".
SAM-type voices.
Not really Flash.
Non-sensical character design.

Fix those things and it may have been pretty amusing. Otherwise it just looks like you used stock demo-figures and a voice-generator to skirt around actually having to do much work.

Score: 10

"Normally don't like these kind of games"

submission: Toss the Turtle

date: August 17, 2009

But felt I had to give this one a 5, and the highest marks for all the variety and depth of gameplay. It is, honestly, the best of these type of throw/shoot the object and bounce games I have every played. Which is, I am sure, what you were aiming for anyway.

My favorite part was how the turtle kept up his speed if you didn't touch the ground, so that power-ups (like the shots) seemed to have more effect when you were traveling/falling fast. Either that... or gravity and friction were reduced when you are in "space" because, with the larger cannons, I soon found myself easily able to make over 300,000 feet without touching the ground, using the rocket after I had reached my peak, and the machine gun as he would fall, trying to shoot just one round at a time to conserve it and make the most distance at maximum speed.

I just bought the NG tank cannon... so I'm going to go see if I can make 400,000 + without a ground hit right now...

Awesome job. Great game.

Score: 5

"Cheapened..."

submission: You Only Live Once

date: August 8, 2009

I got to "live" again on my work computer, and while I was waiting for it to load, I realized something. The "statement" you're trying to make with this is severely cheapened by the fact that there is an ad loaded at the beginning of every attempt to access the game. So basically... you KNEW people would very likely try to restart by closing down the Flash and/or browser and then re-load your game, thus giving you 2 (or more - if they try a few other things to circumvent their "death") hits per person. Which makes me think you did this as much for the ad exposures as you did for the statement. That may not be the case, but I can't help wondering and questioning that about you/your game. Hell... the fact that you even included an ad at all makes this less about the principle of the thing... even if only slightly less.

Score: 2

"Without having to make an account?"

submission: The Newgrounds Experience

date: July 29, 2009

Why does it start off with "The NG Experience WITHOUT HAVING TO MAKE AN ACCOUNT" and then proceed to show a poorly rendered couple of screens of someone registering for an account? It makes no sense... and has this animation come off as... well... to put it bluntly, if animations could have Down Syndrome then this one does.

The animation was too fast at parts. In one particular part the fake cursor was in the way of some of the (supposedly) comedic entries this fake user was making into the sign-up forms. The quality of the grap[hics used to represent the sites involved was really poor - which may have been on purpose, but with the bad quality of the animation itself I couldn't tell.

Score: 3

"Open source?"

submission: SUPER 8 Database Cinema

date: July 29, 2009

What do you mean by "open source" as it refers to your Flash submission here? Are you implying that if some one asks you'll give them the original FLA or something? I'm not sure you're applying the term correctly, which would mean you don't know what it means.

On another note, the separate "scenes" or clips you can shuffle and what-not were just too abstracted from one another for it to really be worth trying to compile them into a new order. In my opinion, at least, the "movie" is basically meaningless no matter what order you put the shots in. Which means probably not a lot of people are going to bother with creating their own video "code". It's a neat idea, but you would have really needed to put some time and thought into the clips you included in order to make it interesting for people to go about forming their own, cohesive, video sequences. As it stands, all you have is a bunch of poorly drawn/animated random shots of garbage (again - my opinion)... which does not lend to cohesion of a movie-experience whatsoever.

Lastly... what the hell was with the animation of the guy reaching down his throat and then (apparently) out of his own ass? Not only do I not see the correlation in that to your theme of "guilt", but it was really, really poorly done. He reached into his mouth with his HAND, directly... there is absolutely no way his ELBOW is going to come out first on the other side of anything. Just strange, and like I said, not worth the time to examine and re-shuffle the clip order.

I like the idea, but not as it is executed here.

Score: 7

"Only stopped in here..."

submission: Dont touch the smoke

date: July 25, 2009

'Cause I saw a review of yours on some other Flash and saw that your personal icon was your own brand of the the NG Level Maker 2 icon. So I went to your user-page and saw that you had submit this Flash... and that, oddly enough, your Flash's preview icon is the same icon.

Anyway... the actual fight-scene wasn't too bad. The stick-figures were maybe a tad simplistic, and their heads seemed to shrink and grow at random in some spots. The only thing I didn't quite get was the jumping/flipping in the beginning between each word. Seemed like it was just an excuse to lengthen the clip with a re-used section of the animation... .but didn't really add anything (except a bit of confusion).

Besides this I agree with "Nemakachec"... the story coming down to being about "smokes" kinda detracts from the punchline, rather than adding to it.

Score: 3

"Really glitchy."

submission: Aquaman flash game 1.1

date: July 20, 2009

I kept dying even though there was nothing to touch me. Like on the screen with the red balls falling out of the big eye-looking thing. The ball would be already under the ground level, and yet I would die because I (I assume) supposedly ran through while the ball was "still there". And on the screen with the big snake thing and the grenades... died for no reason that I could see whatsoever... the big boulder thing wasn't even on the screen, and all I did was take one step forward. Of course... this is also the screen where I realized you could walk off the screen backward... most likely forever, but I wasn't about to find out.