smokinjoeevil's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[KGB Hunter]

Like a space-shooter in cars

It was poretty good. Unfortunately it doesn't really bring anything new to the table. Needs to be a bit more flexible in some ways. For instance, you can drive the cars off the road, which is cool... but it doesn't do anything for you... they can totally drive right over the houses and other objects to the peripheral of the road without taking damage. The bosses that shoot straight backward aren't necessarily more difficult to beat, they just take the repetetive action of swinging out to the side and back in and firing diagonally at them... which just takes longer. In other words, there's not enough variety in many of the the battles you fight, which makes them boring. The road is also a completely straight shot. Which I can understand bypasses a lot of complexity on the part of the coding (for instance, not having to make the AI smarter in its driving), but again, it makes the ride a pretty boring one.

At any rate, it's solid enough, and the graphics are well put together. Just need to work on the content and variety of gameplay to make it something better.

[SuperSwitch]

Too busy... not very original...

The head images on the game pieces (circles) was just too distracting. It made it much more difficult to spot matches. Who are these "Click 5" anyway? Is that a band or something? Was each an image of the same guy? I didn't really look too closely. If it is a band, that also makes this little game seem like a nice big fat advertisement... which is kinda lame. The gameplay mechanics are also a close match to the game Bejewelled, which then spawned a bunch of copy-cat tailcoat-riding games. And, like it or not, it isn't cool to spout off catch phrases about your game like "seconds to learn, life-time to master" when it really isn't even your original idea in the first place. Some of the things that happened to take out multiple blocks/circles at a time seemed unique to this game, but I honestly couldn't tell when or why those were going to happen. It seemed rather random, and I didn't see anything informational telling me how to make those kind of power-moves on purpose.

[Particle Effects in Flash]

Need to delete the movie clips when done...

I could tell you weren't deleting the movie clips after they reach 0% alpha/opacity. I tried it once, playing around with each of the mouse trailers before moving on to the next, and by the time I reached the last one, it was crawling so slow I thought "saved the best for last my ass!"... then I guessed what was going on... so I tried it again, and this time just clicked through to the last one, and voila, it was working just as fast as any of the others had in the beginning the first time I played it. Yeah... you really need to clean up all those unnecessary movie clips before you pass this on to anyone. The way you have it setup now it becomes a real memory/processor hog.

[Landmaster Shotdown BETA]

Some good points... more bad points.

For one, the ship moved too slowly. All of your enemies are whizzing by you, and your ship can barely crawl from side to side. It also fires to slowly, like one bullet every 2 minutes. I could shoot about 10% of the enemies I was face with... and then only because sometimes a bullet would happen to kill 2 of them at once. There are some spheres that look like power-ups or something collectiblke, but nothing happens when you fly into them. Needs a lot of work.

Pikafreak responds:

First of all, this is not a ship. Second, the spheres with arrows in them recover your HP. Helpful?
But have you done anything better?

[Super Sneaky Spy Guy]

Well I was able to use the item panel...

... but the game still suffered in some major ways. For one, it is a bit buggy. I went into the room with the fireplace and clicked the fire... so the keypad appeared. Then I went back out to check the numbers on that painting in the hall... when I came back, the fire was already burning, the keypad was gone, and I couldn't get it to come back to save my life. So I am guessing I was basically screwed at that point... and without a method to save progress I am not about to restart a game like this every time I run into a bug that screws me over.

It could also really benefit from a map. Many times you would turn one way with the directional arrows, and end up somewhere, then you'd use a direction thinking you were turning back, but end up in a totaly separate area... it would be almost impossible to remember the combination of rights and lefts that take you to each of the places you'd need to return to.

Also, the graphics that weren't the photographs really needed some work. Like the fire in the fireplace, and some of the items. They looked pretty poorly conceived/drawn. Which only shows that you didn't take much time on those, and werte relying on the quality of the photographs to carry your game forward graphically.

Anyway... not a bad concept. I liked the idea of being able to drag items on-screen in the photos to unlock hidden things (like the painting that moved out of the way to reveal the flashlight). This just needs a lot more work.

selfdefiant responds:

Yes, I guess when I was making it, I knew what was going on. I will fix the fireplace thing. Sorry about that one. I also did think of a map and will incorporate one into the game. Now for the graphics, I tried on the flame and I am not the best at creativity when it comes to drawing. I do agree they could have been better. Thanks for the info and I hope you will try it when the bugs are fixed!

[spaceship game tutorial]

Pretty good...

There's just one main problem with most of the tutorials around here... they're aimed at giving someone something to copy, which gives them the basic ability to make a game/flash exactly like yours... or to innovate only slightly within the bounds of what you have shown them. You're not actually teaching someone why what you have written works, or what the parts really mean... and in reality, these types of tutorials don't even show that the author really knows why the thing works. Most of the time they read like the author/creator was shown how to do it exactly the same way he's trying to show you... with "hard-coded" references that can be directly copied without needing to know anything much about them.

For what it was, it was "good", I suppose, but there are too many of these "quick fix" type "learning" tools out there. Showing people what to do as if giving them something to memorize for recitation rather than remember for actual constructive application. At the risk of insult... you're propagating the lazy man's way of doing things.

Granted, the main problem is that people don't want to be "taught"... because applying knowledge usually involves doing some amount of work, and heaven forbid that should have to happen. With most people its all about what you can get with absolutely no time or intellect invested.

At any rate, it was alright. But it could most certainly be a whole lot better.

trekopep responds:

This is definately true, and I completely understand you. Although I learned everything in this tutorial from different places, mushed all the info together, and changed a heck of a lot of things, I realize that people who are newer to actionscripting can't do that very easily. I'm going to make little things that tell you how and why something works, and why something else doesn't work. Thank's for your advise. :)

[NG Review Game #1]

What I take away from this is that...

... if I include the words "blah" in my review, then it will usually be helpful to the creator of the Flash I am reviewing.

Seriously though, this was an interesting and creative idea... you just need to work on your animations, etc., blah blah blah...

Little-Rena responds:

Blah blah blah blah!?

lol.

Yeah, I ran out of room to type.
Also, I'm still learing flash P: