smokinjoeevil's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Zombies of the world]

Why does someone...

... buy a Flash game that is free to play on the web? In fact, I could probably get my hands on your SWF if I really wanted to. Not to mention that, in my opinion, you are completely over-estimating the amount of interest your game will draw. It really isn't that good. A few things that could have improved:

1. Graphics - they appeared to be screen-shots of actual photographs of nature back-dropsand textures. Pu this up against STICKS, and you've got less than a winning combination. Plus, there wasn't any variety in the levels themselves really. A straight-piece of land and a couple of inclines. No trees... in fact nothing that would have been present in a real-world experience. And the zombies really needed to be something other than other stick-people with different colored heads. That just made it feel like next to no work was put into this.

2. The physics model used was strange. When I jumped against the "walls" that held me inside a level until I killed all of the "zombies" it kind of bounced me off of them. That, and the character was able to jump between 5 and 6 feet into the air... which ended up being almost half of the height of the game itself with the Stage-size you chose. It just felt odd.

3. Give the player some indication that he has been hit other than just decreasing health. Make the character graphic/animation flash and jump back or something. It is also always annoying in games when you can just stand on-top of enemies and take continual damage until you die. And the enemy wasn't doing anything but trying to walk by me with his arms out... no attacks or anything that would really have made me sustain damage.

4. The music didn't fit. It was kind of upbeat and almost funny in a way. And that makes me think of another thing on the lines of the graphics... the backgrounds were too bright. When dealing with zombies I usually think of darker, more foreboding atmosphere conditions... not walk-in-the-park style forests and ski-slopes.

[-Intermediate Tutorial-]

Intermediate?

I could tell from the preloader screen that it wasn't going to be anything amazing... but you could have at least put some time into the examples. For instance, your frame-by-frame of a stick figure running was awful. If some one were just being introduced to frame-by-frame without having seen any other examples, they'd be asking themselves if that style of animation was worth anything at all. It needed more polished-up menus/graphics. I mean, for goodness sake, you try to show people how to make a button, and yet your buttons in the tutorial are absolutely awful.

[Pappu The Pilgrim]

Kinda stiff...

While the artistic style wasn't bad, the animation was pretty stiff. Like his walking, throwing, the fact that enemies just disappear when they're struck. Things seemed to happen quickly and jerkily also. like when you fell down one of the temporary pits created by the flying demons. You were barely even given the chance to see yourself fall before the game hadalready registered it and moved on to showing you the "game over" screen.

[feverfrenzygame]

Didn't like it...

I suppose I am biased because it isn't my sort of game... but it really seemed kinda pointless. For one thing, I don't see taking care of patients in a hospital as a very fun activity that someone would enjoy doing in their spare time. Do you know what I mean? Its the reason that games where you have powers or abilioties above the common man do so well... it isn't fun playing a job, unless that job is pretty action packed. And I'm not talking shove-the-thermommeter-where-the-sun-
don't-shine kind of action. For instance... you wouldn't want to play the role of a grocer stocking shelves, would you? How fun would that game be? Not very in my opiniuon. Its the same thing here. Sure you tried to make it a little more fun by making the symptoms and animations more humorous, but it isn't enough in my opinion.

As someone else said, it is also way too small on-screen. In fact, I think your graphics suffered severely for it. Flash seemed to be taking care of the resizing, which is sometimes doesn't do so well. So your graphics were kinda choppy, and not very crisp at all. I saw that the link to "Buy" the game was on the front screen. In my opinion anyone who buys the game based on this ittiy-bitty version is out of their mind. Just my opinion, of course.

[GoldenClock FlashFighterD]

Great graphics and cool space effects...

... but there seemed to be something wrong with the detection of hits. For one, hitting enemies only seemed to work sometimes... either that or you didn't provide a way to display that an enemy had been hit except only every so many hits. I also couldn't tell when my own ship had been hit... I wasn't even sure wherre the health-bar of my ship was located on the HUD during the entire couse of the game! So when I died it was kind of a surprise. A walk-through of the HUD features would have been good besides the key-controls. Other than that, pretty good stuff.

[Turret Defence 2]

Good music, nice explosions

And the gameplay is pretty solid. I liked the black-and white graphics, and you can tel it is well put together.

The one bad thing was that the fall-off of the bullets from the gun was completely unrealistic. Horizontal movement does not simply get doused at a certain distance from the object that threw the projectile. And with the speed that bullets travel, this is even more true. I just couldn't get past the fact that angled up at 45 degrees I should most certainly have been able to get a bullet out the entire distance of the screen... but instead, it fell flat on its face half-way. That was a big disappointment from both an in-game ability perspective, and from the perspective of physical reality.

[MiniTut: Keyboard+Object]

Just... not good.

A single screen? Way too messy. It would have even looked slightly more professional had you picked better and more consistent font colors and placement.

I wouldn't even call it a tutorial if you don't explain what it is you are doing. Explain the code, explain the possible usage. With a tutorial, people want to learn, not be hand-fed bits of knowledge that they may or may not be able to apply. I strongly sugest that you learn to use Flash yourself before you go trying to teach it to other people.

Lastly, I'm just going to state my wonder at the fact that you boast 3 people having worked on this. That is all. Thanks.

ADR3-N responds:

Well, it was a bit rushed, plus, we did say it was a mini tuturial you know.

Well, if you paid attention, you'd see that there's a variety of uses, including tuturials themselves. See, I have to go through a lot of things to get a collaborated tuturial done in one day, like getting the info needed, art, coding, color choices, possible mistakes, it is a long list to tell the truth.

In fact, 3 people did work on this, and that's how we got it done in less than a day! Well, since you weren't overly rude, thanks for reviewing so in the future our movies can be improved!

[Joey's Day Out]

Good game

I liked the missions that help people out aspect, and it was pretty strong graphically. One thing that gets to me about some of these platformers, though, is when the platform seems just out of reach and yet the character somehow magically ends up on it, even though it looks like he is going to fall and not make it. I don't know why that irks me... it just does. Anyway, the level in the treee is one I had a hard time with. At first I didn't know that you could jump in the branches on the side, so I just kept falling and falling, and it was a bit frustrating, but otherwise, this is a solid entry to the competition.

Good luck!

CrazyChihuahua responds:

Yes, the one in the big tree seemed to give people the most trouble. It's a bit tougher than the rest.

Thanks for the review.

[- WiggiNaut -]

Interesting dual control gameplay...

... just not enough variety for me. There's only so much flying through space collecting stuff, saving people (without even the slightest protection from the vaccuum of space), and dodging hurtling asteroids that I can stand.