Score: 10

"Nifty AND Shiny"

submission: The irRegularGame of Life

date: November 16, 2008

So, yeah... I'm a mathematician. This game is made of pure awesome sauce.

Two things, though:

1) Level 42 is freaking easy. After wracking my brain on #41, it almost felt TOO easy. The bonehead solution I used did amuse me, though :)

2) Could you modify the sandbox to let us make a level creator? Like, with actual goal and generation restrictions? Doesn't seem like it would be hard, and I'd love to see what some other folks would come up with.

Awesome game, awesome concept... just pure awesome sauce. Thanks ^_^

Score: 8

"Arigato"

submission: Ninja Glove

date: August 28, 2008

With the increased amount of time, I believe the game is very much improved and now more playable. Still, I think there's too many games of moving the mouse around. The idea of the ninja finger suggests to me that creative clicking is the objective, not speed dragging and dropping.

Still, very fun set of minigames, and very colorfully done as well. You have a good sense of style, and I look forward to seeing more of your work. Again, thank you.

Score: 0

"..."

submission: Falcon Punch Re-Animated

date: August 20, 2008

First of all, the youtube Falcon Punch should be required viewing. Second, once viewed, it makes this look... really freaking shabby.

Mate, I don't like to bang on about people's art skills, but the only thing you do with this is present what your artistic take is on a professionally done scene. And I'm sorry... you pale in comparison to the point where you look like you suck. I mean, the art for the glow around the 22 sec marker... that looks like it was done in MS paint!

If you did this as a learning experience, I hope you got something out of it. If not... I'm sorry mate, but while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it also often is never nearly as good as the original copy. This is one of those times.

Score: 3

"Uselessly long"

submission: Lone Defender

date: August 20, 2008

Mate, I have just sat here for I think 45 minutes waiting to see just how long you were trying to drag this war out, and I've got to say... you need to know when to walk your game out and call it quits.

Problems with the game:

1) You're "deluxe" feature was not disabled for here, but in my opinion shouldn't have even been included to begin with because it makes things stupidly simple. After day 20, it wasn't so much that I was defending England's shores as I was just looking for that "you've won!" sign. It got bad enough that I was reading a book while I played, as your planes move in an almost whale like fashion compared with my upgraded gun at that point.

2) Your hit boxes are obtuse. Sorry mate, but if I'm puncturing holes in the wing of an airplane, that sucker is coming down more often then not. Yes, there are amazing stories of swiss cheesed B-17s returning home, but these were chalked up as divine intervention. Bottom line: if I pump 20 flak rounds with ALL upgrades into the wing area, that plane ought to be dead. If you just want me to shoot at some magically invisible area on the plane that only you can see, then a briefing might be in order to actually point out that 98% of the plane is made out of MAGIC!

3) I'm sorry... Germany declares unconditional surrender, and there are still planes flying at me? What, did the Japanese paint their planes in Russian colors, fly to Germany, and then did another repaint to fly and bomb England in a dastardly attempt to make the Allies think the Germans were just playing dead? Yes, I know it's a game, but the moment you reference something real and historical, you have a responsibility towards accuracy. The only time this is excused is when I'm kept too busy to actually realize I've been had for a fool.

4) Upgrading bullet speed and tracking past level 2 seemed redundant. I got full upgrades and only bothered doing them last because the only thing that matters is damage output on the plane. Accuracy was only slightly above those two, and I still can't seem to figure out if upgrading explosion radius did anything.

5) Major flaw in your Lifetime Score Stat: it reads identical to my kill count, not the score I quit with. Unless, of course, that 100,000 that was sitting on the bottom right of the screen was just for giggles.

The ONE interesting thing about the game was how you pointed out all the historical headlines. That's about it. The sounds were bland and the images of each object was kinda nifty, but nothing special. I suppose all that really impresses me is how small you made it.

For everything wrong, I don't suspect there's more bloat in it then average on a 1.5 MB sized file.

Just... very disappointing and annoying. And long. Way, way too long. Go back and think on this again. Please.

Score: 7

"Graphically superb, but..."

submission: Space Station Jason

date: August 20, 2008

First off, let me give you my kudos for attempting and succeeding at something resembling a 3D platformer using Flash as your medium. To say that I loathe flash as an end-user is an understatement, but it's what people make free games in, so what am I to do? Yours is of particularly singular merit in visual aspect, achieving the look and feel of a 3D world, though I would be surprised if it was actually tracking and processing 3D objects in space (I suspect there's a trick to your positioning rather then true objects in the game). The zoom feature is a neat function, and the puzzle set is designed to take into account your extra potential dimension and make full use of it. All of which, I reiterate, I must give copious kudos for. However... there is a but in my praise, and I fear it is an annoying one.

I read a response of yours where you claimed to want to recreate the old timey feel of games where you had to struggle and bang your head on for a while to get it right. Crash Bandicoot was one you listed as providing inspiration for this. Unfortunately, I don't know that game, so I can't comment on your success, but I can compare this to the old Mario Bros (the one that double packed w/ Duck Hunt). In that regard, I think you had a number of good, and bad, takes on what made old time games good.

In the good, you provide obviously surmountable challenges to the player, challenges that most players who take this seriously will recognize as completable if they were just a hair more accurate in their jumps, a touch more responsible in their timing. You have unique enemies (well, traps) that have a singular feel to them, and are arrayed in a vast manner of similar yet distinct ways. The "Box O' Bots" trick was rather flumoxing for a life or two, until I got my timing down well. And I had my satisfaction in beating it dead.

But my primary complaint is not having to start over constantly, but the fact that I had to deal with a limited number of lives. In the real old timey games, lives were introduced as a counterbalance to keeping score. Mario Bros is actually never ending; you can keep playing as long as you want... and as long as you have the lives to keep messing up with. Here, there is no score to seek, no ladder to top. We're just trying to get from point A to point B with all our kit, and having that life counter keep dropping is very, very frustrating. Enough so that I stop and debate if I want to bother finishing the game (I'm at level 14 now, since I can't just let the damn thing lay).

Others have made very good suggestions on new challenges to overcome in future iterations, and I fully agree that they should be pursued. Yet my nit to pick is with this limit you put on me in retrying your labyrinth. Make it as technically impossible as you want; there's a niche for games like that. But unless you are making it a competition, let me keep at it at my own pace. Otherwise, you're just styming me.

Oh, and before I forget, two quick notes on jump controls:

1) Please do not set the jump to trigger if I land with the jump button depressed (land on ground with space held down causes me to jump immediately). Or at the least, set a toggle. For me personally, it makes me miss a lot of jumps, and I suspect I am not alone in this.

2) Please offer a quick tutorial in the future to showcase that you can jump again after bouncing off something. This is not intuitive to me, and I keep flumoxing myself each time I sit down to play again with this.

7/10 overall is given as there is still room for growth, but a satisfying experience was had. Thanks for sharing it, and I hope to see more from you and your crew soon :)

Score: 9

"Good"

submission: Mad Monday

date: August 19, 2008

Good game, but there's a bug w/ the flamethrower. Whenever you catch a vehicle on fire, it speeds the game up to something like 5 times normal speed. I lost a lot of life first time I did that on accident.

Also, I'd like to earn a few more points if I drive on the wrong side of the road or edge someone off the road to kill them instead of using the gun. Takes a lot more finesse for almost no extra benefit.

Thanks for submitting.

Score: 5

"Ironic Newtonian Emulator"

submission: Orbitrunner

date: August 11, 2008

What I find curious about this game is how perfectly it illustrates why everything in the solar system is so 'stationary': move around too much, and planets will collide.

As far as a game goes, I'm not terribly impressed. As far as a concept goes, bravo, but I don't think it worked. Blindly searching for the "sweet spot" to plop your sun is not exactly my idea of a good time. But perhaps you have your own mad idea of how to play, in which case I'd love to see a video of you beating the game. It might make it more intuitive to see what a "succesful" run looks like.

Again, good try to make a game out of physics. I'm sorry, though, that it just wasn't meant to be.

Score: 10

"My rating is 6 times too small"

submission: Sixty

date: August 9, 2008

Appropriate music, seamless handling of a lot of particles/splotch, simple and straightforward gameplay... if you read other reviews I have written, I usually find a number of things to complain about. I can find none in this. You have captured the essence of fun and bottled it in 60 second shots of pure, adrenaline induced nirvana. All this... and your primary graphic of choice is a freaking SQURE. Colorful squares, but still...

Masterfully done, sir. I am humbled to be playing this.

Score: 6

"Fun, but lots of flaws."

submission: AlphaBounty

date: August 9, 2008

This game was quite enjoyable for me on my one run through. Balance was for the most part decent, and th graphics were good, but ultimately I was miffed at the small but ever present annoyances in the game. Here's a list of them:

1) Collision detection. Frequently, I was getting hit twice by the enemies not because of multiple attacks, but because the enemy seemed to intersect my ship twice. As there is no shield to deploy nor any way to decrease damage done to the ship, I consider this a critical oversight. Particularly in the 2nd zone where you had swarms of 2 dozen ships flying at me at once.

2) Fire of Doom. As a result of this detection issue, I think the fire is WAY too overpowered. I was killed from 350 health by one breath of fire. Sorry, but instakill moves ruin any game experience I have ever had.

3) Pause button. Any game that doesn't have a way for me to pause mid level is one I will not play again. Most people can't just sit playing a game in isolation, and its very frustrating having to consign a good run to failure just because I have to step away to let the dog out.

4) Save feature. For reasons I don't fully understand, most people usually wait to put in saving for the sequel, but I'm still going to complain about it here. A great deal of game design theory was pioneered in the NES era, and it found that people like to make records of their good games! Even checkpointing would be good if you really want to force someone to challange themselves in a single sitting (though, pausing becomes even more necessary here).

5) Aiming. The gun is fixed on to the ship, and so fire's parallel to the plane of flight, albeit offset some. While it was a good idea in theory, I found it really freaking annoying with mouse control. Either I was shooting at air because I was dodging, or I was moving erratically upward/downward because I was trying to reaim from a target on one half of the screen to the other. While I realize it's a style interpretation, it isn't something I'm a fan of. Perhaps it would be better if I was given keyboard controls, but even then, I'm not too sure.

6) Enemies flying off screen. Obviously, as a point of balancing, you had to estimate how much cash a player should be accumulating per level, and scaled purchases accordingly. But if you have enemies that start at the far top or far bottom, and they're regularly going to go off screen, that starts to make your estimates a lot more guesswork. Combined with the difficulties of aiming while dodging shots, it just makes it annoying to the player that's really testing themselves.

7) Letter spacing. Presentation says a lot to people, and your letters are cut off or wrapping oddly. A very minor detail, but one that should be kept in mind for future games.

Again, I stress that I did have FUN while playing the game. But there's enough things on this list that I just don't really think I'll have that much more fun from subsequent playthroughs.

Score: 7

"Good idea, but not my style"

submission: Onristu

date: August 6, 2008

As an avid fan of Guitar Hero and similar games, I really like the genre of keeping tempo with a tune. Trouble for me was the circling thing. Multitasking doesn't bother me; it's a skill you learn like any other. What got to me is that the game and I have very different ideas on when I've actually circled the head, and that throws off my rhythm when I need to go back and unlock a note that I thought I'd already unlocked. Particularly, I've noticed the problem comes when I stray near to the edge of the screen, and the game just doesn't intrigue me enough right now to fine tune it.

I will say, though, that your 'note' detector seems more polished then many I've tried on Newgrounds. It also hasn't choked on me when I've had the notes unlocked, letting me actually play the sequence you want me to. Bang on job.

So, again, it's a good idea, seems mostly decently executed, but it just lacks a certain intuitiveness on the fine tuning to make me want to play.