Score: 7

"Not too shabby. :)"

submission: Why cant i? sonic and amy

date: February 25, 2009

The style was a little rough, but it had its moments. Particularly the starry sky. I don't know if I would have put in that one animation frame from the Sonic anime. I think it would have been better off all scribbles, all the way through. Super-Sonic taking off was a nice touch, too.

It's encouraging to see an Amy Rose flash on newgrounds that tells her side of the story. Too many flashes abuse her IMHO. This felt very true to her character. Good job.

Score: 7

"Y'all can whup them piddlin' varmits, sho' nuff..."

submission: Crop Circles

date: February 14, 2009

Well, last year was a tough one. I get set to plow the fields, n' here comes this big ol' flyin' saucer out of the sky. Chock full a' gen-u-wine extraterrestrials. Little green men. Ugly as you like, and dumber than a sack of hammers. Come down right on top of me. Well, I like t' high-tailed it back to the house as fast as Mr. John Deer could carry me. But I got turned around. Left a big ol' zig-zag path through the fields. I call up the army and the national guard, and they sent out some trucks. Asked me where I wanted 'em. I told 'em to just put 'em anywhere, and we held out for a while. Lost a whole heap of money when they asked me if I wanted to buy a stealth bomber between waves. I said, sure. Told 'em to build it between waves. Come t' find out, their idea of building a stealth bomber is to fly it overhead and just drop a whole bunch of bombs. Lost the whole crop that year.

So, this year, it looked like we was fixin' to do better. Soybeans came in early. Sent the boy out to plow th' fields. All of a sudden, he comes runnin' in the back door, yellin' about aliens. Shit, I thought, they're back again? They about wiped me out last year!

But my boy says, naw, it's okay, pop. On account o' some p'thag'rian theorm. I tole him, this ain't no time fer book learnin', I gotta call for the cavalry, and you git in the cellar. When he finally went down there, I grabbed my shotgun and went out back, ready to face those ornery bastards again.

Well, I get out there, and it's just this big line, like a Z, cut clear across my parcel and leaving a straight path to my house. Just two crop circles in all. There was something strange goin' on, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Then I saw that he boy had already bought a missile launcher and put it right in the middle. I sighed. Them missile launchers, see, they fire slow, so I knew there was no way it could take out all them aliens. But the money was already spent. So I just had to make do. I hunkered down and waited for the first wave.

Sho' nuff, here the martians come, walkin' in a straight line down the path. Make a right turn and cut across the field the long way. And the rocket launcher lays into 'em, but a lot of 'em get through. So then they get to the end of the long zigzag, and all they need to do is make one more right turn, and they can come get me and my family and eat my damn brains again, just like last year.

Then, and I swear to you, this is god's honest truth, the lead alien turns around and marches right back to the first bend of the path! The rocket launcher tore 'em up. The next wave came, and they went back and forth a couple of times, that one piddly rocket launcher lighting into them over and over again as they keep goin' back and forth.

My boy was at my side by this time, jumpin' up and down and tellin' me to build more rocket launchers! I looked real close and I saw now what my boy had done. There wasn't two crop circles, there was the usual number, it's just the boy had stacked 'em on top of each other so it looked like they was all in the same place. This here was a path eight times as long as my entire field from one corner to th' other, and it led the aliens back and forth in front of that same turret over and over again.

We built more rocket launchers. We upgraded 'em all the way. We called in as many stealth bombers as we liked, not that they ever did much. Eventually we come to find out there ain't no end to this game, so after cleaning up on government bounties for a while, we sold the farm and moved down to Florida. Can't say much for the view or the neighbors, but at least there's no goddamned aliens comin' down out of the sky at all hours, interferin' with a man's livelihood.

Oh, and my boy? He's drawin' triangles or some such for NORAD now. Never been more proud to have an egghead in the family.

Score: 7

"Ambitious design, marred by poor balancing."

submission: Final Defense: Last Stand

date: February 3, 2009

Okay, so Matthew did the thing with the map screen and the long-term character advancement. And he created a lot of different unit types to attack you. And he even created a whole bunch of different tactical upgrades you can use in the middle of a stage. So what went wrong? Why isn't this game as popular as, say, GameInABottle's Balloon Invasion, which boasted many of the same gameplay elements?

In a word: execution.

These different gameplay systems worked well together in Balloon Invasion (and later, GemCraft,) because they played off of each other to make the game more fun and more interesting. In Final Defense: Last Stand, most of the gameplay systems are completely useless (unless the level objective requires you to use them.)

GAMEPLAY:
The towers shoot wherever you point and click. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for the shots to reach the enemy. I suspect he is using a Movieclip for each shot (expensive!) and simple HitTests for collision (klunky, and limits the speed of shots!) For better performance, I recommend using good old-fashioned geometry math to do collisions, and BitmapData and CopyPixels or Draw to render graphics to the screen.

Most games, there's a certain amount of flexibility in how the player goes about his job. You can take a certain number of hits, and skilled playing means you can avoid damage. In this game, you ALWAYS take the hits. Always. You're a stationary target, and even if you fire the INSTANT the enemy comes on-screen, they will always get a shot off at you because your bullets are so slow.

This means the player has very little room for error, and no chance to play creatively. There is only one way to win. Superior numbers. There is only one way to get these numbers. Grinding. To buy the first Auto-Repair powerup, you must beat the first stage over and over again.

MAP SCREEN:
In Balloon Invasion, you could pick any level you wanted, but you had to unlock them in order first. In FD:LS, all the levels are available for you right at the start, but trying to play most of them is suicide. Imagine if you started playing a Mega Man game, you picked a stage, and then you immediately died, every time, because you didn't already have the platform item from another stage. To misquote Yahtzee misquoting Winston Churchill: Those who implement open-world gameplay while maintaining a linear difficulty curve deserve neither.

CHARACTER PROGRESSION:
It's neat to be able to buy stuff off a menu. And it's awesome to gradually build up your character's abilities during the course of a game so that you can take on the harder stages. Unfortunately, the only shop items that are persistent from one stage to another are Economy and Auto-Repair. These are both basically buffers-- multipliers that increase a number. They don't drastically alter gameplay or give you the option of combining them in different ways to sneakily achieve gameplay goals. They just make a number go up; arguably the least interesting gameplay change possible.

BUGS:
- Currently, Economy costs 18,000, and no matter how many times I click on it, it doesn't increase the cost or disappear the way Auto-repair did.
- If the level ends while trucks are unloading their troops, all the troops will disembark and stand frozen until you close the buy menu. Could have been worse. At least you don't have enemies firing a million shots if this happens while they're shooting, or something else game-breaking like that.

These kinds of bugs pop up a lot when you insist on using Movieclips for everything. Do yourself a favor, and learn how to use math to keep track of collisions and bitmap programming to draw graphics to the screen. If using AS3, I recommend boning up on the BitmapData class. Your games will become a little more complex to program, but a LOT more stable.

OVERALL:
This is an ambitious attempt, but it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Don't feel too bad. I've been there. Learn from your mistakes and move on! Good luck with your next game. Keep trying. This had potential.

Score: 10

"Ahh, fresh, locally-grown nostalgia..."

submission: Castlevania SOTN vs RoR

date: December 22, 2008

In general, I like sprite movies more the less they break with the established mechanics of the original game. So the swordplay and whip-play was perfect, grabbing Richter was great, throwing the shield, less-so. Though, I suppose SOTN makes liberal use of rotation so it's not *too* jarring. Overall I was impressed with some of the special effects here. You really nailed the blood, holy water, and statue break-out, I felt like.

In terms of scripting and staging, it was a great success. You used the limited (and somewhat questionable) sound bytes from the original game to fairly decent effect. In any case, it felt slightly less forced than it sounds when you're playing the game. It's those pauses for player input, I think. They really do break the flow.

I thought the choreography was pretty good, actually, the one exception being Richter's knife attack when it hits Alucard. That and I might have made him crouch while riding the chunk of masonry down into the pit below, because then you could have made his cape pillow in the wind. :)

But yeah, most of the choreography actually made me think this is the way the characters from the game would fight. I liked the close-up combat the best, because without any cheap tricks like rotating the characters unnaturally, you managed to make it look like a real close-up rapid-fire kung-fu fest.

Granted, it wasn't the single most awesome sprite combat sequence I've ever seen on Newgrounds, no, but it did manage to avoid a lot of the really stupid cheap hacks (vector blood, constant character rotation for no reason, general fake-ness,) that ruin 90% of sprite movies for me.

So yeah. Good effort, good production values, reasonably like the game to fulfill nostalgia purposes without breaking the fourth wall too often, yet decently more involved and integrated than actual video game footage. Overall, nice work, and if we are indeed at the forefront of another sprite movement, I look forward to seeing more works at least this good.

Score: 10

"Way better than it has any right to be."

submission: War of Da suitcases

date: December 22, 2008

For some reason I found this hilarious. Probably just as a byproduct of the automatic timing. Some frames, it was a bit of a strain to read the text that quickly, but hey, it worked for Yahtzee.

Even though I have no idea who these characters are and there's not much we (the audience) could learn about them in the space of a few seconds, the drawings allowed a bit of personality to shine through, and there's a certain "party of four" element introduced by giving each of the characters equal screen time and probably reenforced by the big band music playing in the background.

Hastily-scribbled stick figures usually won't get you much here on Newgrounds, but for some reason, I'm seeing quite a few good ones today. Hmm. Budding artistic movement? Or reviewer just in a good mood? YOU DECIDE!

One suggestion, don't try to animate things like the missiles impacting one by one. At one frame per second, it'll never look like real animation. Just treat it like a comic book, showing one panel of the shot firing and one panel from a completely different angle of the shot hitting. If you absolutely *must* show a sequence of several frames, make sure the cloud of smoke from the initial explosion looks much different from the pillar of smoke rising from the dead tank.

Keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to the next one. :)

Score: 10

""It's the economy, stupid!""

submission: W & B : Deadly Strategies

date: December 13, 2008

War & Beyond:Deadly Strategies is a strange little beast. It's perhaps the most "pure" Real-Time Strategy game ever created. Of course, it achieves this by completely removing tactics from the equation. While I realize this was probably done to make the game easier to program, the result is a surprisingly novel gameplay experience.

Basically, you *can not* micro-manage your armies. You can't tell them where to go or which unit to attack. Instead, units on both sides roam about randomly, completely uncoordinated. (And you thought the units in TA were dumb.)

Fortunately, you can give each class of unit a generalized objective, such as to attack enemy units, attack enemy buildings, rush the enemy base, etc. But generally what you'll end up doing is defending your buildings until you can build up an overwhelming force, then launch your attack.

Sustainability is almost impossible to achieve, but if you keep building economics structures packed together as closely as possible, you'll eventually reach a point where you're literally earning money faster than you can spend it. Then you can build 5 or so offensive structures and start mass-producing whichever unit you feel gives you the most bang for your buck. (For me it was probably the Kuburai. Apparently, cutting tanks in half with a sword is not only extremely badass; it's also quite economical.)

*Ignore* the mission briefings when your C.O. tells you to build some big expensive new unit. Most of the time, these new units are too expensive, fire too slowly, or just can't survive very long. Instead, keep churning out cheap units such as the Podas Defense, Rocketmen, or Kuburai.

There's an intriguing "demand surrender" button. It makes sense that if the player can surrender a losing battle, the AI might be willing to do so as well. But since the endgame is the most fun part of any RTS (arguably the explosive payoff for all that tedious base-building,) I hardly ever used it.

Sometimes you'll start a map with forces stacked overwhelmingly against you. That's where the complete lack of discretionary targeting works to the player's advantage. Oh, sure, their forces may overrun your base *initially.* But instead of grinding your base into the dust , half the time they'll drive off again and go back to defending, so you can safely ignore the early skirmishes. The one exception is airstrikes. Air units move fast enough that even random attacks add up, so build cheap anti-air units if you see planes.

I noticed a few maps start with 0$, the objective being to eliminate all the enemy units. Since the player can't build anything, and the player can't directly control his units, it stands to reason that the game designer would have given the player stronger units than the enemy, right? This was an easy intro mission, after all, probably intended to familiarize the player with that faction's units. On a whim, I clicked "demand surrender." Sure enough, the AI did the math and decided there was no way it could possibly win this one. GG, next map!

Later, some 0$ missions become annoying escort missions. In "samurai," I would instruct the titular target to hide at the base while everyone else would attack. (This is basically the only move you can make with $0.) I had to re-do this level 4 times because of random factors beyond my control, such as which units crossed paths first.

Other than that, it's a great experimental game that explores some new territory in terms of gameplay. Of course, no real army would fight like this. But it's a fun game with lots to discover.

I'm giving this game a 10 even though there's plenty of room for improvement, because I was impressed with the game as a whole. It does something unapologetically new, it does it with some degree of style, and it has that kick-ass intro animation. I can't comment on the exe version, but I get the impression these graphics look worse the closer zoomed in you are, because the inconsistancies in drawing style would become more pronounced.

It's a great game, though, and I recommend it!

Score: 8

"Linear and easy, but fairly well-implemented."

submission: Cannon Defense

date: December 10, 2008

What you've got here is a parabolic turret defense game with a single risk-reward schedule. That is, if you kill the enemies, you get points. If you don't, you die. Points can be spent in a shop to upgrade your gun or build defenses.

Rather than divide the game up into levels or waves of enemies, the action here is nonstop. At any moment, you may enter the shop to purchase upgrades. Which upgrade you buy first is a matter of taste, but you shouldn't have too much trouble cobbling together a winning combination.

Most upgrades have a significant impact upon gameplay, and upgrading a stat all the way makes a huge difference in performance. One caveat-- when you buy Max HP, it adds empty bar onto the end of your current health, so don't expect any benefit unless you can afford repairs, too.

The infantry collision bug in earlier versions of this game has been fixed... sort of. Shots still pass through the *body* of a soldier, but as long as they hit the ground modestly close to the target, the target will now die. No more crippling fear that putting more than one point into muzzle velocity will make it impossible to shoot basic foot soldiers.

There are still a few minor bugs floating around. The muzzleflash tends to get stuck on when you fire the gun too rapidly, for example. Sometimes a guy way in the back will die, seemingly at random, when you bomb a cluster of guys in the front. But for the most part, the worst, most crippling bugs seem to have been resolved. Clicking Upgrade while the Upgrade menu is already open, for example, now closes the menu. You no longer need huge splash damage in order to hit a close foot-soldier. I haven't been able to reproduce the bug where the turret build menu stops working, but I'm not sure what caused that one in the first place.

Strangely, I almost found the game more exciting back when it had bugs in it. Survival was harsh, back then, and you actually needed splash. It still leveled off to easy by the time you had all the upgrades, but at least there was a challenging bit in the middle there after the arial units started showing up where you wondered if you were going to make it to the next upgrade.

Now it's just static, linear, and very, very easy. By the time you've got even half of your stats maxed, even the strongest enemies in the game are no match for you. Mind you, I'd be *more* pissed off if the enemies quickly became impossibly powerful, and failure were the only option, but playing forever without losing is just trading frustration for boredom.

I'd recommend adding a definite end, for starters. Maybe the last enemy is a giant, slow mech-walker with tons of health, but he does a ton of damage if he gets close enough to fire. Then at least the game would have a point.

After that, maybe you could add some different scenarios, selectable from the map screen, in which different upgrade paths are secretly the most effective path to victory. That would extend the playtime of the game, but only if the player was likely to lose if they chose poorly.

Oh, also, if each upgrade cost more than the previous one, strategy while selecting upgrades would become more important. Just be careful. As with MMORPGs, the further apart each upgrade is, the more static the gameplay becomes, and therefore the more boring the game is.

Finally, if you do things that make the difficulty more challenging, please, *please* playtest it afterwards to make sure the game is beatable.

Thanks for giving the world another turret defense game. I love these. It still needs some improvement to make it a rich, complex game experience, but this is a good, solid basis for a game.

Score: 10

"Short but funny. Totally worth the loading time."

submission: Twatlight

date: December 5, 2008

Don't let the fact that it's short fool ya. This is a solid, enjoyable 60 seconds of irreverent web-humor.

The art is done in a reasonably clean and consistent hand-drawn style that achieves decent frame-by-frame, but stops well short of the roughness of Awesome territory. I also loved the background, which looks like it must have had a lot of work put into it.

The voice actors are good at what they do, keeping the delivery very natural and casual. The jokes are decent. There's not many of them (how many one-liners can you expect them to pack into 60 seconds, anyway?) but the timing is impeccable, and that's 90% of humor anyway.

Best of all, there's no stupid bullshit here. No 5 minute intro to a 60 seconds toon. No third-party music bloating the file size just because the author had the ability to include it. Just a quick download, a funny short, and a good parody.

Just2Pale? Keep up the good work. :)

Score: 10

"It's less creepy if you forget it's on Newgrounds."

submission: Boogley Bus Stop

date: November 24, 2008

Normally I'm all about story, especially on Newgrounds, but I'll settle for characterization as long as the execution's good. Almost anything FBF is good, as long as it's not dots and lines bouncing around, splashes, and explosions. Thankfully, this cartoon has actual cartoon in it.

More than anything it reminds me of those very early Mickey Mouse cartoons, where walking and smiling were enough because animation itself was an amazing new innovation. You'd think that would make it too derivative to be relevant, but we seriously see so little of this oldschool stuff on NG, and it takes so much more work than what we normally see on NG, that everything old is new again. This toon gains relevance simply by rediscovering and reinventing an archaic form.

To those who don't get it: it ain't rocket science. There's a pissed-off guy and a happy guy. The happy guy wants to cheer the pissed-off guy up. The pissed-off guy isn't having any of it, on account of bein' pissed off. Happy guy pranks pissed-off guy. Pissed-off takes the bait, then gets hurt reacting to the prank. Happy guy goes "ohshitohshitohshit" and bugs out. Pissed-off guy recovers from his spill, realizes he got pranked, and laughs it off. He turns pink because now he's happy, too. Happy guy realizes he not only accomplished his mission of cheering pissed-off-guy up, but also pissed-off-guy will not kick his ass for the prank that got him hurt. "Whew."

Yeah, I was rubbed the wrong way at first just like everybody else. I thought he was gonna be ghey, or the blue guy was gonna murder him in a shower of blood, or it was just crazy random abstract weirdness and the suitcase was gonna start eating people, then turn into a bird, then the bird would splash against the floor, rendering everything we'd seen up till that point completely irrelevant. That's the cynicism of the modern internet talking.

What really makes this film uplifting is, when it's over, -and I mean *only* when it's over- you realize that there wasn't anything dark or pithy about it after all, it's just the story of a dude trying to cheer up a stranger. It's an isle of child-like innocence in a sea of dick jokes.

That's my interpretation of it, anyway. That's the nice thing about mood pieces, everyone can interpret them however they like. Don't get it? Erase your assumptions and expectations and watch it again. Try to look at it from an outsider's point of view. Even just read other peoples' interpretations and try them on to see if they work for you. But never take anyone's word for it, what a piece means, not even the original artist. Art *always* has something hidden to teach us.

Okay so you get some pork chops from the store. These are real thick pork chops that have been cut most of the way through the middle, like little raw pork sandwiches. You need a big, deep skillet with a glass lid that locks in most of the steam. Heat the skillet up to high, throw a little butter in the pan, and put the pork chops in (still folded like little sandwiches,) and sizzle them on both sides for 1-2 minutes. Just enough to get the outside golden-brown. Put these on a plate when they're done and set aside. DON'T eat 'em yet, raw pork is BAD for you!

Now you make a cup of chicken stock from bullion in one pot and some stove top stuffing in another. (Chicken stock from the store works, too.) Stuff each of the butterflied pork chops with stuffing, like little inside-out sandwiches. Stick a toothpick through all the way through each sandwich to hold it together while cooking.

Now you put the leftover stuffing in the skillet, put the stuffed porkchops on top of that, and pour the chicken broth over the whole thing. (Hope your skillet is big enough to hold all this shit.) Now put the lid on, and steam the porkchops for like an hour on medium-low heat. Steaming not only cooks the insides of the pork chops, but it softens up all that golden-brown char so you get the taste but not the toughness. Cut through the pork to make *absolutely sure* it's cooked all the way through. Serve.

Score: 10

"Heh. Awesome. XD"

submission: School 13 - Street Magic

date: November 23, 2008

I loved this one. The animation was good, but the layout was awesome, especially the use of dramatic camera angles. It reminded me of anime a lot, too. I'm not sure why. Probably because I don't understand Japanese or Russian when I hear it, and you used a lot of epic imagery. Good shit. :D Make moar!