Score: 10

"Bally tenpenny ones dropping in the custard!"

submission: Lone Defender

date: August 20, 2008

Whew. What a trip. Lone Defender is a surprisingly earnest turret defense game that single-handedly delivers on the promise of every cheesy over-produced war game ever released to the Xbox generation.

I'm amazed no other game has attempted this. Capturing authenticity is easy when you USE ACTUAL HISTORY. Instead of making up some bullshit one-man army superhero story with like a few elements borrowed from WWII and plugged in as set-pieces, Lone Defender just shows you a front page story from an actual newspaper from back then.

Click the words "continued on page 2," and you'll get a link to the actual web archive of the actual articles! I was just along for the ride, at first, but every now and some random article would really grip me. We humans are fantastic information-filtering machines. We tend to skip over stuff we're not personally interested in, but we're great at skimming. For me, it was moments like the clever "ducks and drakes" bombing runs against german dams, the descriptions of horrified allied troops liberating a german concentration camp, the Americans and Soviets making contact behind enemy lines, Winston Churchill losing to the Labor party depsite succeeding gloriously as a wartime leader. Little details like that meant the world to me, and you'd never get those in like Battlefield 47 or whatever.

I'm sure other players would filter out other key moments and identify with them, but the point is that the game just tosses a ton of information at you between levels, and you'll probably come away with a few moments that really mean something to you personally.

Best of all, you're not getting briefed by some commander or something, you're just reading it on the front page of the newspaper like every other working-class sod. It's a brilliant way to convey story, and I applaud the author for it.

The game itself is just a stock turret defense game with little connection to the events of the war. You start off flacking the enemy with a slow, inaccurate piece of crap, (just like in real life,) but don't worry. The first stage is just barely playable, and as long as you don't neglect damage and spread some points around a bit, you'll soon build a gun you're comfortable with.

I actually held off on reviewing it until I beat the game, because I was worried about how playable it would be without the tier 6 powerups. I like NG because the black background lets me focus on the game, and the ads shut off so Flash Player has more resources to use on driving the game. Free is free, but if the sponsor's corporate agenda to come between me and playing the game, forget it, I won't play the game. I'm out. Mercifully, LD slips you the tier 6 powerups under-the-table after you've exhausted all other upgrade options. Then the game becomes a more standard TDG, with gradually escalating challenge. In the last few levels, I had to let some planes through because the first wave sends like 5 advanced prop planes with stars all at once, so there's nothing you can do but kill one or two of them and let the rest through. I beat the last stage with 1 life left, which is why I'm giving this game a 10 and not cussing the author out over a lack of any saved game system.

I wish all Edutainment titles worked this way. Sure, it's hard to cover all the establishment's programming when you let the player merely skim the articles, but I think I learned more about WW2 by playing this game than I did throughout grade school and high school.

I didn't mind the British frame of reference, either. It was a nice change of pace, and it served as a humbling reminder that while we may have ponied up plenty of planes, bombs, infrastructure, and some invasion troops, the bulk of the fighting was done over there in Europe.

In fact, after playing this game, I'm not convinced you can really tell the story of WW2 from an American soldier's perspective. Not that that will stop EA, but it's good to know that indie game devs on Newgrounds will always be around to pick up the slack.

Score: 2

"Not a game. A puzzle with only one right answer."

submission: Gemworks

date: August 17, 2008

Largely unplayable in terms of a video game. This is like one of those really really old puzzle games you'd see for Windows 3.1. You know what I mean? Like one of those box-pushing games or a maze with keys and doors, and there's exactly ONE right way to clear the room? The (lone) risk/reward schedule is set up like one of those games.

In other words, it's boring. Even worse, the deceptively simple interface obfuscates the game's deliberately obtuse matching rules. The player has no agency whatsoever until they deduce which combos will cause a gem to form where, and since these rules are never explicitly stated in the tutorial, it means you'll need to lose a few games before you'll even have the foggiest idea how the game is played.

The final nail in the coffin is, when you realize you've inadvertently made a large gem in the wrong place, THE GAME WILL NOT LET YOU RESTART THE LEVEL. You need to start a New Game from the VERY FIRST LEVEL if you mess up. This is poor form and very unfair.

Labeling this title a "gem matching game" is false advertising. People hear "gem-matching game," and they think of classical puzzle games where you match small gems, the small gems disappear, and you keep doing it ad infinitum. You know, "easy to learn, difficult to master?"

Well, this game plays more like a cross between a button-hunt and a combination lock. It's a pain in the ass to learn, and if you put up with its bullshit long enough to get the hang of it, it just adds more ways you can fail so you need to start over more often, and random chance means it's more likely you'll end up in an unwinnable state than you'll solve it, even if you work the system right. Just bad game design, all around.

Candystand knows how to code and they have good art, but it's clear they don't know the first thing about game design. Gameplay should be simple and intuitive at the most basic level, and additional complexity should emerge as new risk/reward schedules are added to the game. Overall success or failure should be a long-term thing. It should NEVER hinge on the first move.

And if your game MUST have a ton of opening moves that lead to inevitable dead-ends, the player needs to be able to reset the game at any time, so they can re-do that first move over and over again until they figure out how to frigging play.

Yes, if we took the time to learn the bizarre vertical/horizontal system, we'd be able to play as well as the game's creators, but when the game's on a portal and we have hundreds of other games to choose from, we'll quit a confusing game and keep coming back to a game that's fun. This game was confusing, not fun.

I'm all for games that make you learn, but the learning can only occur in the space of experimentation. If the first wrong move screws your entire campaign, or requires you to make a dozen other moves for the game to say "NO MORE MOVES" and start you over, that game makes you waste a minute or two between learning events. Nobody's going to put up with confusion for that long.

The difference between novelty and confusion is subjective, so I can't prove I'm right. But assuming you want people to actually enjoy playing your game, you want it to be easier and more intuitive at the micro level, and complex in ways that can be addressed gradually over several (successful!) playing sessions.

It's possible this is a "thinking-man's game" and I'm just not the right audience for it. But if that's the case, neither is most of Newgrounds, I suspect. I recommend some serious introspection on the part of the authors, if their goal is to create a fun game that many people will enjoy playing.

If the goal was just to pad Candystand with as much content as possible, congratulations. Mission accomplished. Nothing me or anyone else says about the game can take that away. Maybe there's a big market for boring games with bad gameplay, I dunno. But it's surely not for the Newgrounds crowd.

Score: 9

"Great gameplay! Make it longer! Here's how:"

submission: Bomb Detonator

date: August 17, 2008

Here's how you take a quick mini-game like this one and turn it into a full-fledged Casual Game:

-Separate the gameplay into discreet stages. (Each stage should have vastly different backgrounds, and one slightly unique twist on gameplay, such as motorcycles instead of cars, or stationary buildings you have to drive around.)

-Make some kinda map screen so the player can replay old stages and unlock new stages.

-Keep a local "top score" for each stage, that represents the player's personal best.

-Add a level-up system that the player can use to "spend" points to improve the capabilities of his vehicle.

-Save these per-stage top scores (and other persistent player stats) to the user's hard drive as a saved game file.

Once you've implemented all of those features, you'll need to balance the game:

-Give the player a way to be a daredevil. That is, let him take on more challenges if he thinks he's powerful enough to get away with it. Let the player up the ante at any time, making the game harder but also increasing the potential rewards.

-In order to beat the last stage, the player will almost NEED to buy all the persistent powerups.

-Achieving the highest possible score in all the stages should give the player PLENTY of points to buy most of the powerups.

-You should be able to beat most of the earlier stages even if you have only minimal powerups.

-A high-level character should be able to replay the earlier stages and, because he's so strong now, be able to take on more challenges and therefore achieve a MUCH higher score than before.

And yes, I stole all of these ideas from GemCraft. :) It's a tower defense game, not a driving game, but it uses a lot of game design ideas that are just good sense for any casual game with quick, simple gameplay.

If you implement all of the ideas above, you'll end up with a long game with plenty of challenges all the way through, wherein the player has total control over his actions, but he gains a slight advantage after every stage, and over time he can be more and more of a daredevil, constantly improving on his previous best scores and learning new obscure tricks towards getting the best scores. And, yes, in this case the scores would actually mean something tangible then just competing with the 20 most hardcore players on the internets, it would be how you level-up over time. :)

You can get away with just a fraction of these things, of course. Just make the game end not when the player finally can't keep up with the escalation and runs out of time, but when the player finally beats the last stage. That alone makes the game more rewarding. "Can I beat the game" is just psychologically much more fun than "How long can I last?" That and some kinda persistent level-up system instead of an oldschool collectable powerup system. Those two things will lend any decent mini-game considerable replay value. You don't necessarily need to copy GemCraft, it's just that GemCraft did a lot of things really well.

Score: 10

"The Vote is a Lie."

submission: Tom & Wade fight the spam

date: August 15, 2008

This was pathetic.
I'm making a note here: Epic Fail!
It's hard to understate my disappointment.

Newgrounds Flash Portal:
Everything by Everyone
So as to amuse us all
except for the Kitty Krew.

But it's no use blaming people for their bad flash
If you keep on flaming Tom will come kick your ass
So bad flashes get through, we can't blam the Kitty Krew
Cuz you people are all voting five

I actually liked it...
I'm using irony right now,
even though your flash survived submission.

It gave me a seizure!
And made me throw up. And hurt my eyes.
But if I say anything,
soon my account will be dead.

There's no point in voting with you morons online
I'll be called a hater, I get that all the time
So before you internetters yell "u no can has do betterz"
Note the people who are voting five

And believe me, they are voting five!
I just got frontpage cuz they're voting five!
I'm dissing Newgrounds and they're voting five!

Voting five!

Voting five.

Score: 10

"The music amused me far more than it should have.."

submission: Censor Surfing

date: August 15, 2008

Happy Portal Spam Day. This is actually one of the better portal spams I've seen today. I grew up in the 80's back when TMNT was actually cool, and I always loved the music in those games because it was like the music from the show, remixed, on crack.

Anyways, as far as spam goes, this was awesome. I liked how you synched the nonsense up at the beginning in time with the music. If only you'd thrown some threats into the water and continued to make the clock do stuff as the film progressed, I think it would have gotten a lot better of a reaction than it did.

Good job, relative to other submissions today.

Score: 7

"Nonstandard interface makes it pretty clumsy."

submission: The quarry

date: August 15, 2008

It's not very approachable because of the strange interface and layout. The dotted line triangles were strange, but at least they were consistent. The less consistent part of the interface just made the game confusing, though:

-Apparently you can't pick up a small rock. Because of this, I assumed I couldn't pick up anything else until I found a bag or something. Later, it turned out I was wrong.

-The scythe as seen from far away turns into a battleaxe when you get closer.

-I don't have a very good sense of how the cavern is laid out, because no matter what room I came from, I always appear in between the various dotted line triangles.

-"I could climb into this tube!" Okay. So do it. Click. Click. "I could climb into this tube!"

-And then you enter the maze carrying a torch AND a weapon, and you see something that looks kinda like a brazier where you could light it, but instead you die. You don't see what killed you, you just randomly die. I guess it was a monster or something. Whatever.

That's as far as I got before giving up on it. I'm not about to load it again because you have the most pretentiously long splash screen in the known universe. I realize it must have taken a long time to draw, but seriously, it's not worth 45 unskippable seconds of my life.

I didn't say anything about the graphics, because I think the gameplay is more important. It's an adventure game, after all, and those have never had good graphics.

Overall, it's a decent first effort, but I feel it would benefit greatly from a more unified interface, and generally just a little bit more detail about the world, so you know what you're looking at and what's going on. I definitely look forward to more games by euopun. The world always needs more adventure games. :)

Score: 7

"Nice concept. Too bad it's an arcade game."

submission: Gemstone Hunter

date: August 14, 2008

The graphics, sound, and gameplay mechanics are all excellent. Unfortunately, the arcade paradigm ruins the game. You can only play for a minute or two before dying, and then all your progress is lost. The only long-term goal is to get a higher score than everybody else, and the sheer number of other gamers competing with you online means that even this goal is impossible.

I played it once, then I quit forever after I died. Maybe if the game had some sort of story mode where you do this snake-eating stuff in several different arenas, interacting with new elements, leveling up your snake, acquiring new skills, winning persistent awards for accomplishing certain meta-goals (I.E. Achievements,) and building up towards some sort of climactic final goal (even if it is just a local high score for each stage, like in GemCraft,) if the game had these things, it would be worth playing more than once, and for longer periods of time.

As it is, it's pointless unless you only have like 30 seconds or a minute in which to game. Which might make it suitable for a cell phone game, except that the screen is so frigging big. The concept is good, the surface is good, but the backbone of the gameplay is flawed. A throwaway arcade game submitted to the wrong portal.

Score: 10

"Hmmm... actually, I like where this is going."

submission: All Quiet on theShoreline

date: August 14, 2008

You're not just spamming the portal, you're actually telling a story in the process. I like that. Not many flashes on Newgrounds bother to have a story in them.

I think after you've done like, forty of these things, you should bundle them all together into one SWF, mess with the pacing a little bit, maybe add a few scenes, and you'd have the whole epic adventure set to In The Navy.

If you do all that, and then actually synch it up properly, I bet you'd get a blue score, easy.

Score: 10

"Easy, but surprisingly fun to work through..."

submission: Castle Run

date: August 13, 2008

I really enjoyed this game for some reason, even though the risk/reward schedules made the game pitifully easy. I think the reason is because you're always learning a new trick.

Each room is unique, and presents a unique challenge. It doesn't matter that each individual challenge is fairly easy, and all the threats are obvious. You just need to pause and look at the new room for a couple of seconds, and that simple moment of evaluation is all it takes for the magic to happen. Each room demands a different approach, and that novelty alone goes a long way.

This game exposes something that toddlers playing with plastic rings know automatically, but it's taken the video game industry over ten years to actually put into words: simple problem-solving based on pattern recognition is what makes video games fun, and unlockable content is a potent reward.

As long as your game has those two things, nobody will care if the challenge is trivial, the game takes all of ten minutes to play, and the control is obnoxiously floaty. They'll still play it once, and have fun doing it. Add Achievements and some semblance of challenge, and you could rule the unverse.

Score: 4

"Awkward control + sudden, deadly threats = no fun."

submission: mission to Saturn

date: August 13, 2008

I'm all right with dodging incoming fire, or taking out enemies before they have a chance to unload their deadly payloads, or collecting some things while dodging others, but these cliffs are just bullshit, okay? By the time you know there's a cliff coming, it's already too late. You got hit.

There are many ways to make a game challenging. This way was just cheap.