Great new game idea!
Graphics: None. :P
Style: Very cool! Very original!
Sound: Good music! But pauses between notes made the game harder!
Interactivity: After I put on headphones, it worked great! But, with modern 3D games, the sounds are quieter when they're behind the player's head. That didn't seem to happen here. It would have helped. Sometimes, I thought I faced the sound, but I had to walk backwards!
Overall: Very cool new idea for a game!
Novel Concept. Flawless Execution.
Graphics were weak and unimaginative, except for the background which was kinda cool when it changed. The gameplay and overall fun factor more than made up for the lackluster bubbles, though I liked the various types of puzzles, I loved how smoothly the game reset itself after a critical loss, but what really floored me was the high quality of the scripting job.
I was amazed at how bulletproof the game mechanics seemed. After that final bubble was popped at the hub level, that was it. Game over, man. Nothin's gonna screw this up, now. The cannons hold their fire, the timer stops counting down, and I win. As it should be! You almost never see a Flash game that had that much care/forethought/testing put into it.
The puzzle designs were varied and interesting, and the speacial shots and cannons all added to the fun factor. I got stuck at some of the faster puzzles with tinier holes, but I have a relatively slow computer, and I'm not a bust-a-move veteren or anything, so I can't be trusted to appreciate this game's later levels. If anything, the fact that the game eventually wore me down proves it's a solid title with decently scaling difficulty.
Overall: Great job! If you'd drawn the bubbles to be some of those anime glass-bead-lookin' jewel thingies, and given it some characters of some sort watching the puzzle unfold, it could have gotten huge points for graphics. At it stands it's sorta like the old game Zoop for the PS1. Great fun, new puzzle twist, great design, music you can tolerate for a long time, but very dull graphics despite nice color and style.
Simple. Too Short. Nice crisp style. Not bad.
Graphics: Nice colors, crisp lines, and iconic shapes make for decent visuals. The whole maze has a nice machine-like sense of purpose. Boring character, but hey, can't have everything.
Style: Uhhh... See Graphics. :)
Sound: Add sound please. Google it. It's not that hard, sir.
Interactivity: I hate these mouse maze games. But yours was nicely done. The boulder was uber-cheap cuz I wasn't expecting it. (Maybe if you'd shown it there, attached to one wall, and then when I hit the button maybe it would wiggle a little, come out of its socket, and slowly roll out before following the path it did, the noob player would have had more of a chance to react to it. Instead this is on-the-job-training, which kinda sucks.)
Overall: A nice little game. You used a lot of good ideas that made this more than the typical mouse-maze. Too short, and needs sound, but other than that, good job! :) For your next project, try something a little more original.
Thanks for the long and thought out review! =D
Yeah, alot of people hate me for the boulder XD, I'll try to refrain from hidden traps, as for sound, I had planned it, but I'm no good with sound in flash, it's always too big and I don't know how to make it less quality. Thanks, and I plan to learn sound and put it in Trigger 2 =D
A typical non-conformist dress-up doll...
Graphics: A nice first effort. Alexander's proportioning is a bit off, with points and curves in slightly odd places, and lines subtly conflicting with each other instead of working together to suggest a unified shape. You see a lot of drawings like this from new or young artists... The good news is, it's the sort of thing that one gets better at, with practice.
Style: Goth can be cool. And some of the clothes Alex has given this doll are kinda fun. I liked the striped shirts. Unfortunately, I used to download kiss dolls all the time, so I've seen all this before.
For your next goth doll, Alexander, try giving the shirts different-lengthed hemlines. Maybe add some folds or wrinkles to the cloth. Some of the clothes should hang off of the model's body in places. Very few, if any of the garments, should truly be skin-tight.
Also, name your doll. It's a small thing, but giving your character a name would have helped a lot. A submission entitled like "Dora VenomLace" or something is much more interesting than "Random Goth Submission #3." A little thing like a name, and hints of a lifestyle, (What's her favorite food? Add one to the doll.) can add loads of personality to an otherwise mediocre doll.
Interactivity: Everything works, and although the garments are skin-tight, they line up well enough. IMHO, snap-on is the way to go, but some traditionalists enjoy the simpler method.
Overall: Average doll. You can tell some effort was put into making this. But it wasn't anything remarkable, and the drawing style looked very rough and inexperienced. That comes with the territory, though.
If I were you, Alexander, I'd call this submission a success, and start up a whole new doll. One with a completely different pose and everything. Maybe try copying an artist whose style you already respect. It'll teach you a TON of subtle things about anatomy, perspective, and suggesting a 3D shape that are difficult to learn any other way.
Those HOW-TO-DRAW books would be a big help too, if you're not too proud to learn from the anime and disney conformists. ;)
Best of luck to you in the future, Alex. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your work.
AlexanderTheInsane is a decent artist; I checked out his work in his MySpace and thought they were pretty good. Though odd as it may seem, he did not draw the girl you saw in our submission, but only the girl in the preloader. It was I, Midian, who drew the main girl and all the clothes & accessories, plus inserting the actionscripts and text.
You're right about the title. Perhaps I should change it into something more eye-catching. And I should give the clothes and hair a realistic touch up, and the background could be something better than purple fire trace-bitmapped. I'll try to find some time adding some shading to the girl. But since I'm new with flash, this may take a while.
P.S.
Thanks for the review!
Cute puzzle game/ vaguely hispanic dating sim!
Graphics: The characters had lots of personality! The way they were drawn didn't look very "pretty" to me, but they were cute and consistant and they felt like they belonged together.
Style: Very well-executed puzzle game! The animations were simple but effective, and they added value to the story. Good job!
Sound: Nice music, it reminded me of some japanese puzzle games I've played in the past, but at the same time it sounded uniquely hispanic. Sound effects when you make a match would be nice.
Violence: None. (Unless you count all the torture that poor car's been through!)
Interactivity: Only 9 points because the instructions are too hard to read! Make the print bigger, and this could be a 10. (Or at least add instructions to the top of the Flash's description.)
Humor: The guy pushing his car away was kinda funny, as was the relaxed Pappa reading the newspaper. It's possible there were some subtle jokes I don't get because of cultural context.
Overall: Pretty good game! :D Great gameplay, cute characters, good stuff! XD I only wish we could get to know the author of this game, instead of just a link to a generic games archive. :/
Modest effort, but brilliant execution.
Graphics: Felt a little small and cramped, but everything was rendered nicely, heavily stylized, and consistant within the game. Would have liked to see some prettier backgrounds and maybe a slightly bigger playfield with bigger characters, but that's nitpicking.
Style: Very nice. See "Graphics."
Sound: Nice music, subdued and to the point. Sound effects compliment the music and aren't irritating at all, which is rare in a Flash game. Wouldn't change a thing!
Violence: You, um, do something... to things... and they disappear. Not sure if I'd even call that "violence," but it's definitely "action!"
Interactivity: Excellent for a game of this type. My only complaint is that the boss won't take dammage from the draw tool.
Humor: I'm really not sure why I scored this so high. Something just made me smile about the glowing red cursors of other users and the big red hourglass of LagDoom.
Overall: VERY nice. I would love to see more short, simple games like this, brilliantly rendered and executed, rather than tons of ambitious, elaborate mario clones and RPGs that end up being ugly and poorly made. MAKE MORE GAMES! :D
Thanks for the enlightening review!
The draw tools _does_ damage the bosses, but it's very hard to use against them. It's obviously good against big clusters of enemies though ;)
Thanks for the criticism, this definitely will be getting a sequel after all the positive reviews I've gotten so far, your suggestions help :)
Below-average prototype of a game.
Suggestions:
Graphics: Make some interesting backgrounds and ships. Lines are boring.
Controls: This is a good start, well-executed. One suggestion: You should never make the player ever take his hands off the arrow keys and grab the mouse, click "Next level," and put his hands back on the arrow keys to play. "Press Space Bar" works much nicer if the rest of the controls are keyboard.
Gameplay: Pretty boring. Try adding some enemies, powerups, weapons, targets, goals, or other gameplay elements.
Sound: Boom is good. Music+ boom would be better. :D
Overall: I'm not blamming this because the graphics were lame. I'm blamming this because the gameplay was very boring. It's a good start, but you need more advanced gameplay and add at least a little personality to the world and characters. What's here seems competently-executed, but there's just not enough here.
Great engine! Decent game.
Graphics: Sprite graphics with original characters are always cool, and these characters are very nicely done! Unfortunately, some of the transitions like the "get ready" text break the player's suspense of disbelief by mixing pixels freely with vector shapes. It's almost always better to go either all pixel or all vector.
Style: The strongest part of this game was certianly it's original style, theme, and characters. Nice work! Combat works well enough, but the way enemies and the player die could be embellished a little bit if you really want to nail that classic 2D platformer look & feel. Think "fall off the screen when you die."
Sound: The music gets the blood pumping, but it seems to clash a bit with the characters and the world. Sound effects are good. Though you probably ought to replace that one mario sound effect with something more original. There's tons of free sound repositories out there.
Violence: Jump on the brightly colored toasters to, well, break them, I guess. No biggie. Jack Thompson has bigger fish to fail to fry.
Interactivity: A competently executed run n' jump (by Flash's standards, anyway.) The controls could be further improved by not allowing a held-down spacebar to equal bunny-hopping. It would be nice to collide with the sides of a block instead of just the top of it, but I know this is hard to code. If I were you, I'd make it easier to land on a single block by upping the horizontal decelleration if you're on solid ground, and perhaps capping the maximum fall speed so the player has a bit more time to react. (Or by making all the relevant platforms more than one block wide.) Collecting butter is easy and I could not impove upon it. Good work, there. Combat is decent, but could be further refined.
Humor: The cocnept of anthropomorphic toast is kinda goofy, but it would be even better if you'd add some sort of story with dialogue or even voice samples. Flash gives you an amazingly broad range of tools with whiche to tell a story. It's a shame not to use them. If you absolutely must stick to the pixels, at least add a little intro screen where a big evil toaster steals the bagel pricess or whatever. It would enchance the characters, which are already this game's strong suit, if you add a story to them in a way that engages the player.
Overall: You've done an excellent job of programming this game's engine, and a great job designing sprite characters. The control/gameplay could use a little tweaking, but the real missed opprotunity here is one of storytelling. I'm sure this game will score well, and it deserves to! But if you take it a step further, and really refine it, you could have one of the top 10 truly memorable Flash games of all time here, or a damn fine proof-of-concept for a GBA game. As it sits, you just have a competently executed flash platformer. If that's all you set out to accomplish, good job! :) But keep working on it and in another month or so, it could be SO much more!
Dude I wich I could reply back to you as well as you reviewed my game but. Thanks for the input ^^ and also the mario effect is the only sound I could which would fit the brick smashing effect.
Not a bad beta. Looking forward to it!
Graphics: Rudimentary, but they get the job done.
Style: The original Lunar Lander was one of the greats. A classic. I feel a lot more could be done with the formula. Bonus points for adding the tutorial mode and the radar.
Sound: Add sound plz.
Violence: None to speak of, until you hit Earth and your thrusters aren't powerful enough to even slow your decent... there's a reason we don't fly these things back to Earth IRL.
Interactivity: Conrols are decent. At times I wished I could "thrust down." Earth landing either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be adequately explained that you need to burn the whole way down (if even this would have saved me.) Auto-saving between waypoints would be nice. When I died on earth and found out I had to start the whole tutorial all over again, I quit.
Humor: Nope. But that's okay.
Overall: It's coming along pretty well. Get a friend to help with the graphics, add some sort of sound even if it's just a looping techno soundtrack from Newgrounds and explosion samples from a free web sound effect database, and make Earth easier/more obvious. "Respawn" should restart the current leg of the mission, not the whole mission all over again. The end result will be a much less tedious, more approachable game.
Slow frame rate, otherwise good.
Graphics were simplistic but they got the job done. The sound was okay. Background music was kinda dull though. Just the same old blangey-blang hard rock with no real reason for it. This is supposed to be a video game not a Honda commercial. Probabaly the least disturbing terrorism game I have ever played in terms of violence. I was generous on the humor score. A lot of the chuckle value comes from how doofy the game's characters look before you run over them. Overall, it's a totally average game. One thing I would like to see improved is the speed at which the screen refreshes. Did you use cacheAsBitmap? Anyway, I guess a certian ammount of slow-down is unaviodable with a screen this big. Good, solid game, but it didn't impress me. Keep up the good work.
Age 45, Male
Joined on 1/26/05
for ear,for fun 
- Circlo - 
Trigger! 
Marilyn the Goth 
My Love Rose 
cursor storm 
Ship Navigation 
Toast: Game 
Lunar Lander Advance 
Bridge Bomber Bus. 
