WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Marilyn the Goth]

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.

Midian responds:

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!

[My Love Rose]

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. :/

[cursor storm]

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

unknown911 responds:

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 :)

[Ship Navigation]

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.

[Toast: Game]

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!

Hacker12 responds:

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.

[Lunar Lander Advance]

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.

[Bridge Bomber Bus.]

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.

[BattleMage]

A nice, long platformer with kinda dodgy gameplay.

Graphics: Yes, we do recognize rockman's walk when we see it. Backgrounds are nice-looking, everything's animated well, but a lot of the animations reminded me of other game sprites just traced using Flash's drawing tools. Because of this, different game elements each seem illustrated in a different drawing style.

Style: The opening theme and cinema scenes were done well, though a bit simplistic, it tells the story well. The characters don't look like they all came from or belong in the same world together, I suspect because they were all traced from different sprite sheets. Nothing really jumps out as being extremely well-done or original. I think a personal, unique drawing style (I.E. all characters drawn by the Flash artist from scratch,) might have made a lot of difference.

Gameplay: True to the Rockman/Megaman theme, there's lots of persnickety jumping where hitting your head on a ledge will make you start all over again if you don't do it exactly perfect. Enemies move a bit more like Castlevania, appearing far outside your attack range and then gravitating towards the ground where you are.

Unlike Castlevania, though, these bad guys aren't confined to their own limited areas, which means you're constantly surrounded and often have no choice but to take a hit in order to progress. They'll be swarming around on a ledge beneath you where you need to jump, and you have no way to hit them or take them out. If the enemies dropped random health powerups, maybe this wouldn't be an issue, but the way things stand, they only drop money, so every hit you take is permenent.

The boss moves in odd ways and you can't duck or stab upwards, so I was at a loss as to how to beat him. The only way I could ever hurt him was by trading hits when he cross the screen, and of course, I had been softened up by all the enemies underfoot in the first stage, so I died first. Maybe there's a trick to it. I dunno. You only get one life, then you have to start over, so I didn't have the patience to play through it again. That was a nice thing about Rockman. If you got to the boss with half health and then died, you could always call it a practice fight and try it again with FULL health.

Overall: I liked this game, but the gameplay was frustrating in some ways. I absolutely commend the author for actually telling a story! THAT aspect of the game RULED! I look forward to his next release. Hopefully something with more original graphics, and perhaps a more solid visual theme tying everything together. He's taking the gameplay in a good direction, and he's made a more competent action/platformer than I've seen in Flash. The health/lives mechanism kills it, though. A health meter is better than one hit, you're dead, yes, but a health meter with a limited number of lives that lets you continue right at the boss, is even better. That's just my opinion, though. There's a lot to like here, if you're not as easily frustrated as me.

To the author: Keep up the good work, and I hope to see more games of this caliber from you, perhaps with a bit more diversity and polish and a less severe margin of error.

Arclite83 responds:

Thanks for the great review; you make a lot of good points, and you've given me a lot to consider for BM2 in terms of mechanics. I did take shortcuts with the artwork, and while the originals were from different areas I feel the final style was my own (simplistic) interpretation of the sprites. It's hard to make something this bulky wihtout using more complex graphics, and I was seriously hindered to simplicity because of the engine (I already have a fix in mind for this).

All in all, you've made some great points, and I will definitely take some of this and run with it. I'm glad you like the story; I have the jyst of the next one complete, once I fill in the details and iron out all I hope to accomplish with my next engine revision, I should be on my way to making BM2.

[Denvish Day: Teh Ban Bin]

Not bad, kinda laggy though. :(

Graphics: They work. Nothing too flashy or impressive, but they're okay.

Style: Not much of one. Between the smooth techno music, the quick gameplay, and the surreal modernness of all the gameplay elements, what you've got here is sort of a mild ambiance, more than a style. Still not bad, though.

Sound: Nice music, decent sound effects, the bare minimum of each.

Violence: You shock newgrounds spammers with a cattle prod, a sadistic and cruel method of banning that probabaly isn't even considered a crime in most states. NG has much more gory games than this dealing with the same subject matter, including "Kill Teh Noob," "Newbie Murder," and of course, "SplatterBlam 5: Revenge of the Blam."

Interactivity: An interesting twist on *something* the *someone* genre of games, you rotate around the outside peremeter of the playfield and try to keep everyone corralled in the middle. Unfortunately, he must be using HitTests or something, because every time I click the mouse when there's more than 5 or so enemies on the screen, the game freezes for a split second and skips about 10 frames, and then suddenly there's 4 people banging on the walls who I would have been able to get to and deal with if only the game hadn't frozen. This game is not well-optimized or coded, which is great news for ME, because it means Armor Games would probabaly accept my submissions if I sent them in now.

Humor: Ehhhh. Been done. Everybody hates people who submit crappy Flash. We get it.

Overall: Not a bad little game. Could perhaps have been smoother gameplay, or a bit more personality to the characters, but it's decent, as far as NG flash games go.

[Shotgun Orc]

Well-implemented, but not fun.

Graphics: Decently detailed and animated cartoon characters. Nice backgrounds. Could be more stylized, and maybe better-looking somehow in a way I can't quite describe, but has to do with aesthetics and artistic design, not implementation or Flash itself.

Style: An orc with a shotgun in a side-scrolling brawl. Not as flashy as a capcom beat-em-up, not as iconic as Dad n' Me. Pretty much yet another mideval Flash cartoony game.

Sound: Lackluster trumpets and drums bleat out dull pseudo-european midevial muzzak. Competent battle sound effects from some sound collection somewhere.

Violence: You blow the face off of a wizard, and his skull flops to the ground amid the hamburger that used to be his head. Around here at Newgrounds, that's not quite even a 9.

Interactivity: Frustrating, floaty control that you can't rely on, mized with devestatingly effective enemies you can't predict. But I've played much less playable games in Flash.

Humor: Some of the animations are kinda funny. I'm a little disapointed that more fun wasn't had with the crazy concept of an orc with a shotgun. :)

Overall: For all the spit and polish that went into this game, it's just not that fun. Below average. Nice try, though. Next time, try to work on making the gameplay a little bit deeper. give the player some options, and make it easy to execute them, rather than your current gameplay dynamic which seems to be to throw a bunch of obstacles at the player that only have one possible solution each.