WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Mario Remix]

This dude knows his ActionScript!

Graphics: Sprite rips, but very well-executed. Animations are perfect.

Style: Almost perfect Mario clone. Excellent simulation of all three games. Mario in Megaman was a little hairy. It wouldn't detect collisions with Crashman's big jump, for example. But I guess mixing two games' physics is bound to end up like that. Making a mixture of video game characters' movement styles mesh together as smoothly as Smash Bros is not an easy thing to do.

Sound: Familiar video game tuneage. The Mario music was from the wrong game, but I'll live. The Garidus music was nice.

Violence: 8 and 16-bit video game characters blow each other up and bump each other off the screen. If you consider that violent, don't ever turn on the television. You might see a GTA commercial and your head will explode.

Interactivity: Awesome control. Simply incredible. Points off for Mario in Megaman, because sometimes you couldn't stomp the boss when it seemed like you should have been able to stomp him. At first, I thought my bullets in Gariuds were sometimes missing the enemies due to undetected collisions between keyframes, but then I realized that the enemies all had to be hit multiple times. Tell me, what collision techniques did you use? Kudos for giving us plenty oif shots on-screen at once to get the job done! :) Skip to boss button is useful. I wish you had made it possible to skip the megaman boss poses by pressing A or Z. It was cool listening to the MM2 song the first time, but it got old after dying 5 or 6 times.

Humor: The concept is the funny part. Mario in all these different games. LOL.

Overall: Better than most ripped-sprite games! :D Can't wait to see what you make next! This was awesome! You've got a good, solid command of ActionScript. Now let's see you make an original game! :) CrazyMonkeyGames will pay to sponsor work of this quality, you know, as long as you own the game's copyright.

Phendrana responds:

For collision detection i used a couple different techniques depending on the situation. For the gradius level i set it up so that each fireball would have a name like "fire1" up to like "fire20" I made double movie clips for each enemy so i'd only have to place the collision detection programming in once for each. All it did was use a for loop to check for a collision with any of the fireballs using just a this.hitTest(_root["fire" + i])

[Bullet Dodge]

Frustrating, dull, awkward, and boring.

Graphics: Sticks.

Style: The Lametrix.

Sound: Pfft.

Violence: red lines.

Interactivity: Would it kill you to give me SOME margin of error when I jump? Also, mouse menu + keyboard gameplay = I have to look down and switch my hands twice in order to play again. Either use a keyboard menu or clickable buttons in-game.

Humor: fails.

Overall: Boring.Your animation is slightly better than most noobs' stick animation, and this gameplay formula is fairly fresh, but your execution of it is boring and hard to control. Adding a life meter just makes it less realistic. When people complained "IT's too hard I keep dying," you should have made the jump more effective and gave the player a better feel for which move corresponds to which shot. Adding a life meter is not the solustion here, just like adding a time limit to Adventure Island does not make a boring game fun.

[Fun Hats]

Give the guy an A for effort, it's just not fun.

Graphics: Poorly drawn, cheeseily animated intro, followed by levels that are nice and long and vaguely depict a western enviornment. Your poorly drawn western robot chugs along, its rotating limbs clearly clipped together with chards. No visual style at all, just a mishmash of textures, vextors, and scribbles. Try going for a more cartoony, stylized look next time. Also, to make a train approach the camera realistically, try squaring itssize every frame instead of multiplying it by a steady number. If it was a motion tween, not AS, try easing out of the tween by about 90%.

Style: Firefly has style. The HalfLife mod Gunmen has syle. Wild Guns had style. This... this is a ramshackle collection of clipart, JPEGs, and Circles. The breakable glasses and the exploding vending machine swere nice touches, the buzzsaw and the train seemed like interesting changes of pace, the spinning poles that serve no useful purpose other than to kill you by touching your gun are a work of the devil and need to die forever. Try adopting a simple cartoon style next time, dude. Something simple like Bonus Stage or something. The trick is to make every part of your world seem like it was born from the same womb as every other part of your world.

Violence: Cheesey, crappy blood randomly spigots out of enemy cowboys as you shoot them in the head over and over again, waiting for them to finally die.

Interactivity: I've rated movies higher than this when they had a really, really nice menu. It's not your actionscript. It's your damn annoying game design choices. I have nothing wrong with the mouse control, it's the awkward, useless jumping (adding something that kills you if you DON'T jump does NOT make it "useful") and the sheer pointlessness of clicking on a bad guy as fast as your reload rate will allow you to while you crawl towards the right side of the screen just isn't FUN. By the time I reachecd the spinning poles on the train, I just quit rather than try again when it killed me. Your game is not fun. It does not grip me, sir. It has a few interesting twists, but nothing awesome enough to make me put up with your boring, inspid gameplay. Try making targets that appear and you can SEE them and you actually have a CHANCE at shooting them before they shoot you. THAT would be a game. This? This is a linear, slow-paced, boring tedious click-fest. Also, here's a hint. If your game is slowing down to a grinding halt because you used way too much detail and a bunch of sprites and gradients, and your game still looks like crap anyway, it's time to try a simpler style.

Humor: Educational Egg teaches us about business ethics! In other news, SouthPark's creators sue and the New York Times votes circular gradients the "Worth thing you could possibly put on a nose, 2005." But the funniest part had to be when the creator submitted this game to Newgrounds and... no... no, I'm sorry. That's going too far. You honestly tried really hard here, I can tell, and I shouldn't dismiss the package as a whole. But really, it wasn't that exciting or funny at all.

Overall: Below average game. It's sad, because you kind of tried to be innovative in a number of ways. It's just that the gameplay is no fun and the graphics slow down the computer but don't look good. I hope you keep trying, but please, look up some articles on the internet about gameplay theory, and develop a simple artistic style that uses simple Flash vector shapes, deformed and curved to look stylish, and see how much you can do with just colors and shapes.

CorkySurprise responds:

Woah, long review. I will take some of your points into account the next time I make a game. I know what you mean by "It's not fun". By the time I had submitted this game I had come to hate it, because I was so sick of fixing glitches and crap. And the lag I was aware of, however I played it in low quality, so that wasnt a problem for me.

*several years later*

your review is still damn right! take a look at my newer stuff; I think you'll see improvement :)

Thanks for the review
Mike

[Doom: The Traitor ( old )]

Not bad for a first game.

Graphics: Ripped Doom sprites on simple vector backgrounds. Moving gun and crosshairs like that ad banner at the top of this page. Would be better with original graphics or some juicy smoke, sparks, and debris where the user clicks, and blood if they sucessfully click an enemy. This would involve some pretty advanced AS, though. Spawning multiple objects isn't very intuitive in Flash.

Style: Not bad. Considering that this is all done with buttons and some VERY simple life meter AS, it comes surprisngly close to capturing the feel of an old FPS. Some low-key music would have been nice, as well as moving enemies, projectiles, or pretty much anything else you don't know how to do yet.

Sound: BOOM! *ka-chick* BOOM! *ca-chick* Sounds from doom are used to good effect. The shotgun reload sound actually is a good indicator of when you can fire next.

Violence: Fleshy beings explode into piles of gore when shot. It doesn't get much more violent than that... oh, waith, this isn't 1991. This is Newgrounds, Circa 2005. OF COURSE it could be more violent.

Interactivity: Not bad, for a button game. Pretty darn decent. This kid known how to imply gameplay where you would think there is none. Here's hoping he works hard to learn AS and keeps getting more advanced as he goes.

Humor: The easter eggs were kinda funny. Also, the crappy text on the title screens add a humorous overtone that probabaly wasn't intentional.

Overall: Even though this is a first game, and it's nothing we haven't seen before, it's decent. Average decent. Now watch fifty thousand tards release poor imitations of this already mediocre game, and we'll have to blam them all. Oh well. We'll burn that bridge while we're crossing it. You done good, kid. Now close the damn wad file and start making monsters out of Flash squares and triangles!

I look forward to your future submissions because this simple, short game didn't suck, and things will only get better as you grow.

[Ultimate Battle Version 1]

Mellee Attack is broken. Also, it's a joke game.

Yeah don't ever use mellee attack because if your second attack is a poke, the game will freeze after the next magic spell misses you. The whole first battle is staged so it's basically a waste of time to play through, especially since the game is liable to lock up if you choose the wrong of two commands (50% chance of failure.) Fix and resubmit. No, I take that back. Fix and add content and a reason to give a damn and resubmit. The whole point of an RPG is the feeling of "Oooh! Look! New toys! More STUFF! I'm acquiring money, power and respect that I could never hope to achieve in real life!" Skipping from level 0 to level 100 defeats the purpose of this. Try making a real game next time instead of an interactive movie with one bad joke in it. It pains me to see this much actionscript and work going to waste like this on a non-game.

MercuryLime responds:

I fixed the bug. Sorry if you don't like the game but it's supposed to be a joke.

[Shitemon]

NO! DEMOS!!!

Would it kill you people to finish your shit before you flush it down the portal? I mean, seriously. I am so sick of getting ready to play something or watch something and then I find out the author quit halfway through and decided to release it anyway. Stop DOING that! PLEASE!

[Deluxe pacman]

Absolutely nothing original.

Graphics: Pac-Man's sprite simply gets rotated. Why the author felt the need to give him a linear gradient that would be painfully obviously not caused by light sources when he turns is beyond me. Everything looks just like every other version of Pac-man you've ever played, except the background is inexplicably white. The next time PacMan's croporate owners decide to sue the crap outy of everybody again like they did in the 90's, they will have an airtight case when attacking this game.

Style: Just like the arcade! Which came out aproximately at THE DAWN OF TIME, so graphical standards have improved somewhat since then.

Sound: The most annoying use of square waves you've ever heard. I mean, seriously, why couldn't you be bothered to at least throw some music in there from the audio portal? We'll take anything man, ANYTHING to make this pac-man clone somewhat interesting or unique.

Violence: Low. A man runs around taking pills and eating the dead, who are then reborn from their disembodied eyeballs.

Interactivity: Seems to work properly with the arrow keys.

Humor: *sounds of crickets chirping*

Overall: Below average. Come on, man! I appreciate that you went to all the trouble of working through this tutorial in a Flash book you got, but can't you PLEASE be bothered to change the name and characters to something original before submitting it? And then you have the audacity to promote your own website from the menu. Why? Why would anybody try this? Or wait... did Atari or Mattell or whoever owns 'The Man' hire you to set a big, juicy precedent for their next wave of lawsuits directed at small games developers? That's it, isn't it. Well, great job, dickface, now we're all gonna need to pool our money and create a defense fund...

If I'm wrong about the conspiracy theory, kindly excuse the dickface remark. In short your game is very good, please make one that's actually your game.

[Raiden-City Assault]

Another crappy broken noob game.

Okay, this is just like that crappy Metal Sonic game released the other day, except that the author had the common sense to make things move a little slower, and make the enemy ships smaller, so you actually have a chance of lasting more than two seconds.

Since this is basically just a distortion of the Balloon demo from Flash Game Design Demystified, I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that you read chapters 2-6 and then write a game with REAL collision detection instead of this box crap.

PhoenixRizen responds:

Flash... Game... Design.. Demystified?

ME HAVE TWO LEGS!

[Make Obesity History]

Funny Joke. Hardly a game.

Graphics: *shudder...*

Style: Great fun until I realized that there was no possible way to lose. I guess I could beat my own score if I really wanted to, but the game wasn't that interesting the first time through.

Sound: Hey, I LIKE Weird Al. You got a problem with that?

Violence: none

Interactivity: clinging on stuff works. Some of the targets are a little tough to click, but there's plenty more where they came from.

Humor: Website was the funniest part. THIS IS NOT AJOKE! Yes it is, who do you think you're kidding? LOLs.

Overall: Say, you've got some moderate skill, there. Next time, try making a game.

FLiXD responds:

I bet you like to wear pink shirts

[Zombie Survival]

Great game escept for GAMEPLAY!

Graphics: Great execution of Metal Slug Sprite Rips.

Style: Perfect for a survival horror game. If you don't mind the goofy MS animations. Personally, I think they go great together.

Sound: Excellent... except that the female zombies say "braaaains" in a man's voice. Honestly. Since you were stealing sounds from They Hunger anyway, why not use the female zombie sounds?

Violence: This is pretty much as gory as it gets around here. Pixelly gore, but gory none the less.

Interactivity: Excellent controls. I only wish the Shift button and the sapcebar didn't have all those "make the browser loose focus" keys between them.

Humor: MS mugging. Not much else about this game is funny.

Overall: But, OHHHH! So close. This author could have gotten away with a ten overall, but he made the same mistake that EVERY OTHER ACTION GAME ON NEWGROUNDS SEEMS TO MAKE and he spawned enemies randomly, so that some of them appear right on top of you and you can't avoid them.

What's wrong with you? Haven't you ever played a video game in your entire life? No game with truly random enemies appearing and instantly doing damage to you would last a week in the arcades without being recalled. Even those unauthorized NES games that came in black, strangely-shaped game paks didn't subject innocent users to this kind of bullshit. And damn sure nothing published after 1995, for console or for PC, has pulled crap like this without releasing a patch later to correct the behavior.

This ain't mine sweeper. It's an action game. You establish some ground rules, and then you give the player a fighting chance to succeed within the context of those rules. One of the rules can't be "you automatically just die sometimes." That's just stupid.

Resident Evil never pulled this shit. Hell, even in Fear Effect, there was a slight chance you could plan your way around inescapable attacks. Suspense in survival horror cannot exist without hope. If the player thinks his death truly is inescapable and up to chance, he won't feel fear. He'll get frustrated and quit the damn game.