WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Super Mario Boat Bonanza]

Nice. Too bad it's not fun.

Graphics: Mario sprite rips from various games with some editing. Everything looks lush and pretty.

Style: It's a class act all the way, from the colors to the controls to the physics. The selection of enemies doesn't seem to match the locale, though. Why are there skeletons at the beach?

Sound: Not bad. A nice soft Koopa's Beach remix with coin sounds ripped right from the games.

Violence: Light. Various mario enemies bonk, thwap, and bite you. Most of the time, you die because your boat got upset, not because an enemy actually hurt mario.

Interactivity: Surprisngly good. The controls work exactly like you'd expect them to, which is why it is so odd that the gameplay sucks ass. See Overall for more details.

Humor: Goofy mario antics. Silly face on the big orange blob thingy. Slapstick mayham when mario gets knocked out of the boat. No deliberate jokes, though, as far as I could tell.

Overall: I wanted to love this game. I *really* did. But the author made a lot of design decisions that totally fuck the gameplay over. I'm not talking about playcontrol, and I'm not talking about the coding. Both of those were rock solid. I'm talking about enemies appearing and hitting you before you could even possibly know they are there. I'm talking about coins and enemies appearing at random, so that more often than not, the coins overlap the enemies which means you can't safely collect them. The author needs to learn how to present challenges to the player that are not impossible. He needs to learn how to use random numbers to imply random events, without making the gameplay totally chaotic. We need to know what we're up against before it pops out of the water for the furst time and we die from it. And ideally, it would be nice if we had some sort of way of defending ourselves.

This is just my own opinion. The game seems to be doing very well, so I guess most people enjoyed it. I'm going to try it again and see if maybe there's a trick to playing it. But if you make another version of this, you might want to consider planning the placement of enemies and coins a little more carefully, at the very least.

And do a google search for articles on game design theory. The Carrot and the Stick, Risk VS Reward, stuff like that.

Good luck on your future games. Everything was great about this game escept for the gameplay. :(

Asvegren responds:

Thank you, finally a nice and constructive review. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the gameplay.

I will take your suggestions into consideration the next time I make a game like this.

In case you were wondering, there are actually tricks to playing the game. Perhaps I know them because I made the game, and I've been testing it quite many times.

* When coins overlap the birds, I still go after them. Mario can actually nudge enemies without dying, but if it's a clean hit it's bye-bye. Still, I mostly manage to grab those "impossible" coins.
* Someone mentioned that controlling Mario after he is dead (i.e. when he's flying upwards) is bad. I consider this a possibility to gain an extra coin or life, without any risk, and not a bug or something like that.

Thanks for that nice review. I'm glad some people take the time to show some appreciation for the hard work I and other Flash artist put into these submissions. This is a free Portal for Flash. Most of us don't win the $250 monthly award, so our submissions to the Portal are mainly here for the entertainment of the users of NG. We expect some credit in return.

Wow, what a rant :P

[G.N. ARCADE vol2]

Bad control = GAME SUCKS

Graphics: Stick figure fights alien spaceships on stylish op-art backgrounds. Good color, adequate spaceship, crappy stick figure. Title screen looks great for a 2001 X-box ad.

Style: I think the author was going for some sort of vague amaricana sci-fi feel. Various elements feel like they came from the 60s through 80s of european and american pulp and low-budget sci-fi. The result is a glimpse of what is either an elaborate and inspired fictional world mirroring the grittiest and cheesiest of our extraterrestrial fantasies, or a poor attempt to slap a bunch of random photographs and visual elements together and get something vaguely sci-fi. I can't tell which. All I know is, my gut is telling me Jazz + sunset + photograph of an ugly guy = artistic. Too bad the execution was so shoddy.

Sound: Nice Jazz music. Tired, crappy BEE-DOOW laser sound effects we've all heard before.

Violence: Stuff blows up other stuff. Individual hits are shown only by a shrinking life meter. No blood or gore, just abstract guns that make a laser sound but fire little black bullets.

Interactivty: NO! WRONG! DAMMIT! The noob platformer physics, I can live with. The slowdown, I can live with. He's probabaly new to ActionScript, okay? Over time, he'll get better. But you do NOT put platforms at the apex of your player's jumpaing ability. You do NOT make ammo that the player desperately needs appear at the top of the god damn screen where he couldn't possibly reach it if his life depended on it. These two things were INTENTIONAL GAMEPLAY CHOICES, and the author ought to be shot for introducing them to his already buggy game. Forget the controls, all right? The GAMEPLAY sucks. Even the carrots have sticks.

Humor: It's. Not. FUNNY.

Overall: ZEROED. You know those people who say that "Gameplay is everything?" Well I'm one of them. The gameplay here is crap. Even though the art and the style do have some merit, it is a HORRIBLE game.

After this gets blammed, I suggest re-releasing it with the ammo appearing on the ground, and all the platforms lowered by about the player's height. You might find it survives for a few seconds.

MahonenNiko responds:

ooookayyy :P. You surely took your time wroteing that didn't you. Wise words, but strike missed targed ones in a while. It sounded that the game was too hard for you, and you got angry whit the game play just bacause your computer is too slow to work it right. I didn't notice anything when I test played it during and after the process (about 50 times). Some wined about game play too saying that some of the platforms couldn't be reached, I am telling you now, you have to jump from the lower to higher, I designed the scenes carefully and I personally think that the gameplay is the best thing in the whole game. You have to dodge the attacs and survive when you jump around the scene hunting ammo, the places that ammo appears were also carefullu thought that it wouldn't be just walkeing on one level and hideing under one platform allthetime, that obiously was what you were looking for. I continue working on whit this to get it work right whit your lazy computer too. Maby this time I make a big sign that the dude moves more slowly backwards than forwards, just for them that are stupid enouh not noticeing it right away, don't worry I don't mean you whit this. Correct me if I'm wrong whit anything here, let's make an angry discussion, it always makes my day.

[Stench Of Blood]

"eYe CaN tHeNtHe ThEm!" :P

...too bad you can't "hit them."

Graphics: Nicely drawn characters with some attempt at flair. Unfortunately, the attempt at realism works against the author cuz they're not perfect, and the more relaistic you try to make them, the more every flaw shows. Next time, try to find a way of stylizing things. Seriously, you can stylize cartoons without making them any less serious.

Style: Attempts were made at evoking a dark, somber mood. Unfortunately, execution fell short enough for it to be unintentionally funny. Like that SNL sketch with the goth guy in the cape walking around in broad daylight at the park while people are playing frissbee in the background.

Sound: WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YA! SPEAK UP! OH! YOU SAY YOU CAN SENSE THEM? THAT'S GOOD TO KNOW! YEOW! THAT GUN'S REALLY LOUD, HUH? OKAY, I'M TURNING THE VOLUME BAck down now.

Violence: If you empty a clip into an insect, it might bleed. Might.

Interactivity: Ahh, there's nothing like fighting invincible enemies. Oh wait, they're not invincible! They just seem that way because they disappear before you can empty an entire clip into them. huh. Oh well, at least they always get to hurt you and there's no way to avoid their attacks. Remember, kiddies! The key to good gameplay is making a game impossible to succeed at!

Humor: The whispering whatever-hunter had me rolling in the asiles, but I have a feeling they were trying for drama.

Overall: Ugh. Painful. Look, here's what you do. You give us some indication that an enemy is coming. Maybe the ground starts to crack before a worm comes out. Maybe a wasp glides onto the screen and hovers for a moment before attacking. Next, let us take them out with one shot, since they're hard to hit in the first place and they keep coming out so fast. even if an enemy has multiple hit points, give us a little splash of blood or a sound or something to let us know we didn't miss. Let gamers feel like they have a fighting chance. I know it's supposed to be all dark and spooky, but this isn't the right way to play up the "hopelessness" aspect. If a gamer has no hope, he quits the damn game, fool.

[Peaches Mario makeover]

Great. Now add a game to it.

Full points for style, but everything else about it sucked. The background graphics were good, but this is not a makeover game. This isn't even a magnetic hair game. This is a "hey look, I can make bald Mario bleed" game.

SUGGESTIONS ON HOW TO TURN THIS HALF-FINISHED PIECE OF CRAP INTO A MAKEOVER GAME:
-A color pallete, so we can choose colors other than fullbright red.
-Line width tool, or thicker dealt lines, so it doesn't take all day to draw Mario's hat.
-Some actual articles of clothing. Nobody ever said it couldn't be a dress-up game plus makeup/doodling.
-Put the princess toadstool icon on top of the lines, not beneath them.

Good concept, nice graphics, (The 3 is for the graphics that I was able to draw with your crappy red line tool,) it just needs more functionality in order to actually be worth playing. I hope you expand the drawing capabilities just a little bit. Seriously, add a few primary colors and thicker line width, this game could make the front page. As it is, it looks like it's headed for Blamville. I hope you take it a step further. This idea has potential.

[Chief's Customs V.1]

Broken menu + lame music = *yawn*

Graphics: Nice vector warthog. Decent menu. Some interesting mods.

Style: Ehh, nothing spectacular. Music drags it down a notch. Hiding the menu doesn't actually hade the menu options, just the frame, so what's the point of hiding it? It's not like you get to look at your warthog all by itself, or anything.

Sound: I thought the music was lame. I'll admit it was thematically apropriate for a modding game, though, so I gave it a 5 instead of a 0. THANK GOD he put in a button to make it stop.

Violence: none.

Interactivity: Well if the menus made more sense, and if you could tell what clicking somewhere was actually gonna do before you clicked it, and if painting the car different colors made more sense instead of making it look like the whole car's gonna be red and then, all of a sudden, just the hood turns red when you confirm the color change, I wouldn't have any complaints about the controls. As it is, I guess my only complaint about the menu is that it is a broken piece of crap and desperately needs to be fixed. Other that that minor detail, the controls are great.

Humor: OMG the song is so FUNNY! He's trying to sound bad-ass by singing HIP-HOP! LOL!!! Hillarious!

Overall: This is the best broken mod game I've ever started to play and then realized it was broken.

the-disturbed responds:

HAHAHA! REading this just made me crack up!

Anyhow, thanks for pointing out the bugs to me. I'll fix em, and add more music into the game thats not rap (because flash was being a prick and wouldnt let me import any other fitting song).

Thanks,

~JC

[RaidenX]

Classic 2D action! Yay!

I was expecting to be disapointed, because most of the time on newgrounds 2D shooters end up being a ship on a boring star background while random enemies appear, and remakes of sprite games usually end up with borked control or leave out crucial elements. Not so with your game! :D You did in the loading screen what most flash authors barely do in an actual game, and I was delighted to discover a REAL 2D shoot 'em up here. YAY! Do Layer Section next! XD No, fuck that, DO GUNSTAR HEROES!

Graphics: A little lackluster, but they get the job done. Player ship looks nice. Backgrounds are kinda cheesey, but they load better I guess than if they'ed been sprite graphics. The visuals don't seem as refined as in the sprite game it's based off of, but they get the job done with vectors. Animated sequences look kinda cheesey. Explosions are the best I've ever seen using only gradient balls. Enemy shots are very nicely differentiated from other types of graphics, which was a problem I always had with the sprite games. Well, that and the flickery giant fireball explosions. You will never see a more awe-inspiring sight than the fully charged purple laser ricoheting between three targets while a small star shimmers at the nose of your ship.

Style: Full points. Everything design decision in this game tickles my fancy... Well, except for that tree on the title screen. If you're flying a plane that close to a tree, I'm sorry, you're already dead. But you've sucessfully captured everything that mad the 2D shooters of the 80's great. fleets of enemy ships, streams of enemy shots (thank God Flash slows down instead of skipping frames!) Shiny, happy anime music, clunky mechanical bosses and lots of meaty explosions. Again, props to the purple laser. There is nothing more stylish than the purple laser. :P

Sound: Perky 80's j-pop tunage, nice explosions. Were they ripped from the coin-op? Music cuts out halfway through the first level in space... is tyhat a bug? Incidental sound effects (player shots, enemy shots, explosions) are PERFECT, everything is nice and subtle except for an explosion. I wish more modern game designer could figure out that we don't want a loud BE-DOOW! BE-DOOW! playign throughout 90% of our game just because it happens to be the noise our phasers make.

Violence: Big go boom. Many, many big go boom. Happy.

Interactivity: 10 out of 10. Perfect, crisp, precise movement. Enemy shots travel slow enough that you actually feel like you have a fighting chance of weaving between them. This is something so many flash game authors scew up when making a top-down shooter, and I know you were imitating an old arcade game but still, good job pulling off the imitation. This is control that WORKS, plain and simple. Pure 2D gaming. Gotta love it.

Humor: None. It's a serious, if upbeat, 80's 2D shoot 'em up. Now go blow up some planes, dammit.

Overall: 10. This is not an objective rating. This is not a sum of its parts. This is Good gameplay + stuff I miss most in modern games = TEH PWNZED. Yes, it's a copy. No, there's no real innovation here. I'm not complaining. Seriously.

Do gunstar Heroes next!!! XD

Go0gley responds:

First of all, thanks for your nice and detailed review. Don't see a lot of these nowadays. :D

The backgrounds are kinda optimised because they'll slow down the game a lot - but I guess you're right about the animations. I should have spent more time on them, instead of just one week! Sorry for that tree on the title screen. I ran out of ideas of what to put there... =P

The background music will cut in 1 out of 15 chance during the space levels (due to intensive action - Flash disables some sounds to reduce demand on CPU). And maybe 1 in 30 chance on levels 3-5 but it only happened once during my alpha testing. All methods I used to stop this had failed, so it's something we have to put up with. :(

Once again, thanks for your lovely review! It's unbelievably hard to get these on Newgrounds and I appreciate every single one of them! ^ ^

[Super Mario Revived]

Great look-and-feel, mediocre gameplay.

Well, you can't run, you can't fight a chargin' chuck the way you expect to, and there's no powerups as far as I can tell. I would not have died nearly this much in Super Mario World, and the reason is the control is much less versitile. Still, it works, it's predictable, and at least it's good and tight.

Enemies you don't actually fight drift by in the background, providing great ambiance. There's plenty of room for improvement and I got bored partway through with 25 lives left, but it's a decent ammount of game for one flash file, and I hope the author tries soemthing more ambitious for his next project. :)

Sinterkaas responds:

Thanks for the review!

[World Domination]

OK Strategy game. Worth playing, I guess.

I was kinda lukewarm on this game. Propaganda is too unpredictable to be much use (unless of course you're the underdog.) It's realistic how the game pretty much ends with 95% of the world's population dead, but other than that it's not a very realistic war game. Spies are pretty much a waste of turns. There wasn't a whole lot of flavor. I would have liked to see maybe a little news feed along the bottom of the screen detailing public reaction, policies explaining my moves, etc.

As it is it's just a rock/paper/scissors game. Once you get down to one arch nemesis, it get pretty tedious. You just defend yourself and let all the weaker countries kill each other off, then it's pretty much a slugfest between you and whichever country's left, so as long as you have a stronger populous than him by the endgame, you're pretty much guarunteed to win. Just counter everything he sends at you and build faster than he can and hopefully you'll build subs and GIs faster than he can, since they're the only EFFECTIVE weapons in a 1 vs 1 war.

I wish you could choose which weapons you build instead of randomly getting them. A also wish things were a little more realistic, though I'm not sure what I mean by that. Instead of a turn-based system, maybe something with money or something. I guess the full version with tech trees probabaly improves the strategic options a bit, but I doubt this would help MUCH. Nice try.

[Hunga Hatch]

Ehh, better than StripDown, I guess.

Graphics: Cute dino stickers fall. CG'ed neanderthal.

Style: Look & Feel? No big deal.

Sound: Click click click. No music.

Violence: No real killin'. Suitible for children.

Interactivity: No gaps between spaces, which beats Stripdown's interfaces.

Humor: I guess they look kinda goofy. (If you been hittin' the roofie.)

Overall: Kept me busy clicking stuff. By level ten I'd had enough.

[Family Guy test1]

Glitches make this nice-looking quiz unplayable.

I messed up on round 1 a couple of times, and the music starts again and again each time you are dropped on the title screen. Too bad, because I like Family Guy and this has a nice, simple, clean style to it. Author needs to fix that overlapping music glitch, and maybe also add like a buzzer noise or a "WRONG!" screen just to let us know when we screwed up.

xXMEOWXx responds:

Sorry bout that i will get right on it