WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tentacle Wars]

How to turn a fun game into a frustrating one...

It's been said that the best video games combine a planning challenge with an execution challenge. If that's true, then it follows that the one surefire way to ruin a game is to cockblock the player from both planning and executing his plan. Tentacle Wars is that game. Let's go down the list:

- Start with a totally new gameplay concept so the player isn't familiar with the game's verbs or interface. (Or at least rip off something you saw on Kongregate.)

- Don't include a tutorial. After all, a walkthrough is pretty much the same thing, right?

- Use obscure level names that seem to hint at the level solution but don't really mean anything unless you already know the answer.

- Carefully balance the gameplay so that even a moment's hesitation will force the player to start over.

- Make as much time as possible pass between the player performing an action and seeing the result of that action.

- Don't even bother writing up your walkthrough, just record yourself beating your own game and then put it up on youtube. Everyone knows there's nothing more fun than watching someone else play the game you wanted to play.

- BitmapData display programming is the fastest way to improve performance in flash, so don't use it. Instead, use MovieClips! That way flash will randomly hang for a split second every so often on some systems, causing the player to mis-time your clicks.

-Restrict the player's gameplay options to a single correct answer in the later levels. Make sure this solution is as obtuse as possible. If you must throw the player a bone, for example by altering the level over time so that a secondary solution becomes feasible, be sure not to tell him that's what you're doing so he thinks it's a glitch.

- Give the second-to-last level some pointless busywork at the beginning so that every time the player dies, he has to go through the hassle of executing the same 4 or 5 obvious opening moves again and again.

- Make the final level insultingly easy. Hey, it worked for Halo 3!

-Tack on a story, literally, so the player knows what's going on right after he finishes completely beating the game. If you can't think of anything original, just quote some famous author.

If, despite all of this, your game has nice graphics, a novel gameplay mechanic, a satisfying difficulty curve, and a quick way to retry when you lose, your game might actually end up being good in spite of itself.

[Diesel Valkyrie]

Hard due to implementation constraints, not depth.

Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it. Diesel Valkyrie is hard. It's damn, damn hard. Too hard for my liking. I'm just going to get that out of the way up front.

So if you're one of those badass hardcore gamers who thinks modern games have gotten too easy, you'll love this one. Stop reading right now and play it.

If you'd like to know more about the specific ways in which it's too hard, and why being hard in that way is a problem, read on.

Here's the thing. I'm not convinced being able to shoot 8 directions was due to limited art assets. There's no reason they couldn't have a character that only faces 8 directions, but shots which come out in all 360 degrees. You know, like Diablo, or Zombie Shooter. It might look a little wonky as each shot left the barrel, but you cover that up with a muzzleflash and nobody minds because you've combined the attractive graphics of a 2.5D sprite game with the familiar and precise keyboard & mouse gunplay we've all come to know and love.

More to the point, though, I'm not sure the limited aiming is the reason it's too hard. I watched carefully, and even though I could never aim precisely where I wanted to, very few of my shots ever actually *missed.* I would still hit a zombie most of the time. Just not the zombie I was aiming for. So in terms of crowd control, I was doing as much damage to the horde as I would if I had precise aiming. Furthermore, as long as you're careful and pick up every powerup, the game really isn't all that difficult.

So why are so many people complaining about the difficulty? Because the game *feels* harder than it actually is. It's frustrating. It's difficult to control. It engages lobes of your brain that last saw action trying to dodge medusa heads while climbing stairs in Castlevania. It feels like a headache. It is not a fun feeling.

Also, because you can't aim at a specific monster, there's no potential for target prioritization. This was a big part of the Serious Sam games, specific enemies that needed to be taken out first, or at the right moment, for various reasons, all of them emerging from the core gameplay. If a particular fight is hard, it's hard because of the enemy balance and your maneuvering and weapons choice. For me, this emergent complexity is the whole point of swarm games.

This element is completely absent in Diesel Valkyrie, at least what I saw of it. In the levels I played, weapons are temporary powerups dropped from the heavens in random spots on the map, the enemies are all clones of the exact same slow-moving, high-armored melee attack zombie, and dodging and shooting just isn't fun to do.

Circle-strafing, my go-to arena shooter tactic, doesn't really work in these levels, which means you'll need to face the direction you're traveling and punch through the horde to reach a powerup on the other side of the horde. This probably sounded good on paper, it makes sense with the 8-direction aiming, and it's perfectly serviceable. It's just not fun to do.

Also, does each zombie really need this much health? Why not make most enemies die from one bullet, with a few big zombies sprinkled in there that take more? This would make the pea-shooter feel more deadly, and the big guns feel like godly WMDs, which would ultimately make the gunplay feel visceral and more exciting. As it is, the weapons feel weak and the powered-up weapons feel barely adequate. Maybe this would work in a survival horror game, but this game presents itself as a straightforward action game.

It's sad because everything else about this game screams pure class. I feel like the opportunity was missed to turn these characters, settings, and art assets into a kick-ass game that's fun to play. I would encourage the developer to explore other genres for these characters. In fact, I would personally love to take a stab at it if they feel like sharing the assets with me.

likwidgames' first foray into action games is gorgeous and polished, but ultimately falls flat due to crude player inputs and extremely limited depth.

[Digital Upgrade]

Drop/Match game with a brilliant difficulty curve.

I was never that big on puzzle games. And I've been largely left out of the new Casual Games movement. So understand that if this game is just a knock-off of some Popcap game or something, I'll be the last to know.

I bring this up because Digital Upgrade has such a simple, intuitive, and refined core mechanic, I can't imagine it being novel. If it was novel before this game was released on newgrounds, by the end of the day it will have knock-offs circling the drains of every casual games portal on the interwebs.

You play as a... guy... downloading stuff... actually, to be honest, I couldn't follow the narrative. You turn viruses into good files, and good files into hardware. How does that even work? Maybe you're a hacker, and the resources you're juggling belong to other users? Whatever. It's not important.

The graphics are crisp and consistent and serve the theme, if not the plot, very nicely. Color and shape are both used to help you tell the shapes apart, which is important in a game like this. There's a skippable tutorial which explains the basic controls and combo mechanics, but honestly, you can figure it out pretty quickly on your own.

Combos generally try to condense the new object down as low as possible, and if there's a toss-up on the bottom row, it will move the resulting object as far left as possible. But once or twice I was surprised by where the new token ended up... to the point where I'm not sure if it's deterministic, or if the game puts the new icon in the place it thinks you can make the best use of it.

Either way, the game gives you plenty of time to think before each move. Which makes it odd that I played it so rapidly. It's a testament to how intuitive and approachable the game is. Also, the game's music becomes more decisive the higher your stack grows, which can lend an emotional urgency that spurs you on more effectively than any arbitrary time limit.

All things considered, this is easily the best puzzle game I have ever played. It's incredibly easy to just drop in and start playing and make a bunch of combos, and it's almost impossible to keep that going when you craft your way down to the big toys. Is that icon that looks like the Earth the endgame? Do you take over the world if you can make just one of them? I believe it.

Easy to learn, difficult to master does not cover it. This game starts off so simple anyone could do it, and it ends up nearly impossible, all thanks to increased complexity. You decide when you make a move and you decide when you advance. It really is your fault when you die... which is why it bugs me that I can almost never make it further than the diskettes!

I made it as far as USBs once, though, and I can tell my style of play could still be honed further. Unlike the vast majority of hard games, I feel like with practice and experience I will get there someday. There are tactics I haven't tried and emergent mechanics I haven't figured out yet. You can tell it's lurking there, just under the surface, and the process of discovering that complexity is as intuitive and automatic as picking up the basic gameplay.

Because of all this, I feel confident giving this game a perfect 10 without having beaten it. The narrative is light, but if they'd gone all the way with it it would have been hackneyed and overwrought. The game is hard, but it's hard for all the right reasons.

This is not a game I would have made myself, but unlike most games on Newgrounds, if I'd had creative control over the project, I wouldn't have done a thing differently.

(If it turns out some other game did combos this way first, and this is just a rehash, bump that 10 down to a 6. It's hard to believe a puzzle game this could could be totally new at this day and age, but since I'm not a puzzle fan and don't have time to research it by playing every puzzle game ever for the fist time, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt until someone with more genre experience can step in and mention it in their review.)

[Spacer]

Games Factory can do better than this, guys.

I used to use Games Factory, back in the day. This was long before I got Flash, and indeed, long before Flash could be used to make decent browser games.

Among other projects, I created a game called Heart Attack, which won a contest on their website. I was deeply involved with the community for a while, and I saw a lot of games come and go, good and bad.

The reason I'm telling you all this is to put this submission and my review of it into context. It's obvious from the author notes that ClickTeam put this game on Newgrounds to advertise their games creation software, so I feel it's only fair to review the game according to how well it make the pitch.

Quite frankly, I remember Games Factory as having the potential to be better than this. They had scrolling backgrounds, for example, even back as far as the ol' Click & Create engine, if you knew how to kludge it. There were additive blending effects. There were rotations. There were not alpha blending until a later version of the tool was released, I think that was MMF, but that's beside the point.

The point is that this looks like the same old top-down shooter that was bundled with the my original Games Factory disk back in 1992. You got 3D spaceships pre-rendered into tiny sprites. No alpha channels, so individual pixels don't blend into the background. No scrolling. No glow effects. Echoey explosion sound effects and cheesy techno loops that sound like the filesize limitations of wav were the deciding factor in how long they could be... just a lot of really old ideas and old implementations, even though the content itself, from what I can tell, appears to be fresh.

Adding insult to injury are the stock Flash buttons with antialiasing intact. I have no idea if this represents the capabilities of the new Games Factory 2, or if it's just some sort of interface layer encapsulating the GF2 plugin, or if the entire thing runs on some sort of emulator in Flash. All I know is, Flash can do better than this. Love2D can do better than this. Perhaps Games Factory 2 can do better than this. But if it can, they didn't show off all its strong suits with this demo.

(If it can't, then they should be showcasing this technology with one of those extremely retro games that use pixel art!)

Maybe I'll take a look at the source later, since they offered. :P But as of this build, I can't say I'm too impressed. Either with this game or with the product that made it possible.

And that really hurts to say, because I had a lot of fun playing around with good ol' Games Factory back in my youth. ;_;

FlyinV responds:

Heart Attack was a great game.

[Age of Kingdom]

Why do they keep remaking this game?

I keep seeing this game, released over and over again on Newgrounds. Someone makes a new version of it every 6 months or so. It has better graphics each time, but the gameplay never gets any better.

It presents itself as a town-building, army-raising game. But because important mechanics of the economy are deliberately hidden from the player, it's impossible to know ahead of time what units you need to build next . They hide cause-and-effect from the player, as if a game where the player knows what to do next is some kind of tragic mistake.

I figured out a couple of the underlying gameplay mechanics through trial and error, and actually won a battle. The game won't let you compete in a battle if you have fewer units than them, even if your units are all Wizards and they have nothing but weak melee units. If you do manage to actually get in a battle, just put all your guys in a row. It does not matter if the enemy walks past you. All that matters is how many attacks hit. This makes the arbitrary unit number requirement even more annoying, since you are mysteriously not allowed to compete in battles you could easily win by lining all your wizards up.

It's a resource management game that expects you to read the developer's mind. Instead of a game that's easy to learn, difficult to master, this is a game which is impossible to learn, and would be trivial to master, if all of the gameplay rules were exposed to the player.

I suppose if you play it 100 times, you could understand what the most efficient build order is, and then you could start to have fun. However, there is no reason to play a not-fun game 99 times when Newgrounds is *full* of games that are fun right from the start.

[Saturday Night Bloodfest]

It's all fun and games until someone loses an ear!

This simple Smash TV clone managed to implement weapon upgrades in a way I found incredibly enjoyable. Mainly because no build order is particularly useless. I found shotguns very entertaining, but SMGs really kept me alive while saving up points for that gatling laser.

While the weapon stats are all over the map, each gun really does improve upon the previous gun in that branch of the tree, and all the capstone weapons are ridiculously overpowered. Perhaps more importantly, they all feel deadly, even your starting pistol in the first room.

My favorite part of this one has got to be the audio. The cheesy carnival muzzak becomes increasingly atonal after a few bats to the head. It becomes noticeable around 60% health, culminating in total deafness when you're down to 10%. It cracked me up when I first noticed it, and it never got old.

While lacking the visual quality, scrolling, and money-grabbing of Daytraders of the Dead, the guns are so good, I almost feel like the long-term payoff is higher in some ways. Good stuff!

[Gunfire Echoes]

Just let me kill things, dammit.

Gunfire Echoes is a beautiful, very visually polished game whose main problem is, it constantly tries to punish you for not playing it a certain way. You play a power-armored space marine whose hatred of the enigmatic "Enemy" is matched only by his hatred of monitors, as he struggles to defend a series of increasingly pathetic crumbling outposts from wave after wave of incredibly well-equipped enemies. He starts with a surprisingly effective pistol and a shotgun that works exactly the same as the pistol, but he'll soon get a machine gun that works exactly the same as the pistol but runs out of ammo faster, a sniper rifle that works exactly the same as the pistol except you can't fire it fast enough, and presumably many more, even though I got sick of playing after the third level and so can't testify as to the pistolyness of the weapons you unlock later.

You see, like many Flash games with hastily tacked-on RPG elements, Gunfire Echoes pretends to offer the player a bewildering variety of gameplay styles, an illusion that is shattered instantly when you realize that practically all of the available weapons, options, and upgrades offered to you just don't work. From the turrets that don't work on flying enemies, to the explosive barrels that explode so slowly you can't possibly use them tactically, to the reload mini-game that finishes the animation so slowly you'll miss guys even when you do it perfectly, the game is a veritable smorgasbord of wrong choices. The smart bomb doesn't kill all enemies on-screen but instead only slightly wounds them. Even straight-up damage upgrades that don't mean anything since you'll be making all of your kills with headshots anyway, at least in the early levels.

Later on enemies were coming and going so rapidly that I couldn't even follow what was going on, but the game definitely gets worse, not better, as the difficulty curve ramps up. I'm not even sure if I was expected to keep up some kinda perfect kill-chain of headshots in those situations, or if the game was just pretending to kick my ass with overwhelming numbers, only to lower the difficulty at the last second so I could win.

I have to give andvari3d credit for a spirited attempt at cinematic storytelling within the context of gameplay, but I felt like I was being screwed every time story was happening. The game likes to take away the player's control for no good reason. For example, the camera will pan left and right while you're lining up a shot. Even when you're in control of this mechanic it's largely useless because there's almost always an enemy just crossing the line while you're switching, so you have to switch back. You can't reload while the support character is talking, with the game ordering you to "HOLD YOUR FIRE" even though there's no friendly targets on the screen. In general, the game just likes to cockblock you from doing stuff which you know you *should* be doing, but can't. Even the slow-motion mechanic that helpfully targets an enemy just before they reach the shield is a pain in the ass, since the reload animation (again, even when the mini-game is executed flawlessly) prevents you from firing in time, and the amount of damage it would prevent is usually trivial compared to how much time you waste trying to get the mouse cursor over there.

As I write this, I have no idea what the best upgrades to take first are. As far as I can tell, they all suck. You pretty much know everything you need to know about this game when the first boss swoops in and wipes out all your defenses with one blow, because that's what playing the game feels like. It's frustrating, annoying, pretentious, and unnecessary. It's like the game is playing you instead of the other way around.

The presentation is incredible and the graphics are top-notch, but the gameplay is enough to make you slam your fist down on your monitor, possibly cracking the screen or something. They took a simple, flawless core mechanic, (point & click,) and then caked on so much window-dressing as to render the game practically unplayable.

[AS3 Tut: Data Structures]

An excellent primer for non-programmer developers.

Newgrounds needed something like this years ago! AS3 is much more focused on traditional programming than AS2. Now Mind-Blight presents some very common design patterns every programmer should have in his toolbox. Bonus points for using animation to illustrate some very abstract functionality that usually languishes behind the scenes.

If your game lags, I'm not 100% sure these objects and methods will solve the problem, but they're definitely faster than a typical Flash Array. I'd love to see some examples of use cases (simulating a deck of cards comes to mind for FILO, for example,) or examples of step-through, sort, and search methods which could make these objects as versatile as standard arrays.

Oh well, maybe in part 2! For now, this should be required reading for anyone who uses AS3! Keep up the good work, Mind-Blight!

Mind-Blight responds:

Thanks a bunch!

I'm thinking of creating a second which focuses on OOP philosophy and AS3 in general. I've been browsing the forums, and a lot of people seem to be scared of AS3 because of its more rigorous adherence to OOP styles.

[PixEvo - The Fountain]

Thoroughly explores the core mechanic...

... but is that necessarily enough?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good retro game, and like Braid, this game explores every possible permutation on the core theme exactly once, with no real duplication of puzzles. This game takes the run n' jump side-scroller to its logical conclusion, forcing you to make exactly one of each kind of jump possible in your quest to collect 'em all.

So if it's so definitive, why doesn't it get a 10? Two caveats:

One, video games have been around for long enough, that I kind of feel like jumping and collecting have been explored already. Deeply and definitively. Ad nauseum. To the point where in some games, this type of gameplay is sometimes considered a lame way of padding out the gameplay. (Yhatzee's review of Psychonauts springs to mind.) So does it really need to be explored in its purest form?

Two, and for me, this was a bigger deal, some of the jumps require you to make jumps that are *exactly* the mathematical apex of what is mechanically possible in the game engine. This makes that last pixel an exercise in frustration, and one that you'll repeat basically forever until you get it right.

Yes, it harkens back to when games were hard. Yes, it has iconic style and is executed with panache. Yes, the music is catchy as hell. Yes, it is the definitive treatment of as classic theme.

No, it's not fun.

It's not fun for the same reason that any given ultra-low-budget first-generation NES title you care to think of may not have been fun. Something licensed from a movie franchise. With dodgy hit-detection and insanely unforgiving mechanics. Think Ghostbusters. Or that first Ninja Turtles game, not based on the Arcade.

Okay I admit at the time the first TMNT had its charm. :P

But the point is if you play one of these games today, they don't measure up. Not in terms of graphics or spectacle, but specifically in the way that games like 8-bit Mario or Megaman have stood the test of time. It lacks approachability (despite the thoroughly modern integrated tutorial and pacing,) and that all-important fun factor.

Maybe your keyboard is a millisecond more responsive than mine. Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe you'll love this game. Maybe you'll snag each pixel in that magic zone between difficulty and frustration.

Maybe this game deserves more credit than I have the patience to give it.

But for me, I got tired of trying missing jumps at 15/16 long before I collected it. And around 26/32, I started to realize that not only were there a LOT of borderline impossible jumps I needed to make, but I had to jump through more hoops (I.E. off of more ledges) in order to set myself up to try the jump again.

Heh. I just realized. In reviewing the game, I've somehow turned a critical eye towards my own gameplay experience.

That's what art is supposed to do, right? Make us question our preconceptions?

All right, screw it. :) As a fun video game, it's 6/10.

As art, however, it is made of win.

Evil-Dog responds:

Well thanks for the unconditional 10 and I see where you're coming from, I may haev overused the pixel-perfect jumps but with such a short game, I felt that the chalenge had to lie right there. Yes I could have enemies, many more puzzles, more intricate platforming devices and a lot of stuff but as a small project I wanted to do in the few days I didn't have the internet, that's the scope I came up with and decided to stick with it. Many people find fun what you describe as painfully frustrating so that is pretty subjective. I know this game will not appeal to the vast majority, although it's length might. But all around I pretty much agree with everything you said other than the conclusion which is that certain types of gameplay have been used beyond their fun value, something as simple and trite as jumping can become fun when a twist is added to it in my opinion. Thanks for taking the time to write a lengthy review. I appreciate it.

[Claytus Hood TowerDefense]

Another "learn by tedious failure" TD.

Pick a number between 1 and 4.

Got your number? Good. Write it down. Now pick another one. In fact, keep picking numbers between 1 and 4 until you have a long list of numbers. I'm not going to tell you in advance how many numbers you need to pick, but just pick about 20 or so for right now.

If your first number was a 1, you lose. Start over. Read this review again, starting at the top.

Good job if you made it this far into the review. I'm afraid you're going to have to keep waiting for me to get around to telling you whether you got it wrong or not. I'm just gonna sit here and waste your time. There's a button you can supposedly click to tell me cut the crap and finish this review faster, but clicking it doesn't seem to do anything.

If your second number was a 2, you lose.

Notice how you have no idea, when you first pick your list of numbers, what's going to cause one number to be right or wrong. Notice how you have to play the entire game just to discover whether or not your previous choices have locked you into a fail state or not. Notice how long and tedious this review has become. It's not very fun, is it?

If your third number was anything but a 3, you lose.

If I were going to try and convince people that this review is worth reading, I might claim that it has "suspense" and "keeps you guessing" what the correct sequence of numbers is "right up until the very end!" I might claim that it's a review you will re-read time and time again.

If your fourth number was not a 1, you lose.

In fact, one of the first two numbers should probably be a 1, too.

Sorry I didn't mention that sooner.

Of course, most people would probably not call this review fun. If you did find this review fun, then you will probably enjoy Claytus Hood TowerDefense, as it uses the same pacing, risk schedules, and feedback mechanisms, as this review. It also respects your time and intelligence just as much.

The fifth number should probably not be a 1. But you won't really know more until I review Claytus Hood TowerDefense 2. Until then, enjoy blindly picking numbers and wondering if you're going to lose or not.

Rafarel responds:

I love your review ! Just one thing : Claytus is based on strategy, not on random numbers :) I'm coding a mode with a lot of money for people who just like to chain kill enemies with a lot of turrets :) Thanks for your time