WarpZone's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Unusual Side Scroller]

WTF mate

Graphics: All we've eaten, mate, for the last four bleeding weeks is lupin soup, roast lupin, steamed lupin, braised lupin in lupin sauce, lupin in the basket with sauteed lupins, lupin meringue pie, lupin sorbet!

Style: ...and the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging choloera epidemic is mearly a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the last outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and descimated Europe, and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting 16-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under 19 who doesn't like Franco...

Sound: Well, er, yes, Mr Anchovy, but you see your report here says that you are an extremely dull person. You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in Chartered Accountancy they are a positive boon.

Violence: Dear Sir, how splendid it is to see the flower of British manhood wiping itself out with such pluck and tenacity. Britain need have no fear with leaders of this calibre. If only a few of the so-called working class would destroy themselves so sportingly. Yours etc., Brigadier Mainwaring Smith Smith Smith etc. Deceased etc. PS etc. Come on other ranks, show your stuff.

Interactivity: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these...

Humor: This morning, shortly after eleven o'clock, comedy struck this little house in Dibley Road. Sudden... violent... comedy.

Overall: Tonight 'Spectrum' looks at one of the major problems in the world today - that old vexed question of what is going on. Is there still time to confront it, let alone solve it, or is it too late? What are the figures, what are the facts, what do people mean when they talk about things?

[Throw It! (KB Game)]

Limited concept, but well-executed.

Graphics: This is the best use of simple Flash shapes and gradients I've seen in a long time. I wish there had been characters or something more interesting than just a ball. Still, it's a nice ball, so far as balls go.

Style: The mountains and grass are about as stylish as mountains and grass can be. It's just too bad mountains and grass aren't stylish at all to begin with.

Sound: NEEDS MUSIC! Or at least a little "boing" when the ball hits the ground and some sort of boost noise when it hits a powerup. Go to Flashkit dot com.

Violence: none

Interactivity: You throw the ball and hope it goes far. Everybody loved Nanaca Crash but this isn't quite the same thing. First of all, that game had a more precise way of choosing your angle and velocity. Secondly, although there wasn't MUCH chance of you using it strategically unless you were slwoing down and right by a powerup, there was a boost down button which would thrust you towards the ground, and a boost up button that could be pressed three times, plus occasional "quick, hit the button NOW!" moments. All of these things added to the gameplay and made it more of a game and less of a toy. This thing, as far as I can tell, you get one throw and then, GG, wait and see what score you got.

Humor: none. Which is ANOTHER thing that was great about Nanaca Crash, it was funy as hell watching that poor guy get the shit kicked out of him by every shojo contrivance at your disposal.

Overall: This game was pretty well done. I only wish the author had been a little bit more creative and ambitious in designing the gameplay and characters. I definitely look forward to future games by this author.

FLiXD responds:

It was pure code. No graphic symbols, images, sound, movie clips or buttons in the Library. I'll probably be releasing another version WITH sound etc at some point soon, but I put this out as a tester.
Thanks for the in-depth review, it'll be very helpful for future upgrades.

[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])

[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

[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.

[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

[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.