Bezman's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[3D Animation Test]

Good models but not entertaining.

Well, these models look fine. They'd look great in a 3D animation of this quality.

I assume the ribbons leading into the miniguns is meant to be a roll of bullets? Modelling some bulletes on that would make a big difference.

I also noticed to ugly white spots appearing in the front of the guns on the rotating turret, where there shouldn't have really been any. Only a small issue though.

Essentially, this all looks good but I can't give a high score because it's not entertaining to me.

-Review request Club-

[Tom Fulp: DAI493+D 069]

Not entertaining nor interested.

Again, the intro's OK (though maybe move away from the circle gradients and make a more interesting bitmap background) and in the actual frame, the grassy photo looks good.

However, this really holds fewer surprises and has fewer changes made than any Adolf Hitler Flash did.

Maybe the Pokemon could have been disguising themselves to avoid being caught? It might have been funny seeing Bellsprout hiding and pretending to be a flower - with a few additional edits.

As is, it's really too similar to what's gone before and didn't entertain me at all.

[Tom Fulp: DAI493+D 068]

Worse than the original.

The intro is reasonably well done, though not as good as in the original.

I mean the fonts are all pretty and the use of what look like featured item and Bauhaus93 work well.

The pic of Tom works well too, though he seems ever so slightly squashed.

The bg works well given the physique of Machamp.

However, I can't help but feel pretty underwhelmed by it all. There's no humorous outfits. No funny photoshop edits. The music didn't feel related to the subject.

And in this kinda format, when you're limiting yourself so much, you've got to make the best of each element.

[We <3 AfroStud]

Heh. Decent drawing.

I liked the shading on his face - good colours - but some shading on the torso and maybe a collar on that outfit would have worked well.

Is that meant to be a trophy in his hands?

Regardless, it's a fun little homage, but unfortunately really offers no surprises of its own. Some crazier outfits or something may have made it funnier.

Not that the ATWI80D series was about big surprises...

[LOVEBLIMP]

Good vibrations.

That was pretty cool.

Simple plot, but nice vibes. Also, the graphics for the smiling blimps and the end song pretty much make it.

The graphics near the start leave something to be desired. The words could have been better decorated - maybe having 3d-style block letters or something for 'love' etc and more angular letters for 'war' etc.

The bomb could have used some shading and the frame for when the green blimp drops his cigar could have been better.

Also, the blurry rainbow doesn't fit in brilliantly with the crisp vectors in my opinion.

Your smiling faces rock though, the hearts-as-smoketrails are awesome and the song is brilliant.

Makes me smile, despite slight graphical issues.

-Review Request Club-

WritersBlock responds:

Yeah, it's not the best, but the style is simple and attractive, despite the flaws.

Maybe next year I could put more time and effort into a Loveblimp-2. LOL
<3
Thanks for the review.

[Street Fighter Series pt2]

Way better, but needs more narrative and tweaking

I'm not too keen on this. It's a lot more interesting than the original, but the style of on-screen action isn't to my tastes.

First, it looks a lot sharper - crisper and better, like this time you didn't lose the .fla. Heh.

The buttons need to be improved. Draw a rectangle on your 'hit' frames so we can click in the spaces between the letters, rather than needing to click the strokes exactly.

There were some white bits you forgot to remove in photoshop or whatever, that show up in the speech boxes. Also, the parts of text over the whitish portion of the rectangle are hard to read.

I think you should avoid stretching bitmaps - during the fight, their proportions change and it looks tacky.

I liked how there was more of a narrative during this fight and you tried to inject some excitement with the transformations. With the sfx and all the clouds of dust etc. it looks a lot better.

The negative image of Sean with the aliased brush stroke behind him didn't really fit the pixellated look of everything else though.

It was actually vaguely fun to watch, but I suggest you try and work out some narrative to tie this series together. I mean, straight-up fight scenes can get old pretty quickly, specially considering their ubiquity.

-Review Request Club-

mortis5000 responds:

Thanks I really enjoyed this review...
I will take everything you said into consideration

[Street Fighter Series pt1]

Should have been more than just a fight,

The intro text was kinda cool. I take it that's not done in flash, but rather just exported to an .avi or whatever, then imported into Flash? Really, apart from the intro text, there's nothing that couldn't be easily done within Flash itself. And then the filesize would probably be a lot smaller and we wouldn't have all these visual artifacts.

The episode itself just seemed to consist of a fight. No sfx, so it was actually less entertaining than just watching someone play the game, let alone playing it ourselves. I was expecting a bit of narrative, a bit of character interaction beyond the fisticuffs.

I actually kinda liked the fact that you introduce the characters and the layout of the text and stuff looked cool in the intro.

Overall though, it never really entertained me.

-Review Request Club -

mortis5000 responds:

Thanks for your review

[AnalogyOfFrozenSheep Ep 7]

Needed more stuff

Disappointed to read below you didn't scan the paper yourself. I mean, that was one of the highlights of the flash!

I felt the start was good, with some fbf morphing and some cool synching to the music.

I like the blobs and explosions later on and the noise and brush strokes you add during the radiohead tune work really nicely. However, I felt there was a slight over-reliance on tweening at times and showing the same mcs multiple times (like the pig or exploding buildings) kinda brought it down for me.

I felt that for a movie of this style, there perhaps wasn't enough going on - faster action, or more fbf shenanigans or other visual candy would have brought it up a notch.

As is, I found myself getting a bit tired of it after a while - with no narrative, it's down to the visuals to prop it up so you need to work a bit harder - inject more humour, more of your cool animated animals or a bit of colour, like you had with the trumpets.

- Review Request Club -

FrozenSheep responds:

I would have scanned the burnt paper background but my scanner is kind of...
..not scanning right now.
Its broken.

As for the repitition, I found it neccisary to keep in spirit of the analogy series...
..and also having a storyline and/or narrative would go against it.

Though, I could have added more humor to this project but I guess I forgot to deliver in that area.

Also, the lack of color was used as contrast to make the falling trupets mroe significant and for better blending with the paper background.

Anyway, thanks for the review.
Bye bye now.

[Pokemon Bahamut Version]

The best Pokemon-related Flash I've ever seen.

I think I realised something - the colours of the old button bothered me maybe more than the font. Cyan just isn't that appealing a colour in my eyes when set against the other colours you have. (It'd be find with the other 5 primary colours but certainly not with grey and not set against white.)

Anyways, this was hilarious!

I like your Tom Fulp graphic near the start, though I wonder who the other dude is.

The changing characters were fun to see, though I doubt anyone will here all the voices. It'd maybe have been cool to have the voices in an 'extra feature' at the end, with a sorta mini-soundboard so we could hear 'em all.

"It's Bahamut you idiot' could have been shouted more and sounded a bit too similar to Oak's voice for my liking.

The music throughout was perfect.

Selecting the Pokemon was a great bit.

I liked the softer colours you used for the books or tables. I think you should try and move away from the saturated colours you usually have, like the red green and cyan we see after the NDS 'reveal'. It'd be an easy way to step up your gfx a notch.

I liked the way you got the Pokemon and the crash screen was cool.

It was great seeing the characters in this world and I liked your inside-jokes and most of Graham's lines were gold.

My only real criticisms are probably the sometimes ill-fitting primary colours and the fact that I'd have liked to see more jokes and maybe just a longer length.

Sad it had to end.

-Review Request Club-

kinggila responds:

So something like Cyan text on Blue background be OK? I can see that as being a good mix.

Tom Fulp was fighting against Wade Fulp. It doesn't look obvious since you're looking at his back, but who else would Tom be facing on the intro?

The changing characters, if I had something that could set the frame to where it left off, I would do that then. Sadly, there was no way to do that. A soundboard for those characters wouldn't have been too bad, actually.

Graham would have made all the Pokemon do teh goatse if the main series was never forced to stop.

A longer flash? Damn, this is 7 minutes long. My flashes aren't usually that long and after discovering the frame limit, I've been quite intimidated to make really long flashes. I did hear about a loadMovie actionscript, however, but if that LOADS a movie elsewhere, then I assume this requires some loading time for the loaded movie.

Thanks for another great review Bezman! :)

[Edgar N' Locke 06]

Glad you sorted the replay button

Heh. I was preparing to again withhold constructive criticism on anything bar the replay button. Glad to see you changed it. The new colours, heavily pixellated font and retro-style soft gradient count for a lot. Now you just need to make a 'rollover' state. Maybe darken up the gradient for that?

The use of verdana (I assume) ofr the 'Edgar n Lock' title in the intro was a bit naff. I think you use Verdana too much. Use a heavier font for the random messages and headers maybe?

I liked the heavy metal font.

Anyways, the actual story was fun to watch. I chuckled at his voice when saying, 'those aren't metal bands!'.

Also, the closing comment by the girl was well placed.

I wasn't too keen on how the explanation for the new feature was nearly as long as the actual episode. It was fun listening to the tune whilst writing the review though.

I like how you give the date and album, but maybe make it more obvious and have something like
Band: Megadeth
Song: Hangar18
Album: RustinPeace
D.o.B.: 1990
Somone less astute than myself might not realise which was the song name and which the album.

Anyways, it's cool to hear your music commentary in this format and apart from the slightly long bit about the new feature, all my comments are just from the perspective of a graphic design nerd.

Keep it up.
7.5(though my scores are only ever a rough estimate - humans aren't robots after all...)

-Review Request Club-

kinggila responds:

I mainly changed the replay button for this flash so it goes with the FFVI theme. :) However, for normal flashes, they'll still have the normal button, which will disappoint you a lot. :( However, only 10 flashes away from 100 now. :D

The font on the "Edgar & Locke" part should be whatever's on the Adolf Hitler flashes, so I shall fix that on the next episode.

Yep, the Iron Maiden font is perfect for these flashes. I should keep that font for all the future episodes (besides ones that use band logos).

Yeah, I did think about having artist, song, album, year down on these, but I was running short on time for this to be submitted before Pokemon Bahamut Version, but next episode, I will certainly do that. :)

Thanks for another great review Bezman. :)