Bezman's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Swoopa]

married with the choice

++ Intuitive game objective.

++ Power-ups provide some nominal strategy and variation.

--- The game all seems too similar throughout and lacking in variations for my liking.

--- I don't like the style of movement, accelerating as distance increases. Forces me to play silly games with over-compensation.

--- Feels

--- Not enough feeling of urgency. Beeping countdown or maybe even spoken may help.

==
Completed game. Died once on first level (thought I should collect the red thing - thought it a starfish) and 2x on last level. Played bonus game twice, getting 13k. Bored.

The power-ups do provide the nominal strategy of deciding whether to pick up the new one or not. But beyond that, very little changes. That small consideration, married with the choice of when to fire the bombs and how to dodge homing mines just doesn't really give the game enough variation. There's so much more you could have done, with different movement patterns for starters.

[Sailin']

3rd attempt.

+++ Intuitive.

++ Pleasant music

+++ I like the inertia.

----- randomly-positioned obstacles make for uninteresting layouts.

- I don't like the colour for the water. Dull and bland. Maybe add some highlights... Nor the rock graphics.

?? Progress meter (to show how far we got)

==
Completed on 3rd attempt. Got bored.

[Slingette]

a tiny bit

+++ Interesting movements/controls.

- I felt maybe the hit-box should be a tad bigger for the slime and the amount we can move for it to still register as a drop a bit more.

-- The static face was kinda off-putting and creepy.

--- When I got to the harder levels and started having to use trial and improvement for some slingshots, using the bg as reference, it got tiresome. Not sure how you could solve that. Maybe add optional guidelines?

--- For much of the game, it all seems like an extended tutorial.

+++ Various levers/spiky blocks provide variation.

+++ I did like the 'up and down' level, despite slinging a few times when I meant to drop.

==
Reminds me of an Edmund McMillen game, with the focus on the movement and physics, but it's a lot simpler to pick up and easier to go through.

'Levers' was probably the hardest level for me.

Got gold times on all levels bar boss, most on first attempt.

I actually started playing Slingo, but couldn't be bothered playing through those same levels again.

I enjoyed the mechanics, but the controls seemed a tiny bit too pernickety and the levels a tiny bit too repetitive for my liking.

[Cosmo Pilot]

any real resonance

++ Great typography for 'game over'.

+++ Clean and cute splash screen.

---- unoriginal gameplay.

--- overly repetitive.

--- RNG plays too great a role. Getting the fuel when it's right on the edge is a serious risk and getting killed there can feel unfair.

-- Intro lasted so long on a single frame that I started to wonder if the game was broken or a joke.

==
The mechanics work fairly well, but nothing I did had any real resonance. Maybe audio and sfx would have helped.

So would some more obstacles/enemies and bgs.

Really, the Mario pastiche with the FLUDD thing was a better copy, I felt.

[Start Hack Interactive]

risk all my work

++++ Informative.

+++ Following the commands in the 'virtual environment' made me feel more confident that if I dl the program, I could maybe do the hack.

- Not getting us to type the name seems needlessly cheap, when everything else is really flawless.

!!!--- When you convert 'start' into an input box, you keep the quotes as part of the input string. But when you show it on the start menu, you fail to strip the quotes.

==
Great tutorial! This is pretty much how it should be done!

I'm not gonna try it though. I'd rather not risk all my work and stuff and spend 20-30mins dling and following instructions, just for the sake of a (n addmittedly groovy) mod.

jpoke89 responds:

I will take your requests into consideration, I understand where your coming from. Check back later to see if there are updates. :-D Thanks for the review! Oh, and thats the point of the tutorial, to try it before you actually compromise your system, to see if your comfortable doing it or not.

[Tim the Zombie]

interested to see

++ Cute character traits.

++ Great tree in bg.

-- I find the simple limbs and lack of shading a bit bland.

? I think it'd maybe work better with more direct influence - maybe we drag and drop a brain or cape nearby/onto him or something, to which he reacts? Just now, it does seem a bit too disjointed and like the interactivity is just a lame attempt to bring this all together.

==
Made me smile slightly. Vaguely interested to see the series, now.

[Santa's Rubix]

RNG, with the 2 tricky bastards

+++ Great main-game tune.

+++ Upbeat theme, of present-making.

++ Spangly stars

+ Fairly impressive transition animation.

+ Drawing and dragging provides some variation...

---------- RNG plays way too big a role in determining difficulty. Most games take 4-9s to complete (generally 5-7). Green dude and thing we need to buff take around 25s though. So success is mainly caused by the RNG not picking those games.
The difference between having to drag 2 pieces (mouse), drag 7 pieces or do the buffing/green man guantlet is too much.
Either have them all uniform difficulty, or ensure they come up an equal amount.
Also, when draggable pieces pop up, they sometimes come into existence already in place.

---- When drawing the limbs for the green figure, doing it or not seemed overly hit and miss.

---- Buffing game is too hard to work out. Everything else is fairly uniform, only requiring dragging or 'drawing'. In this game, I knew I must have to use the rubber-majigie somehow, and it was only after a while of waving it about, to see what it reacted with, that I noticed the slight change in brightness.
What's that thing meant to be, anyway?

--- The way the games are presented in the practice session, I thought there'd be 27. Disappointed to see so few.

-- The custom cursor seems a tiny bit silly when most the games centre around dragging.

!!!!!--- After playing a game, if we try to replay, it just takes us to the end screen, where we may resubmit our score (hence my two identical 300-something scores). So, if I was so inclined, could have submitted the same score 11 times, just for the sake of it.
Surprised no-one mentioned this and it wasn't spotted before submission. Has no-one else tried to replay it?

==
Played 3 times, got a score of 300-ish. Played a few times, quitting if I got the 2 difficult pieces too often. Eventually got 500-something, with the tricky bastards only appearing twice (once as I was finishing).

How many games are there? I saw 8. Mouse, Red soldier, train, jack-in-box, gameboy, pop-gun, green guy with hard-to-draw limbs, thing we buff.

It's good to see the microgame format changed around, with a focus on thematic consistency and the switcharound of no actual time limits (replaced by an overall one).

I did enjoy working out the gamerules after the buffing thing, but the difficulty being so affected by the RNG, with the 2 tricky bastards, just seems game-breaking to me.

Jindo responds:

Heh, awesome review :P.

The green dude was supposedly an elf, but yet it kinda messed up.

The arms and legs are really about which order you go (star closest to body first or star furthest from body first?), it's tricky, but you have to get both stars i the right order with no more of a delay than half a second (I didn't program to do that at all, that's pretty much how it turned out :P).

As for the buffer thingy, I was confused as to what you meant, until you referred to the pink thing (which I admit was way to basic for anyone to figure out), was a sponge and the end product was a sleigh (sp?).

There were no bugs on the file I finished, but I uploaded the wrong one and when I went back and uploaded the right one, some freak bugs that weren't there before start happening >_<.

Thanks for the incredible review >_<!

[Halo Havoc]

merit in the game

+ Vaguely interesting story.

++ Tune kinda matches atmosphere well.

------ Very repetitive play.

???---- Count-down?

??- Rankings?

+ Various imps add some interest

-- But don't really affect what we do at all.

==
Played, got 49pts, played again, got 56 before dying. Vaguely curious to check the death.

2 minutes seems an awfully long time for folk to repeat, without at least some indication of how they did. It all seems rather slow and without much merit in the game mechanics.

[Atomic workshop]

could definitely be

+++ Unique.

+ I liked the various styles. Specially the simple +/-s.

---- Kinda overly limited.

--- I distinctly remember that elements have a certain number of neutrons - it's not just the protons/electron that make it what it is.

-- centre button, which took us to the never-ending stream of code, was annoying.

????? A reviewer below suggested having protons/neutrons only draggable to the centre, whilst electrons should gon on the outside. That would be rather cool, making it more visually intuitive.

??? You could easily make the electrons spin round by making them mcs, maybe instead of dragging, we'd toggle a number... you could either have an mc with frames for each number of electrons, or you could duplicate the mcs at a random rotation each time, centred on the neucleus. That would be kinda impressive-looking.

==
Always good to have some new styles of content.

Needs more work done to it, but it could definitely be a cool little application/thing.

Keep at it!

[LvBomb's PTP&3D tutorial]

elsewhere on the internet

+++ You pick good subjects to teach. Perspective isn't really shown in any tuts on NG.

--- I think your tutorial doesn't really teach the concepts well enough. Any monkey can follow instructions to copy a simply picture, but we want to learn how to use those principles for our own ends!

---- Dodgy bottom lines in 2-point perspective end and wonky-looking example of 'what you can do' make me think that maybe you don't know the subject well enough to teach it.

--- Zooming in revealed that your 3d text uses quite a few instances at the lighter shade - whereas your text suggested we should use one for the same effect.

+ Some fairly pleasant tune.

==
I don't think you should teach stuff unless you're able to fully implement and explain the principles properly.

Better tutorials exist elsewhere on the internet, created by accomplished artists.

++ Some nice music.

GlueyMcGee responds:

This tut isn't for advanced people, more fore noobs, and at the "what you can do" example at the bottom it's written"and much more"
Your not supposed to some in.

Thanks anyways!