Bezman's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Newgrounds Sig Creator]

What's here is good, but not enough.

I was hoping for something that let us make more than one style of signature.

The one you've got is kinda nice looking and certainly fits in with the NG look, but it also looks kinda generic, with all the NG icons and plain text alongside the bg we see everywhere.

You need to change it so when we enter a message, it keeps it. And correct the grammar. "your", not "you're".

And frankly, though I assume you've done a bit of work in editing the bg and icons, anyone with gimp/paint could surely add on text with hundreds of font styles, without having to deal with these issues.

If it had a wider range of possible outcomes - like maybe 10 backgrounds, 10 pictures to drag around and a text box that we can move and doesn't have these issues, then it might be actually good.

As is, it just feels far too limiting.

I really liked the colours on the forward/back buttons though - perfect mimicry.

[Spaceship Escape]

Worse than 'helicopter'. Needs tuning.

First I hit a blue sphere, thinking I had to collect it. 2nd game, I died within seconds, as the physics are different to what I expected. 3rd game, I died at 46k. It had gotten repetitive and ceased to be interesting well beyond that - to be honest, I was just carrying on to see what would happen.

In this game, we rise/fall a lot slower than in most other games of its ilk. Its disconcerting but does distance itself slightly from others and the direction of the arrow works well to show the current velocity.

It kinda means we need to plan our moves a bit further in advance.

The music was a tad repetitive (got repetitive before the song ended) but suited the atmosphere well.

Graphics were decent - 'vector' look suits it. Though maybe keep blue circles off of the yellow blocks.

My main gripe is definitely the difficulty curve - or the lack of one. You need to make the cave thinner, add more circles or do something else to keep upping the challenge and add an algorithm of course, to ensure it's always possible to fly through (although maybe not HUMANLY possible at the upper limit...)

In the end, it's not only unoriginal, but also far worse than the elegant simplicity of the original 'helicopter' game.

colintso responds:

Thinking you had to collect it? Please read the instructions...

I'll try to add levels to the game.

[You Have To Burn The Rope]

Deserving of its accolades

For me, the fantastic thing about this game is the discrepancy between the pomp it gives itself at the start/end of the game and the brevity of the action.

The intro's actually really inspired. You assume enough knowledge of computer games that we're able to work out how to walk/jump at least and simply use the intro as a bit of foreshadowing.

The graphics are great and all 3 bits of music are nigh-on perfect. The two loops loop perfectly and evoke the atmosphere they're meant to despite their simplicity. The redundant nature of the ending song makes it hilarious!

The mechanics work well - with the auto-torch-pickup, the weapons system... one thing that did annoy me though was that we can't land on the chandelier - I'd have personally liked that to be a platform as the first time I played (and today since I forgot), I thought I'd be able to land on the chandelier, so jumped two platforms, ended up falling through and having to climb up again.

really though, this is a game that deserves all the accolade it got all over the internet. A refreshing and well-made joke.

[Rotate 720]

Is that it?

I was disappointed by the lack of either any variation or challenge.

Persevered until the end, where it says, 'well done - you have finished.' I was expecting a hard mode after that.

Really though, my first disappointment came around the 2nd or 3rd level, with the lack of new elements. On the final level, I was following the exact same processes that I was on the 1st and a combination of trial-and-improvement and using the infinite supply to make a 'funnel' for the ball saw me through with no percieved challenges encountered.

All but 3 of the levels were completed on the first go thanks to the latter technique and if you had limited the number of platforms we could use, it may have allowed you to develop some genuinely interesting puzzles.

The graphics were good, the ball generally behaved well and the game was simple to understand.

It just seems like you need to make some mechanical changes and add some interesting levels.

[Earth Defender!]

Needs some twist to introduce a challenge

The graphics were brilliant (I love the cute squashed earth) and the music was good. I felt the game's mechanics really needed more tweaking though.

In easy mode, I lost a life within a second, another at 2500ish points, then exited to the menu at arounbd 3k. In hard, I got to 8k without having lost a life, then got bored, let myself die and closed the window.

The speed of the asteroids doesn't seem to noticably increase. As we get further, their frequency should start increasing.

I'd also suggest upping the speed - at the minute, it just seems too easy to survive indefinitely and that's a real turn-off.

Lovely presentation though and it's simple to pick up and everything's clearly signalled from the lives to the power-ups.

[The ghost train]

I love the photo-montage style.

I love the photo-collage style.

The vector work looks kinda odd against the photos, but it still has an interesting feel.

I specially liked the opening screen (with the menu) and the shot at the end of the intro, when the TV shrinks away.

I was disappointed to realised that it really was more like a 'presentation' and not-at-all like a point-and-click game.

The text was kinda annoying to scroll. If you could add a real scroll bar and increase the size of the up/down buttons' hit-boxes, that'd help.

At the bottom of dracula's history, there seem to be some missing words.

Leatherface's text was kinda hard to read against the light bg. Add more contrast - maybe darkening the bg rather than lightening it...

The music is atmospheric (though they don't seem to be credited) and the visuals fun. The end was kinda funny.

I just felt that the whole idea of a presentation of horror-character-info, interspersed with minigames wasn't a great idea. Those looking for a game will be disappointed and those eager to read about the characters may be irritated by the game or presentational issues (white text on light bg & scrolling).

In the end, though I wanted to enjoy it, I just felt it didn't work.

xzomxbie responds:

As u like in the end. i just love what i did. ts very very good i think:) or lets say that am sure about what am saying
but anyway thnx for ur review.

[Onristu]

I'd have liked some potential fiero.

The beats never seemed perfectly timed to the music. For example, on the level just after the darkness try to capture the kid (just before he runs off to his mum), the timing starts out synched to the starting beats in a bar, then drifts to match the syncopated beats, then drifts to match the starting beats of each bar again. Not as if there's a definite change-over - it just kinda drifts and seems badly timed.

"IF YOU THINK EASY IS NOT FUN, GO TO FREE PLAY OR UNLOCK HARD A MEDIUM MODES IN THE GAME. THEY ARE MUCH MORE CHALLENGING AND FUN."

So then, why do you even force us to play through 'Easy' before we can choose something to challenge ourselves more? By forcing folk to complete a game mode they may find uninteresting, you're just artificially lengthening the game, whilst reducing its overall fun.

I don't like the fact that we can never lose - it eliminates any potential fiero. Even for a wanderer, it's often better to have a small risk of failure than none at all.

I felt that the action on the bottom of the screen seemed largely irrelevant - it was just a case of drawing the biggest circle I could within that area over and over - a simple thing to do whilst it was only in my peripheral vision (or even without looking).

If you wanted to add a bit of a multi-tasking premise to the rhythm action, having a 2nd task that actually takes some effort would have been a better move.

I did like the simple graphic design and the 3D effect on the 'great' etc. letters was cool.

Some of the songs you picked were great, too!

I think the fact that there no real opportunities for comparison of highscores and no potential for failure made it lose focus in my eyes.

[Globs]

Great mechanics, flawed presentation.

The basic mechanics of the game are definitely fun!

I like the fact that we could concievably work out the optimum path right at the start of each level, yet somehow analysis paralysis never occured for me.

I think a few presentational problems got in the way though.

Firstly - the music. Repetitive and annoying. You did well to have a mute button, but WHY have the music return at the start of each level?

Two - the end-of-level presentation. The doubling of our score should be a real event - cause for some mild celebration. I think it would have been worth putting the score in the centre of the screen and maybe have it double 3x a second, waiting for each move we didn't make. Then we could visually see our score doubling and the payoff would be greater.

I felt that a single undo would have been a good idea - this wouldn't have reduced the difficulty much, nor made it likely that we would play indefinitely. It would, however, have ensured that pressing the wrong button (thus losing the game) wouldn't be the horrible thing it currently is. I don't think this game would appeal to fiero-seekers anyway, given the random nature and the fact that the game never increases in difficulty beyond a certain point - rather it seems like it'd appeal to wanderer-types and I think you should have made some allowances for that.

I did also feel that the transition from one colour to the next took slightly too long at times. I don't think 3s (or whatever it is) is necessary - half that time may have been fine.

Lastly, though I'm not sure if you could do anything about this, there were a few times where I clicked 'done' rather than submit, meaning my score was lost to the electronic ether.

It's a fun set of behavioural rules, but the aforementioned problems keep it from being one of my favourites - as it could have been.

[One Level Game: Hardcore]

Great for fiero-seekers.

It was a fun game.

The start (the starting chorus) took ten or so lives to beat. A bunch of places we just needed to learn - no way of doing on our first attempt. Can't say I'm a fan of that technique.

The section where you need to dash down (after the falling then rising circles) killed me a shitload of times, thanks to being genuinely hard - there was a short window of time to react and small margin of error in where to stop.

Having to play through a minute of gametime - that I never failed after beating it the first time and realising I should only use left/right until then - just to have another attempt at this difficult challenge got pretty annoying.

I did eventually beat it though.

I liked the variations of obstacles and nothing seemed obnoxiously difficult to me.

I'd have liked a more satisfying ending - something that clearly looks like a climax. At the end of this, I was just kinda surprised, as the lava bit felt fairly easy to me.