Score: 6

"One of the better throwing games"

submission: Throw Me

date: September 22, 2007

It's not a genre I enjoy much, and while Throw Me doesn't do much to push it forward, it seems to do enough to make it interesting. Stamina introduces skill, where you can move yourself toward a crane to keep going.

I searched through 43 pages of reviews and didn't see anyone mention that the blur isn't done properly. It's reversed. You're blurring the object, but the object isn't the one that's moving fast relative to the camera; the background is. I realize that maybe Flash can't handle it, but still, if you're going to blur something, it should be what's moving fast, relative to your eyes (the camera). If someone is skeptical, think of car chases in movies, where the camera is looking at a car from the side, and following it as it zips through traffic. The car isn't blurred. It's everything else.

From a gameplay standpoint, it might not be beneficial to blur the background, so in that case, nothing should be blurred, or only the background should be blurred at high speeds. Okay, enough about blur.

There are nice effects and presentation. It's a game anyone can get into, but it could improve upon this genre more by giving the player a bit more control, and a bit more to look at as they fly through the sky for 30 seconds at a time without anything else to do.

Score: 8

"A queer parody for those who understand it"

submission: Queers of War

date: January 15, 2007

First off, I love the Excitebike music. It was a tad loud compared to movies, but it doesn't really matter. It set the mood very well.

Everyone did a fine job with theirs. :P My favorites were Tom's torque bow, and Dan's nice parody of what goes on during a Gears match. If you've played Gears, or most other team games, you'd be familiar with the humping that goes on when a player is AFK. Girdlock isn't my favorite map but it's a nice little recreation of it. Utah's Tankmen-esque short also stood out.

Not the best animation, but parodies don't need that. The drawings were fitting, some quite detailed, and the jokes were well done!

Score: 6

"Great artwork, good concept, bad execution"

submission: Cereus Peashy

date: January 10, 2007

Good
~~~~~
- Good, simple controls (mostly)
- Using the enter key to pause.
- Some nice game play innovation with the spikes as platforms.
- Awesome artwork, and satisfying head stomping.
- Nice camera work. Smooth, you can see in front of you, and parallax.
- The two challenges are neat, but not really much more than what they are at face value.

Bad
~~~~~
- Major lag, even after saving the SWF and playing it in the Flash 9 projector on a powerful computer, on LOW. Required shrinking the window. If you think using a lot of blur and trail fx makes the game look better, consider how the game looks when it's set to low and the frame rate is still chugging.
- The game is slow and inconsistent in speed. I don't mean lag. When shrunken to a tiny window, the game seems lag-free, but the game's movement is still slow. Jumping while dashing makes you slow back down to walking speed. Killing your momentum like this kills the fun too.
- bug: I pressed enter twice when selecting Level 3 and after it loaded the level, I couldn't move or do anything, as if the game was paused. Pausing and unpausing didn't help.
- Wall jumping is needlessly complicated. Having to press toward the wall, up, AND jump? Seriously? I'm a fan of wall jumping but it's just done so poorly. Play some games with wall jumping and notice how they accomplish this without requiring quick directional presses. Don't forget Flash games are played on a keyboard (although I played Peashy with an Xbox 360 gamepad). Also, wall jumping needs to be mentioned early on, like level 2. People who got stuck while in Bloodlust mode could have used this information. I made it up that skinny wall area to get a 1up (when you first learn about wall jumping), but let me tell you I hated it. Don't challenge people with frustrating controls.
- Blind jumps are extremely annoying and just bad level design. Sometimes the ground is there, sometimes it isn't. Even if you added in the option of looking down before you jump, it would not be good enough. Blind jumping is bad, period.
- Others have mentioned the levels are too long. I think they are a good length (otherwise people would complain they are too short). The problem is that there's no checkpoint. While some might argue that checkpoints take the challenge out of games, replaying a level is much much worse. Besides, it's more fun when the challenge is in the gameplay/combat, not in having to play perfectly less you start over.
- Inconsistent level collisions. e.g. Chapter 1-4, sometimes you put a platform on a spine bone, sometimes you don't. This lead to more than a couple deaths. Save for secret hidden walls, collisions should be as you expect, not whatever the level designer felt like giving collision to.
- Platforms that look like regular platforms but are actually ones that crumble within half a second of landing on them. No game does this. Well, no good game does this. Yes, I'm pissed I have one life left on Chapter 1-6 and died because of an unwritten rule that breakaway platforms need to be solid for over one second.

Quick rundown of individual scores:
Graphics: The animation is awesome, but the lag really affects the gameplay and feel of the game.
Style: Awesome, as always, Edmund. It's hurt a little though, by the odd usage of beveling and over usage of Flash filters. The menus don't match the artwork.
Sound: Nice moody music and wet death sounds. Sounds good to me.
Violence: This rating is unnecessary, so 10.
Interactivity: The simple controls make the game easy to pick up. The wall jumping makes me want to break my controller. Overall it's good but the few areas it has problems are pretty major.
Humor: Not really funny, but amusing in general.

I tried to give the game a fair shake by replaying it a few times. After dying on Chapter 1-6, I'm done. Maybe I'll return one day to see the twisted boss Edmund came up with. Good job releasing a game after starting it so long ago. It's just plagued with so many little things that it's 3 steps shy of greatness.

Score: 10

"You are a true artist!"

submission: PEACETANK

date: March 3, 2005

You don't sell out, you don't use NG to simply promote yourself or your site (I realize there was a credit to your site, but that is not shameless promotion), and you don't take no guff from nobody! You make what you want not what other people want, and that's highly commendable!

I love peacetank.. I hope he grows wings and drops a giant flower nuke on the world.

Score: 9

"Haha, funny stuff!"

submission: Storybook 1: Synj

date: October 15, 2004

Haha, this is great. I only wish it were longer! That gel's got a girly body, and nice braids!

Very Conan O'Brien!

Score: 10

"GO JERM!"

submission: Newgrounds Versus - Final

date: September 23, 2004

Heh heh, since I can't respond to portal reviews, I'll just adress some stuff here!

- Illegible text: The movie I made had perfectly legible professional comic book lettering (I've been doing comic books for 10 eyars), but the font screwed up on T0MMY's computer and the updated file wasn't accepted since T0MMY barely missed the 5000 view cut off. I'm really sorry about the text folks. Tom has no answered emails and the NG staff in charge of reviewing file updates has not yet reviewed the new file.

- Ryle looks like the AOL guy: I'm taking a jab at stick movies here, folks. If you've ever seen stick movies with large sticks, they tend to look like the AOL guy. I was parodying that.

- Dustball composed all the music, including the beginning stick fight music. If it seems similar to Anitomica Returns, that's because stick movies tend to sound have soundtrack that sound that way. He was told to make stick fighty music and that's what he created.

- Priscilla, Dustball's wife, did the voice for Simone. Her voice isn't the only sexy thing about her!

- Yes, you can move the sticks around. That's not a glitch, I had to code that myself!

- Sorry about the sticks overlapping the letterbox and navbar, but trust me, it's pretty unfixable. Whatever you think you know about layers, virtual cameras, navbars, or AS-drawing, just know that it would take a TON of work to get them behind the letterbox and navbar.

- The philosophy isn't garbage or nonsense. It's existentialism, and it has to do with the co-existence of sticks and full figures. Just because you don't fully understand it doesn't make it "bullshit." Sartre had a viewpoint, Ryle had a viewpoint, and Simone had her own which mirrored both Ryle and Sartre. Yes, her eyes do glow green at the end. What evil lies ahead?!

- Like T0MMY has mentioned in the updated author's comments, we only had two weeks to do this. Jerm and I both had quite a busy schedule and this does not truly reflect our best work. It's our best work, within a two week time constraint. Ask Adam Phillips to make a full movie himself in two weeks while maintaining his day job and I don't think you'll end up with Prowlies at the River.

And now, a little review of Jerm's movie, which I voted for.

I got to see an alternate version of this movie and I must say that T0MMY did forget to include the opening scene, which I relaly liked. It had the credits in it (giving Evil Dog credit for the music and setting up the atmostphere very well). The movie does a great job creating a sense of suspense and intrigue, but it quickly falls flat at the end. The movie was still building up when it abruptly ended and weened out. The animation was very good, and having seen your more action oriented animation in the past, I really think you should have gone with the action this time. Anyway, see you in a future battle, buddy!

Thanks to everyone for watching, and thanks to those who donate money!

Score: 5

"Hey hey"

submission: Gay Eskimo's Song

date: August 27, 2004

I've always liked this song, and you've made a movie with it. I'd like to point out that it's a song by Corky and the Juice Pigs, not Tenacious D.

I'd have given sound a higher score, but the sound quality was soooo low. You don't need to compress it THAT much.

By the way, sinc eyou were curious, I found your movie because you reviewed my movie and I checked your profile.

Score: 10

"I love me!"

submission: 16 Color Showcase

date: June 15, 2004

So few colors, so much fun! It's 16 Colors of Goodness! What a great game, I mean movie! I mean game!

Score: 10

"WOW!"

submission: Peoplemation: Spin

date: May 22, 2004

I've never seen anything like that! The only thing better than watching that is lying in the street holding onto a trashcan while cars drive by and honk at you! I want more peoplemation!

Score: 5

"Good tutorial."

submission: Old Movie Effect Tutorial

date: March 26, 2004

This is useful information for folks who want to create that effect without having to make a less cool looping MC.

There were a couple AS flaws, but nothing detrimental. In the actions square, it said:
if (i=2) {
i=0;
}

First of all, this if statement is wrong, and secondly, it's unecessary. It's wrong because the "=" operator is an assignment operator, so what that if statement is actually ding is assigning the value 2 to i. All htat doesn't matter anyway, since when you finished that for loop, i is always 2, so you don't need the if statement. Just set i to 0 and be done.

The other AS "flaws" is just that you use old depracated functions and operators. The "<>" comaprison operator has been replaced with the "!=" operator, and the random() function has been replaced with teh Math.random() function. Flash did away with these things for a reason, and although you have ensured more compatibility for the 5 people left in the world who still use Flash 4 to do scripting, you should try to teach newbs the new code, so their apps run faster and read better.

Anyway, good job. When I voted it was at 1.75, so I hope it doesn't get blammed.