Score: 7

"Overall coolness"

submission: Battle for the Portal Pt4

date: October 18, 2003

Your series has an overall coolness factor. You use a few NG characters and you put them in a believable setting with ambience and nice lighting.

I particularly enjoyed the Flash file surfing, that was creative and I would liked to have seen more interactivity between the characters as they glided toward the crown.

Mega Knox was cool, even if it were only a cheap 3d model with bad animation.

The inclusion of the Stick Mafia was kinda lame, especially since they aren't even in the Portal yet. Sure, the creator asked you to put him in, and I'm sure that Flash is very nice, but you know, there are a lot of other characters/series that you didn't include (or gave even shorter cameos to) that other reviewers have already mentioned. You shouldn't need to be asked for you to have included more of the Portal's favorites (Foamy, Compasses, Madness, and I Love Egg were nice, albeit brief).

As synj mentioned before, even though you made fun of yourself for the cop-out ending, it still doesn't alleviate the fact that it's a cop-out. The ending was expected, but the king comes in for a second and gets his crown whereas the others have been battling it out for the last 3 installments? That's just cheap.

I hope whatever your next endeavor is, you think about the animation. You've mentioned to some others I know (via email) how you aren't good at animating and just happened to composite all the separate 3D renders together. Although the compositing/rendering is well done, it doesn't make up for the lack of animation (and any animation thereof consisted of a lot of rotation; just think Lengendary Frog and you begin to realize that rotation doesn't equal quality animation).

You surely don't deserve to be the Top Rated Artist on NG. Battle For the Portal is overrated. You have attested to this in personal emails, but you would never mention that here. Bask in your glory that is the one-eyed man in the land of the 3d blind.

(Side note to other reviewers: You can't nominate SecretAgentBob as the King. He's not a character in the Portal, he's the author. e.g. Knox can't be King, but you can nominate Knox's clay army)

You've got a lot of potential to make a real blockbuster, not just one that the kiddies find entertaining because it has a lot of smooth 3d renders in it. You are pretty good at direction (even if it is about cheating in part one, i.e. the flag shots), and your talents in that area would be greatly enhanced if you team up with someone who lacks those skills and are better at animation than you. You might even be able to make another tribute movie that actually includes many of the characters you're paying tribute to!

Score: 6

"Getting better."

submission: Battle for the Portal Pt3

date: October 13, 2003

Well I could go on for days about why I didn't like it, but I know you don't listen to any of my "nitpicking" as you put it.

Okay, just a few:
- that fading in and out while SBC went berserk was really annoying. I was about to just blam the movie right then.
- The Lego men have mouths, but why didn't you remove the black line behind their mouths when they talked? Just change the texture, you shouldn't put the open mouth over the closed mouth!
- I still want to see the other characters actually get HURT when they are hit. The clay guys just fell over when SBC hit them. Try slicing them up, clay is perfect for smashing!
- Clocks have arrows above their heads when they talk. As a film student you should be more aware of such things (and not just not do it because you don't think they should have it). It's a part of what clocks are.

All right, that's enough of that, everything else is still fine and dandy. Good sense of placement within the environment, nice actiony camera shots, good humor on SBC's part. You know, you can go back and reupload new imporved versions over the old files. Make it better, or forever stay in your comfortable position as amateur 3d king of the portal.

Score: 9

"Touching"

submission: synjclock 'n the hospital

date: October 12, 2003

Has anyone tried to kill you lately? You're invincible! Animation was great, nice shots, I liked the words EMERGENCY on the wall. Great smokey animation too.

Your shorts are quite short though. Can't vote badly on it, you just leave me wanting more...

Score: 6

"Better"

submission: Battle for the Portal Pt2

date: October 12, 2003

I liked this more than part one. You have more going on here, and this time, there's animation!! Even if it's just the Lego guys moving their arms, it's nice to see a little more animation.

The clocks with guns is nice. I'd like to see bits of sprites and other guys blasting apart when they get shot, instead of just more particle effects, though.

You should work more on Joe Zombie's animation, even if he might not be back... That fire made me cry.

One guy gave you overal 0 for not putting in Krinkels' Madness guys, which is pretty harsh, but a cameo only? That's like having World War III where America and Germany will just make a cameo appearance. You don't have the Battle for the Portal, you have a battle in the portal.

Good job, the atmosphere and ambience of the whole mvie still remains from the first. This time you added more animation, and that's always good. I was very happy not to see just rotating objects floating around. I would have said more, but I know you've already made the other parts and probably wouldn't care what anyone said, you ain't redoing nothin'. Keep it up, don't go back to the crap that was part 1.

Score: 1

"What a load of crap."

submission: Battle for the Portal Pt1

date: October 11, 2003

Your graphics were just terrible! Okay, now that I've gotten that out of the way, the rest of the review will be constructive.

You're lucky the VGDC sprites have more than one frame of animation or your entire movie might not have had any animation at all. Here are some examples of where it showed you truly lacked any qualities or skills of animation:
- the first shot of the blue clay guys. They are badly animated and you KNOW it. The arms just raise up and down in stiff fashion. The models aren't clay, they're just 3d blobs. You couldn't even fix up the smashed polygons when they bent their arms.
- Joe Zombie's frames of animation are just the keyframes with the "tweens" filled in by fading the keyframes out.
- The fighting between the clocks and the VGDC sprites were just overlapped images, rotating and flying around.
- The flags are quickly rendered with some sine wave running through them and they don't attach to the flagpoles, they just float there next to them.
- When Joe Zombie jumps from building to building ala Spiderman, he has no thrust. You just see him fly from one building to another at a strange speed, likened to a poorly tweened Flash movie.
- Anytime there were particle effects onscreen, they would mostly fill up the front of the shot, making it seem like a lot was going on, but nothing was, just particles flying before the "camera."
- Whenever there was any 3d model that wasn't nailed down, it was flying through the air and rotating in slowmotion. Cars, clocks. Rotating. Always.
- If there was anytime you saw the flags in the air after that first shot, for more than 1 second, it's because you were too lazy to animate anything, so it was time to show the flags again, with explosions in the background. Perhaps that was better than more rotating sprites.

I give you pretty high marks for the sound editing, which wasn't bad. Lots of explosions, nice choice of music by the great Danny Elfman, and other miscellaneous sounds that fit the action onscreen.

Everything else is very very poorly done. I'm afraid my movies all sucked, since so many people who reviewed have said your animation was top notch and very well done. You know very well your grasp of animation, and I think you know that this movie didn't showcase very much of it.

Your directing skills are pretty good too, but I can't really say that without realizing that any good shots in the movie were just taken straight from other ones. The first shot with the speech has been done a lot, the tunnel view of cars blowing up inbetween buildings (e.g. Armageddon), flying around the buildings (since that was supposed to be like Spiderman, I can't give credit to you).

I'd like to mention again that if anyone thinks there is good animation in this movie, to just watch it again and look at how everything rotates. Nothing is animated, they just rotate. The only thing that might be considered animation is the clay guys bending their arms and slightly bending their legs to walk.

In summary, if this were submitted to any 3d forum, you'd have your head on a pike. Luckily for you, this is NewGrounds, and any bit of 3d rendering will win you accolades. You're certainly smart enough to know your audience.

If you think I'm just being a jerk, email me. I'll be happy to tell you again jsut what is wrong and you can defend your position or agree with me. I know NG will surely hate me, since I've seen all the good reviews, but perhaps they should watch it again keeping in mind what I actually said and they would see that I made several valid points.

Score: 3

"The movie didn't get a high score"

submission: 50 FPS

date: October 7, 2003

But it's still a good presentation. Nice experimentation. I gave it a three only because it was really entertaining or anything, just shows you put some effort into it (sorry, effort means very little, it's the final product that counts).

Don't listen to Kirby212112, at least not most of what he said. There's a limit to the human eye's "refresh rate" but it's way higher than 12fps. You can tell he doesn't know what he's talking about by his first sentence, " the human eye can only take 12 frames a second, which is why flash MX does 15 i belive." By default, Flash is set to 12fps.

Why do you (Kirby) think people like video games at 60fps or higher? 12 isn't nearly fast enough. You can easily see the difference.

Anyway, although there's a limit, as long as your monitor's refresh rate is in sync with the framerate of the movie, it'll look VERY smooth. Your movie looked smooth. Now that you're done with this experiment, try making an actual movie (although it seems you're into clocks). Your AS ability is pretty good too, so you could incorporate cool effects, probably.

Score: 6

"Coool"

submission: Contra Game Workshop

date: September 27, 2003

I could go on for days about the great level of customization, but I'll get straight to the negative, because authors love that so very much.

The game portion of this Flash is terrible. You got the running and most of the shooting down, but it's definitely missing a few things. The game is slow. I'd run this game non-fulscreen, but then it would be dificult to see all the text in the editor and below the game. I noticed once the player fires a bullet, the bullets follow the player when he moves. It's the same with the enemies when they are shooting up and you jump pass them, the bullet they shot will suddenly go diagonal because they face diagonal too.

Once again, the customization and interativity is incredible. The ability to save files, open the premade stuff, weapon/pickup property inspectors, all great. But it's like putting up new wallpaper on a ghetto shack. It's different, but what's the point? The game isn't really fun, so customizing it doesn't really make it any more fun. Try working on the execution more, since you did well with the planning stage.

Score: 8

"Fools"

submission: -True North-

date: September 14, 2003

That was very good. I'm also very happy to see that it was a complete movie, not actually to B continued.

The fact that you say you didn't intend to make a politcal statement is irrelevant. It's like saying, "Bush is stupid" and not making a political statement. You didn't "intend" to, but you know you would and you did.

After reading the reviews, I've found that some of those reviewers who hate clocks are idiots. I don't hate clocks, nor do I love them, but the point is, they would say something like "finally, the clocks are dead! I'm so tired of their stupid voices!" Did they notice Strawberry Compass sounds just like a clock? Or how about that he looked just like one with a compass instead of a clock? If you hate clocks, you should hate compasses too. Of course, they did kill clocks, but you're just replacing one evil with another right?

Anyway, good stuff. The irony of compasses instead of clocks is apparently lost on a lot of clock haters.

Score: 8

"Incredible"

submission: Nightmare

date: September 10, 2003

Great graphics, fun game. It could use some replay value, but then again, I didn't finish.

I couldn't finh the game because of a bug no one has posted yet. It was in Level 3 and I had 2 lives left. For the first time, I died by actually losing all my health (not by falling in a hole). I came back to the last checkpoint (the beginning of Level 3), but I was still flashing red. As you know, when you're flashing, you can't really move sideways very much. At one point, I had to jump up and far right to reach some carrots, and I couldn't make the jump b/c it would constantly (every second or so) think I got hit. Even though my health didn't go down, I would stop moving sideways and fall to the ground. After hitting 'R' I still kept flashing so I couldn't finish the game.

Score: 8

"Very well done."

submission: Madness Avenger

date: September 10, 2003

New locales, more action, better story. It's what sequels are supposed to be!

Now, I know you'd probably say it's part of the Madness style, but I think you should brush up on your perspective a little. So much action takes place in those little rooms and the one-point perspective just isnt' right. I won't explain it here, you can learn more elsewhere. The otehr thing is the movement of the hands. I've always felt they are a little too slow. Don't smooth them out so much, they are hitting people. Quick, rigid movements portray action much better. What is this supposed to be, Disney action? (Disney action is too smooth and less convincing than, say, anime fighting) Everything else is wonderful!

And to those who want to view it offline, I can't believe some people still haven't figured it out yet. Open the movie, view the page source (right click near the bottom), and find the only .swf file on the page. That's the movie, so just stick that URL into some download program, like GetRight, and there ya go. This movie is worth saving and doing so helps NG's bandwidth too!