gel's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Human Centipede: The Game]

Well done!

I'm sad to see so many people that think this is Space Invaders... it's a great recreation of the classic Centipede, right down to the terrible controls, haha. I always hated that about Centipede, how you could only shoot one bullet at a time. Sure it's super fast when you shoot stuff at the bottom of the screen but you miss once and you have to wait an hour to shoot again.

I can't fault you for the design of the original game, though. I applaud this parody-based remake.

[Throw Me]

One of the better throwing games

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.

[Cereus Peashy]

Great artwork, good concept, bad execution

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.

[Old Movie Effect Tutorial]

Good tutorial.

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.

[Rural Racer]

Great!

This game's almost as fun as Off Road! It's a pretty good clone though.

Work on your sound some more. The music was flavorless and the sound, although fitting, wasn't anything special. Perhaps some engine revving or something when you hit turbo.

I'm pretty sure the turbo key worked only 30% of the time, even when the turbo bar was at full capacity.

Glad you included the 2 player option. I'll find someone to torture with this game. It's adequate, but I'd much rather play that old Off Road game in DOS. And that's almost as fun as the arcade Off Road!

[Contra Game Workshop]

Coool

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.

Jhunour responds:

Your advice is very helpful thanks

[Nightmare]

Incredible

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.

[turbo catalyst vampire]

Nicely done.

I love the smooth framerate. The animation is adequate, though I think there were a few spots (like when an enemy gets hit) where you could have put in some more animation.

Was there sound? I didn't hear any, all the other movies I watched on NG prior to yours had sound in them, so I assuem you didn't put any in. The later reviews will prove that lack of sound, in a game especially, greatly lower the fun factor.

I guess the other thing that lowered the fun factor was that it wasn't fun. I mean, control was quite limited and ammo pickups disappeared waaay too soon if you were on the boss level and set to high quality (I've never seen a game slow down, but remain at a high framerate). Some people wish I had given them advice and not just said what was wrong. So many people seem to say "well, what was wrong with it??" even though the answer is obvious, so I'm gonna tell you, just in case you're one of those guys: You should be able to shoot and toss grenades in the air, sometimes I would jump twice in midair, touching an enemy should make you recoil or something, not just constantly lose life, sound would defiitely benefit the game, even if the files was twice as big, and most importantly, the game was monotonous. Shoot shoot left, shoot shoot right, shoot a lot at the boss, jump over him when he comes at you.

The programming was good, I'll give you that. It wasn't good enough to make this game more than a tiny bit enjoyable though. Listen up people, there's no need to make side scrollers where all you do is shot and lob grenades. It's been done before, a million times. If you're gonna make a game that is just the same game with new graphics, at least give the player a LOT of control (shooting in air, ducking, shooting upward/downward, perhaps more creative moves like kicking or dashing moves, and of course, more weapons.

OWell, people put those definitions. U can put one too...And I would like to here u rap, hehe :d

I also enjoyed the cinematics. It's cool to see them pop up and say something while you're shooting and giving the player the ETA for the copter was cool. Too bad I couldn't hear them talk or hear any explosion sounds. Come on, sound fx aren't hard.

Keep at it. You've got a lot of skill and the more you do it, the better you'll get.

[Drama In Stickville 2: MT]

I don't mind sticks.

However, I do mind terrible terrible graphics. I think the most advanced thing you did was when the player was waking up and his eyes were blurred, but that's it. The other graphics were just bad, and not just because it wasa stick movie.

Speaking of movie, you're right; it's just an interactive movie. Actually, it's a little less than an interactive movie. It was too linear to be really interactive. It we more like having to push the play button every 3 seconds to see more. I don't want to see more of this stuff, though.

I did think the audio was well done, but that may be its only redeeming feature. The story wasn't really creative as it was a jumble of random things that almost seem coherent. I think the first Stickville game was even slightly better.

MarkOfTheBeast responds:

Thank you for your review. Even though you think this movie has bad graphics... I think it has very good ones. For my standards. I am TERRIBLE at drawing, yet I was amazed at what I made in this game. It might just be me, but i think the story was good. It might be too "jumbled together", but in my head it was perfect. Thank you for your review. It wouldve been cool if you left some constructive criticism, but its ok. Thanks.

[Red Foxx Soundboard]

Redd Fox rules!

But you gotta get better sound clips. Those are so low quality it's hard to understand anything. I realize you also compressed them in Flash, but it's the recordings that are poor. Poor Sanford.