Score: 10

"Another Classic"

submission: Castle Repercussions - B

date: December 21, 2009

What can I say? The film grain effects, the graphics, the sound. This one really shows a vulnerable position for the pilot that sets the watcher on end.

Three problems I had with this movie, though. Once again there's no playhead or invisible button, it's way too short (only 4.6 MB, it's not just me), and a storyline fluke. How strong exactly are the Evils? I heard Boomer talking about how they 'break so easily' and now one of them can force open a door that the pilot can't? Are they fragile but strong, or what?

Still an important installment, even if it's small.

Score: 10

"Great, Man!"

submission: Castle Repercussions - A

date: December 21, 2009

Castle 3C and 3D use masterful graphics, sound, and concept work. It's the first display of radical fighting animation that features shrapnel, massive war-like combat, and the most intense character development yet. The general's true colors are revealed as Etrius and Lloyd are removed from the rest of the group. Additionally, the voice acting is better than both A and B, featuring the becoming-maniacal voice of the general, the comic-relief line from Romanov, and many others. The watcher gets exceptionally strong feelings for Beecher, although the entire team earns immense respect when they show their will to survive. No characters in this film are weak, not even the soldier fodder. Best of all it leaves everyone worried sick about Etrius and Lloyd. The menu sound effects were a bit loud compared to the rest of it, though. On a last note, Dimmu Borgir perfectly fits the environment of the parallel universe. Its name complements the film all on its own! (Meaning "dark fortresses" in Norwegian.)

From where we left off, we had all that on our minds. In Castle Repercussions, the watcher is perfectly teased by the ominous intro... And the rest of the film, really. We enter the spooky deserted castle once again, lead by a private. Cooler still is the sentience that lurks within the castle, a foreshadowing to a malicious figure that we hope we can learn of later.

Sound, graphics, animation, concept, all perfect! Love how you changed the point of view back to the private! Only problem I had with it was that I missed the invisible button and playhead badly. Wish you could have used them again.

Score: 10

"Awesome!"

submission: Castle III part B

date: December 21, 2009

Graphics are once again awesome, and the animation is a bit smoother than Part A. You used blur effects this time, and everything looks a bit smoother. However, the menu lagged a little bit. The insides of the castle were pretty neat, too, although there were a few rare cases where parts of the graphics looked a little plain.

The voice acting was pretty good, but a few lines seemed to place emphasis in the wrong spot, and the tone was off a little. The character development was otherwise great; you can see outstanding chemistry between the characters.

The invisible button and playhead were very nice. It made the film easy to navigate, and overall I loved the feature.

Score: 10

"Beautiful"

submission: Castle III part A

date: December 21, 2009

Graphics are incredible, despite the fact you're using sticks. Animation is pretty much top-notch as well. However, a few of the animations such as the helicopter blades are a little choppy, so you could have used some blur effects on them in my opinion.

The voice acting is simply superb; high quality, clear, and they fit the characters well. The only thing that irked me about the dialogue were the consistent mistakes with the subtitles.

The concept is utter brilliance. You've set up a common futuristic distopia but fused it with sci-fi and fantasy at the same time. Masterfully shot, great presentation!

Score: 10

"Wow!"

submission: The Pen is Mightier...

date: December 17, 2009

That was great! Graphics were great (obviously), but let me add that the animation had one quirk... When the bullet went into color and there was filmy white stuff on the back of the bullet. It looked too sticky, and I'm guessing it was smoke or something, or some kind of gaseous effect. If it was, there should have been some more particles being clipped off of it, or just dissipating from the sides as well.

Sound was great, well done, good quality, but it started off a little slow. A lot of people are going to close out of it before it reaches the end because of it. Seriously, the beginning IS BORING. I guess that's the point though.

Lastly, the concept was pretty original. I loved it! You did a great job with it!

Score: 10

"Liked It"

submission: Christmas Uncovered

date: December 14, 2009

The graphics are great, but the characters probably should have had outlines. Maybe even just giving their edges a slight lighting differential would have been nice. Otherwise the graphics were awesome.

The sound was nice, good quality. The story... Eh, it was funny, but way too short. You needed to add way more. Adding the tiniest bit would have made a big difference.

But all in all it was funny.

Score: 7

"Good"

submission: Snow Fight

date: December 14, 2009

The graphics were simple but good, the blur effects were nice and well-thought out, and the proportions weren't obnoxious (like a few anime movies). Overall the animation was good.

The audio was also great. Loved the British accent, also high quality and great timing.

The storyline started good but got old fast. While it is a cartoon, it's somewhat resemblant of a 5 year old's elaborate story that swells with time. I loved the rock, and the mustard gas made me laugh, but after that it just went downhill and the plotline wasn't quite as graceful.

Score: 10

"Amazing"

submission: Tower of Greed

date: December 13, 2009

This was one of the best games I've ever played. It looks like you're hiding behind the style of nostalgic 90s games to appeal to players that grew up around that time, but you really don't need to. Even if this game had modern-looking graphics, the simple gameplay would still easily annihilate the competition.

Graphics were pretty good. The pixel art is way better than I could do, but the lighting on the ladders looked kind of weird. You might wanna think of polishing that up. Also, I don't know if the little white guy you control was a tribute to an existing character, but if not, he needed more detail.

The music got kind of repetitive, but I actually liked the sound effects (even if they got repetitive too). I'd personally suggest adding more songs tacked onto the current one, maybe with a random playlist or something to spice it up. Kraftwerk and Nullsleep are huge recommendations here, although you might also consider Nine Inch Nails if you're appealing to the demographic into the whole sprites, big headphones, 8-bit, etc.

The gameplay was pretty interesting. Tower of Greed is a game of risk and reward, security and insecurity. While you had a sense that everything could go down the drain instantly, you also got immense satisfaction from locking in a medal. The player moved great; I loved how fast he could move. Also, the gems were placed pretty well. It was usually just out of your way to lure you on a long chase.

There were a couple problems I had with it, though. For one, a few diamonds or items were extremely hard to pick up without getting killed, when diamonds and items with the exact same value could often be obtained by easier means. To remedy this, it would have been nice if you had an extra kind of gem (like a red ruby) to rectify the strange learning curve. It would have made it easier to give better rewards for harder maneuvers.

Also, the jumping enemy and stair-climbing enemy were pretty unbalanced. Sometimes they'd jump right off the screen, but sometimes, either at a low level (like 4) or a high level (like 40), one of them would literally stay on top of me to the point where i couldn't shake him and I kept getting hurt until I died. This is a very, very serious problem that can slash a player unfairly.

The shield powerup was a bit useless, meaning that 1/4 of the time you picked up an item it was fairly useless. I also couldn't see the difference between survival and arcade.

Lastly, it would have been nice if you had an adrenaline mode where the stage moved a bit faster. I found myself craving action sometimes and being denied it, but would have loved something where you could barely keep up with the pace of it all.

Score: 5

"What a Crock"

submission: the Last of the Dashkin

date: December 12, 2009

NOTE: This was from my old review which was deleted, but I got a PERSONAL HEADS UP from Holla36 that it IS NOT abusive. I don't want some stupid fanboys flagging this again.

There's like... No animation in it. You tossed in some Filters, the animation is way choppier, especially the walking and running, and it just kind of... Disappointed me.

The graphics are pretty much the same as they've always been, which I guess is good. The audio quality was very high.

Here's the main problem, though. You've always used silent storytelling before, making the story unfold on its own instead of leading the viewer on with narration. You should have maybe shown a flashback to the Dashkin or something, or maybe some kind of montage timeline to tell the story. Spoon-feeding it to the audience was a big mistake.

Another thing that pissed me off was presentation. While the animation was several minutes long, you made it seem kind of short. You end it with the line "we're about to find out", which leads the player to believe the entire animation was only the intro. The animation told a lot and a little at the same time, but it was done all wrong.

A lot of people won't like this because there's not enough happening. It's a bunch of telling and no action, which is what people really want. You could have just kept the file on your computer until you had some more aftermath to tack to the back of the animation, and you'd have gotten way more stars from me.

Score: 5

"Needs Lots of Work"

submission: Bounce (Platformer) FIXED

date: December 10, 2009

It's decent, but it needs a lot more. For one, you need to learn how to draw. Give the character some lighting, and maybe make him a bit more than a ball.

Second, the ground needs way more texture. Just create a Group over your current ground and make it artistic. You could draw lava over the red spots to make it look more cinematic, or maybe grass over the ground or something, or polish up the yellow sunbeams. That would have made tons of difference.

It seems like you might be using copy/paste tutorials... The engine at the beginning reminded me of FeindishDemon's tutorial, while the space levels reminded me of Ball Revamped, except that it had way better hitTest for the corners. I think you'd have used the same hitTest for the entire thing if you had written all the script yourself.

It needs way more levels for the different realms, like Neon and Space, and it also needed something like a Level Select you could go back to. The balance was whack.

One more note was that the inverted colors thing was stupid. You're just redoing the same level with different colors for no reason? Come on. You changed ONE of the levels for it, and that's it.

Lastly, the V-Cam was way too small, giving the player a bad view of the map. Just use the Free Transform tool to make it bigger.

Needs tons of work, most prominently in the graphics area. I used to draw graphics almost that bad, but the important thing is not to let a single color take up to much area of the screen. Even using Bevel filters is better than it.