Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ball Revamped 5: Synergy]

While the most polished looking Ball Revamped, I feel like this is missing something that BR4 had. The synergy system is cool and allows for some neat puzzles, but the mechanics never feel fully realized. Similarly, the alinear style of the game feels like it has potential but mostly just feels like you never get the complete experience, especially since there's no clear way to be sure you've beaten all of the levels upon replaying the game. The alinear puzzle and exploration aspects don't really blend with the arcade style of carefully avoiding obstacles, and while this game is far less frustrating than BR4, I'd argue it's less rewarding as well.

Still, the beauty of the graphics can't be overstated and the music has gotten a big overhaul as well. I specifically loved the elemental animations for the ball, and the effects on the four colors shown.

[Ball Revamped 4]

This is the Ball Revamped I remember from my childhood! It's no wonder I liked this game so much, considering how polished it is for the year it came out. The physics are far improved from the previous games, the glimmer and shadow effect on the walls finally feel like actual graphics and not some kind of placeholder, and the music is catchy (despite the loops being very short.)

If there's any one thing I'd criticize it would be the general lack of design in lieu of powerups. There's a lot of content to be sure, but a big chunk of the middle levels feel more like a showcase of different features (bombs, lasers, fire, steel, darkness, etc.) than actually making challenging levels out of them. As a result I found myself struggling the most with the first couple worlds as well as the last 5 "countdown" ones. The final boss also feels kind of gimmicky in that there's really no point in avoiding the attacks so long as you can get to the goal when it pops up. Having the player be able to react to them in some way (especially requiring some tasks to be done to make the goal accessible) would make it feel more like an actual fight.

That said, this still holds up wonderfully! Performance isn't the best on Ruffle but I successfully made it to level 55 before having to download it and play the rest in Flash Player.

[Ball (Original Demo)]

Stupid me, I quit at level 44 before realizing there were only 45 levels. Oh well...

For 2004 this is plays pretty smoothly and still manages to be enjoyable nearly 20 years later. It is simple, but that's the point of a demo, right? Plenty of obvious things to change here, namely the music, textured walls, etc. but the core physics feel good, if a bit frustrating for some of the more difficult levels.

[Tricky Keys]

For this being a Game Jam game, it's really nothing short of incredible. Or maybe a sign I need to stop doing Game Jams solo. Either way, this is a really neat concept. Pixel art is so overdone, but the actual theme of a Windows 95/98 computer looks fantastic and really gives a sense of charm to the whole game. The puzzle platformer thing is also pretty done, especially when it comes to indie titles, but it really does fit the theme.

Level design is tight and doesn't pull any punches. However, I found a lot of the earlier levels to actually be harder, whereas later levels were longer but easier. Most of them felt pretty well-balanced, though the final level was a bit too long (the difficulty was appropriate, it felt like the puzzle elements should have been spread among two levels instead of one.) Fortunately the one level where I felt the difficulty was bordering on too much also happened to be the final level, so I also appreciate that the outlier also happens to be the closest thing this game has to a final boss.

There are really only two flaws to this game that I can think of. First, a few of the background elements are a bit too vibrant, making it seem as though the player could actually interact with them. A simple transparent black filter over them might make it a bit more clear what's part of the level and what isn't. Second, seeing the virus tap the keys is useful, but it's really annoying that you have to look at the other end of the screen to see what's going on. The amount of looking back and forth between the controls and the game world can feel frustrating in a way that doesn't feel entirely fair. There are a handful of things that could have been done to make this a bit easier to digest, such as having some kind of wind-up animation to show when the virus was about to hit a key, but I can also see these making the game too easy at some points as well. Overall I think there's a way you could have telegraphed the key presses without sacrificing too much of the game's central mechanic.

[Comic Reader- Art Forum Battle Royale Volume 1]

The art is great at some points and at others very inconsistent. Hard to put a rating on that as I don't think the better artists should suffer because others are stragglers. I'm also not sure if that's the point of this being a battle royale - is the competition only within the confines of the comic, or did the original forum eliminate competitors when their art was trumped by the art of a competing artist?

As far as the rest of the submission, it's pretty clunky. The page flip animation is a bit basic and could have benefitted from being just a bit longer and smoother. It's also disorienting that the frames change only after the animation finishes. There should definitely be a mute button. Most importantly, whatever zoom-in feature is advertised in the help menu doesn't appear to actually work, and this makes most of the dialogue completely unreadable.

dw bro i got u

I'm assuming the comic book panels are stored within a single Movie Clip, and you're navigating between frames on that Movie Clip? If the registry point of that MC is the center of the stage, try this code:

https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/abb76c2053be98383cbedbfe78546171

Mabelma responds:

Thank you tons! For the wonderful feedback I will definitely put it into practice for the next version, and I appreciate the code greatly! I’ll check it out 🙌🙏

[Spot & Click]

I was surprised by how well a simple concept translated to a solid game. Spot-the-difference games feel pretty dead at this point but keeping everything in motion made this much more difficult, especially due to one or two differences that were only present at certain parts of the animation (like the birds.) The first two thirds of the game went pretty fast, but the last third starts getting ridiculous. Would be nice if there were a warning before going back to the menu, and maybe an animated (and quieter) victory screen as winning can be a bit jarring - you just click and instantly see a new screen pop up. The difficulty is also highly variable. It might have been nice to have a few levels ranging from easy to hard, but given how much work went into the art and animation what you have now is probably sufficient. Spam-clicking is too useful; it would be nice to have some kind of cooldown on clicking differences (even if it's like 2 seconds) to discourage it. Offering some kind of zoom feature would have been useful as a means of looking at smaller details up-close, though I can see this not translating well given that the entire background is constantly moving.

Last thing I'd mention with regard to the game experience is that performance is a bit shaky in Ruffle. It's not bad, but the jerkiness can make it a little hard on the eyes, especially when looking for small details. Swapping the graphics from vectors to rasters by exporting and re-importing as bitmaps would probably have improved performance.

Though it probably doesn't need to be said, graphics are beautifully drawn and animated, and the lo-fi music fits. These are definitely the highlights of this submission and it shows.

[Cookie Clicker: Cookie Awaits: Beta]

Even for a game made in Scratch, a lot could (and should) have been done here. A simple background for all of the items is probably the easiest thing you could do to make this look nicer. Experience-wise, having a mute feature is critical since the appeal of idle games is that you can leave them on in another tab while doing stuff. Last note is that your CPS shouldn't be capped at 99, it makes the game come to a dead halt after you reach it as there's really no point in continuing. Balance-wise it would be nice to have the three items do something different from each other, especially since the house clearly gives you the most cookies per second per cookie (in other words, the grandmas and city are useless.)

[Stranded on a Desert Island]

Point and click adventures are fine, but I literally have no idea what's happening here. Some of the earlier frames in the game have some nice coloring to them, but it quickly goes downhill, turning into pretty basic drawings done with a large-width paintbrush tool.

The UI could use a lot of work, too. Just draw one button well and re-use it in different positions. There's no reason to be clicking a bunch of unique (but ugly) single-color, deformed arrows for the whole game. The short animations that play after clicking the "click here" buttons also go by too fast to understand what's happening. It looks like maybe a stick figure is getting on a boat? But these animations need to be delayed enough for the player to take in what they're seeing, as well as showing the animation happening slowly enough to process what's going on.

A "click buttons and try not to backtrack" game is pretty basic, but it could be decent with a bit more polish.

[Drop Cannon]

Damn, Utah's artwork never ceases to amaze. This is easily the most polished looking game in the jam and it's clear he's the reason.

The first couple minutes of this game I thought it was going to be too simple to be enjoyable, but the mechanics are added in nice and slow and ramp up into a pretty fleshed out experience. The added mechanics were a mixed bag. I never once fell for the decoy vehicles until the last level, and the drone sequences felt a little tacked on, but I also really liked that the vehicle stopped for the drone sequence - it gives the player a bit of time to catch their breath in a game that otherwise doesn't stop moving for a second.

The random all-ATV level, surprise boss at the end, or crushing the robots with heavy cannons were neat ideas, I would have liked to see more stuff like that. Perhaps having a mismatch between the vehicles and the cannons and forcing the player to equip vehicles with weapons below their weight class would have been interesting, but as-is I mostly found myself only doing this toward the end of levels if I made some pretty serious mistakes earlier on.

For the fights themselves, the Cassandra-bot (I'm calling it that because that's totally what it is) is a bit simplistic; shoot out its eyes and you're done. Having it regenerate mid-battle would keep the player more focused. Also, having the drones fly in multiple directions would allow the player to purposefully let some of them explode behind enemy lines. Or, drones could explode upon death, making it so that you could shoot them down only while they're over enemy lines? There are a lot of ideas that could have been explored here that weren't.

All in all, there's a lot going on here and even more that could have been added. It's unfortunate that the bulk of the difficulty increase comes from increased speed, as it seems like the most bland way to increase the challenge. It can also make this game a bit overstimulating, as you're watching very bright colors moving across the screen quickly while not taking your eyes away for even a fraction of a second.

I'm curious why you didn't make this a rhythm game. You've been doing this for 20+ years so I KNOW the thought crossed your mind.

My last note would be that it's interesting to see how this performs with Ruffle. Some of the later fights can take a pretty serious toll on the framerate, but as the battlefield clears up it's usually not much of an issue at all. I can't help wonder if this game is the byproduct of a stress test that you decided to flesh out into a full game, considering how easy it is to arbitrarily add in objects.

Btw, you forgot to tag this with "flash-forward-jam"