Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Shore Acres 2]

Wow. I really can't vouch for graphics that are a dozen years old but you've got a hell of a game here. Some font choices and coloring were pretty poor regardless of system capabilities, and the music got pretty repetitive at times, but you have a great concept.

The inventory is nice and limited - makes a short game like this easier. I think it's interesting that you have areas and sub-areas accessed through clicking things on the landscape. Some of the animations really help ease one area into another and give this Flash an extra layer of polish. Overall I really liked this, though I got totally stuck with the vending machine and soda - I wouldn't have thought to acquire soda without having money first. The storyline is tacky but I have a lot of respect for what you accomplished using such an old version of Flash.

[Sift Heads Cartels Act 3]

I'm starting to think Sift Heads has gone the way of the dinosaur. You've got a fun game here but the game has definitely lost its roots. As always, the graphics are stylish as hell but the gameplay is starting to get a little rough around the edges. First of all the cursor and camera pissed me off, especially since the quality was locked on high; I experienced a good deal of lag while playing.

More importantly, the gameplay just didn't seem that rewarding. Simple point and click, shoot up a bunch of people, repeat. Most of the difficulty came from figuring out where to go rather than tough shoot-outs, and that's a big problem. Also I noticed I was able to open fire on all of the people in the prison, though they didn't die. Kind of glitchy...

I have to say I prefer the old Sift Heads.

[10 (NG Medal Edition)]

Interesting concept, definitely interesting. I think it might be cool to involve multiplication and division as well just to mix things up. Honestly the game got boring pretty quickly and I think that the level design was wholly unnecessary; there should be a way to make Flash generate solvable levels on its own by reversing a completed puzzle. I think an arcade mode with randomly created levels would be more interesting than having set levels, especially when most of the game is guesswork.

[Hot Throttle]

Wow... What to say about this? I like the game. Great graphics, music, story, everything really. There's a definite style going on here and it makes the game hilarious and enjoyable.

What this game is missing is a good tutorial. I have no idea what any of these items do; I just mash a bunch of buttons when I feel like a weapon would hit another contender. The game is also sometimes unclear about what is a path and what's a wall; coloration doesn't always point out where to go or what you're allowed to 'offroad' on.

Aside from that I liked the game a lot. The graphics and story had me on the floor laughing, I only wish it was longer.

[Galaxy Golf]

The concept is fun, I like the control scheme and the little prediction line thingy. The add-ons like teleporters, buttons, and sticky ground were also nice ways to freshen the gameplay. The biggest issues I noticed while playing were slight lag (can't I change quality?) and the lines appearing almost invisible sometimes due to the background. Couldn't you have changed the colors from white to inverted? That way they would have always been clearly visible.

As far as level design goes, I was a little put off by how oversimplified everything was. By looking at the par and the map, you can easily tell what each shot is supposed to do and in what order. The game becomes less about 'can you do this in X shots' and more about 'can you make X correct shots in a row?' Seriously, games are encouraged to be a LITTLE more complex than that.

The music's kind of bland, too. Couldn't you have made the soundtrack a whole playlist or something?

[Squirrel Squash]

Nice. I played this back in... 4th grade, was it? The speed factor in this game is really cool, and I like how you can fine-tune your runs with repeated laps of the same level. What I don't like is the needless utilization of left and right movement. This game is meant to be fast, and regardless of whether or not it helps your score, I never used the left key while playing this, nor did I ever lift up on the right key. You could have easily gotten by with a two button system for the speed burst and jumping.

Also, I noticed longer falls sometimes making me fall through the floor. Bro, what?

As far as actual gameplay goes, I feel like this game could have used more levels and just stood to be longer overall. I also didn't like that it was kind of tough to gauge how to get the best score. Yes, we see how much acorns and crowns give us. We don't see just how much MORE we benefit from getting a few extra seconds. Yes, it's nice seeing the score multiplier kicking in every second, but it's kind of cryptic and not really helpful when you're busy running your ass off.

One last annoyance was that the screens switched whenever you hit a border. This made it hard to predict just when to jump unless you memorized the course. A panning camera would not have been as stylish, but it would have made the game a lot more fair.

Overall a fun game and I love the speed, but there are several issues getting in the way of the replay value.

[Carve n' Share]

Nice drawing application, I like the art and the features, everything works really smoothly and the sharing feature works too, which is awesome. I only wish that you could zoom in to draw more precisely, as you don't actually know where your cursor is on the screen other than it being inside one of the pixels. I also wish you could half-carve to create a pale orange surface on the pumpkin. Otherwise really great.

[Billy Suicide]

I saw this on a website talking about depression, citing this game as potentially offensive, and I have to say I absolutely disagree. This game is a brilliant reconstruction of depression, and it really hits the nail on the head.

First of all, the player is immediately given a feel for how small the world is. Confined only two a four-room apartment, the variety of things for Billy to do are somewhat varied, but all done while inside, and it creates a very constricting, claustrophobic atmosphere. The fact that your financial and mental health are constantly decreasing also shows that just moving from room to room is difficult, expressing the lack of motivation someone has when they suffer from depression.

Most of all I love all of the bars and urges. The player is 'supposed' to finish every task, but at the same time is always under threat of some kind of timer running out. Whether it's the "Did I leave the ____ on?", an urge, or just the depletion of one of the gauges, Suicide Billy pressures you constantly and gives the player a feeling of being under stress. The fact that your financial and mental health is always a trade off, and especially that later in the game the bars seem to both be going down no matter what you do, instills a very strong sense of helplessness and futility in the player.

Adding onto the activities that Billy does, the fact that you see only a small animation for what he's doing makes the player feel very distant from the actual activities they're having Billy do, which is yet another accurate portrayal of what a depressed person feels.

Though the actual gameplay is quite simple, the variables (what Billy can do when he's drunk, on anti-depressants, etc.) are fairly complex, and literally every mechanic in the game is specifically designed to make the player feel what the character feels. This is further exemplified by beating the game, at which you realize you've gotten Billy through a grand total of ONE day after all of that running around. I also like that Tarah's 'reward' is his main motivation for getting through the day; it adds on to the whole thing about your world feeling very small when you play the game.

Onto the more aesthetic parts of the game, I really love the graphics here. The video animation works surprisingly well, and the environment is also very crisp despite looking like a bunch of photographs. There's a very distinct style here, and it works perfectly for what you're doing. It also reminds me a little bit of older Newgrounds fads, and makes me feel kind of nostalgic. The lines that appear over the screen are also a cool little subtlety that makes everything seem just a little bit less real.

The sound is absolutely excellent. The sound effects provide great ambiance, and despite not really being music, they're incredibly effective at making the player feel stressed, fatigued, and generally overwhelmed not only by the urges that pop up, but also by the activities that you do willingly. The little bits of music you hear while listening to music and playing guitar and bass are also really good, I'm surprised you haven't put the full tunes up on the Audio Portal (as I hear that you composed all of those clips yourself).

dlasal responds:

Thanks so much for your review. I'm always happy when I see that someone understands Billy Suicide, and that it still has some relevance even after so many years have gone by. Oh, and some of the music is available here: http://davelasala.bandcamp.com/

[Pico's School 2]

Good prank. You did a really seamless job with the graphics/music/dialogue - I can't tell that this wasn't done in 2002, it looks really authentic. Since I didn't play this on April 1st, I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be a joke (should have scrolled down).

Music is catchy and at least I got 150 free and easy medal points. I noticed I had to play the game several times before two of them would unlock, which is kind of a pain in the ass. And of course I'm mad that I didn't get to play an awesome sequel.