Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Kill Bubbles (ppg)]

I had to watch this on YouTube because the file doesn't seem to be working.

Anyway, this Flash has a very nostalgic feel to it, which makes sense given that it's over a decade old now. The graphics are pretty good for their time; in fact, the vectors look great, very crisp and colorful.

The music selection, in particular, Closer, also make this feel very stylized and fit to the time period in which this was made. The poor animation and sound effects could have been fixed, in my opinion. Frame by frame animation was possible with early versions of Flash, wasn't it? I'd say the sounds could have been better too, but I know online sound libraries weren't as big or high-quality in 2001 as they are now.

Overall this is pretty good. The over-the-top violence and bad humor, plus the shooting bit at the end, make this very reminiscent of the types of games that existed back in the very early 00s.

[400 Years]

Ugh, yuck! What the hell is this?

Alright, first up the graphics are nice, and I like the textures and landscaping, but the first issue here is the pixel art. Sure, it's not bad, but the style just does NOT work at all. You need to pay more attention to fine detail, and then add in a lot more background graphics and animations. Because of how slow the character moves, you need to awe the player and give them something to look at as they dawdle their incredibly slow way from point A to point B. The animation could also use some work. But most of all, you should not be using rectangles as water. Make sure the water is hugging the ground, otherwise it looks tacky and horrible.

The music is good, as most things by Kevin MacLeod are done well, but it gets so horribly repetitive, it would have been nice if you had interspersed it with atmospheric sound effects, like rustling leaves, harsh winds, gentle breezes, or birds chirping. Perhaps a different music track for every season would be nice, too.

Gameplay is by far the most flawed part of this game. The instructions don't tell you squat, which leaves you floundering in the dark, and if you screw up you're penalized by having to wait more... And more... And more! There's a difference between a slow-paced game and a stupidly tedious game. I've played through Vagrant Story and consider it to be one of the greatest games of all time, so I know what it's like to spend a lot of time learning a game and warming up to unconventional gameplay. This game is just done badly.

Overall, the biggest change this Flash needs to rectify its incredibly slow gameplay is a more detailed and immersive environment and atmosphere. On top of that, perhaps doing SOMETHING to speed up the gameplay might help a bit. I found myself stuck at the puzzles and at a couple points facepalmed when I looked up the solutions. I think it's because all of the waiting fried my brain. You could also hint a bit more at directions, or help cue players in on WHERE to wait, because a lot of the time I would end up waiting in the wrong area (and it seems like if I'm not in the right place, it won't matter how long I wait).

I guess the last reason this game ticked me off is because the ending is ridiculous. It doesn't explain anything, expand on any plot, or have any buildup whatsoever. Just 'jump down here and then you win'. Come on! You saved the world because you blocked an active volcano? Get real - even if a rock were able to block an entire volcano AND seal it (which is impossible), it would still only increase the amount of pressure and contain the buildup for a larger, more powerful explosion. Besides, lava melts everything except for diamond, and molten magma will melt even diamond.

Overall an interesting concept, but did you not test this AT ALL and realize how boring it is?

[Bloons Tower Defense 5]

Two steps forward, one step back... The graphics and overall interface are as they've always been: Attractive, simple, and functional, although somewhat less so now that you've come up with all of these upgrade paths and the experience bars. The gameplay is kind of frustrating to me, though.

I like the overall increase of upgrades. It puts a lot more emphasis on the strategy of the game, and allows players to make a lot of different choices. What I don't like is that you have to unlock these upgrades through experience meters... To me, this just seems like a way of making players wait longer, making progress more linear, and making that progress arbitrary. Although the system works, it has a certain 'feel' to it that I'm really not sure I like.

It feels a lot like the Bloons series has gravitated a lot more toward the mobile market, which isn't necessarily bad, but means that the gameplay is appealing to a different audience, which means that a lot of features have been added, but what these added features COULD have been has been dumbed down a bit.

Overall what annoys me is just how I feel like the game is holding my hand, giving me a pop-up every time I unlock a new feature, or flooding me with easy levels. I finally quit when I lost because of the lead camo level, which was just about one of the cheapest ways to get a game over. My overall response to this game is that it's reached a point where now it's just trying too hard. The game is still good, but the spark is gone now.

[Rock Hard Coliseum 1]

Nice work, Stone! I'm really loving the animations here. (Did you do all of them? The body types look a lot like yours...) Everything looks great from movements to particle effects to the sounds. This entire submission is just loaded with polish, and it shows. I also feel like you did some really great pairings, putting together fighters with similar styles which really made the animations more interesting.

What annoys me about this is that it seems like some kind of collab that was turned into a bunch of quicktime events at the last second. I'm not too happy about that. "Guessing" who's going to win, and then participating in short mashing sequences just doesn't do it for me. I'm also not really sure what the exact point is. If a QTE is helping the player you didn't vote on, do you just sit and let them fail? Or are the outcomes all predetermined? What determines how the mashing works? Is the difficulty of the QTE dependent on the actual poll from the original battle? And what the hell do I have to do in order to boost my score up to a 7 from a 6?

The whole game aspect of this just doesn't work out for me, and seems like a cheap way to label an animation as a game. Still, the game looks pretty, and looks are the meat and potatoes of this anyway.

Stone-Steven responds:

Hey I appreciate the lengthy comment. Yes, I did do all of these myself. I'm not much of a coder myself, so I tried to give it a little extra interactivity.

The meat and potatoes is the system of calculating and storing the users selections of characters in the RHC that really makes the user interact with the project as a whole. Even deciding what will happen next in it.

[Super Joe]

What a stressful game.

What you've got here is decent, but just feels unpolished. I can understand that this was a warm-up since you're getting back into programming, but there was a lot you could have fixed. I liked the puzzle element of each level being different, but the sheer difficulty of some levels oftentimes made it feel redundant. The old blood splatter and sound effect also roused some gamer PTSD I had from playing Stickya Adventurya.

Overall the gameplay suffered from minor mechanical issues, length, and difficulty. One really obnoxious issue I had was the last level, where the fan simply wouldn't trigger on some of the bullets, killing me. Another one that had me for a while was the level with ice, which had me struggling because momentum was changing so much. On top of the mechanics screwing with me for the right reasons, I also noticed certain jumps not having as much oomph in them as they should have. Little things like that made a hard game tougher for the wrong reasons.

Sound-wise, I feel like you just tossed in some Doctor Who remix and an old death sound effect without much thought. There aren't even sound effects for jumping or bullets. Because of the difficulty of the game but the length, the song got really repetitive, really quickly. A small playlist of different songs, especially something from the Audio Portal, would have given the game variety.

As far as graphics go, I can see you either used placeholders or slopped together stuff that was barely better. I'm not picky with graphics, and I like how easy it was to play because of its simplicity (nothing distractingly flashy) but you definitely could have done a bit more. The backgrounds are fine, but stick figures could have been bolstered a little bit more. You're not bad with graphics, but even if you didn't want to do anything, you still could have ripped some sprites from Smithy's Quest or something. Hell, you could have even used Tricksy!

Overall fun gameplay, but got really frustrating later on. It would have been really cool if you could go back and user new abilities later on, especially like using different items for different levels, so the same levels would be easier or tougher.

EggysGames responds:

Yeah I do agree with a lot of that. It is a bit rushed for a small game and my artists have all been away so I need some new ones for graphics instead of reusing old stuff.

[V-tech Rampage]

Decent. This game was surprisingly enjoyable but I still found it to be kind of annoying. The graphics, being an 8-bit throwback, did their job, although it didn't look nearly as pretty as it could have. The sound, while not bad, seemed simplistic to the point of quiet. In a game that's supposed to simulate real-life events, sound effects for footsteps, screaming, outdoor ambiance, and scribbling in classrooms would have made the game feel a lot more 'alive'.

Now that the aesthetics are out of the way, I'll go into gameplay a bit. The first level kind of annoyed me, since I didn't know who it was I was supposed to be killing and I didn't know what she looked like. The slow movement speed amplified how annoying it was to get your bearings when playing. The second level had its own annoyances too, not showing very clear objectives and also having the dialogue appear in real-time when you made it to the slot. On top of the dialogue getting me a game over, I also failed several times because I didn't know what to do, even though I hit S by the mail slot. The area where you can hit the S button should be a little more lenient in my opinion. Finally, the last level was fun but only had one annoyance, that being that shooting people behind walls required you to move behind a wall to make it transparent. Little gimmicks like these picked away at the gameplay and ultimately killed most of the fun out of it.

As far as the subject matter goes, I'm not sure what I can say, since I'm not the most knowledgeable about the Virginia Tech massacre. That being said, this game seems like a simple recreation, nothing more. I didn't notice any terribly offensive humor, and the violence seemed more to be a simple recreation of history than anything else. Overall, this game struck me almost like some kind of educational game rather than something that was made to be offensive just for the heck of it.

Needs polish, but still good.

[Thoreau Redux]

"Why do you keep trying?"
"Because my friend made this."

Dude, where do I even begin on this one? The graphics and animation look good, I won't lie about that, but everything else is just pitiful. You move so slowly that I had to resort to tapping the up and down buttons repeatedly to break dance or bunny hop my way to the next trap in order to entertain myself. The sight ability is only useful for some abilities, and the limited uses really makes it annoying to look around without overusing it.

But by far the biggest issue with this game is just that each time you restart, you still move so slowly that you end up taking a long time to redo a small portion of the game, only to slightly misjudge a jump or react just a little too late and have to do it all again. This game is far more style over substance, and even then the style is degraded each time you redo the same thing again (and again).

Overall this game is slow, boring, difficult, and repetitive. I just can't seem to enjoy it at all, and the ending left me completely unsatisfied.

[Peter Bell Saves Christmas]

Damn it, this wasn't as good as I was hoping... Still fun, though. But you'd have thought between Christmas of 2011 and 2012 you could have done a little more fine-tuning.

The graphics look pretty good, with the simple style you used in the Lazer Collection making a comeback in full color and improved animation. The animation is similarly simple but surprisingly good. While I didn't mind the visual aesthetic of the animation, though, some of the choppy motions made the control scheme somewhat deceptive, and I took a lot of damage because the walking animation was just so odd.

The plot wasn't bad, though it was a little predictable, and uses the same style of humor from all of your YouTube videos. Though humorous, I never found myself laughing out loud at any of the cutscenes.

The music is pretty darned good, reusing a lot of the musical motifs from the Deck'D series, but it really sucks that the style has gotten kind of stale, too. This isn't a huge issue, though, and the voice acting and sound effects more than make up for it.

Now, onto the most important part: Gameplay. Well, I didn't know Darren could program, but maybe the real answer to that is that he can't (sorry!). The combat mechanics work, but tend to be very frustrating.

The first issue here is that you just don't get a very clear indicator when you take damage. Sure, you can always look at your health bar, but the 'impact' is missing when your character recoils, sometimes fooling you into thinking you aren't taking as many hits as you actually are.

The second issue is that grunts are just way too easy. From very early on, I just learned to bait enemies into following me until they were parallel, then repeatedly jumping and spamming the attack button. Since I was able to use jumping to eliminate that window of opportunity at the end of a combo, I was able to remain largely in the same place while still pressuring enemies with attacks that made them flinch. This made the non-boss levels extremely repetitive, and the one time I did die during a normal level (it was at the very end, damn it...) I just felt annoyed redoing it all.

As for the bosses, I felt these were kind of botched, too. Much of the time I was able to use the same jump-attacking pressuring technique to prevent bosses from nailing me, and the attacks that did hit felt cheap for several reasons. Some were just too fast to realistically dodge, while others were hard to read and basically spelled death if you hadn't seen the attack coming from the very beginning.

But by far the biggest problem with the bosses is that you have to read them too quickly. The 2nd boss is a great example of this; the differences between his attacks (high flick, low flick, short range attack, charge attack) were so subtle and brief that the developers are really the only people that could have possibly felt reading them was easy. The polar bear racing level was a lot like this, too. The twitch-reflex thing just didn't float my boat, so overall I beat the game feeling rather empty.

One last thing I'll mention about the spirit gauge is that it just isn't very useful. I only ever felt myself using it during boss battles, and even then I found it easiest just to use normal attacks until the boss was low on health and then just using Singing Spirit to bullshit my way past the boss while they were attacking most frequently.

Overall this game just doesn't feel complete to me. I think the biggest issue is that you didn't have enough beta testers, or your beta testers got too accustomed to your game as you produced it to be able to give you good feedback on how the game would appear at face value.

[Ereban Dawn]

Frustrating... When I clicked this I was expecting something like Limbo. And it sure seemed like it at first, but I can't tell you how many times I just ended up going around in a damn circle. Plus the ceiling collisions are a little too aggressive; I missed a lot of jumps because of that. The gameplay just isn't fun or intriguing, all I noticed was a platformer that gave you no directions. Overall it was an exercise in frustration.

As far as sound goes, this may be one of the top reasons why the game wasn't as scary as it was meant to be. It seemed a little too loud and techno-like. Just taking music from another horror game or film would have been much more effective than using something on the Audio Portal. Penderecki is really the only person you can reliably go to for scary music, but you could have also used the Giygas Theme or something. Some kind of sound effects would have been nice too.

Now, graphics... Not good. I like the black and white thing, but it needs polish. Lots of it. There are some nice transparent fog and mist images you can find (just Google "mist filetype:png") that you could animate floating across the screen to give it a more grainy, textured look or feel. It might also have been a good idea to slightly blur the ground you're standing in, and possibly showing slowly moving environments in the background. For a black and white game, it's important to up the ante when it comes to effects and atmosphere. I'd also point out that the animation is rather poor, and the character could be drawn much better. There's only one playable character, right? So put some time into animating him!

Last, I'll address the scare value. Taking the whole concept of shadows and a limited line of sight, it looks almost as if this game was inspired by my Flash story Gemini. This is not entirely bad, but the game has some serious balance issues. The spectre guy that floats around comes too often and drains things too fast. Plus he doesn't even have any sound effect. When I first started the game I tried seeking out potential hazards just to see what dying was like. In the end it felt more like I was playing Platform Racing against the spectre than he was actually chasing me. The visibility penalty is annoying where it should be creepy. The only thing that really bothered me was when my line of sight dwindled to almost nothing. And that was because I thought something would jump me if I lost. When I realized it just gave a silent game over screen, I decided to quit. No point in going through the same boring landscape again only to fall and climb my way back up.

The biggest thing this Flash is missing is polish. It needs more atmosphere in looks and sound.

[Sift Heads]

Reminds me of Sin City. Like you said, the voices suck, but you chose an excellent soundtrack (if a bit repetitive) and the graphics are excellent and really set the mood, especially with the black and white thing going on. The gameplay is kind of simple and easy once you memorize things, but this is something you fixed in later installments.

Overall this was a good game but feels unfinished. Obviously a bit dated, and far inferior to the sequels.