Glaiel-Gamer's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Space Pips]

Flawed

Ya the engines good and the graphics are flashy but there are some serious flaws.

For one, you lose all visibility in the direction you're moving. This is bad because you are most likely to be hit from the front. Please pan the camera so that you can see where you're going.

Another, enemies spawn way to close to you, and it gives you almost no time to react before they hit you. A lot of the times I was hit I didn't even see what it was that hit me because it spawned close in front of me and the camera didn't have time to catch up.

Third, the collision box should be slightly smaller for everything that can collide with you. I get "barely touched" a lot, and that should not count as a collision, especially when you always have to dodge so close to everything, if something brushes the edge of me it shouldn't count as a collision. You need to give some leeway there, it'll make the game feel much more fluent.

Fourth, I know the rising cost of health is "original" and all, but there's a reason why they didn't do it before. You end up punishing people for mistakes made while learning, and the price of healing 1 hit is tremendous compared to the amount you heal. If the heal healed you completely full then rose its price, that would be ok. But having it cost 100 pips to heal you 10% is ridiculous when coupled with the unfairness of the collision, camera, and spawn points.

Its not a bad engine but you need to do a lot more on polishing and balancing the gameplay, not just the graphics.

[DUCK SIM 2008]

Amazing!

You should enter this in the IGF next year, might give You Have To Burn The Rope a run for its money.

[- Darkness -]

Nice idea

It's an interesting idea, but it couldn't really hold my interest very well. I'm all for interesting ideas, but even if one is original, it's not always going to turn out to be fun.

I appreciate the work you did for this though, but it needs something more to actually make it fun.

[Elektric Drawingz 3]

for some reason

It won't register my mouse clicks. Did you handle mouse clicks in a MOUSE_DOWN event or a KEY_DOWN event and check for the key with key code 1? If you did the latter, then you need to fix it, cause the mac version of flash player doesn't recognize the mouse as a key.

liam responds:

I set a bool to true with MOUSE_DOWN then if thats true on MOUSE_MOVE it drew (basically), rather than setting the event in mouse down then removing in mouse up, but, still, yeah. You told me it works now anyway, strange >_< I'll look into it :)

[Penguin Skate 2]

*Raises Hand*

I know where you got inspiration from!

Anyway it was a bit short, and the cutting out of the music when you weren't collecting canes was almost annoying, but the was was good overall.

You probably could have spent a little more time on it. If I had to guess, you spent no more than a week on it.

Anyway I'd love to see more cohesive minigame compilations from different people, it's a fun genre to work with.

However you took the easy way out and did separate cutscenes instead of in game cutscenes. DAMN YOU FOR DOING IT THE EASY WAY!

Coolio-Niato responds:

Haha well of course I got the inspiration from you guys =)

Minigame compilations are really great to see, I remember the first one I saw was by Buzzwerd and TrueDarkness, Prehistoric. I really want to see more stuff like this as well.

And sorry for taking the easy way out for the game cutscenes =( I'm not as awesome as you glaiel :P

[Ball Revamped :: Duo]

Well it's an OK tribute

The problem is there isn't anything original about it, and the game you're tributing is available for free on the internet as it is. A tribute needs to be better than the original, or a free version of a console game, or have a unique twist, to justify a good rating. A simple clone of a flash game, while it might be good practice, isn't very impressive as a submission.

I know you're only 11 though, and I started flash when I was 10 or 11 too, so here's some suggestions and tips.

1. The level design you have is very bland and boring. There's not much difference between them, they don't get that much harder as the game goes along, and the powerups aren't used in a very creative manner. You need to work on a difficulty curve, but also work on implementing powerups in a creative way instead of a "They're just here for no reason" way.

2. If you decheck "Use compression" and set the sound to RAW in the export settings, it won't take 15 minutes to export for testing. Make sure to reset the fields for the final builds though, or you'll end up with a 40 MB file.

3. Try some original game ideas.

AsianSpark responds:

1. I know it's boring. I think i will redesign it. =/
2. 5 minutes only...
3.Im TRYIN!

[Vector Runner]

Fun

You should get used to AS3, it's a lot quicker with math and won't take a minute and a half to multiply 2 numbers.

[[Orbitron]]

Not bad

It's not a bad game, but here are the issues

Your ship should be able to shoot at angles too, it would make it a lot less frustrating. Or it should at least move faster. It takes too long to dodge or get into position to kill the yellow ones that it gets frustrating.

Bombs should destroy bullets. When using one to save myself nothing's worse than just getting hit with a bullet after you use a bomb.
When you die you should get a few seconds of invincibility. One time I died twice in a row cause of this.

The upgrades now. The turrets are cool, the walls are cool, but the "upgrade shoot rate" and "upgrade power" have such a miniscule effect one at a time that it makes them pointless. There should at least be a noticeable change each time you upgrade so it doesn't feel like a waste of money. You need those upgrades at their full level, but getting to it costs so much and doesn't show much effect one at a time. Same with power.

Also, the turrets are by default wayy too weak. They shoot slow enough, there's no need to make them less than the ships power (and the bomb turret should start off at least twice as powerful as the ships turret, i don't see why it starts off weaker).

Sometime's I'd kill an enemy right in front of me and still die. Don't hittest against dying enemies, only alive ones. One time i used a bomb and an enemy BELOW me killed me when it exploded.

Overall not bad but it needs improvements.

tyfunpw responds:

Thanks for the comment.

For being able to shoot at angles: that would totally ruin the need of placing your walls strategically, as you could perfectly shoot around them. Yeah, we could make the ship faster, but you shouldn't chase after every enemy and it's intended that way.

About bombs detroying bullets, yeah I see the point. I'll consider to change this. But you really do have a short period on invincibility after you died. Thats when your ship is grey and not white.

The upgrades are quite useful at the later levels. It's just very carefully balanced, since they're permanent and buildings are not. I promise you, after 2 or 3 points in the ship upgrades, you'll definitively feel the difference.

Hmm, I never felt that the turrets were too weak, on the contrary, I consider them quite powerful. I mean, if the turrets were more powerful than your ship; there wouldn't be a reason for you to shoot at all ; )

For the last point, I never experienced that, but I'll fix it, when I find the bug.

[Blockout]

A bit TOO simple

The engine was good, and the concept was overused.

The 3D aspect was neat, however since the whole thing was just grid based you could have saved a lot of CPU power by pre-rendering the blocks instead of drawing them every frame. Rendering caused noticable lag for large amounts of blocks, when it really shouldn't have.

Also, the gameplay itself was wayy too simple. The grid didn't offer any room for large levels, and the difficulty of every level was about the same. 90% of the levels I beat in 10 seconds or less (my final time was just over 500 seconds). A puzzle game like this needs special blocks and some unique twists to keep it interesting, otherwise it's just a generic puzzle game.

[Ball Revamped 5: Synergy]

Excellent

Well jmtb, it's pretty good. It's hard to pick out what's wrong with it.

I played it through once. And the "stargate" level was a pain. I would die without hitting the walls, it took forever to beat cause I kept freaking dying.

Also, this game is in serious need of an AS3 makeover. You seem to love effects and such, and what better way to add more effects than to upgrade it into a much faster script. Think about it. You could do 3000 particle particle effects, or bitmap distortion to distort the screen, or have spectrum effects be an obstacle in one level and have power downs that make the sound go crazy.

Think of the possibilities!