superguh's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Me and My Dinosaur]

urgh

I was sold on the concept right away. But like a guy below me said, consistency is the real problem here. I finally gave up on the sunset level after dying around 30 times from a ceiling that would spontaneously boost me sideways into the spikes, and once I found a way past that, dying at least 10 times when the game lagged and the boy continued walking for a solid second after I had released the key. I wanted to beat your game. I wanted to see the ending. But I wasn't having fun and it wasn't worth it anymore. Please, for your next project, don't release a good idea with (frequent) game-breaking bugs. We'll all survive an extra month without your game. Hell, Blizzard waited 11 years with Starcraft 2.

[Multitask]

Seriously though.

Incredibly original. Intuitive controls. Fun, addicting, and difficult.

There's one thing I didn't like, though. When trying again (which I have frequently), the beginning is really boring, and it doesn't get particularly interesting until the third game. Perhaps a better overall structure would be to make it so you have to perform X number of mini-games simultaneously for, like, 30 seconds, but once you do it unlocks the next level, which has more/harder mini-games. That would give the game a better sense of progress and variety.

P.S. High score: 101 and counting!

[nanoTank]

A good idea

but it's brought down by rather poor design. It's fine that you wanted to make a heavily physics-based game, but all the moving parts rarely contributed to the game. Instead they got in the way and brought to the fore how obnoxious it is to maneuver the tank precisely.
I feel like you fell in an awkward gap between two kinds of fun games: high mobility games, and precision shooting games. On the one hand, you tried to make the tank a flying vehicle. On the other hand, you frequently required me to shoot at faraway locations, but when I did, the tank would fly backwards across the level because of the ridiculous recoil, and I'd have to grudgingly trudge my way back across obstacles I'd already cleared. So... if you had just picked which kind of game you wanted this to be, I think it would have been more fun.

[Vorago]

Good story.

This flash was especially interesting for me because I've put a lot of thought into a Revelations based video game in the past. Revelations has a lot of very interesting raw material to work with, and it was fun to see how you took it in a completely different direction than I would have.
The story's the real strong point of the game. The art was minimalistic but good, but many of the animations were rather choppy. The pointing & clicking was pretty intuitive as far as these games go... but I've long since given up trying to beat one without the walkthrough. I think the mini-games were the worst part by far. A good game, mini or otherwise, requires traps that are avoidable, and the collision detection on the car game was so poor that it was merely an exercise in memorization. I think, on the whole, you would have been better off without the mini games at all.
Overall, I thought this was a great submission. The story was certainly enthralling and remarkably deep for a flash game. Well done.

[Da Pink Knight]

Frustrating.

Here's the deal: Games can be frustrating and still be good. This is achieved by giving the player a sense of progress. The inclusion of character leveling is an easy and proven method of doing this. When playing your game, it felt good to know that I was unlocking more powers as I succeeded.

But here's where you failed: you went and included leveling down! Sweet, I'm think, now I can double jump and dodge that God-forsaken saw attack. "JK!" says your game, "Level down attack! Now you can't!" All of a sudden, there's no sense of accomplishment to leveling up, because it'll just be taken right back. That's incredibly frustrating. It's no coincidence that hardly any successful commercial game doesn't include leveling down: It's NOT FUN.

There was one other big problem, too. Generally, it's a bad idea to let the enemy hit you while you're down. Again, it's just frustrating. You could have solved this problem by including a more potent recovery move. Maybe tap up or down to roll back into a fighting stance, or press shield just as you hit the ground to keep your footing.

I realize most of my review seems full of vitriol, but it's worth pointing out that those really were deal-breakers, and that the game in general is quite good. The art design is great, the story is humorous, the basic physics and controls are intuitive... there's so much this does right. I really wish the gameplay wasn't so frustrating.

MindChamber responds:

The Leveling up and down is done all the time in games, Its done in shooters side scrollers platformers and almost anygame that gives you an upgrade you lose when you get hit or killed..

And if you dont like enemy A.I hitting you more than once when you are down, then dont play, Streetfighter, MortalKombat, Tekken, Virtuafighter, or any other game..
ever.

just because you didnt like a game mechanic, or you suck at doing something in a game, doesnt main its a "fail" just means you suck,

[A Crow in Hell 2]

Marred by some bad decisions.

This game is fun, for the most part. It's hard, mostly because the controls are extremely touchy at first. That's excusable, because the controls are very tight once you get used to them. However, there were some things that really hurt an otherwise enjoyable experience.
-Reusing the same graphics. There is a time and place for copy paste, but this is not it. You had this whole "exploration of massive, dilapidated dungeon" thing going on, and then there's these cookie cutter items. Even one or two variations would make the environment seem much more real.
-Hit detection on the crow. I realize this is tough to program, but there wasn't any obvious way to tell which of the crow's body parts counted towards colliding with the walls.
-Those vent things. There's ZERO indication of how close you need to be to a vent for it to affect you. This was really frustrating, and resulted in blatant trial-and-error gameplay, which sucks. Always.
Aside from these three things, I really liked this game (and I beat it!). The art style is great, the interactivity of the environments is cool, the music is nice and moody, and the gameplay is solid. Good job.

[Type It II]

Sure, it's simple.

But it's TRYING to be simple. And you've done a fantastic job fleshing out a good concept into a well polished and expansive game. My biggest complaints:
-I would have liked to quit back to the parent menu rather than the root menu from the game over screen.
-I wish there was more than just the one song. Some songs are so good in the way they subtly change that they can carry an entire game. This song is not one of them. It would have been so simple to switch to another loop after, say, 10 repetitions, and it would have vastly improved the experience of the game.

[Bars of Black and White]

Intuitive.

Here's my problem with point and click games: They often expect people to make connections so obscure that the vast majority of players will have to use a walkthrough just to get to the end of the story. Why not just watch a video? Either way, you're in it just to see what happens.

That said, this point and click worked for me. I think you really managed to do more than just tell a story. The barcodes really helped lend the game a feeling of exploration, and that had me eager to explore every room thoroughly and find all the hints. And there were enough hints that I could figure out easily enough how to progress through the whole thing. Overall, it was a satisfying experience. Good job!

[Two Rooms]

Pretty good

The gameplay is engaging and just the right difficulty, hard enough to be a challenge but easy enough that I could make it to the end. I liked the random sketches, you had space in the hint box so you might as well fill it with something, right? I did encounter a few glitches; sometimes one of the pieces just randomly disappeared. Also, the graphics were mostly good but it would have been nice to see unique art for the largest and smallest blocks, rather than just scaled versions of the other blocks.

[:the game:]

Wow!

This is a textbook example of how far good writing can take a game. Seriously. You just jump off a platform for like 35 out of 40 levels. And yet, I played it all the way through, and laughed the whole time. Good job.