BazzMann's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Poring!]

Very decent...

This was a very decent game, good coding, nice control, bubbly graphics, bouncy music and it was fun to play!

But it didn't have much replay value - no real levels from what I saw, and no real bigger-picture objective. I didn't play for that long, so maybe that's why - but I don't think there were any powerups or anything... it didn't say so in the instructions anyway.

Including powerups/changes of scenery/bosses or something always make games that slight bit more playable, as long as it's not too tacky. But this is very good work - well done!

[mole attack!]

Keep it up

Effort, nice-looking graphics, playable - qualities a game should have on Newgrounds.

I hope to see more of your work as you continue to improve!

[Bank Shooter4]

Feedback...

Problems I found:

Firstly, when people die, you can continue clicking on them repeatedly so they keep resetting and re-falling down, which looks really weird. If you want to be able to shoot up dead bodies, fine - but in order to make it more accurate, make the people a movie clip, and have different animations at different frames within the movieclip - if you click once, say - it plays one animation. Then if you click again, it goes to the next animation. Or you could just have one button, and when you press it, you can't press it again (i.e. make the animation out of movieclips, not buttons, just have one starting button). not sure if any of that makes sense...

This one's simpler to explain - Hide the damn mouse pointer!! It's so crappy when you make a "nice" cursor in Flash, but still have the Windows one floating around. If you look under "OBJECTS" in the Flash actionscript, you can find Mouse properties, and hide the mouse.

As for gameplay, I think music would be nice as others said. Also - FAR too easy - perhaps raise the framerate to make enemies move faster, or just reduce enemy movement to speed things up. Oh, and it'd help if enemies actually fired at you once they actually do get a lock-on. Otherwise - you should include net ammunition, so you can actually run out, and perhaps a better load-mechanism, e.g. pressing spacebar.

Improve on this, it can actually go somewhere with work.

[Play]

I liked this.

I didn't love it. Firstly, even though the click interface is all very well, it'd have been nice to also assign some keyboard keys to those buttons (e.g. using QWEASD for each different drum or something), that way you could overlap individual sounds and make some better beats.

Also, the idea of background beats was great - perhaps add a few more options? But I did like this movie....

[below average pong game]

Good pong...

I myself made a table tennis-esque game. It was bloody hard to make - I think this system could be improved somewhat- and even though you probably know your problem do to with the bone-thing, I *might* have some input that could help...

Basically, I assume you're using a standard hittest with the ball and the 2 paddles - and the ball changes angle according to the Y coordinate values. Well basically, if the X coordinate values are too high (i.e. the ball goes too fast) - sometimes the ball will "skip" past the width of the paddle and not count it as a "hit". 2 ways to solve this - 1) you could easily widen the paddle, i.e. make it THICKER not LONGER. 2) you could slow down the ball - but that'd make a boring game.

Other than that, I did like it... I wondered how you made your system capable of changing angles of hitting the ball - the way I done it was a bit poor, I cut the paddle into segments, each corresponding to a different coordinate changing value (or "angle") when a hit test is run... a bit simplistic, so I'd be interested to see if you did it differently, or more accurately, better!

Sorry - I got carried away there. Good gaem, you get 3 from me.

SPLANKGY responds:

thanks for such an in depth review!
kudos to you, and thanks from me!

[SuperBallBounce]

Good attempt

This game was well-made, there are some major improvements that could be made to the game as a whole (I'm not mouthing you off, I'd actually like to see this game go further) - but I do like it. I'm just here to constructively criticize...

1) - you should allow the user to start the game by hitting the ball, as opposed to it coming from the centre, diagonally right - it's a bit random, and you have to play it twice and lose before you even know WTF's going on!

2) - Angles - I know roughly how hard it is to make a game like this (check out my early table tennis game!). A way you could explore is changing the trajectory of the ball according to where it hits the bat... a way of doing it is to "segment" the bat into multiple sections, and the increments of the Y coordinate increases/decreases depending on where the ball hits the bat (i.e. multiple hit-tests). I tried this, but since my bat-shapes were fiddly and awkward, I couldn't do a great job with it

3) Speed of the ball - I didn't deal with this very well myself, but if you were to do it, it would most likely involve changing increments of the X axis, i.e. "speeding" the ball up by moving it forward at differing rates. But this might complicate things.... just an idea.

A few other points which aren't as important to me, but might make it more playable: Sound - the music was... not fitting the mood in my opinion. And it was also low quality - if you included a track selector, and an option to turn sound off, it might help. Also, include in-game instructions, and the "3...2...1" screen would be better if it was transparently placed OVER the main screen, so you could see the blocks/bat while the countdown took place. And lastly - the mouse idea soemone else suggested might be nice, but I personally prefer using the keyboard- you could make an option for obth to select at the beginning - by slightly altering the current game in another set of frames, and at the beginning give a choice to jump between the two.

Sorry, I got carried away with the constructive comments, I meant this to be a short concise review! Hope to see improvements, don't quit! Just add some more levels, maybe even weapons if you get confident, though I can see the difficulty in that!

[cantankerousTANK]

I LOVED IT!

This was a fantastic game - I loved the total randomness that comes with the scrolling, and the variation in ground and air targets... it was totally playable for a good 10 minutes, and to me that makes a great game - I would and could have played it for another hour or so, but you know... us students have work to do some of the time!

I love this style of game, especially intergrated sooo well into Flash - the controls were very smooth, and everything just... fit together perfectly! I want to thank you for showing people what is possible to create in Flash!

[Christmas Flash]

Very festive, Raphael!

I might be a bit biased, since I was sent a personalised version of this - but this is a very nice Christmas flash movie! Well done Raphael - you managed to intertwine a very nice backing music with an actually fun-to-play game, and some very nice pictures!

Da-RaZZMaN responds:

Yes yes bazzman! It was very nice, and unlike all these newground losers you deserved the personalised version! (and I don't mean the losers that gave this nice reviews, they were nice losers!)