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JeffersonTD

67 Game Reviews

11 w/ Responses

Neat game from Nitrome again, although not as good or inventive as my favorite Nitrome game, Faultline. In any case, the concept works, and the visual style is quite nice. Some feedback:

- Dying because of not paying enough attention and not remembering a swap and in not being properly visualized in the game isn't that much fun. Expressing the current effect through some glitches not only when actually touching the block could be nice.
- There is a bug with the music that makes the music play twice, with two tracks overlapping with each other, which is disturbing. By disabling the music from the menu I get it to play only once, but can't disable the music fully. This happened on both times I tried the game, although reloading the page fixes the problem.

Ps. I didn't get how you are supposed to finish the last level. The last jump just seems one block too high - unless you're supposed to do an insanely difficult mid-air enemy-bop, which would be just too evil. Is that what you're supposed to do?

A pretty nice NESish experience. Some modern features do make it differ from the old games though:
- Enemies don't reappear if their position goes off screen.
- You get to choose whether to take a new weapon and there is a visual instruction for that.
- Bullets collide with the world, not just the enemies.

Although these make the game less authentic old school experience, they might not be a bad thing. However, I'm kind of missing one more modern thing that did exist in some older games too like Contra: being able to shoot in 8 directions.

Only one week to make? You must have had a lot of existing assets and code base to begin with...

SinclairStrange responds:

Aye, the enemy thing is just my preference and I do have some games in my collection that when an enemy is dead, it's dead for good.

The choosing weapon is actually from Gunstar Heroes because I love the fact that if you accidentally go over it, you're not punished with collecting the weapon. And same with the bullets, some games they get destroyed by walls and some don't. (To combat this, I actually made some weapons go through walls and some not.)

Not included eight directions was a time saver mainly and also I wanted to save that for my other game getting released soon.

And yes, one week. All graphics from scratch, no existing assets. Same with the coding side of things as well. I've made lots of these so I guess I know what I'm doing and how to save time in areas.

Really fun game! It makes you laugh and offers fun puzzles too!

There is a problem with the mechanic on level 28 though: sometimes as you change from Yosh... I mean hop off your ride you sometimes just don't get the fire protection. This can be pretty annoying.

Excellent homage to one of the greatest games ever!

A great game. It's not the most original game out there, but it's still more creative than most games. It features
+ appealing visuals
+ nice music that supports the atmosphere
+ levels that get more challenging through the game, but as you play you get constantly better at avoiding the obstacles.
+ a humorous ending

I played it through and there's really not much to complain here.

Here's how I experienced the game:
- At first I thought that you should be able to move the cannon left and right.
- My second impression was that it must have been a conscious decision to keep it simple like this, and it actually works nicely like that.
- My third thought, as I was beaten by the enemies, was that I'd still prefer being able to control the cannon, and shoot them in the order I want.
- But then I actually read the instructions and noticed that you can click the extra zombies for extra points. :) That's a nice addition to the gameplay and a good justification for the simpler cannon controls.

Some kind of a combo system might be a welcome addition to the gameplay, but it's a nice little game, with a well-suited choice of music!

What new does this part 5 bring?

I remembered seeing this game before, and then I noticed that (including the eastern special edition) that this is in fact already the 6th Flanders Killer submission.

So my question is: what new does this bring to the table? All of the games seem to have the same intro and the first level at least always looks the same. Just adding a new level in the end hardly qualifies as a new game. Apart from improved graphics and probably different enemy patterns and some additional links to your sites, what are the differences between the installments? To me, they seem more like versions of the same game all over again.

As for the game. Well, if you enjoy shooting Flanders, then this is perhaps for you. It's repetitive and messy though, there could be a point reward for speed (is there?) and it's too tempting to shoot the characters you are not supposed to shoot.

Aprime responds:

That's strange, if you played the previous ones you would know that the Intro is different. The first level on the other hand is the same yes, because it's the easiest level and can't get any easier than that.

As well as the improved graphics and extra levels, as you mentioned, there are also other new functions such as the weapon sway.

This game is directed to a younger audience whom of which enjoy the continuous repetitive dynamics.

Perhaps I'll give points instead of take them away when you shoot someone random, I'll do that next time. I'll also add a combo feature, that was a nice suggestion which I had already considered adding.

Nostalgic game of the decade!

What a lovely trip down the 8-bit memory lane. I wouldn't go so far as to call this the game of the century (heck, video games aren't nearly that old, and this century has just started), but it could be said that it's a nostalgy game of a decade in three different ways:
* It took 10 years to make it.
* The original games came out during a period of roughly 10 years.
* It's the most expansive nostalgy-driven game ... well perhaps ever (so far), but there hasn't been that much nostalgic material to build on for that long, so a decade is an appropriate figure to throw in there.

Here are some more specific pros and cons style comments regarding the game:

LEVELS:
(+/-) Double dragon is an appropriate start for it, but it felt awkward that you could start running (even by accident) but then always lost the power due to a lack of rage. I know that running didn't come to the series before DD3, but it's a nice addition to the gameplay, so it would have been better without the requirement for having Rage power.
(+/-) The swimming level was okay, but not that much fun. There are many obstacles which are sometimes hard to dodge but all of them just make you lose energy, and you have plenty of energy and lives.
+ Urban Chabobo was excellent. A good joke and a pretty unexpected choice for a level.
(+/-) Zeldabobo Level okay, and boss was good. It would have felt tedious to play the whole level again though.
+ I like the fact that balloon fight was included.
(+/-) The pro wrestler part felt a bit long.
+ Megabobo was a nice level, and the boss was good too.
+ Contrabobo was great. Fun gameplay with loads of small nostalgy details.
(+/-) A personal thing, but I'm not really a fan of the Punchabobo level. Beating it took me more time than beating all the other levels alltogether. I had to try it so long that I even encountered an obvious bug with it: I was facing Little Mac and had full rage. As I was about to unleash the rage I was knocked out, and after I recovered from that the game got stuck in a state where both Abobo and Little Mac are just jumping around but and you can't even pause the game anymore.

GENERAL:
+ Excellent artwork - even the custom art work very loyal to the 8-bit style.
+ Nice level transitions and cinematics.
+ Almost no bugs (the one with Punchabobo was probably the only one).
+ Music mostly fitting.
+ Some moments that make you laugh.
+ A wide selection of old games represented.
+ Lots of medals to collect.
+ Ending. :)
(-) It would be nice to be able to return to the title screen. But well, I guess that kind of emulates the NES experience of having to press RESET. :)
- I feel the Rage meter's name was a bit misleading. Now rage of course fits like a power glove when you consider Abobo, but I find it counterintuitive that getting hit lowers the rage and hitting someone raises it.
- Regarding the sounds, is there a blasphemy on level 2? Isn't that throwing up sound from the 16-bit era? :)
- The title screen music is a bit annoying.

OVERALL:
A fun and extremely NESish experience - both in good and in bad. :) It's not perfect though, and I personally would have liked to have more fun action games like Megaman and Contra (how about Castlevania, or even Rush'n Attack :)). Nevertheless for all the diversity, excellent implementation and overall uniqueness of the game it would be hard to give this any less than the perfect scores of 5/5 and 10/10. :)

This is how stealth needs to be done!

A very nice game. In the beginning it actually gave that nice feeling of discovery that only a few games are able to deliver.

I don't have that much experience about stealth in games in general, but from the experience I've had, I think that at least sometimes the problem lies in failing to find the right balance between realism and good gameplay. True realism would require very complicated rules, but on the other hand good gameplay should often be based on relatively simple, easily understandable rules.

I think many games try to reach the realism without really succeeding in that, but by trying to do so, they also make the rules too obscure for ideally fun gameplay: the player doesn't that easily know what are the things that the enemies actually do easily notice and what are the things that the enemies do not notice. Or then it might be that I just haven't played good stealth games. :)

Any way this game shows, that stealth can work in a game. Simple rules, and even though the enemies are stupid, their behaviour can be understood, and there is a clear way their area of vision is visualized.

Now as for the game itself. The gameplay combines skill with tactics in a nice way, with the luring sounds and all. The graphics are extremely simple, but that doesn't really matter much. One thing that I would perhaps include though would be some kind of a level skipping possibility, since this is a quite tough game. Of course you shouldn't make it too easy with that either. Maybe you could get 1 skip per 30 or 40 stars or something. :) But this is of course a matter of taste. As I'm writing this, I'm at level 28.

All in all, this is a nice game that stands out for being different in a positive way. Score 8+/10. If you make a sequel that somehow offers an even better gaming experience, eg. with more interesting gameplay elements, more variation to the levels, more of a plot or character, or more features like a game editor, that could very well be worth a 10.

playchilla responds:

Thanks for the review! You have very good points, will consider adding a skipbutton if I do an update.

Excellent flash game!

This is a great flash game in almost all aspects:
+ A working concept
+ Offers a real challenge (especially with the last levels), and I don't find the lack of difficulty levels a problem.
+ Great graphics
+ Even has a background story and cinematics
+ Suitable music
+ Not too long
+ Level editor, with a nice enemy spawning customization possibility.
+ Some humour

Nevertheless, there are a few things I found worth improving:

- Unless you go into the game editor or figure it out yourself by playing, one crucial gameplay element is never revealed: the fact that finishing those terminal s changes the enemies. Knowing this changes the gameplay tactics entirely, so this should be told to the player (eg. in the second level).

- Only being able to put one bomb at a time seems like an unnecessary restriction. On one or two of the middle levels bombing through the mountains was almost tedious, and the same may apply to some user levels.

- Like the second last level the last level was challenging, but could have been designed better: once I found a somewhat right tactic I didn't have problems staying alive but it took something like 7 minutes to finish the level, so it felt more like waiting.

- In the game editor I was wondering for a long time how to actually add those enemy spawn points. I clicked on the borders, but nothing happened. Then I finally figured that you can scroll the screen with the WSAD keys. This should definitely be told somewhere.

- As some minor things some gameplay visuals could be improved:
** The usage of the armory could be more clear. I tried to use it only once as I was playing the game through, but never actually used it for anything. Only now as I'm writing this review I checked how to really use it, and noticed the not-that-noticeable icon there.
** Sometimes it seemed like the bomb icons were a bit off and it was unclear which block it would explode.
** It would be good to have a clear signal when you've finished with a terminal.

I've been looking for freedom.

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