JeffersonTD's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Alien Splatter]

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.

[Flanders Killer 5]

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.

[Shadowess]

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.

[Line of Fire]

A great action game!

This was a fun game to play.

Pros:
+ No unnecessary and boring upgrade bs.
+ A proper challenge and nice quite balanced gameplay.
+ Nice graphical style.
+ Arnie speeches gave the commando feeling to it.
+ Didn't exactly go that much into how the scoring worked, but I suppose it works well. Took a while to notice that you lose points for using your weapons though - the idea is still good: it's more fun if you aren't encouraged to shoot all the time.

Cons:
- A little bit of more structure to the levels wouldn't be bad. Now it was pretty much constant mayhem on screen. The only exception to this was the latter part of the last level.

Chrispington responds:

Good review! The score works like this:
If you die mid level, you submit the score you had for that one level.
If you finish the game, you submit all three level scores combined!

[Gap Monsters]

Nice, simple concept with a lot of potential!

It's a nice, different concept: a rather simple basic idea, yet something that requires a bit of getting used to, and on the other hand has the potential of offering real mind-twisters. It's especially fun in a way when you have the pixels represent some well-known characters and in order to pass the map, you'll have to mess its/his/her appearance.

ps. This is the first NG game where I see user levels like that. So how do you add your level to newgrounds? What am I missing? All I saw in the editor was the export and import buttons.

Nutcasenightmare responds:

Thanks!
Also
To submit a level, you first have to play and beat your own level, to prove that it has a solution.

[The Bros]

Quite good for Flash Mario but wall jumps are bad!

In the group of FLASH Mario games I've encountered, this is actually relatively good. You just didn't copy the sprites from the originals, but recreated the characters with quite nice graphics, and you've taken some personal directions (eg. with the swimming) that don't destroy the basic concept of Mario. And the controls are mostly okay, except for those wall jumps, which - believe me and the other reviewers - is indeed a problem here.

As a reply to a comment regarding the wall jumps problem you asked:

"Though I wonder if if those commenting on wall jumping ever played New Mario Bros and share a similar opinion there?"

Well now I'm a bit confused. This puts me to question are we really talking about the same games? I have played and enjoyed New Super Mario Bros and definitely share that opinion! In New SMB the wall jumps are close to being the easiest wall jumps in a game ever! In New SMB you don't need to time the wall jumps as you automatically slide against the wall and can jump of the wall whenever you want. And when you jump you always have a proper jump. So I'd say the wall jumps work perfectly there. Then there are many games where wall jumps are more difficult than in New SMB since you have to have the right timing, but even in those games, once you time the jump correctly, you'll usually do just fine.

In this game the biggest problem with wall jumping doesn't seem to be timing: you can quite easily do one wall jump to reach a slightly higher sledge (like in the short introductory scene). But the problem is that usually the wall jump is just a very small nudge upwards (and I think that's the thing people are having problems with). Once you study the controls a bit you can find a way to leap away from the wall, but still the jumps reach very low, and going short distances is already a trouble. And by the way, I found the same, if not even more troublesome issue problem with that swim-wall kick.

The bottom line is that the basic controls (which the wall jumps are a part of) should be easy and intuitive. In this case the wall jumps are neither. The difficulty should be reached through challenging enemies and situations, not having to cope with difficult controls. Difficult controls just make people frustrated and annoyed.

If you can fix the wall jumps (and maybe redesign the levels accordingly a bit) this could be quite a good flash game. Still, the fact remains that the quality would still be far from the real Nintendo Mario games. Thus, like you said in the game description, maybe it's better to work on a new personal idea next. Then you can have the best existing implementation of that idea! :)

Berkman responds:

This is the best kind of review; thanks Thomas.

I, "personally", found NSMB's wall jumps difficult. Not because they were hard to do, but because they were so easy to do by mistake. I mean, think about it - you're usually holding right to travel right and if you jump by mistake against a wall (whether you thought you were going to land and came up short, or near the bottom of a wall and preemptively hit jump), you fling yourself in the opposite direction you were holding. </opinion>

You have a valid point on the jump height and i'm glad someone brought it to my attention - I can definately make the height more forgiving. I can run through the whole game without dying and never failing a wall jump, so I always have a fog of bias on these things since i'm trying to create a challenge. That and, unfortunately, I don't know anyone who enjoys 2d era gaming, so its always hard to test.

And this is something true of every game i've submitted: someone complains that something is too hard and some people think its fine. It is so frustrating because i'm inevitably making something too easy for good players or too hard for more causal players. I grew up in the time of Ghosts 'n Goblins, so for a game to offer challenges that can result in death or frustration aren't *always* a bad thing. But they certainly can be, and I think you've made a solid case as to why this instance is.

Again, great review. Part of the review is explaining what about a mechanic makes it frustrating so that I know what to look at.

[Bast Attack]

Waves or some special menace would make it better

I don't mind a simple game, but this has a couple of issues:
- It remains constantly the same. More and more aliens come, and there are different species, but it just gets more intense each moment till you die. Waves would be one option to make it more interesting. Another option would be some kind of more specific and threatening menace that you're hoping to avoid.
- Once most of the buildings are destroyed you can keep the basic aliens away by just shooting a bit above the last building(s). That makes playing the game feel stupid.
- The big bombs felt very powerless. For the regular enemies they are just more unhandy to use, but surprisingly they didn't really seem to be effective against those stronger ships either.
- At least I often find it difficult to enjoy a game where the controls are very restricted. So since you cannot move the cannon, there should be something really special to keep the player interested.

Superpoo2 responds:

Thanks for the feedback, all constructive criticisms are welcome. The waves ideas is a good one, would provide more structure to the game and then allow me to better introduce tougher units as well as break the game up so I could introduce some kind of upgrade mechanism.

[Frustra Bit]

An okay dragging game.

You have two skill levels and separate highscores for each, and failures add up to your over all time. Nothing new but it works.

I found an issue though. I wouldn't call it a bug but rather a mess-up in level design. If you hit an enemy on a safe ground you keep spawning back on top of the enemy and dying.

OlegAntipov responds:

In this case press [R] to restart level... :-/

[Annoying Shooter]

Annoying Shooter With A Pointless Invisible Wall

I think the issue AcetheSuperVillain is referring to is that for some weird reason you cannot move to the right side of the screen. There is no obvious reason for that, so it has to be a bug, right? But how on earth can a bug like this be unnoticed by the creator of the game?

xxmantisxx responds:

Look, what happened was this: I made the game smaller than this, thinner anyway, and it messed up, as people said, and made it go off the screen, then i fixed it, re sized the window and all of the frames, but in my rush to fix it i forgot to reposition the boundaries for the cursor, so i went back and updated it just now, so there you have it, enjoy.

[Sonic Scene Creator V. 1]

Animations? More?

Your description says: "It's a basic tool to make animations, photos, and more."

Where are the animations and "more"? It's dragging a small set of items, and that's it.

SceneCreatorHQ responds:

Srry man but if you drag it you can make only an "Animation"