AdamJ2012's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sky Panda]

Cool at first, but it gets REALLY irritating.

The bounce when you land from a high jump makes the game stand out, but it also makes it so hard to be precise...

The animation on the panda is top notch. And making him sound bouncy even when he runs is a nice touch. Makes him kinda cute, witch is weird for what seems like a 40-something-year-old bear.

The level design starts out ok, then gets really bad. There are so many jerk moves. There's not much strategy, so you just kinda throw yourself at problems until everything goes your way. And then going back for secrets only to die again and need to grab the secret again to carry it through to the next level... it's a pain. With levels so tough, you'd think there'd be checkpoints or something... It's tough, but it's not the right kind of tough, ya know? When I die, it's kinda the game's fault and not my own.

And touching the SIDE of spikes hurt you? It's irritating when trying to jump over spikes, but this was probably intended.

One of my biggest problems is the wind when the starry sky is the background (especially "MR. INSANE'S"). It just hurts my eyes to look at! If your going to do that, then fill the background with something dark and consistent like stone, but not stars and clouds with parallax scrolling!!! I don't need any of that strobe-lighting in my face.

Could have benefited from more environments and more music, but whatever...

The music is ok, but it sounds grating on my ears after a while. That's not the music's fault as much as how the game uses it though.

I think I got 5/6 secrets (missing number 5) and I got the bad ending. My total time is 4:10:384.

I guess the game is... ALRIGHT?... But it's not my cup of tea.
I also would have liked to right-click the game and change the quality. It's nice to be able to do that through the pause menu though.

I haven't found many bugs though except for one. With the wind, I bumped my head on the bottom of a platform, then I think I landed on top of it. It teleported me on top of this fountain thing. I thought it was a secret or something, but I didn't see anything up there. This was just to the right of the exit, so I jumped in. I think this was during the day or afternoon...

The game assumes hitting your head on a ceiling means you landing on the floor beneath it. That's not always the case for wind though. Nothing game-breaking as far as I could see, but kinda odd.

I guess the game engine is nice, but the game itself is meh.

[Velocity Wings]

THIS GAME IS AWESOME!!! It's a fresh twist on Flappy Bird AND Green Hill Zone. And I thought I was sick of Green Hill Zone by now.

It's oddly fitting for a Sonic Game to have such fantastic music.

There's only a few things that would be nice to see tweaked.

1) Mute button. I would have used it when looking up the origin of the song, or keep the game paused in the background.
2) When you zoom in with the browser, the sky and a lot of detail stay the same, but stuff like rings and platforms grow with the browser leaving an empty white background.
3) I tried to search this on my Kindle, but the game isn't supported. Must be hard to fix that, but doing that would be a huge bonus in my eyes.
4) Sometimes the game will just stop. And if you're on the water, then jumping will actually make him curl into a ball and make the jump sound. And holding the jump button will continuously make the jump sound. If this happens in the air, then flapping works similarly.
5) And there's this one thing where sometimes hitting a clearly flat ceiling will kill you. Maybe I hit a corner of square platforms made to look like a ceiling, and the game thought it was a wall? It's very rare though.
6) When you click outside the window, it asks you to press the SPACEBAR. As an added touch, I think it would be cool to have it also be activated by the mouse. I wanted to show this to someone and let them play, but they were across the room. They didn't care anyway, but adding this would be kinda cool.
7) I guess a few more restart buttons would be cool, like "m". Sometimes I use my right index finger to press space, and I usually raise up my left hand to hit the "r" button so my other finger is still on the space bar. Maybe give us some extra custom rebind-able keys for restarting? Yeah, serious nit-picking...

EPIC Game. My biggest problems involve not being able to play it everywhere and leave the game open all the time. The game looks beautiful in low, medium, AND high quality. And the totem poles have awesome faces.

bumblebirds responds:

Hey, thanks for the suggestions!

I just made a couple of changes to the game for you. It should now scale up with the browser when you zoom in. I've also made it so you can press Space to restart the game.

Hope this helps!

[Alien Siege]

This game is... really boring. It's kinda odd how you say this is cross platform without the need for plug-ins yet my browser asked permission to use a unity plug-in.

I don't think you manage player expectations that well. You say it's like Space Invaders from the Alien's point of view, but then it's not like that. Then you say you want to make something innovative and not retro. By the way, it IS possible to be retro and innovative.

The music tried to be all mysterious and alien and cool, but it just comes off as boring and lifeless. While I think it's cool you can use a touch screen and a mouse for the same game, the User Interface has a big problem.

That X in the pause menu wasn't intuitive to me, and I clicked it out of curiosity. Sent me back to the menu and wasted my progress. Made me kind of want some text to appear when I hovered over it, but I guess that's personal.

The controls felt painfully unresponsive. Sometimes he would shoot and sometimes he wouldn't. After messing around, I found that you gain the the ability to shoot after the last shot hits a target. So it IS like space invaders but not at all... It's infuriating to shoot between 2 buildings and have to wait for it to hit the ground. Since it IS tougher to shoot between then, why couldn't you do something cool with that? Shoot down the middle 2 or 3 times and both the buildings collapse, but in the meantime, make sure they don't hit you on your way down. Or you could have this shave off 1 floor from both the buildings...

The aesthetics and visual style don't do anything for me. There seems to be a LOT of gradient here. Why?... I thought that was bad for frame rates.

The displayed frame rate goes all over the place, but hovers below 30 fps. Like 24. Frame rate fluctuations can kill a game like this that requires precision. If you're going to make the buildings so square, then why not use pixels? It might work to mix that with vector trees. I get that you think the technical side is so important because you're a developer (and it kinda is), but the people don't care that much.

When you said it was reverse Space Invaders, I thought I should focus on the sides so they don't move down so quick. Silly me. There is a technical quirk that gives a sliver of strategy.

When a building goes down (after it's animation), it checks if there are any more buildings and if not, you win. If you take out 2 buildings in a row, it's the 1st that confirms the win, so you land quicker. I try to focus on the buildings farthest to the right. Otherwise, I drop down before I win and I lose points.

For a strategy game, there isn't much strategy. You can buy shields at the end of the level... but the price goes up every level. And I get bigger and bigger packs of money per level. That means buy ALL the shields you can because your money is about to be worthless. Why would I ever sell a shield? If the price went up and down, then there'd be a reason. Buy cheap, and sell when it's expensive. Like a stock market game. But no.

It'd be awesome to get more alien pods to shoot with you so you can grow up to be space invaders. (Could my frame rate handle that?) When you win a level and land to make a new alien base, you could buy more aliens (I guess you would actually just make more but whatever).

The game gets kinda tough, but not really fun. No power ups, no alien buddies, nothing to change the game play. No progression, except the linear progression in the useless monetary system. No really fun building designs or different building types. Why can't I shoot down a hot dog stand? No humor. No over the top action stuff. The level design doesn't have any good psychology behind it. And the only narrative the levels have is that jerk move when there's a high building right when you start and there's no way you can reliably hit it. ...What is this supposed to be?

I don't think you made a beloved game here. You just made an engine. And this proof of concept proves it works.

I think of Graphics and the technical side of things like an empty container. You fill it with aesthetics. Aesthetics (what you DO with the graphics) is what people want. The more graphics you have the more Aesthetics you can fit in there. But the empty space in the container is bad. This game feels empty.

I hope you can use the engine to make a truly wonderful game.
But this game... at least it was entertaining for more than 5 minutes.

Wait... This isn't your first game or first set of games? According to your account, you've been making games since 2006. You seem to like making games with terrible controls and slow frame rates. Controls are important to me, so I guess I'm not going to like the next game you make.

If you make the frame rate half of what it was before, can't you just double the movement speed? Your pacing in general needs work. Here's a video that might help.

http://youtu.be/5LScL4CWe5E

(The games I looked at from you are Castle Knight, Spud in the Sea, Gario and Bario Brothers, Nerd Zero, Pocket Fighter Tournament, SquirrelFartyPants, Squirrel and friends, Rhinoball, and MatrixOverloaded.)

The laser sound in this game isn't an awful sound affect, and that's good. Try making an engine where players can do more than 1 thing at a time. (Like moving forward and punching, or moving forward and shooting.)

Ya know, your weird Mario clone would be much better if you either made the frame rate higher or made the movement variables bigger. Is that why this game implies an obsession with frame rate? The frame rate isn't the goal. The goal is the good game play and the frame rate got in the way of that. Please be aware of that. It IS possible for Flash to detect RIGHT and UP at the same time. I've done that before In ActionScript2.0

Hopefully something I said was helpful...

didinko responds:

Hi Adam, thank you for your wonderful review here...
If you have some spare time, I have one little exercise for you. Find the 10 worst games on newgrounds.com and play them to completion - in fact you can pick my games - they all have very low score, terrible gameplay and laggy fps. This is correct — the worst you can ever find. I’m talking about the real crap. Then write a review for each one of them pointing out what’s wrong with and what’s right. It seems to me you simply don't have enough experience doing so. Anyone can enjoy playing and writing about good games (I wonder what your comment will be about Flappy bird for example), it’s the real professionals who put as much effort into the bad games as the good ones.
Friendly advice thou - don't get too technical when talking about features or functionality - your lack of basic knowledge on programming crops up. As I agree on the frame rate (I shouldn't have placed it on the screen at all) the rest of the points were based on prejudice and no understanding on the game industry in general.

[Rooftop Challenge]

Pretty cool game, but it wouldn't be nearly as good with the awesome music.
And with this kinda game, lag can REALLY mess you up.

I don't know what's up with the textbox that shows your current distance, but the bottom is clipped off. I can still see it, but it looks kinda weird. I guess some fonts are a little weird at different window sizes.

I played with low resolution while it was still starting up, but then switching to high made the loading smoother?... Idk what's up with that, but ok.

Good job. :)