Score: 10

"Defense games designers take note!"

submission: Base Defence 2 Monster

date: September 18, 2005

Now this, THIS is what a call a defense game done right. The following are essential points that make or break or defense game, and this game got them all:

1) Difficulty must scale up but not exponentially over your ability to defend yourself. Example of failing this point? Just look at all the armies of invincible archers/autocannons in the other games.

2) No mouse click spamming. You'll notice that a lot of people did NOT complain about their CTS hitting their wrist, that is because the game only demands a reasonable (read: comfortable) clicking rate, and damage is more related to WHERE you click other than how many times you click it.

3) Streamlined upgrade structure. I want all of my upgrades viewable from the same screen, and all of them equally useful, thank you very much. Having a shit load of mostly useless upgrades (and this is happening MORE often recently, and it pisses me off) does NOT make your game better, alright?

Oh, and bonus point for being able to upgrade anytime. That really smooths out the flow of the game. Catering the upgrade schedule to the player and not your enemy (i.e. waves) makes perfect sense now that I try it out myself.

Other mentionable touches include the automatic distribution of hp+1, ammo, and bombs between levels (because you'll have to buy it anyway otherwise, and getting those for free speeds up the action). The solution for the out of bounds cursor is also very, very nice (unlike *certain other game* that admits the problem then do jack shit about it).

*exits soap box*

Score: 5

"Complete Instructions For Those Curious Minds..."

submission: MahJong Connect

date: August 17, 2005

1) Your objective is, obviously, to eliminate all the tiles.
2) Like the Shanghai variation, you eliminate tiles by selecting pairs with the same picture.
2) Unlike the Shanghai variation, the rules for legal elimination are as follows: the two tiles must be able to connect via a line that makes 2 or less turns. If the line hits any other tile, then the move is illegal.
3) There's a variant in this instance of the game where tiles are shuffled up or down as they are being eliminated to clear the center. The original rules prohibit this, making the puzzle much harder. Maybe this rule will come back on the higher levels or something, I never finished anything beyond level one.

The more you know.

Score: 7

"Comments and Suggestions..."

submission: Element Saga ch5 - DEMO

date: June 19, 2005

I really like the direction this series had been going... the controls really tightened up over the different versions and everything is almost perfect now, there's a small bug where enemies may occasionally get stuck in the hit frame in midair, but I'm sure it's something that'll get fixed eventually.

Some suggestions:

- You might want to use keydown/keyup to get your inputs instead of lastkey capture, because lastkey capture counts repeating keystrokes, which breaks a lot of my combos when the game unintentionally registers repeated keystrokes.

- Air control can use some tightening up... it's really annoying when some of the air attacks (hell raiser, eagle strike) gets comboed into another eagle strike instead of a heaven fall (which connects much better). To make things simple, you might just want to restrict air attacks to spinning crescent/hell raiser/heaven fall... since you can recover from the jump fast enough to continue the combo anyway.

- The timing window between eagle strike and dragon's fury is too close - I often pulled eagle strike instead of dragon's fury (you can see that I don't like eagle strike very much). maybe you should make dragon's fury forward+d+d and eagle strike no-direction+d+d?

- The weapon feels very tacked on right now.. it doesn't do anything that continuous smacking can't do. Maybe it'll become more useful when you have more than one enemies on the screen at once.

Anyway, keep up the good work.