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.

Score: 7

"A Mix Bag..."

submission: Maganic Wars Final

date: December 16, 2004

In short: while the game mechanics are slightly broken, the game itself is visually appealing, which largely makes up for the lack of strategy thereof involved in the actual gameplay.

I love the blood splatters, the sound effects, the little animations, and the opponent comments. Those are the strong points of the game.

My biggest gripe is with the card system itself: it's too dependent on luck, too situational, and strategy doesn't take you very far.

For example, there are cards that are obviously worst than another one (heal+<heal+, asp+<asp++). It's excusable in a TCG when availbility is the balance factor, but here it's painfully broken as there's no good counter when your opponent, say, has a hand of 5 Dmg+18 cards.

The card set itself is strangely short of chainable cards (there's only crit. strike). The rest of the game boils down to a buff and debuff game that's strangely reminiscent of RPG fight mechanics. Rune buffing is especially unnerving since there's a card that simply max a level and the only counter is a rune-20, which you may or may not have (there's no library manipulation, meaning you take your chances on what you can have).

Give some thought to why each card exists and why, despite of all other cards in the set, the card you hold is still useful. When a card game is devoid of a resource system, all cards should have qualities that makes it uniquely useful, and that should remove people's gripes about the card mechanics.

Give it some thought. Your next work maybe your greatest yet.

Score: 9

"What a Gem!"

submission: Rain of Balls 2

date: October 22, 2004

Who would have thought that a game that involves you touching hundreds of balls can be so... fun? Sure, it takes inspirations from the "Defend the X" genre of flash games, but it's well balanced and the difficulty racks up while still being reasonable. The game demands timing and coordination, but removes the CTS inducing mouse click stress. The cost of the upgrades are also reasonable and well balanced.

The only bone that anyone and everyone will pick is the graphics. It serves its purpose, but it definitly needs less of that "pychedelic hippy rainbow" theme and something that's more serious or kids friendly.

You have the right sense of juggling playability, difficulty, and balance that are essential to good flash games... now you just need to find yourself a good artist to compliment your abilities. Best wishes and good luck on your next game!

Score: 8

"Innovative, and best of all... fun!"

submission: Angel of Death |>>Game<<|

date: September 10, 2004

I've always wanted to do something like this - a game that requires some skills, some patience, and some memorization. I think I'm most impressed by the fact that the game is very nicely balanced - the amount of crowd and their movement is just right to make you call for those "shoot or not" decisions, and I throughly enjoy that.

Using real media for the entire game is interesting, but you might want to improve that washed out look by increasing the image contrast and using shading more liberally. Afterall, all you have to use is black and white - make sure you take advantage of the full light/dark scale!

Score: 8

"I love reflections..."

submission: Fairy Sorrow

date: June 15, 2004

I was awed by some of the visual effects that you've achieved in this short movie. The reflections of the water in the opening scene, the reflection in the buildings in the top down street scene, and the distortions of the water droplet over the city background are all very nicely done. I think that I've learned quite a few good lessons on new flash techniques to use by watching this video alone.

Score: 7

"Halfway there..."

submission: Arrogancy Game Demo

date: October 24, 2003

When I first heard about the Arrogancy Game, I was really excited: there're a lot of good elements going game-concept wise, and so I had pretty high expectations of what comes out of the box.

It's hard to say that I'm disappointed, but seeing that this is a demo, there's still plenty of time to make this better.

So let me just run down all the categories and then add some notes:

Graphics: There's some elements in the game that I really liked: the reflection on the mirror obviously is a nice eye candy, and the multi layered scrolling is always nice. I'm a little disturbed about the use of sprite art, though, especially when it stands out like a complete eye sore in comparison to the rest of the art in the game. However, that is your decision... I personally feels really distracted by it but if others disagree, then go ahead with it.

Sound: Sorely missing, and the BGM is strangely low in volume. I can barely hear the BGM after cranking my system volume and the speakers all the way up.

Interactivity: The mini-game seems strangely jerky compared to the rest of the interface. The problem comes when the sprite stops moving with the mouse or if it starts striking or starts a victory pose. It could be a feature, but it does make the mini-game abyssmally annoying and hard to beat.

It might be better to have a coherent interface... if you start with the keyboard, stick with the keyboard. If you start with a mouse, stick with a mouse. If you have a key for all the other actions, it might help to have it used for attack, too.

Style: The aforementioned "pixelation problem" makes it very painful for me to enjoy the game. The character looks clean but suffers from low quality pixelation, they seemed overly detailed for the game's screen size. And you can probably pull less puns about the game's redundency in the dialogs. I'm guessing it could be a by-product of the demo, but puns like this is only funny the first time you pull it, then it gets really annoying.

Violence/Humor: The game was intended to be neither, so there should be no disputes about those.

Other Notes: The dating contest still seems rather random; it seems as if you can select the same option over and over once you found out which option works. It doesn't help that the character's facial expression doesn't change no matter what choice you make.

Best wishes. It'd be sad if a game with such great potentials go to waste!

Score: 10

"Time tested concept, perfect execution"

submission: ::gunny bunny::

date: September 5, 2003

Flash shooters are a very, very old concept - from the yore days of Club a Seal and Pico School to Combat Instinct 2/3, they all play the same way - you click and stuff dies.

So it's refreshing for me to see something new on the table - full 3D graphics! It's beautifully rendered, kept under an amazing frame rate, and the file size is surprisingly small (play the game and then ask why)!

But of course, what's a review without gripes? while the cursor scrolls smoothly within the focus of the movie (unlike *ahem* madness interactive *ahem*), the keyboard layout baffles me. It isn't really a bad choice as much as a "WTF" kind of deal.

Of course, I'm sure this invisible glitch will not stop you from playing. And you shouldn't stop playing in the first place.

Score: 9

"Now that you have the publicity you needed..."

submission: Freak : Prelude (Ep. 1)

date: September 3, 2003

Replace that annoying voice for the main character! It really stands in my way of enjoyment when a highly educated FBI agent would sound like a mentally challenged patient with speech impairment problems. It really hurts the mood and pacing of the story since his narration was basically half of the story (the other half being the 3D rendered graphics, which nobody can really complain about).

As far as animation is concerned, it's mostly fluid, but some of the cutting can seem awkward (the tentacle-tongue man somehow stood around for a second before grabbing the main character) and classic anticipation techniques are lacking (the main character knocked off a gun and punch a guy out while standing perfectly still; even if he's perfectly trained in martial arts, that was hardly convincing)... but we ARE talking about 3D animations here. The effort alone are worth the props, but the critiques are there in case you're ready to move on to the next step.

You can probably lose the character portrait on the subtitles to give the movie a more cinametic feel.

Kudos!