jamus-se's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[MahJong Connect]

Complete Instructions For Those Curious Minds...

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.

[Element Saga ch5 - DEMO]

Comments and Suggestions...

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.

[Maganic Wars Final]

A Mix Bag...

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.

Maguas responds:

I'm reading carefully all of your comments and I agree with many of them.

In particular Jamus you are right when you say that the game needs a more clear strategy factor and more unique cards, but I don't want to change the basics of the game so I'll have to think about it very carefully. More balanced cards are needed too...it happens too much often that you got a card that you never use, that's quite anoying.

Anyway I want to clear something about the deck:

1.- The deck has from 24 to 35 cards (depending the level) and all of them are different.

2.- When you receive a card it disappears from the deck.

3.- The enemy has 5 cards from the same deck as you. ONLY 5 CARDS! . He only decides which of them is better to play (depepending the level too). Someone said he had 5 Dmg+18 cards...that's impossible. It is possible that he has a +18 card and when the deck is shufled he receives another +18 card as when it shufles the deck includes even the cards of the table (I'll have to change that I know).

4.-The deck is shufled randomly so you have the same chances as your opponent to get a good card.

Finally I have to say that I think I don't deserve such a good rating...there are lots of fantastic developers out there...thanks to everyone! The game is not concluded at all and I have lots of things to improve, this is only the beggining, but I enjoyed so much playing my own game (specially on my palm) that I wanted more people to know about it and I wanted to know what people thought about it.

BY THE WAY...this is for the people who have found the secret button on the "i" at Raistlin's shop...well done! ;D ...in future versions you will be able to find a little key on the floor...I'll keep you informed...SEE YOU!

[Rain of Balls 2]

What a Gem!

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!

[Angel of Death |>>Game<<|]

Innovative, and best of all... fun!

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!

[Arrogancy Game Demo]

Halfway there...

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!

[::gunny bunny::]

Time tested concept, perfect execution

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.

[Blood Shed (Revised)]

The Boss Didn't Work :(

I really liked the camera "pan" and the overall art style - having a leg shot death animation missing seems strange but I guess it's really not THAT important; Not being able to get pass the boss is the only thing that ticks me off... while I'm at it, the health indicator seems to disappear a few scenes into the game also; you might want to look into that.

[Defend Your Castle (Full)]

It was pure joy until level 20.

First of all, the bugs:

1 - Well, not exactly a bug, but when the first pawn came out after 10 seconds of wait, most people will think the game doesn't work and quit...

2 - If you are using a spell icon while the level finishes, you'd lose the mouse cursor afterwards.

3 - Loading a save game puts you back with 1000 points of HP (with the maximum intact).

The game was fun, fast, and furious until I start getting magicians - once I'm able to cast area blast once before a pawn (any pawn) reaches the gates, I can simply blast a group as they come without fail.

Then it gets even more ridiculous when I start to be able to blast and convert before a group reaches the wall. I'm converting people like crazy; I can get about 200-300 converts per level.

Then it becomes completely insane - by the time I collected about 500 archers and 180 magicians at level 22 (craftsmen are useless since nobody ever touch the walls), the castle is just about self sufficient - all I have to do is sit and watch and occasionally blast a few people if I feel malevolent or convert a few if I feel benevolent.

Which makes the level ending very lengthy and exhausting. Because the unit upkeep counts down by 1, by the time my upkeep goes to 10,000 it literally takes 3 minutes for the countdown to finish...

The enemy suicide bombers also feel unfinished - as an experiment, I built my wall up to some 50000 units and just let my units do all the work; it turns out that the bombers hurt my enemies more than my castle - especially when you can left click and all the units near them go boom. For the most part, when they pop up, I don't even have to bother casting spells - I just click the bombers and everything dies.

Fun thing to do though - try and collect about 50 converts and send them all out into the screen (suicide bombers), and watch the fireworks lag your machine like hell.

When the game was about throwing people to their deaths while occasionally casting a spell and converting a pawn, it was mad fun... but then afterwards, the game degrades into a broken click-fest.

No words of complaint from me, though. Quoting the famous webcomic RPG World - "It's a single player game... we don't need balance!"

[Slacker 2 (Preview)]

Just Finish It!

Everything looks great so far, even though the story is a *little* pointless (but what story isn't?). A little more sound effect would be nice but what you already have isn't too bad either; the dialogs are a little dry right now, maybe if the dialog actually contributes more to the puzzle (as in, you might need to ask a few questions before you know what a person wants).

Or, just finish the game and we'll all be happy.