Gaiacarra's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Stack n Roll]

It's alright.

Jeez, man... a little presentation goes a long way. This thing looks and sounds like something that came with Windows 98.

Anyway the game is quite fun... it's pretty much like Solitaire, it passes the time. Also like Solitaire it seems extremely improbable you'll ever get anywhere in it. Maybe slightly reducing the number of colors would have been a good idea, or increasing the usefulness of the balls.

Your interface is a bit weird looking all around, but the biggest flaw is that there's no way to start a new game after finishing the current one. There's also no mute button, which is a must for any flash application of any kind. High score board doesn't work.

Overall: decent solitaire-style game, but a total lack of effort in presentation and UI.

rpawlak responds:

Thanks for the review. I'm new to newgrounds. The game does not seem to work properly here; http calls to my server to process the high scores don't execute and flash cookies won't work here either. That interferes with the re-starting of the game. It works differently on my website www.stacknroll.com. I suppose I would need to make a special version for it to work properly here.

[Monsters in Bunnnyland]

Nice presentation, no substance.

I can't give this any more than a 3/10, and all three of those points are for the visuals and the relative level of polish. You have a nice, fresh looking art style and a sleek looking UI. But the game has no substance.

The biggest problem is that the levels just aren't fun. Very poor level and puzzle design. You just kind of stumble through the puzzles without any real thought or challenge, do you see what I mean? End result: boredom.

More specific problems are the controls, which are frustratingly slow and floaty. The music is very poor. It gets on your nerves almost immediately and just isn't very listenable. Having good music DOES matter, particularly in puzzle games.

The level design sometimes suffers from elementary mistakes like pitfalls that you couldn't see because there's scenery in the way (as in the very first level) or ways in which you can get a character stuck and have to restart the level, which you fall into by mistake far too easily, sometimes as a result of just trying to explore the level. Mechanics, like switches and so on, are introduced somewhat haphazardly without proper introduction, causing some of the early levels to be a little bewildering at first.

Overall, just a very bad game.

limex responds:

Thanks for your constructive criticism :) Negative feedback may even more valuable than applause.

[Dress Up Raven]

Well, I won't Blam it.

Not worth a Blam, I mean it's functional and some people will probably want one of these featuring Raven, so... 2/5 I guess.

Can't really give you a good score though, I mean there's not much TO a dress-up game, and you don't have any of it. Really to make one of these worth-while, you'd need an animated and possible voiced character, at least a few dozen of each piece of clothing, the ability to individually customize colors, and a much better interface (for a start, your menus should cycle, and second of all they should be the sort of menu where you can see all the items at once rather than just looking through them one at a time).

I realize this is all probably because you didn't particularly feel like putting weeks of effort into some simple thing you were knocking together for your wife, I'm pretty much just musing out loud about what a dress-up game would need to warrant a good score in my book.

powermanX responds:

Thanks for the crit. All things taken into account, Yes i did actually sit on this for a while so it wasn't just a quickie but it wasn't on purpose either.

I did say this was my second submission to newgrounds, and was hoping for some mercy...so i gotta ask...is this you going easy ? LOL, Oh well i tried and hope someone derives some enjoyment from my efforts.. ;)

[-Brain Train-]

Not great.

Mostly I didn't feel like I was thinking. I like logic puzzles - Sudoku, Mastermind - but most of the puzzles here didn't require much thought or deduction, it was just either being able to think quickly, or having a good memory. Which is fine, but it's not very interesting, and it's not the best way to test intelligence.

The first puzzle was a bad idea. When you cover up one of the numbers, there were several times when there could have been more than one answer. Like "40 ? _ = 20"... could be minus twenty, or could be divided by two. Just as an example.

Overall though, the biggest problem is the lack of a high scores function (unless you have facebook). The game is totally worthless without a way to see where you rank compared to other people. It's like a scientific experiment without a control group. You have the results, but have no idea what they mean. You could have gone and gotten a bunch of people to play the game, and used their scores to calculate an average, at least.

Coolio-Niato responds:

The covered up numbers don't change. If between one problem and the other a number is covered up, you have to remember what number was in that previous question. It's not guessing.

[Xalaxer]

Too long.

A nice effort. Retro graphics are usually just an excuse to not make any real artwork (and they probably are here as well) but at least you did it with some style. The explosions were low-key enough to not be tacky and stupid, and the sound and music were spot-on.

The game is functional and kept me playing for a good few minutes, but it's also just boring. I'd recommend increasing the difficulty level, but then it'd just become another impossible multitasking clusterfuck.

What I WOULD recommend, instead of increasing the difficulty level, is to just make stuff happen more often. Reduce the amount of time between "events" like the middle-bar disappearing, or the background changing color, and allow people to finish the game in under 5 or 10 minutes. Every flash game has a life-span, beyond which its fun cannot be stretched and the game outstays its welcome.

Rhete responds:

"Retro graphics are usually just an excuse to not make any real artwork"

lol you got me... when I draw normally everyone says it looks like crap so I've been experimenting with lazy pixel art lately... and almost no one says anything negative. It's kind of annoying.

The reason nothing really happens after the wall split is because I wanted to make a more cerebral arcade style game where you fight until you break or the game finally kills you. I did make the mistake of not making it hard enough though, the inevitable goal is to kill the player sometime after the wall split, but I didn't want it to speed it up so fast to where you hit a brick wall and die no matter what, it had to be a gradual descent into enemy madness that the player keeps trying to overcome. I didn't really expect people to get over 500,000 points, but a few reviews mentioned breaking a million which I didn't even think would be possible, so indeed it probably should've been a bit faster than it is now.

[Death Delayer]

Problems.

I really love your game. I love the claustrophobic, morbid atmosphere, I love the game-play ideas, everything. Here's the problems.

Hit detection. What the fuck. Half the time nothing would happen when my magic pulsed, even though the cursor was right beside a scorpion or a line of ants or whatever (incidentally, how did those ants manage to build a tunnel through the air?). The second problem is the oxygen. How do I stop it going down? I tried pulsing magic around the guys mouth, but uh... nothing happened. Either I was doing something wrong (maybe you have to pulse just as he breathes in...?) or it's another hit-detection glitch. If it weren't for the hit-detection glitches I probably would have just chalked it up to a steep difficulty curve and not complained about it at all.

Now, I like the very Spartan attitude the game has towards its players: give them the basics and then leave them to figure the rest out for themselves. And I have a kind of a paradoxical opinion on it. On the one hand, I felt there was too much of that: the instructions page left me feeling kind of perplexed, probably because it never explicitly said what the magic pulses were for. But at the same time, I want MORE of that feeling of isolation and helplessness. I don't know how you could do that though, it would probably have to be an atmospheric thing with the sound or the graphics.

Which brings me to the graphics. They do their job: they're not horribly bad. But they don't do justice to a game like this. My advice is that if you made a sequel, to collaborate with someone who knows how to make really cool, stylized graphics.

Overall, I fucking love your game, but it needs a little extra polish and some glitch-fixing. I was going to give you seven, but fuck it, this sort of thing needs to be encouraged on Newgrounds. 8/10 | 4/5.

Hetrae responds:

Thank you very much for the review - your encouragement is greatly appreciated. As for the hit detection - the most likely problem is that you said you were beside the scorpion - you have to be right on top of it (where the wings connect to the back should be covering the scorpion, and blocking your view of it) - this is the same for the ants - though try hovering over the ant hil - it has a bit of a bigger detection space, and does the same thing. For the oxygen - you have to hover over the lungs. However, this only stops it for a little bit, there are plants that give you more oxygen -you have to find them. If this doesn't fix it, then try adjusting the quality.

This was supposed to be a three-series game, rising from Prolonger of lives to Death Delayer to Death Defeater. If I can find an artist that is willing to take a risk, and most likely not get paid, (and I have tried finding one) - then I will be sure to get improved graphics.

Thanks again for the review and rating!

[--Pulse--]

Unplayable.

It's pretty fun, but totally unplayable because there's no way to restart once you die. You just have to refresh the window.

Grent responds:

I unfortunately didn't notice this problem until the trial version of Flash I was using to fix the glitches had expired (what happened to the copy I was originally using is a long story), so it was unfortunately stuck like that until recently when I bought CS5. It's fixed now.

[Puru Puru]

Puru Puru is a brand new puzzle game!

Brand new? Yeah, right. Physics puzzle games are so over-done, and the "guide this inanimate thing to an exit" paradigm even more so. The game shows no originality in gameplay, visual style or anything else. It's not particularly fun, either.

KingDotCom responds:

I guess if you think the "guide this inanimate thing to an exit"-paradigm is over-done, you also criticize every single platformer for being "a character running from left to right to get to the exit"?
The game is brand new, we never claimed to reinvent the wheel (very few games do). We're convinced this one is relatively original though, especially with the new items that are introduced from level 6 and onwards (you obviously did not get that far).

[Clear Vision: Elite]

what the hell

I CANNOT HIT ANY OF THE TARGETS WHAT THE FUCK.

The whole game (series) seems to be kinda deliberately camp though, so I dunno if that's just the point. But the shooting is ridiculously inaccurate. I fired 6 rounds at that guy with the hat, Ernst Zimmerman (a supposedly "easy" mission), all of them right into the center of his head as far as I could tell, and none of them hit him.

Daani responds:

That's odd.