Score: 10

"Awesome!"

submission: Megaman - Rockin in paper

date: October 26, 2008

The concept is highly original, the video is brilliantly executed, and the humour is great. Also, as a fellow AfterEffects user, you used the program well but didn't go over-the-top with it.

This is a great tribute to an awesome game. In a word: fantastic.

Score: 5

"Interesting idea..."

submission: Brackenwood: The Game

date: October 11, 2008

...but it's broken. Not only is it FAR too hard for the average player, but after finally getting to the final stage and managing to get through without hitting anything, I was told I'd failed. I repeated the stage to check I hadn't accidentally hit something, but no - you simply get to the end of the stage (when all the blocks have disappeared) and you automatically fail.

Anyway, it's an interesting idea and I liked the challenge of learning the block positions and timing, but it's a shame you can't complete it and I imagine the majority of players will be extremely annoyed with the difficulty.

Score: 2

"Some advice"

submission: SiloZen Adventures Pt 7.5

date: April 20, 2008

I've been watching through some of the SiloZen series and I figured it's about time I offered some constructive criticism. However, I'm not going to talk about the plot too much because, while I don't like it too much, I realise you're quite set on keeping this series going and I realise a lot of people like this kind of series, so that's fair enough.

Anyway, I think you really need to start thinking about progressing your skills as an animator and finding a consistent drawing style. The scene with all the characters in perfectly highlights your need for the latter - every single character seems to have a different style of drawing, including ones that are blatantly traced (most of SiloZen's body is obviously copied from somewhere else), ones that are fully-drawn but quite crudely, and some that actually have stickmen bodies which frankly makes no sense. Going back to the animation itself, you still seem to move the characters about with really basic tweens and this makes the fights unbelievably choppy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to criticise you for the above, I just figure you should take a little time out and really practise your drawing and your Flash skills. You seem to be making these animations at a really rapid pace and while you're adding superficial improvements like slightly better backgrounds and more traced stuff, what you really want to be focusing on is using frame-by-frame animation and drawing everything properly. I mean come on, you've said above that this animation took you 'forever' to do, yet judging by the date you submitted SiloZen 7 I'd say you actually only had about a month to make this one.

Just give yourself more time, that's all. The people who like your stuff on NG aren't going anywhere, so why don't you spend a good couple of months (or more) on SiloZen 8? It'd be awesome if you could learn stuff like perspective and drawing characters from different angles, as you'd then be able to put more depth into your animation and it'd just generally make everything look a lot better. Doing voices for the characters would also be great, although that might be a lot to ask.

One last thing - you may already know this, but if you import a song into Flash and then use it in a cartoon, it doesn't matter if the cartoon itself only has about 20 seconds of that song in it, the WHOLE THING will be contained in the finished swf file. This means that even small cartoons (like this one) can end up with ridiculously large file sizes, so what you want to do is get an mp3 cutter (there are loads of free ones online), cut out the part of the song you need, then import that into Flash. The size of the swf should be dramatically reduced and it'll mean people won't need to load 10mb for two minutes of animation.

So, there you go.

Score: 2

"Just a bit flawed"

submission: Tech-Avoider

date: March 11, 2008

I like what you've tried to do here, but there's just too many problems with it. First, the game is just too hard - don't get me wrong, I quite like a challenge in a game but it's far too easy to dodge something only to be stuck in a position where it's impossible to escape losing. Equally, the cursor is just too big and makes it stupidly hard at times to move between falling blocks.

Second, you HAVE to sort out the sound - I have no real problem with the choice of music, but it plays over itself every time you press 'replay'. There are plenty of really simple Actionscript tutorials that will show you how to make a sound start playing and not repeat itself.

Third - and by far the most important point - the whole 'move the cursor about to dodge moving stuff' is possibly the most cliched type of game you get on Newgrounds. I'm not saying you can't make a fun game using this idea, but it's been done hundreds of times before and in many cases much better.

Anyway, it's a brave attempt at something new so just work on something with more depth and iron out some of the technical problems.

Score: 6

"Really surprised!"

submission: The Shootout: (old)

date: March 1, 2007

This, by all means, should have been awful - you've never used Flash before, the concept is horribly cliched, and the sound is really bad.

However! You've clearly got a really good idea of how to animate stickmen, and there was hardly any tweening in this whatsoever. For a first Flash movie this is great - sure, the whole 'stickmen having a fight' thing has been thousands of times by now, but this had a lot more effort put into it than most first-time flashes that use the same concept.

Keep it up!

Score: 4

"Hmmm"

submission: Tetris Craze

date: February 21, 2007

Technically there's nothing 'wrong' as such with this submission, but the problem is there was a different Tetris game submitted a few days ago that was awesome - it had loads of different songs, showed you what the next block was going to be (something you should definitely put in any future Tetris games), had various difficulty options to choose from and was generally very smooth and very polished. Furthermore, the filesize came to an astounding 64kb, which is Flash compression at its best.

Thus, the fact your Tetris game is 2mb+ and is easily the weaker of the two games means it's hard to give it a good score. However, you've got the basic structure of a decent Tetris game down, so with a few extras like being able to see the next block, some different music, perhaps a few neat backgrounds and a smaller file size you could be on to a winner.

Good luck!

Score: 7

"Not too bad"

submission: Tetris 64k

date: February 18, 2007

I usually rate Tetris games on NG pretty low because, let's be honest, it's just the same thing over and over again. However, this one just seemed to work really well, had a decent skill level thing at the start, and is probably the first Tetris game on NG which has been suitably compressed - 64kb, for this, is very impressive.

Good job!

Score: 0

"Oh for goodness' sake"

submission: Scandinavia

date: February 18, 2007

I am getting so fed up with this growing trend on Newgrounds of awful Flash animator groups who vomit out the same awful type of animation day after day. It's not funny, it shows absolutely no skill and it's a trend that is frankly ruining the integrity of Newgrounds as a serious portal for talented artists. You may think it's totally hilarious how idiots let this pass through the portal, but don't think that not getting blammed means you're somehow 'beating the system'. You're never going to have a huge audience, you're never going to actually achieve anything through these animations and you're just gonna be hated by anyone with the smallest amoount of intelligence.

Score: 0

"Hang on..."

submission: Plantation(suffocation)

date: February 17, 2007

You submitted this yesterday and it got blammed.

That is pretty much all that needs to be said.

Score: 6

"Hmm"

submission: The Melcrosum Person Pt.1

date: February 17, 2007

I agree with the last review - some of the jokes are extremely drawn-out and because of this they lose all impact (the worst of all was the bit with the guy holding up the signs outside the rock place). Furthermore, the cartoon seemed to sporadically cut between serious and random. Indeed, after watching the first scene I didn't even realise this was supposed to be a comedy until you had the 'should we go to the next scene now?' bit, which seemed completely out of place.

However, as a first submission this is surprisingly decent and because of this I'm not going to try and get this blammed. For example, the artwork - while certainly not award-winning - is pretty good, especially for a first-time submission. The sound is also ok, and you've actually managed to use a lot of music and speech without the filesize going above 2 megs, which is great seeing as so many first-time Flash users have no idea how to compress a movie.

So yeah, keep it up, just try and really focus on refining the jokes and the script. Comic timing is essential to making something funny and if you drag jokes out for too long or simply repeat them over and over again they stop being amusing and detract from the overall impact of the cartoon. You've made a good first try, but it's heavily flawed - work on it!