B1KMusic's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Codeine Cowboys [v2]]

It's like a fusion of Pacman and Hotline Miami, though not quite as good as either. Wall collision is a bit janky, too. I got stuck on walls quite often.

MoeAnguish responds:

That's fair.

[Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle]

Very interesting choice to make a court drama visual novel in RPGMaker. The latter element nearly turned me off of the game until I realized that it the VN aspect was the dominating element. Why do I have a problem with RPGMaker? Because it lowers the barrier to entry to the point where anyone can make an "RPG", including (and this is very often the case) people with zero game design experience, who don't know what they're doing. Game design is a skill that has to be learned, and no matter how many unity store assets you throw at it, no matter how many engines you provide that make the game creation process as easy as possible, bad game design is always evident. There are no shortcuts.

In any case, I don't see any obvious flaws with the game, I can't really dock points for legal inaccuracy since court drama was never intended to be accurate, the only things that really irked me were small UI/QoL issues like the lack of a 'load game' option alongside the 'save game' option and the fact that I wasn't allowed much room for creativity, for example, why can't I make an objection about the fire mage costume on the basis of relevance rather than try to justify why she'd wear it? Saying that someone must have started a fire because they're wearing a fire mage costume is obviously grasping at straws and would never hold up in court, it's completely ridiculous. I am deducting a half-star for the story, because I found a lot of it to be unrealistic or limiting in player choice, and it came off as a cheesy court drama that you'd see in the form of a parody in a completely different show, e.g. that TV show that Lrrr wanted finished in Futurama. I'd rather not go too much more into the story. thezipper100 already tore into that. My focus here is on the game's design, which is competent. I care a great deal more about how it *feels* to play a game than the graphics, sound design and story. Here, the story does sort of affect the game feel, thus, considering this, the minor UI issues, and my experience with the game as a whole, I think 4/5 is more than fair.

Overall, a solid demo and one of the best entries I've seen in this month's panel so far. Right up there with high stakes.

[Deck Adventurers - Chapter 1]

Running this on chrome 86.0.4240.198 and the game crashes on the loading screen over an overflow of the call stack on the part of UnityLoader.js. This may be out of your hands, and I suggest either filing a bug report with the vendor who provides UnityLoader or optimizing your game to try to mitigate this issue. Since NewGrounds will not let me post a review without a score (I still maintain after all these years that NG needs a comment section for non-reviews), I voted the median, i.e. 2.5. The score does not reflect my opinion of this game, as I am unable to play it.

[Bright in the Screen 2nd Session]

To say I'm disappointed that you just dug up a project that's been sitting on your hard drive for a decade and uploaded it to ng because, idk, maybe you were feeling nostalgic and wanted to push it out before flash goes away forever, would be the understatement of the decade. I played the original back in '08 when I saw it on the front page and remember being blown away by it. I saw this in the monthly voting queue and it was a big surprise. I get it, I'm nostalgic for it, too. I was so excited to see what you've learned about game design over the course of 12 years. It kills me to rate 2.5, but my dude, you released a 2008 flash game in 2020, what can I say? Fear Unlimited 3 and Bright in the Screen were my jam back in the day, but they certainly don't hold up to what exists on the modern indie platforms we have today like itchio, gamejolt, steam, gog and the storefront that shall not be named.

That said, if you *are* developing games professionally, hit me up some time. I'd love to see what you've been up to ♥

-Braden

P.S: consider uploading this to the blue maxima flashpoint database if you want it to be preserved. They're a good community making a solid effort in preserving all kinds of flash content.

HapPie responds:

Hey, thanks for an honest review.
I'm not pro and never been, this was just a silly hobby, never really expected success or any kind of money. It was sitting there and rather than have it rot in my hard drive I put it out there and maybe someone would get a kick out of it. Even if one person enjoyed then it was all worth it, sorry that person wasn't you. I had lost all motivation to make games, but I feel like tackling it again, we will see how things go.

[High Stakes]

tl;dr vampire poker

[Hour of the Wolf]

I don't think even the original castlevania trilogy has this much bullshit level design in it. I get that you're going for that "nintendo hard" feeling, but towards the end of the game it gets more frustrating than fun. There is no reason that I should be dying 20+ times in a row to the same boss.

I'm mainly salty about the last boss, which again, took me at least 20 attempts to beat. The boss is more luck than skill. Wanna know why? Let's take a look at his attack patterns. To start, you have the guy spamming attacks at either end of the screen, all of which deal insane knockback, and the longer he is alive, the more shit gets spammed onto the screen. The only way I've found to deal with this phase without tanking your health to near zero is to spam the hourglass and wail on him relentlessly.

In the second phase, he spams attacks from every other boss in the game, which is cute and all, but when you can't predict what attack he will use, there are problems that arise. For example, the tongue attack from the previous level's boss will hit you if you're standing too close. You have to jump to avoid it. But it comes out so fast, and with no warning, that you have to pre-emptively jump JUST IN CASE he does it. The problem with that is that he could also just use the bone attack, which will hit you if you jump. So you can stand still and get hit (or not get hit) based on RNG, or you can jump and get hit (or not get hit) based on RNG. It's an unpredictable clusterfuck and the only way to beat him is to get lucky.

That's my problem with this game: it's unpredictable, and it's not because it's RNG, nor for a lack of effort on my part. It's because the enemies do not telegraph all of their attacks. You can't use the fact that it's a love letter to castlevania as an excuse for this design flaw. Unfair =/= hard. You had the sense to avoid resetting the player to the beginning of the game after an arbitrary number of deaths; you should have also animated telegraphs into the enemies' attacks. That's not hard. That's just bad game design.

On an unrelated note, the achievements are broken. I only got the pumpking achievement despite beating the game. See screenshots. You should look into that.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/769430851695280149/780981713748230154/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/769430851695280149/780981935924838410/unknown.png

Edit: I originally said I died 45 times to the boss, but actually I wasn't counting. 45 was just my total death count and I was salty, so I just said 45. Actual death count was probably closer to 20, hence the edit to 20+

RainbowCemetery responds:

refreshing the page and restarting should unlock any achievements that didn't go thru while you were playing

[Plasma Fist]

Before I explain why I gave a 3 to what otherwise would/could have been a 4-4.5/5 game, allow me to preface by stating that to date I have finished, with 100% achievement completion, over 200 games on Steam, and that I, too, am a programmer who knows a thing or two about software design patterns and system/game/level design. So I do know what I am talking about and have quite a bit of experience with both good and bad games to color my knowledge and opinions.

This game seems to be confused on whether it wants to be a roguelite or an action-arcade. It would be better if either 1. the moment-to-moment gameplay was more challenging but with checkpoints between levels so as not to force the player to repeat things they have already done (arcade design) or 2. more ammo at your disposal, more ways to maneuver and defend yourself, and a character progression system (roguelite design).

If you're going for an arcade design, you need to keep in mind certain things like the fact that arcade games of old had designed "lives" systems as a mechanism for milking coins out of players (similar to today's lootboxes and microtransactions). Some game mechanics were originally informed by monetary needs rather than the needs of the player. While setbacks are important for keeping the pressure on, it's important to keep them reasonable. In this case, you could lose the lives system entirely and instead have death send the player back to the beginning of the current level with a score penalty, and you'd have yourself a great balance.

If you're going for a roguelite design, you can't make the player so powerless. No matter how badly you play or how wasteful you are, there should always be options (not to mention roguelites are randomized and often give you an overall sense of progression so that your runs all come together at the end). Meanwhile, in this game, you can run out of ammo and get cornered by those pink fuckers. I saw in responses to other reviews that some of the things I just mentioned "were a flaw in spelunky too", which is a terrible justification and frankly made me lose some respect for the dev. Copying a design flaw is *still a design flaw*. It's not suddenly a good thing just because it was intentional. If you buy a shitty plastic chair that falls apart if you sit on it wrong, and then make a wooden replica of that shitty plastic chair, but on purpose because it's "based on a chair with the same flaws so it's okay"... then you have a shitty wooden chair. It's still shitty, and being based on a previous shitty thing doesn't make it less shitty.

This is why appeal to tradition is a fallacy. Believe it or not, you *can* take inspiration from your favorite things without copying the bad parts and still have something that resembles (if not exceeds) your favorite thing. You like the way the shitty plastic chair looks. I get it. But that doesn't mean you can't examine what does and doesn't work well so you can keep the aesthetic in your wooden version without copying that weird flaw that makes it collapse in on itself when you sit on it wrong. Do that and you suddenly have a decent, good-looking chair.

In my opinion, you should lean in the arcade direction and consider what I suggested about ditching the lives system in favor of more difficult level design and a score penalty + level reset on death.

Anyways, that's pretty much it. Please refrain from making justifications like that in the future. You're doing yourself and your fans a disservice.

[Elementalist: 0]

a little janky, but it's solid and has a lot of emergent gameplay and opportunity for an evolving meta. Add a leaderboard and throw it on steam for like 5 bucks and you got yourself a seller.

Franuka responds:

Thank you! I'm not sure if it's suitable for steam on its current state, but I'm planning on making a second, much bigger game with more maps, enemies, skills, replayability..

[Cathode Raybits 2]

The game plays like and is heavily inspired by Mega Man, if the title screen and controls are anything to go by, but that's where the similarities end--the rest of the game looks and feels like Contra. The level design and enemy placement feel a lot like Contra, and the art style and enemy design look a lot like Contra, so I try to aim in 8 directions but can't. Aside from the Mega Man controls not working well with the Contra everything, it's just jarring in general. Let this game serve as a living reminder that Mega Man and Contra go together like strawberry jam and soy sauce.

Oh, also, bad design decision to make enemies respawn the instant their slice of screen real estate scrolls off-camera. I think you were going for "Nintendo hard" difficulty, but the enemy AI is nonexistent, so it's just tedious. NES games are "hard" because they are usually designed poorly on purpose to create artificial difficulty so the player feels like they got more content for their buck than they actually did. It's mostly cheap stuff that you can get past easily with some muscle memory and patience rather than a true challenge. IWBTG hits that nail on the head, as the game is actually very easy once you learn how to play it properly.

[Super Newgrounds Hyper Fighter II]

TL;DR this doesn't belong in the game portal. Please add more content to justify it as a gallery-type submission, as right now, it's no different from a series of animated gifs.

I know this is 3 years after the fact, but I find it bothersome that this is presented as a game, and was uploaded into the game portal, despite having zero interactivity. Slapping links on thumbnails does not count, and while games that are little more than just galleries or art trinkets, dress up games, gadgets, etc. tend to blur the lines of what is considered a "game", at least those have a measure of interactivity to justify it. Galleries have multiple pages of art and sometimes commentary or special things that can't easily be conveyed in a static image.

Here, though, despite the line being blurry, it is obvious that you have crossed it. It's just a single page of a few pieces of thumbnail art with animated sprites and static art. There is nothing in this flash that separates it from a static art piece, or an animated GIF. It could have easily been uploaded into the art portal as 9 consecutive collages of each character. E.g. on one, show the menu with the character select box on Dr. Bees, showing the animated sprite and background art along with it. IIRC Gifs are allowed in the art portal, so it'd be just fine.

I get that this is a collab, and you have this gamey aesthetic in mind, but something like this really ought to have more substance to it. I would be perfectly okay with the thumbnails instead going to an in-game page for each character with trivia, concept art and a link to their respective channels. I'm not fine with just a link, though, because it is confusing and makes it seem like you just designed the menu poorly. So I'll press a bunch of buttons on the keyboard and my controller in attempt to troubleshoot the menu to find out why the game won't start. But there is no game. There is no disclaimer, either. There's a tiny passage in the description, but the fake patch notes completely undermine that. I'll get to that in a sec. The point is, I'm clearly not the first to be misled and get stuck troubleshooting the menu because I'm not sure if there's a game here or not. It doesn't help that the description lists fake patch notes. It's misleading, and I refuse to play along. So I hope you can understand why I'm rating zero. The zero doesn't reflect the quality or artistic merit; I voted zero because this simply does not belong in the game portal. It's not a game. It's not interactive. It's just a fake character select screen with nothing worthwhile to justify its presence here.

I will be happy to change my rating to a 5 if you...

1. upload this to the art portal as an image or series of images
1.5. (optional) upload this flash to one of your dumping grounds so users can still play with it and post a link in each of the descriptions of each of the art portal submissions

or

2. add more content to this. To recap, my suggestions are:

* add a disclaimer to the menu to make it absolutely clear this isn't a game. You can't expect us to quickly figure that out on our own. We're stupid sometimes.
* instead of linking to the newgrounds page of, say, HappyHarry, when you click on Dr. Bees, have it throw up a personalized "info card", like a case file or something, showing history, facts and trivia about Dr. Bees. On that page, you could have a link to the original Dr. Bees sketch and a link to HappyHarry's newgrounds page, youtube channel, etc. Do this for every character. I don't care if it's the shittiest looking info card possible. I don't care if it's just black text on a white background. What matters is that such a thing would meaningfully differentiate this from a static art piece.

If you did that, I would happily change the rating, because then there would be actual justification for this to be here and to receive a score based on its artistic merit. If you wanted to make a game, that could be a separate project. I do not think it would be a good idea to replace the flash on this page with a functioning game.

Also, I saw that response to a May 2016 review where you said it was a week's worth of work, with coding as one of the pieces of work. I'm not trying to flex, but as far as coding goes, I could replicate the functionality of this menu in 10 minutes. It's just movieclips and mouseover events. The point is to say that whatever interactivity you have here is bare-bones. The work really went into the art, which is why it kills me to leave a score like this. But again, it doesn't belong here, and I would rather leave a negative review than use the report button.

Template88 responds:

Interactive art isn't allowed in the art portal.
Submitting this as a series of gifs destroys the presentation.
It is listed under "Gadget" which are universally not games.