Auz's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Stamper's Quest For Fags]

Alright

I thought this game was alright. The game looked pretty nice, with good drawings and animation and I thought the bees looked kinda funny. The music was also good. I noticed there were different songs for different diffeculty levels. I guess that makes it a little bit less repetive.

The bad thing about this game is that the hit detection is just awful. Or at least, there is a very, very large area in which you get hit. Too large if you ask me. Sometimes a bee clearly appears above my head or underground (?) and yet it hits me. And to prevent damage from cactusses you have to predict when they appear because when they´re on screen already you are too late and they hit your toes or something... =/ The damage the enemies do seems to be kinda random also, although I guess it just depends on the time you are hitting the enemy. How much health you recovered did seem to be completely random though and sometimes it was so little that an increase was barely visible.

The annoying thing about all this is that there is now a very large luck factor. I don´t really like that in a game that should be mostly based on skill. So I think it would be better if enemies could only hit you once for a standard amount of damage and health packs also healed a standard amount of health.

Overall 6 out of 10, 3 out of 5. Like I said, I thought it was alright. I did have some fun with it and took the trouble to collect all the medals (which were pretty easy to obtain by the way). The gameplay could´ve been better though.

~Auz

Kevin responds:

Bees can swim underground in this game, sorry.

[Epic Battle Fantasy]

Awesome!

I thought this was a really good game. One of the best turn based strategy games on NG in my opinion. It was very FF'ish with a lot of Pokemon, but I like both of those series and you mixed them nicely. I also heard some Zelda in between, which is also one of my favorite game series. Not the best songs you picked, but they were the only ones that would fit I think.

The game plays really nicely, with plenty of options and attacks to choose from. And I found that none of the attack options were useless. In these sort of games you often see a lot of attacks that you´ll never use anyway, because there is always one attack you´ll spam because it´s simply the most efficient one to kill enemies with. In this game, there was no such attack since most attacks did about an equal amount of damage. You really had to go for weaknesses and think of strategies to maximize your damage. Also, the few abilities to restore MP added a nice extra diffeculty factor to the game. So I really had to play this game differently than how I would normally play these games which is a plus.

The game had great drawings as well. I´m still amazed how you went to a completely different style from Black Mages 4 to Black Mages 5. BM 4 was not all that impressive graphicwise, but BM 5 had very clean, cartoonish drawings which were very nice to look at. You continued that style through your later submissions and I could even see some slight improvement since BM 5.

As for the bad parts and stuff to improve on: I read your post about changes for a sequel and most of the things I would suggest are already covered there. Lower HP for enemies would indeed be nice since battles took very long. Hard mode took me over an hour to complete. And as for status effects, indeed be carefull not to overdo them because I personally find them annoying as fuck in most RPG's. Positives ones like Regen and Auto-Life are okay, but stuff like Berserk, Confuse, Paralyze, Blind etc. are just lame. But maybe you can put a system similar to FF9 were you could select skills against certain status effects and have an option to change skills between battles. I think that system had quite a lot of depth and I think it would solve the "making other skills completely useless"-problem.

Overall 10 out of 10, 5 out of 5. Very nice game like I said. Added it high up in my favorites list. Also decided to add you to my favorite authors since I really liked your work so far. Keep it up and good luck with the sequel.

~Auz

matt-likes-swords responds:

Berserk can be a positive one!
Say you want to tank weak enemies that are unlikely to kill you without wasting MP.

>>change skills between battles
Possibly.

Anyhow, thanks for da review.

[Best League]

Nice

It´s a pretty nice football game in my opinion. It has a nice pixely style which reminds me of old gameboy football games. The little cutscenes that occured after a goal were really typical for those type of games :p Anyway, I thought the music was well done, although there wasn´t much music in it. The sounds were alright as well, but they could´ve been better. Personally I thought the "Goal" sounded a little bit lame. There were also few other things that need some improvement in my opinion.

My main complaint is that the ball moves too slowly during passing. I could pass the ball and immediatly run after it to pick it up a bit further. Also, the only way to pass the ball seems to be through the air. I had a feeling every ball I passed went a mile up before landing a few meters up ahead. Why can´t I pass the ball over the ground? It would be nice if you could add that and make the ball go a little bit faster. This would certainly add a bit more realism to the game.

Also, you might wanna make the players a bit faster as well. Or make a button that allows us to sprint. I thought the players were running pretty slowly, which made the action slower and made the game a bit boring.

To add even more realism to the game, it would perhaps be nice if you added fouls and cards and stuff like that. I mean, I made a few red card tackles and they all went unpunished here. Perhaps you should make it in such a way that every tackle from behind is a free kick and perhaps a yellow card.

One last thing, broadening the field might be a good idea. It was weird that when I made a diagonal shot from the corner of the 16 meters line, the ball ended all the way at the other corner flag.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. A fairly enjoyable game. If you improve on the stuff I mentioned above, I think it could become pretty awesome. Keep up the good work and good luck with the production of any future flash games.

~Auz

EasyRetro responds:

Hey Auz,
Thks for this in-depth review. The overall game is probably not running fullspeed on your computer for some reasons. Could you please PM your processor and Web-Browser name that would be really nice.
~EasyRetro

[Floor of Irritation]

Nice timewaster

A nice little time-waster game. The idea behind it isn´t very original, seen plenty of games like this. But it was well made, and deffinatly a good version of it. This one was very challenging too. The levels were quite diffecult even early on and sometimes I noticed it was better to just run instead of standing still to think.

I thought the lay-out was especially good. I liked the digital text, which gave it kind of a high-tech feel. The password system was also a good idea, better than a save function in my opinion cause I lose those files all the time when clearing up my internet files. The music was okay in my opinion. It was kinda on the edge of not getting on my nerves, so perhaps it could´ve been better.

As for what to improve: Well, I think the game is fine as it is now, but you could always add some stuff to make it more interesting. It would perhaps be nice for example if there was a death counter somewhere or/and a timer. Those might give it more replay value as players might start to try and beat their old scores. What could also be nice is certain upgrades. Like being able to move faster/slow down time, stuff like that. Those kind of things always make a game more interesting.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. Nice little timewaster like I said. Did get a little bored with it after a while, but oh well. Anyways, if you keep going like this I´m sure it won´t take long before you win your first trophies.

~Auz

AntoArts-Admin responds:

I don't know if upgrades would really work...

A death counter is planned (if I make a sequel), but you gave me an idea, a personal high scores list.

I shall add a mute button

[Willy Wonka Soundboard]

Good for a soundboard

Not such a big fan of sound boards, but this was fairly good one. Agreed that the older movie was better than the new one. Although the newer one was better visually, it had a lot of weird scenes and dialogue. So I´m glad you used sounds of the older one.

The lay-out was made fairly well in my opinion. It looked nice and colorful and everything was easy to find and read. The sounds were of a very good quality which is a must in case of soundboards. It was just a bit strange however that some of the sounds were implented twice. Contract had the same lines at the end as You Lose, same goes for Scratch and Reverse and Contract and Chocolate. Perhaps you should´ve just split these up, especially Chocolate since that one was incredibly long.

By the way, I also missed the Umpa Lumpa song, would be nice if you added that somewhere.

Overall 6 out of 10, 3 out of 5. It was good for a soundboard. Did actually enjoy listening to it as it brought back memories from the movie which I last saw a looong time ago. Keep up the good work.

~Auz

Frenzy responds:

Awesome, thanks for the long review Auz! And about the sounds that appear twice, they are there so you can listen to part of the clip instead of the whole thing, since you can't fast forward through clips. Thanks again

~ Z

[More Avoidance!]

Nothing too special indeed

Indeed there is not much special in this game, if you can even call it that way. The scripting that you used is interesting and I suppose it all works well, but everything looks quite ugly in my opinion. You should really work on your drawing skills. Try out some drawing tutorials. And if you can´t draw, then use sprites or something. They´re easy to use and usually look nice.

I thought the music you added was good, I kinda liked the tune. But I believe it is poorly optimised looking at the file size. I suggest you go find a tutorial on how to optimise music, there are plenty of them on NG I believe. You can easily cut the filesize in four and barely lose any quality.

I also experienced a lot of lag on the first screen, even on low quality. You might not wanna add so many of those circles and stuff on one screen.

Overall 4 out of 10, 2 out of 5. The actionscript worked well as I said, but playing around with it in this game quickly got boring. So I´d like to see you turn this into an actual game. If you focus on your drawing skills, then I think you could be able to produce something nice.

~Auz

therealmoomoomoomoo responds:

I will never be able to draw well m'afraid... I guess using sprites is a pretty good idea, and yeah... The first screen does lag a bit for some people it seems, even though it doesn't for me... And i didn't even know about optimising music, i will make sure i do that in future creations. :p TY for the review.

[Space Wing]

Pretty good

I thought it was nicely made, although I've seen better versions of this game. The music was a bit typical for these sort of games, but it was nice. The graphics were okay too, but I´m not a big fan of things that are build out of 3D-shapes. What I liked a lot was the experience, HP and MP system which made it feel a bit like an RPG. What I did not really understand was those 2x, 3x etc. that appeared above those green things sometimes. It probably was a multiplier for your points but I did not know how to increase or decrease that multiplier. It just seemed random to me =/

As for the bad parts; The first thing that annoyed me was the white stripes in the background. In the beginning it looked a lot like enemy fire to me, so I kept trying to dodge it and then I found out it didn't do any damage if I got hit by it. It seems like I'm not the only one who got confused there, looking at the review below me. I suggest you turn them into dots or something instead.

Secondly, later on in the game the field got a lot busier which made the game lag a lot. I don´t know if there´s anything you can do about it, but if you can please do.

And last, I think stage 6 was supposed to be the final boss battle, right? This guy had WAY too much HP in my opinion. I was kept firing at him for ±15 minutes and got his HP down to about 55% I think =/ And it wasn´t even diffecult to dodge his attacks, even after he went through his attack pattern 3 times I still had about 80% of my own HP left. The most diffecult part there was actually to have that much patience and I guess I do not have that cause I decided to let myself die.

Then I found a bug, after I got myself killed the game just continued... The boss kept firing, the screen still moved, but my ship was gone and nothing happened. You might want to take another look at that.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. I think it was a nice timewaster and I kinda enjoyed it until the last boss. It could use a bit more improvement though. Perhaps you should take a lot at RaidenX to get some further ideas for this game.

~Auz

CLOUND responds:

Thanks and sorry about that.
those 2x 3x are score multiplier for item (not xp pts) If you move yourself to the enemy fire close enough, it will increase and it will decrease over time or getting hit
Maybe I should reduce the last boss's HP??

[Hedgehog Launch]

Great game!

It´s a great game, it´s quite addicting and lots of fun to play. Graphics are good and the music is pretty awesome. The story behind "trying to launch a hedgehog into space" was kind of funny too.

But what I think this game misses is a free-mode in which you can´t launch yourself into space, can fly as many times as you want and can get as high as you can. I think trying to gain a large amount of money in one run is more fun than actually trying to beat the game. You could make it so that money is changed into points after you have bought all the updates and you can compete for a high rank in a highscore list. In that highscore list you can implent many seperate lists such as: "highest amount of total points in one run", "highest elevation", "longest runtime" etc. Just an idea/suggestion.

Overall 9 out of 10, 5 out of 5. I had lots of fun with it like I said, but I really don´t like beating the game. It forces me to start all over again which makes it kinda feel like a game over :( I hope you´ll add those features I suggested. Keep up the excellent work.

~Auz

jmtb02 responds:

Thanks for the lengthy review! Will definitely think of free-play mode in the next version. Thanks!

-J

[Visual Illusions 4]

Interesting stuff

I like these sort of things and I was glad that there was some stuff here that I´ve never seen before. My favorite was the thing with the flags and the Cyan color, I wish you had added some more of those.

Not all the illusions seemed to work for me though. The flashing square with the dots that you created yourself did not seem to work that well. All I saw were small yellow edges around the dots, but I think those were there already. The reversal thing with the cube didn´t seem to work either, I kept seeing the same cube from the same angle.

As for what to improve, one thing that annoyed me a little was the add that popped up when switching menus. It wasn´t that much of a problem, but it seemed to me like some sort of bug that you just couldn´t fix. Also, the lay-out could be improved a little perhaps. The music was alright. It´s not really what I would call great music, but it was good that it was there.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. I thought it was an interesting submission. I would like to see some more. Keep up the good work.

~Auz, Review Request Club
(#458)

Treerung responds:

Hey the cube illusions works fine..but it took me like 15mins of looking at it to see it..In my opinion its actually the coolest illusion here and I definetly recommend that you take a second look at it.. just follow the blocks through with your eyes and you should see it.

[NSG015: Apples & Bananas]

Nice

Quite a funny game. The graphics were pretty good, and I liked how all the pictures were black and white. I guess it would´ve been way too easy if they were colored so that was a good idea. The little animation after you answered a question also looked nice.

As for what could improve, I think the backgroundsong was a little annoying. It was funny at first, but I just had to turn off the speakers after a while. It almost drove me crazy.

Also, the game has absolutely 0 replay value as all the pictures are the same and they stay in the exact same order. Maybe you should add a lot more pictures and let the program pick 20 randomly.

Overall 7 out of 10, 3 out of 5. It was a nice time-waster. Keep up the good work.

~Auz, Review Request Club

Bezman responds:

Originally, I was gonna have the starting ones be coloured, then go B&W, then pixellated, blurred etc. I think starting off with B&W art helps show that it's not gonna remain totally easy throughout though.

The text took a little bit of experimenting. I almost didn't bother adding the trails for 'wrong' and 'timeout' but it definitely makes a big difference.

Sorry about the song. It's meant to be my version of the song that I think Tom Fulp references in Pico's School, but my mic had static and I didn't spend the requisite amount of time to get it to sound good... I guess I could ask someone else to do a better version...

Randomly chosen pics? Maybe for next year...

Thanks for the great review!