Haggard's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Super Brick Duel]

Interesting

This is a pretty nice game, I like the idea of putting bricks behind the paddles that have to be destroyed first. Only problem is that the game can get very tedious if you have to destroy brick after brick before you can finally score a point.

I liked the addition of power ups, they add more fun to the game. What can be better than to freeze your opponent and then score a point easily?

Fourplay looks like it can be great fun, but I couldn't play it since I'm alone right now. A CPU mode would be very nice to have there. It would also be nice if the game screen didn't scroll up and down the whole time, can get very annoying after a while.

I liked the addition of the tutorial modes. This can really help you to get better in this game and I liked the varity of the tutorials.

Overall, this can be a fun game for a few boring evenings. I think that Fourplay can be really cool, but since you need three other players for it it's unlikely that too many people will play it. It would be really nice if you could add CPU players to that game mode, so you can have some fun even if there's only one or two human players.

{ Review Request Club }

JPB responds:

Regarding the slowness/boringness of the game, I felt the same, until I added the powerups, but it seems more powerups wouldnt have been a bad thing. CPUs in fourplay is really fault of my laziness, turns out the 2 player hard AI was retarded in fourplay, should've spent more time. Thank you for the review!

[Gravity Bob]

Good game

Well, there are quite a few gravity related games out there, but I don't think none of those games has such a cute main character, lol

I really liked the music in the menu. Sounds awfully familiar, maybe I heard this track in the audio portal or in a different submission, or maybe the menu music was inspired by some other gameing related track which I just happen to know.

The in game music wasn't that appealing to me, but luckily you added a mute button. I always appreciate if a flash author adds a mute button, because even the best in game music can get annoying after a while. So it's always nice to have the option to turn it off.

The gameplay itself is pretty good. The controls are very simple and they work very well. It takes some time to get used to the gravity related acceleration, but after a while I was able to manouver Bob through most of the levels. I haven't beaten the game, but I think with some practice even a "no continues" playthrough would be possible.

Overall, while the game idea isn't that original it is at least executed very well. Good controls, nice graphics and a very nice main character.

{ Review Request Club }

ProfessorFlash responds:

I like Bob as well. I originally wanted him to be a furball, but when the artist gave him fur he looked like a hobo who needed to take a bath :D. So fur had to go, but he still looks cute :).

Thanks for the nice review.

[Lost Catacombs]

Nice game

This is a pretty nice game. A mixture of Indiana Jones movies and Sokoban, the game. The riddles are ranging from very easy to pretty hard, so the long time motivation definitely is there.

Maybe the tutorial is a bit too long. I was hoping to finally start the "real" game, but room after room another explanation popped up, telling me what to look for and stuff. Maybe it would be better to give a basic tutorial, then have the player play the first set of levels and then increase difficulty later on with additional traps and switches and some more explanations. That way the player won't feel drowned in tutorials.

Also, the view is a bit weird. I have to push up to move up and right on the screen. This can get confusing and sometimes I found myself pushing statues that I never wanted to push, just because I got confused with the view and the controls. Maybe a full top view or a view from a "straight line" (where "up" is "up" on the screen) would be better here.

{ Review Request Club }

SantoNinoDeCebu responds:

Yeah, the tutorials where an awkward one because I felt I didn't want to cram a lot of features into single levels at the beginning when they are being introduced or there is too many obstacles that the player wont understand being thrown into the mix at one time, that was my logic anyway. Can never get tutorial balancing right!

[El's Quest]

Not too bad, but far from being good

"Not too bad, but far from being good" seems to be the general consensus among reviewers and I have to agree with them. But hopefully you aren't discouraged by this insight, because this is your first submission ever. Usually "first submissions" are far worse than what you submitted here.

I like the idea of the game. It has a very simple gameplay but it also has the potential to become really addictive.
The controls work pretty well, even though I think mapping "Z" and "X" is a poor choice, at least for me. For me, the keys "Y" and "Z" are switched (meaning that I'm typing on a "QWERTZ" keyboard, not a "QWERTY"), so it's kinda hard to keep my fingers on both keys. "A" and "S" would've been much more convenient. Even more convenient would be the option to chose my own keys. That way, everybody would be happy.
But other than that, the controls are very respondive and work good enough.

The music fits well to the game. As the graphics are made out of simple lines it would've been very unfitting to listen to anything other than some 8 bit music. Even the sound effects seem to come from some old Atari or NES game, very nice.

To make the game even better: Some sort of upgrade system would be cool to have. Maybe more bullets on the screen at the same time, bigger radius of the triangular fire, or something like that. I think this would add another element to the game that would make people come back to it.

{ Review Request Club }

[~Strange Thoughts~]

Trippy

The animations in the intro are a bit slow, but still enjoyable. The game itself is a bit weird, but can be funny to kill some time. I liked the "floating" here a lot. It makes it hard to control the character, but I think after a while one can adopt to the controls easily and get very far in this game.

A quick introduction to the game would be nice, thogh. At first I didn't exactly know what to do, which items I can collect and which ones I should avoid. I then noticed that you describe that in the author comments. But I still think a "how to play" button on the main menu would be a good addition. Only one screen is needed to explain the game. You could list all the items we should collect and list the monsters and hallucinations as "don't hit those".

{ Review Request Club }

[Flying Barry...]

Hmmm

Well, the game has potential. The story is a bit silly, but funny at the same time. The graphics look all right as well and I like the sound effects here.

You propably should put a main menu at the start of the game and put the tutorial there in an extra menu. That way we don't have to click through all this again if we want to replay the game.

But the biggest flaw of this game is the controls. I never felt like I would actually control Barry. He was constantly moving up and down without me doing anything. No matter if I pressed "up" or "down", he still was swinging all the way across the screen from top to the bottom and back again. I really don't see why I should play a game if I can't control anything...

{ Review Request Club }

[I Want Your Blood!]

Bloody quiz...

This is a pretty good quiz about a very serious topic. I wanted to donate blood for quite some time now, but never got around to it. Something I should put on my list of New Year's resolutions, I guess.

The graphics are very bland. The background isn't that appealing to the eye, but at least the text is readable. The musical choice fits the halloween theme, but most of the time the songs didn't loop too well in the game, which was slightly annoying.

I like very much that we can learn something from this game (I learned which day's the world blood donor day, for example). I also think the questions are very well chosen.

On a sidenote: There seems to be a bug with question 20. I got the answer wrong and yet I still proceeded to question 21.

{ Review Request Club }

IceDragon64 responds:

What is stopping you!?! If you send me proof that you have donated blood, I will put your name in the Notes! Do it and get others to do it. It is a GREAT feeling when you have done it. As you sit with the other guys who have done it afterwards you feel like you are ONE OF US!

Ah thats just it, in order to make sure that the text is 100% clear and large , the bgd has to be reasonably simple. I don't see why so many people complain about the Bgd in our quizzes- most quzzes have far less art/pix than ours. Nevertheless I will think about improving it for the next quiz.

Sorry about the music quality- the DS just ALWAYS have difficulties with sound and this took hours just to get it this good.

You guys just don't get it, do you? If you re-read the response you got for your chosen answer, you will see why you had to go forward. Just think about where else we could have sent you. Sorry guys but we thought that would be obvious.

Thanks very much for your review

[Zambu Dance]

Decent game

This - just like OONi battle - is a good game to waste some time. It can get very difficult if you have to get a combo of 10 or more buttons right and it can get very annoying to see the same sequence over and over again. It's a good thing you implemented a way to speed up the sequence.

The graphics are very nice. There's not much to look at, but what we can see sure is pleasing to the eye. Good backgrounds, nicely drawn characters. Good work in that departement.

The music can get annoying after a while, so it's a good thing there is a mute button present.

{ Review Request Club }

[=Button Tutorial 2=]

Good tutorial

I'm not too happy with the background colour. I think black text on a white background still works best for longer texts. Granted, it always looks a bit boring, but why change around something that works so well?

Anyway, I really liked this tutorial. You explain very well how to create different kind of buttons. I still see flash submissions where the buttons don't really work or where only the text of a button is clickable (which can be annoying if the font is too thin), so I think it's a good thing that button tutorials are submitted somewhat regulrarly by different users. This might encourage some upcoming flash artists to watch at some tutorials every now and then.

Last thing: The links on the start screen didn't work for me. The mouse pointer changed appearance, but when I clicked the links nothing happened.

{ Review Request Club }

Phantox responds:

I tried black but I don't think it went as good as white. I'll keep that in mind for next time, though.

I just noticed that the screen doesn't work either. I can't change it though since I lost the .fla file.

Thanks for your review

[Ballz! Bounce]

Basic

Bounce-a-ball games are very basic games, but they are a good way to practice action script and other things you need to create a game.

Controls are simple enough, it's just that I never have been good at those type of games.
But I like the ability to upgrade certain things, it adds a lot of replay value to the game. It would be cool if there was some sort of highscore system, like "most bounces in a row" or "highest bounce", those kind of things.

You also should look into a way to disable the TAB button. I could simply hit tab and then space to bounce the ball. When the ball went too high it was suddendly gone, heh.

{ Review Request Club }