cableshaft's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Dad 'n Me]

I really hate to go against the grain here, BUT...

... look, I love Tom, Dan, and the Dustball. They're all very talented people and I look to their success as proof that I can be successful in this business as well, in the future, and a lot of hard work went into this game, but it has some pretty major design flaws which most people will overlook or forgive simply because it's the first game released by Tom on Newgrounds in almost a year.

1. There's no real point to this game.

90% of the people you (have to) fight don't fight back, and just annoyingly run away (if that). This may not be true for the entire level, but it's true for 15 minutes of it at least. The only health I lost was due to the one bully who actually did fight back at the beginning and rebounding fuel tanks bouncing back and killing me. All other games like this all have people who are constantly fighting you, you're fighting for your life, that's what makes the game fun. Instead this is just masochistic and boring.

2. You only get one life, the levels are 15+ mins long, you can't gain health, and when you die you start over at the beginning.

Combined, that just makes it really frustrating. Enclave did this too, but you could drink health potions and you were actually fighting for your life, instead of accidentally doing something stupid (rebounding fuel tanks) and getting yourself killed for it.

....eh, those are my main gripes. Besides it running at about 10 fps average on my 1Gig Athlon machine (I know it's old, but I haven't felt the need to have to upgrade...until now >:(). With such complicated vector graphics, why aren't you converting to bitmaps? It'd make this run on slower machines easily if you did.

The rest of the game is amazing, including the coding. It's just the design issues that pissed me off and gives me no desire to ever play this game again.

[Lunatic]

Pretty cool.

I liked it.

[the NG Calculator]

Interesting...

...interesting idea, although I'm kind of curious what how you determined to weigh these things. You'd think having a decent amount number of flash submissions plus a high batting average would weigh more than BBS posts or Blam points, yet somehow I'm only worth 49 bucks while other people here are (well, at least claiming) to have double or triple that without having hardly any submissions at all.

You should also include front page flashes in your count. I've had 2 myself :P

[bottle toss]

Cute!

Very clever, cute, and simple game. I'm jealous.

[Collection 1]

Not bad.

Seen this type of game before, but it has some clever question blocks and power ups (loved the one that switched all the enemies into crystals temporarily so you could clear part of the level up).

However, the main character moves incredibly slow and that by itself made the whole game feel kinda dull and sluggish. Play my Save The Ring! game for an idea of how quickly he should move and how it affects the gameplay.

[Endless War]

Clever game.

Liked it a lot, a couple suggestions though:

1. I don't like the health display being tied to your character. If you're hiding behind a rock near the edge of the screen, quite often you can't even see it.

2. Convert most, if not all of those images to bitmaps/PNGs and re-import them. You'll notice that it'll run a lot faster if you do so. Because right now flash has to calculate every curve and every gradiant every frame, and it's a major reason why it's slowing down so much. Do this and you might get a decent speed even when everybody is shooting at you.

I've been wondering when someone would make something like this with a decent enough A.I. Fix it so the A.I. doesn't get stuck on edges and this will be a pretty killer game.

[Flipz]

Good idea, poor execution.

It seems like a neat idea when you play the first couple of levels, but then the game doesn't get any more difficult. The game has no challenge to it whatsoever, since the simple rules don't allow the game to be hard, so it's not fun.

I have the exact same problem with an idea of mine. Extremely clever and simple idea, but when I prototyped it I discovered, to my horror, that it was terribly easy, and with it's current rules I had no way of making it harder. I'm still trying to find a way to change the rules to make it work, and make it challenging. You need to do the same with this.

[Orbit]

The game I wanted to make.

I've been wanting to make a game using orbits and gravity for awhile, but I couldn't think exactly how to make it. Well this is what I was actually wanting, I just couldn't see it. So thanks for making it and saving me the time :P.

[Jumping Circle 3]

Some advice...

...maybe someone's already mentioned this, but in case they haven't, cuz this is important:

Your game wouldn't be so goddamn hard if your character had variable jumping (like in mario - tap and you jump short, hold longer and you jump higher). Having to wait to fall onto each platform from your giganto jump between platforms that aren't that far apart from each other while the screen relentlessly scrolls makes it hard to even keep up with it. It's an unacceptable design flaw and needs to be fixed.

As do the graphics. The background is awful, distracts, and clashes with the foreground. But I'm sure other people have said that already.

joshuaskillsrobles responds:

This game is suppose to be hard, theirs way to many easy games so i made mines diffrent, stop complainoing and play it more.

[RaidenX]

You optimized graphics incorrectly.

Pretty good game. I found it a bit too easy (you collect a few powerups and you don't even have to aim anymore, just dodge the bullets), but apparently there's a hard mode. I just don't want to play it anymore.

I noticed in several of your reviews you said you had to optimize the backgrounds to make it run at a decent speed, but you didn't optimize them appropriately. You should have just converted each element in the background (if it's generated via script, otherwise the whole image would be better) from a vector graphic to a bitmap. Flash doesn't have to make calculations on bitmaps, it just blits them to the screen, making it super fast. Then you could have made it as complicated and beautiful as you wanted.

Go0gley responds:

If I convert them to bitmaps - that's not called optimising... at least on the file size. I'm guessing it'll reach up to 4-5MB if I used bitmaps instead of vectors. But nice thought! Thanks for reviewing. =D