cableshaft's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Rings and Sticks]

Unconventional math made into a fun game?!?

Wow. I never would have even considered tapping into binary trees for anything other than searches for word games. Here I am looking at all other aspects of game design to try to come up with some compelling and unique idea (compared to the usual "take this format and tweak it slightly" most web game devs are taking nowadays, that even I kinda got sucked into), and here you are and find something in math that hasn't already been used in tons of video games out there (physics, particle motion, magnetism, orbits, etc) and turn it into a unique and challenging puzzle game. Huh.

Seriously, I haven't seen a game so different on this site since... well, I guess since your Blockhead game, but those have been the only two in a good year or two, at least. Even triachnid was just "ragdoll physics with drag and drop sticky legs"

Komix responds:

Thanks. I was thinking of a good game for the JiG contest (with the theme grow) in a half hour the idea completly developed as it is now. I did the game graphics and script in less then a week. the only problem was making up good levels.

I sure liek how it turned out :-D

I liked Proximity btw
-Komix

Let creativity take control

[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

[Letters Game Final]

594

Neat game, although the difficult seemed to be capped after about 400 some points...just seemed to turn into a waiting game of "eventually I'll screw up" then actually getting more difficult. Also it looked like my hit count went down after I pressed space a couple times. Not entirely certain about that, though.

Still, quite fun. And would probably help some people out in the process.

k3k5 responds:

765!
Thanks for review.

[Particle Stuff!]

Excellent.

This is the type of thing I'd like to see more often on Newgrounds, these code experiments. People submit their unfinished animations all the time, why not coders submit their little experiments? There should be a category for this, since it's not really a game and probably confuses people.

Oh, and who was the flash code god that couldn't make the dual stream of water? It looks a little difficult, but certainly not undoable.

Rammer responds:

the, er, "god" was trying to do it in a much more complicated way than i was. i took teh esay way out, but it still looks good (:

[Grave 2]

...you're right.

I didn't find the game that fun (I found the Knuckles demo even less so), but you ARE right about how hard it is to get an award on NG nowadays. My first demo (read UNFINISHED GAME! BARELY ANY GAMEPLAY) was on the Top 50 for weeks, and now three years later I'm making games professionally and I'm lucky to get the 3rd place and more than 15,000 views, while a sprite movie released the same day hits the Top 50.

In general, animations seem to do sooo much better than games here, and a good game takes a lot more man hours than a decent animation. I wonder why that's the case?

Oh, I'll give you a 5 and help you try to win an award. It's hard enough to do as it is.

FrostedMuffins responds:

thanks for seeing it my way. I used to view NG differently, as a place that I could have a chance, not that it's anyones fault. I just wish that games weren't so underrated. Thanks for the help!

[SMASH! Part 2: Predation]

Surprisingly fun.

I don't tend to like quiz style games, but this was pretty good. I especially liked the music section of determining the song as fast as possible.

Smoking-Chimney responds:

Thanks very much for your review:) I will make another one, complete with more fun bonus games and questions.

[Ball Revamped: Metaphysik]

Really good game.

This has really improved since the last game. Some minor nitpicks: 1) the controls, while much better than before, are now a little too touchy to navigate the much more cramped levels. 2) the music loops too often and too obviously, 3) i think the title is probably preventing you from getting more exposure. this game could potentially be on a lot of websites and get a lot of attention if you didn't have such a generic and long name.

Anyway, I liked it, and I'd like to see more games from you.

jmtb02 responds:

Touchiness I can agree with, music I can as well. The title is pretty long, but I like it. Needed to somehow stick the Physics nature of the game into the title. But thanks for playing both versions, good to hear from people who have.

--jmtb02

[Cupcapades 2]

Needs fixing.

The collision detection is a little too stiff and unforgivable. I die on things when the cupcake isn't even touching them. The collision testing seems like you've got a large bounding box around the movie clips and you're doing a simple hitTest which is causing the problems. You should set it so it checks if the images are actually touching instead of the size of the MC or write a function to test the distance between the players and the enemies. Either one will do.

Kenshino responds:

I think it is a bit more complex than that, but Rhythm decided against doing advance collision detection since he feared it would slow down the game too much.

[Random Wars]

I was going to make something like this once.

Only mine was going to be set in medieval times. It was just an exercise to see if I could do it, and I quickly got distracted by other projects. It's nice to see someone made one and see how it looks.

Lord-Lucraft responds:

heh, that's funny =) I actually got quickly distracted too... though i managed to create a viewable version :P