Coop's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ask A Clock v.2]

Why I dislike Clock Day

Another work of ill-conceived origin, that has been poorly animated and is a modified 'magic 8-Ball' concept that only goes downhill from there.

The image of Strawberry Clock could be much better - with so little of your own work there, you could have spent a lot longer drawing something like Strawberry Clock, to at least give yourself something to shout about. After all, you've not made the preloader, you've taken an image of the Clock Day Flash Portal for the background and added an interface that can only be described as poor over the top.

The space that is left for the username is too big for my name, so perhaps set the statement to two lines:

"Hello [username]
Type something in to ASK A CLOCK!"

That way, you can set the text of the username to butt up to the 'Hello' and go from there. Is it really too much extra work to get Speakonia to read that out? Perhaps you could also use Speakonia to read out StrawberryClock's answers. That or give people the change to have other clocks answer the questions as well?

[Review Request Club]

piggy123 responds:

ok thanks

[Solar system illustration]

Needs scaling

Not a bad little informative piece here, but it does need some work on a few pieces of information - The planet's scaling is not very accurate - Sure, the Earth : Sun ratio may be correct, but in that case, Jupiter is many times larger than this.

Perhaps have the option to double click on the planets and bring you in for a closer look with some info, like the mass of each planet, primary atmosphere composition, number of satellites, that sort of thing.

It's a good start, but could become so much more with little additional effort :)

[Review Request Club]

[Hollywood Zombies]

Not bad

A little difficult if you're not familar with the way that certain figures look - I had no clue whatsoever about the SAW doll, but there you go. With the way it pans out, I'm a little confused as to why the game area is blacked out around the scope - surely you'd be able to use the rest of the field of vision to gather the target before sighting and slotting them.

I appreciate that the view of the zombies would be a lot smaller, but if you're looking for one distinct zombie, it shouldn't be too hard, even if you can magnify them with the scope around the place. Perhaps don't have the zombies wander off the screen, as that ramps up the difficulty, especially as the zombie you're trying to shoot wanders off screen, then you can't find them again.

Finally, I noticed that these zombies are from the sprightly and athletic breed, so I'd assume that they are more like the things we see on I Am Legend, as opposed to the more traditional Resident Evil / Dawn of the Dead zombies? Perhaps slow them down a tad, as it's not going to make too much difference to the gameplay.

[Review Request Club]

Samanus responds:

I didn't want the game to be too easy, but I see what you mean. On later levels, it would be difficult to spot the zombie with or without the black. So, I'll definitely look at that during the revision. Thanks for your review! :D

[Interactive Kitten]

And we can do what here?

Seriously, this needs a lot better of an interface - even with a tamogotchi, you could slap the animal if it were doing something wrong, or you felt like some legal forms of animal based violence.

All it seems to do is sit there, then when you move the mouse across, the thing reacts as if you;re stroking it, regardless of how fast you pass the mouse over - there aren't options to feed it, bathe it, drug it up to the eyeballs or whatever else it is you do with the real thing.

I think that some experiments to see what can be done with this are needed - how long does a cat have to go without food before it dies? How bored does it have to be before curling up and going to sleep, that sort of thing.

A little more work on the drawing wouldn't have hurt, either - just to soften up a few of the angles on the cat's face.

[Review Request Club]

[Piggy123s flash tutorial]

Screenshot collection

Truly poor when it comes to making a tutorial, this needs lots of work - show people what they're after, rather than just a wall of code and show them how to improve their works. If it's a 10-12 step indication of the process required, this is what you need to do. At the end, give them a "How it looks" animation sequence, showing them how to their animation should look.

It needs improved drawing, better looking buttons, rather than just squares made into buttons. Perhaps draw them as 3D buttons with perspective and then animate them actually being pressed. I think that you need to look at additional tutorials to make your own pieces reach a good standard before you try showing other people how to make animations.

[Review Request Club]

piggy123 responds:

look at the other responses i made this like when i got flash and now i am making a better one

[human actions drawing tut]

Not very detailed

I think that when you've shown these steps, you've not been very detailed - you can achieve much more of an effect by using a smaller drawing tool and zooming in. This will give you a more detailed image, with less clutter - the black lines don't interfere with each other, causing the image to look blotted and ill-drawn.

With the drawing of the body parts, would you not be able to draw a movie of the piece being drawn, rather than a step by step placement of the lines like importing girders for a steel frame.

Practising with the drawing style will give you a much better output - you don't need to draw chest muscle structure in a figure until you come to the detail part if they are going to be wearing a T-Shirt. That's one of the major failings - you do too much more work than you need to do, in order to produce the piece. Working on that will give you a much improved product to show the uninitiated.

[Review Request Club]

piggy123 responds:

thanks you

[A Christmas Story SB]

Not bad

Not really much for me to comment on here - I wish you could put images with the piece, so that we can see some screen shots of the movie or something similar for each sound byte.

I think that one of the buttons is not working - "Out here" by the Old Man is not registering as a button, so there is nothing that can be heard here. Not that it affects the submission too much, as it still has a wealth of quotes, although some of them cross over one another, with longer and shorter versions cropping up all over the place. I'm not sure I agree with that, as it's extra work for no extra reward.

[Review Request Club]

Frenzy responds:

K thanks

~ Z

[Ultimate NG Quiz]

A few issues

It's not a bad quiz, with some decent questions, which can't pose too much of a problem to users prepared to look at the FAQ, the forums and the like to get their answers.

The one question that you posed in Hard mode has a real issue with the fact that the maths is wrong - 30 per day for 516 days does not equal 17,500 B/P, which is the requirement for Colonel, the corresponding badge. A little trial and error will find the answers if you're desperate for getting further in the quiz, but it's not really what I was after.

A good selection of music and it all fits together quite well.

[Review Request Club]

dx5231 responds:

I'll check out this wrong question. Thanks for pointing it out.

[Borsti]

A little simple

A nice concept for the game, the mechanics work well, with the jigsaw pieces slotting together nicely - I'd have maybe linked all of the pieces together when they are in the right place and perhaps had a hot key to toggle the remaining pieces to the front or the back, for example.

Higher difficulty levels would also be appreciated - the simplistic 16 piece puzzle presented no challenge to complete it quickly and it would become more challenging with 25 or even 36 pieces on a 5x5 or 6x6 grid, straight away. Most of the difficult pieces are the ones in the middle, as they have no straight edges, so increasing that number can only help towards making it more of a challenge to your target audience.

[Review Request Club]

[Accidents Happen - Part 2]

Interesting game

I like the way that some of the stick deaths are incorporated into this whole game for the failure part - a great way to show exactly what you did to mess up this time, I feel.

Perhaps the walking animation of all of the sticks could have been sped up a little, just to give a less boring part between the one part and the next, as Lance walks from place to place.

A decent plot and some good backing music to keep everything happy, but I think that you could have done a little more, rather than just keeping it so short and leaving at at such a cliff-hanger.

[Review Request Club]

neon8100 responds:

It really was just something I'd been meaning to finish. I'd started and stopped and restarted from scratch so many times. I just really wanted to get it off my back now, and i'm proud of it just purely because of the difference between the two. Thanks for the review.