AlextheBestCat's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cowabunga Down Under]

I like that the Queen personally flips you off if you fail despite her being dead for 11 days by the time this game was uploaded.

When you release the GOTY Edition, you should make it Charles who flips you off.

[Stress Quest]

I really love the concept behind this!

It's Warioware, but with some choice and general story/theme behind what you're doing, instead of just random objectives. I feel like this could be expanded further into a full game to have multiple worlds that cover different days, with more tasks to do, and you could have an overarching story behind it.

I will say that I wish the quests were a bit more "reactive" when you complete/fail the tasks. A very important aspect in Warioware is that you always get a sort of "end animation" which indicates that you can't interact with the game anymore, and if you did it correctly or not. You have that when you win some of the games already, but you don't have any for when you lose, which I feel is a missed opportunity. Like, idk, when you lose the chest mimic quest, it would be cool if there was a splash screen of Chester running out of the cave waving his hands around with one of them with a mimic eating it. And for the duel quest, it would be better if the sheep guy reacted in some way to being shot, and if Chester is shot he could have the Bond blood effect going down the screen.

Other than the big "reactiveness" criticism, I don't really see any major design issues. This is very competently made, and I really love its style! Also, the frog princess is very cute, good job on that front. I know that must've been an important detail in the dev process that required everything else to be held up to make it right (like jarjar), so it's great you got jar jar working.

Good on ya!

[A Date with Death 2]

I love this continuation so much!!!! The visual style reminds me a lot of Paper Mario, which is a great evolution that you've gone into! This whole story of the series could be turned into a short game if you decide to conclude it eventually. Like, kinda like each chapter has a different game mechanic. Please continue the Date with Death series!

[Deal with Putin]

This really brings you back to the Bin Laden games when 9/11 happened....

[Sab I: Tubby Assassin]

This really shows how incredibly basic Flash was in its early years. The "games" were essentially just slideshows that would wait for user input in order to progress. This input could also only be clicks because, again, early Flash were formatted like slideshows that could only go forward. Nehi here didn't even loop the music when the game got to the point where it needed the user input. This is such a relic.

The only reason I'm giving it any credit is due to this game's ridiculous age, and the fact that it was a Flash game on Newgrounds before Newgrounds was even called Newgrounds. It's literally older than me by like 2 years (2001 baby here). Crazy how history can be preserved like this

[Radiance Hearts]

Ok so, I just want to start this by saying this has some pretty big potential behind it and you have a pretty solid concept for a game. Blob-on-Hero's-Head is an unexplored territory. The particles and music are really professional and they were the only things I feel like didn't have flaws.

However, the rest of the game is a very unpolished thing. I understand this was made for a game jam, so you were under time constraints, but I'll just say what I feel could be improved.

Things that need work done:
- Framerate: While I was playing, the framerate was the single largest issue that brings the whole game down for me. I swear to god it just dips and jumps with any small input and it doesn't even make sense why it would slow down as badly as it was. If you're planning on continuing this game, PLEASE get the framerate dips fixed first and foremost.

- Artstyle: This particular pixel art has a very quick turnaround for getting assets ready— so I understand why you went for that style in the game jam, but it's very boring. No outlines and flat shading isn't the most engaging thing, and could easily make this game blend in with the thousand of other games in this style. I'd recommend changing it in some way. It doesn't even have to be that much of a change from the current style. There's this trend recently of "HD Sprite" games where they use 16bit looking sprites with stupidly good lighting and particle effects. You could try that if you think it works with the style.

- Premise: Really? A Light vs Dark story? C'mon, you can be a little more unique than that! I don't really know what to suggest for this issue, because that's more of a personal thing you should decide, but please try to think it out more. It doesn't have to be convoluted or anything, or have exposition dumps, but just something to be a little fresher than the Light vs Dark trope.

-Controls: Playing this platformer game with a keyboard is hell. I feel as though you made controls work as best as they could given the control format, but gamepad support is a necessity. Also, holding up to do the huge jump AND also making it the hover button gets a little unintuitive.

-Sound design: Many actions in the game just don't have sound effects tied to them. Whether it be from the player, enemies, or the environment. It's weird. That's all I have to say on that.

-The Boss: Oh my god. Why. WHY did you make a boss that 2-SHOTS YOU and has a health pool as large as what it had. Why. Especially as a first boss. Accounting for the platformer keyboard controls, this boss was actual hell. Such a spike in difficulty out of NOWHERE. I will say, I VERY MUCH appreciate the instant respawning after dying to it, and I felt very accomplished when I finally did beat it, but you can't just have something like that after an entire game that was no where near that level of difficulty and required precision. If you're going to have bosses as difficult as that, reflect it in the level they are in. Don't put a rip-your-dick-off boss in the time-to-show-you-the-ropes level. Please. For my sake.

Minor Issues:
- Projectiles from enemies linger even after respawning. Reset enemies and delete all projectiles when the player dies, please.
- The wall enemy has to be stun-locked in order for you to damage him without getting hurt. That's very boring and has no complexity. Just make it so that the wall shots one projectile at an interval from random heads on the wall instead of making them fire all at once and stop when they're being attacked.
- A dynamically zooming camera might be useful for platforming sections. The camera is fairly zoomed in normally, but when doing platforming I feel like it's a little too close for me to judge jumps effectively. If you had the camera zoom out a little bit in more open areas, I think that would make the issue go away.

Again, I do see potential in this! If you keep hammering at it, I could see it being a very nice little experience.

Yword responds:

Thank you so much for playing and providing the detailed feedbacks, I will keep them in mind. (And sorry about the issues mentioned.)

[On Being Undermined.]

Please make more games! Preferably, I'd like a good portion of them to be goblin related

[Teletubbies -Mercy Kill.]

This truely is a relic of it's time. The most impressive part is how it still holds up today lol. Amazing how this game is older than me...

[POOM]

So let me get this straight... You're using an engine, that is mimics the hardware limitations of 80s consoles, and made DOOM run on it? That's pretty crazy! You made a console that doesn't even exist run Doom lol.

Does the engine mimic the software limitations too? Like did you have to do assembly programming? For me it's pretty laggy, but that would be expected of something of this tech lol. Really cool stuff!

freds72 responds:

thanks - pico8 mimics 80’s computer though some aspects are much faster that any hardware ever had.

Laggy? are you playing on a phone? If so, suggest to try a desktop browser.

[Minecraft Lay Egg]

This isn't an original game by any stretch. The gameplay has been done before and better, with no additions to make it unique. I'm pretty sure every graphic and probably every sound in this game has been ripped from somewhere else without credit. I also don't know whether I'd consider this worse because it's obviously a direct port of a mobile game with the minimum effort to translate it to a browser game.

Besides plagiarism, it's somewhat competent and it's probably non-malicious in its plagiarism. If anything I'd consider this just practice with programming, which is fair. Gameplay wise, the fact that everything is on a continuous plane instead of a grid makes blocks slide in strange ways and interact in ways that probably weren't intended. It's impossible to get all the coins in the levels, which in my opinion is just bad design philosophy.

Overall, it's pretty bad, but I feel as though you have good potential if you keep working on your programming skills and game theory. Try to make some original ideas! Original assests, and mechanics that aren't just recycled from what you think looks cool. Thinking out of the box will improve you the most.