Wastelander's Reviews

[Dont download this song]

'twas Okay

But nothing more.

Weird Al surely made a funny song, but your 'animation' didn't in any way add to the humor. It was just simply depicting the lyrics in no special or noteworthy way. "Pirating music" made me chuckle a bit though, and overall your drawing style fitted neatly, so keep on practicing, especially when it comes to animation.

Regards
~Wasty

mushirhoda responds:

ok thanks. Ill have more animation in my next flash :)

[The Truth Behind Cancer]

I always knew it!

*lights cigarette*

You're so damn right, buddy! I'm so glad you found Prof. Smart and that he told us THE TRUTH! After all, my Grandfather knew a HOMO and thus he died of cancer!

That's the evidence! Thanks to Prof. Smart that he found out and told us!

So to all the kids: Don't let the mean politicians fool you, you'll be perfectly healthy if you smoke! After all, Prof Smart is a scientist, isn't he?

[Fred the Notable Monkey]

Not so notable at all

IMO a very selfish message.

Wikipedia is a free, open encyclopedia and has the aim of collecting scientific knowledge about the respective topics. There are still a whole lot of entries on Wikipedia, which are - no offense - obsolete.

Apart from that, I found your submission quite cute and well drawn. I don't think it was especially funny, entertaining or original though. At least not funny, entertaining or original enough to mention your work in an encyclopedia. Don't get me wrong, your work isn't bad. But I find your request of including aspiring artists into Wikipedia. That would be like giving 2nd or 3rd Division soccer players their own Wiki-entry.

Regards
~Wasty

JKR responds:

Frankly, I find that if a site is as large as Wikipedia is, they can find room for people who work every single day of their life at nothing more than making people happy through artwork. But perhaps they are "above" such things. I find no issue in giving 2nd or 3rd Division soccer players their own entry. The internet is certain big enough, and these people work just as hard as the 1st string, even if they don't get as much field time. But more than any of that, it is the WAY Wikipedia informs people that they are not permitted to be mentioned, with brash words like "non-notable - delete" or "fails". I do not agree with this method of dealing with people.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to leave a review. I'm glad you liked the art style of the cartoon and animation, even if you didn't agree with it. =)

[goodbye, doggy]

He's a good boy.

[Boombox 2]

Still lots of room for improvement

Well, my first thought about your game was: Either you intended the game to run totally sluggish for some artistic reason, or you weren't able to optimize it enough even though the graphics are below average. Worst of all, there even isn't any obvious way to lower the graphics quality. I then lowered the quality via the flash context menu which was completely unaltered and thus allowed myriad ways to mess up the game completely.
Furthermore, even on "low quality", the game runs extremely slow, whilst, as already mentioned, providing mediocre graphics at best. And that's not even taking into account that a puzzle game doesn't need ANY nifty visuals to be good.

Which leads me to the game itself. Well, the idea isn't too unoriginal, but there are some design decisions which I simply can't understand. First and foremost, BOTH the control options have serious flaws. While the keyboard controls suffer from AND add to the overall slowness of the gameplay, the mouse controls are inaccurate due to the lack of a "helper line/beam" which would show where your block is to land.
Also, I found the lack of a true combo system pretty disappointing. Instead of letting "unaffected" blocks drop, um, "up" onto the rest of the stack, they simply disappear. This, IMO, leads to a pretty flat gameplay and disencourages any planning-ahead.

Overall, most of these issues are such serious fun-killers, they also killed more than half the rating score for a game that, even without those issues, wouldn't have gotten more than a 7. After all, it still is only a "match X" puzzle game which doesn't provide anything that exceeds this concept, f.e. some kind of meta-game.

In conclusion I'd like to soften my harsh-sounding review by honestly saying: I see a lot of potential, but it's not used as of yet.

Wishing you success in your future game developing career!

Best regards
~W

[Knights of Rock]

Interesting idea

As the title suggests, I find your idea interesting. The concept of combining a rythm-game with action-packed animations reminds me of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat which I found very fun to play.

BUT that was not as much the case with your game. The most annoying thing about playing the game was the combination of fast moving symbols and low framerates, which was the biggest - if not the only - challenge in getting the rythms right. On top of that, the symbols seemed a bit off-beat to me, which was probably a result of the low framerate. As a long-time player of the fluidly animated DDR arcade-machines and O2JAM, this was very hard to get used to.

Apart from that, I also had wished a bit of actual interactivity in the background animation, for example your character getting wounded when missing a symbol. After all, this resulted in the animation being just a distracting background.

Lastly, the music didn't fit my taste at the very least, although I am a fan of fast-paced rock and heavy metal. That however is just a matter of taste.

Still, this was one of the more innovative and interesting submissions I saw recently and after all, if it motivated me to write my first review in a long time, it had to be at least decent, somehow. :P

All my regards and keep improving as you do.

~Wasty