EmDubya's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[LARRY: Doug-Out]

Strategy

Looks like everybody's already had their say on what needs improvement, so here's a strategy that works well:

At the beginning of the game, keep only the outside keg and one keg in the back filled. Other than filling the kegs, only spend your money on upgrading ale quality. This way when Doug appears, he can easily be deterred from taking your ale, albeit fights with Doug will take a minute or two. If the fights with Doug get so long that you do not have time to sell both kegs before the day is out, upgrade your weapon ONCE. Once you have maxed ale quality, start to max weapon quality, while still only keeping the outside keg and one storage keg stocked. Once you have maxed your weapon, go nuts. Buy as many extra kegs as you want. While Doug will take a bit of your ale, the highest level weapon will ensure that fights do not last very long.

This strategy works for the two max upgrade achievements as well as "Endurance Master" and "Massive Score." "Maxed Money" is impossible to get, as even with maxed ale and weapon quality and a store room full of ale I only had enough time to make about $1000 each day.

[Hippolyta]

Cool!

There's a lot of good stuff in this game, so I'll just outline what could be improved:
-The voice actor's accent sounds a bit forced
-No pause button
-I didn't see the option to purchase vanity armour until I searched for it after reading about it in the achievements
-The flashes and slow motion sequences can get annoying if there are two or three in a row
-The later levels are way to long. It's very annoying to have to restart a ten minute level because you get bored of dodging the same stuff a hundred times and make a mistake. I could go for more short levels with a steeper difficulty increase.
-The environment could use a bit more variance. Although the different colours in the forest corresponding to the different times of day are cool, they are still a bit repetitive. I would have the levels progress through different settings and change what the obstacles look like. For example, after a forest level, having a village level where instead of jumping small rocks you jump small crates, large carts instead of large rocks, etc.
-The concept of having a finale at the end of each level is good, but the big jumps are not nearly challenging enough, especially in the later levels. Using it on the first level is nice to introduce the 'sprint' command, but other than that I would substitute something harder.

[M-Bot The Game]

The Cons

Occasionally it's a little hard to judge where you are relative to stuff that will hurt you. No animation for coming out of k-9 mode. If you are in k-9 mode, you will be unable to shoot holes in the walls, and you also appear to pass through them. More stuff should spawn during k-9 mode so the player does not simply have to sit at the front of the screen and hold down 's'. Using k-9 mode during a mine segment screws up the alignment between mines and the 'tokens'. The wall part of the main game is extremely easy relative to the stuff that comes before it, and i suggest you put some holes in the upper parts of the walls to shake things up. It's much more beneficial to keep a triple blaster than it is to go into k-9 mode and then be demoted to a single blaster afterwards. The file size is waaaaay too big. Replay is good, but I don't want to have to wait 5 minutes every time I want to play.

[The Scale of the Universe]

Cool stuff!

The graphics could be the tiniest bit better. Other than that, the only thing that would make this better would be a narration by Morgan Freeman.

[Canabalt]

Incredibly Addictive...

And awesome. Except those windowed buildings keep killing me. Where did you get the name from?

[Mini-Game Collab]

Yum Yum!

My brother has a game in this, so I figured I'd write a review.
There are some glitches with the menu return buttons etc. that I am sure you are already aware of, so I'll ignore those and get right to the actual gameplay.

Saving The Moon
+cool idea for the health bar with the colour inversion on the screen
-would have been better on a 'space' background
-gameplay not too challenging or exciting

Pee
+very funny concept
-too difficult at beginning; start sparks slowly, then get faster
-getting shocked animation should be wilder to suit the humorous game concept

Angry Faic Toss
+nice graphics
-very hard to control
-distances for medals are insane

Clones Ambush
+nice graphics
-difficulty should start lower then progress higher
-add sound effects for zapping

Sharkbait
+inverted controls make ya think
-conflicting graphics ie bitmap fish/bubbles, rendered oil barrel, vector sharks
-difficulty should increase over time

Rock Guitar
+nice graphics
-uncomfortable gameplay (controls)
-'keys' didn't match song

ASCII Tank Battle
+great concept, solid graphics, strong gameplay. Well done!

Death Ball
+decent idea
-repetitive: add difficulty progression (speed up balls, irregular intervals)
-add a nasty death animation :D

Lost In The Dark
+great concept
-graphics could use more detail
-a bit tedious/frustrating

Trilobitus
+nice graphics, strong gameplay
-sea bombs randomly disappeared

Anatomy
+nice graphics
-hit boxes were off
-gameplay not very thrilling

Block Swap (Blcok Swap :P)
+nice looking background/blocks
-unoriginal idea; needs a twist

Aerial Defence
+nice concept
-add progressing difficulty
-death animation on large cars could be better

Monkey Maze of Doom
+good concept
-should be more linear (less mazey) with more obstacles
-graphics could be improved (make the monkey look like a monkey :P)

Bacteria
+great graphics, nice ranking idea
-a bit confusing (you can click on any bacteria to kill them), make change in 'featured bacteria' more noticeable
-have the game display the one appropriate ranking, rather than showing them all and figuring it out yourself

Sky Pirates
+good concept
-improve graphics
-add progressive difficulty, start game faster, add various enemies

Spot the Difference
+cool background
-tab trick works :(
-needs more levels

Possible Plane
+great idea, lots of room for expansion
-more levels, less time

LED
+nice gadget idea

Click on Buttons
+made me laugh :)

Overall
+lots of potential games here, pretty impressive
-music a bit repetitive
-achievements should look prettier :P

Next time I would add a sort of 'adventure' mode, where the player goes through and plays the games in a select order to achieve a goal, along with the listed mode you have here.

Great job everyone!

MrRandomist responds:

ok thanks for your loooong review, ill keep in consideration for the next collab

[Chrome Wars]

Not bad

It could have used a larger variety of attacks and items you can buy. The repair ability is pretty much useless, and the grit skill is way overpowered. Even on hard mode, just put all your points into grit at the beginning, and then you are pretty much set for the rest of the game.

[Exploit]

Puzzling...

A great game. The only trouble with it is that some of the puzzles on the 'harder' levels are too easy compared to some of the other challenges that should be of the same difficulty. Also, I have beaten every puzzle except the two challenge puzzles named 'Cardinal' and 'Barrier Firewall 2.0'. I can not for my life figure out how to beat them. Are you sure it is possible to win those?

GregoryWeir responds:

I'm sure.

[Killego]

Holy Original Batman!

This is an incredible concept. I nominated this for not only the Shooting Games collection, but the experimental collection as well.
There are a couple things that would have made this even cooler than it already is. By the look the animation and actionscript, I can tell that you are new to flash. Obviously better quality will come with experience, and I would have never been able to program a shooting game when I first started, so you are definitely on the right track. The menu could have looked a bit better, and the HUD could have been sharper as well.
The game itself was a bit short, which I can understand, seeing as you had to take about a jillion photos and 16 MB's to do it, but you could solve this problem by making giving the game a faster pace. Those pop-ups were a bit unnecessary, as each enemy had pretty obvious weaknesses.
Try and get some solid coloured walls for next time too. They're distracting and look a bit silly.
The game itself was wayyyyyyy too easy, if someone wants to enjoy all your Lego picturing then they should have to WORK FOR IT!!!
I suggest you find some ways to improve the special effects of the stop motion to make the movement a bit smoother and more natural, and to impress everyone with awesome blood splatters and knockbacks. An idea I had would be to take pictures of the background, then use a green screen to film an an enemy popping out of cover and shooting at you. that way you can have more than one enemy/event happening at the same time. You could also add a reload animation this way.
Sorry if I sound critical, but you already have about a 4/5 rating, and there's so much potential for this. Looking forward to a sequel! :)
(If I don't make it first! MUAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAA)

xLite responds:

Thank you ever so much for this. The more reviews I read, the more I want to begin on Killego 2. I understand this potential and I love your green screen idea. I have used it in films but never thought of games :P

Now to address some things :D
The quality is choppy for two reason, I had to use the Eyetoy because it was the only camera I had that reached the Lego head level. My proper stop motion cameras are simply too tall (gonna need to buy a new one), and the second reason, the raw data used to make this took up 3GB, so I tried my best to get it as small as possible. My stop motion skills are fantastic I just didn't have a nice enough frame per second to work with.

Flash... :D I am not a beginner. I have been using it for years. I am not a uber professional. I just know how to get things done... to a standard above "sweet!". Again, this was all down to filesize. I had to sacrifice alot.

The rest of your review has been mentioned a lot of times. So I have noted it and will consider it for Killego 2.

Killego 2, now the thing about this is. I won't care how big the filesize is this time (I will still try and keep it small, I just won't make any sacrifices to do so, besides code structure and maybe the odd video/animation if it isn't entirely necessary). If it appears too big, I will upload the game to my personal website for all to see. Unless Tom Fulps turns uber nice and let's me upload the big ass bad boy, if he likes it enough, I will understand if not due to server storage and fair share limitations etc.

So look out, I might start planning K2 sooner than you all think. :D Here's to a great sequal.

P.S. Sorry for the very long post, i'm tired. I do funny things when i'm tired. :D

[War Droids]

Not bad

I thought it was alright, perhaps a it generic with all the Bowmaster-ish stuff coming out. The game could have used a couple different difficulty levels, more upgrades, and better balance. All you really need to do to win is get all the upgrades as soon as you can and spam rocket launchers. Each troop should have a visible strength and weakness, forcing the player to introduce a bit of variety into their gameplay. The splash damage system was also acting strangely, you might want to check that out.