sharpnova's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lockehorn]

-1 star for the adblocker BS. you act like we're blocking ads just to hurt indie developers. what about the disgustingly obtrusive ads on sites like youtube and ign?

4 overall because this is a great game as i always expect from nitrome

Nitrome responds:

Just because you argue that you are blocking ads for sites like Youtube and ign does not mean that you are not hurting indie developers?
The arival of App stores on mobile as a whole has led to an ongoing decline in people playing flash games which in turn is putting a squeese on the revenue a flash dev can make from their game. We have to get millions of people to play our games just to pay the bills of making it which is no easy task! On top of that it is generally accepted that you have more potential to make money in mobile now than you do in the flash space so flash developers faced with this dilema are increasingly jumping ship.
What I'm saying is avoid watching ads if you want, but then don't complain later when there are no longer any free games to play on the internet any more of any worth.

[Orbox C]

i love this genre of puzzle game.
you were smart enough to not force us to move our hand back and forth between keyboard and mouse which most level-based flash game creators lack the intelligence to do
sounds/music are awesome.

top notch.

GameBalance responds:

Thank you!

[Dracula's Treasure!]

Check out the author's idiotic reply to the accurate criticism that this is just that old Flicky game with different sprites.

As if he would need to steal source to copy a game this simple.

01010111 responds:

It seriously would have helped. Also I don't take it as a criticism, because my idea was to make a game "similar to games like Flicky and City Connection" :D Anyway, I'm sorry you don't like my game or my facetiousness.

Oh, also - if you want to check out my source, you can search for this game on ludumdare.com!

[Pokemon Tower Defense 2]

this is a great game but there's something about it that's always bugged me. now that i know more about game design i can point it out: bad jiving of different graphical styles.

if you used a retro-pixely font everywhere, this game would look and feel 10x better.

having retro-pixely looking sprites and then a sharp smooth font makes it look amateurish.

Olmate responds:

I see your point! I guess it just doesn't bother me

[Maximum Frustration 2]

not a fan of games that are designed to be annoying.

also my right ear is bleeding. you need to balance your audio.

Zapxo responds:

Are you frustrated yet?

[Echo Bullet]

no upgrades = no stars

Nonako responds:

(sorry for my English)

I'm really not a fan of upgrades system, at least in these kind of game. I love to rise my skill and win than use my time to farm lot of money and buy powerful weapon then beat all bosses without hard trying. So sorry...

[Outpost:Swarm]

a bit laggy. graphics are low resolution. and i didn't like how i couldn't set it to full screen again if i hit escape and ended full screen mode. if i could, there were no instructions or menus to show me how.

Squize responds:

Yep, you can only turn full screen back on via the title screen, as we figured players would either want full screen, or not, rather than change mid game ( I understand that real life gets in the way and you may need to swap between the two views when playing, but the whole full screen stuff wasn't in the original, and we could only devote a certain amount of time to this newgrounds exclusive ).
As to the graphics, they're not low resolution, Flash scales things up in full screen, the bigger your display the more it has to scale, there's no way around that really.

Thanks for taking the time to play it.

[Legend of Pandora]

-when creating a new game and not having ever played before, there's literally no reason for you to have the three save slots pop up and have us pick one. just unnecessary interface clutter.

-when having people enter their name and nothing else, you should have the focus be in the name entering box upon the loading of the page. doesn't make sense for us to have to click into it.

-when having the user enter their name, they should be able to hit enter to submit. you shouldn't force them to move their hand back and forth between the keyboard and mouse that many times. it gives a very unpolished first impression.

-i noticed at the very start that when swinging to the side, the graphic showed up as a pickaxe for part of the swing, despite the fact that i was wielding a sword.

-the default controls are possibly the worst you could have picked. people have to hold their arms at a very awkward angle. basically the left hand is ok but the right hand has to shift over far further to the left than is natural. this is typically the reason why flash games of this type use the arrow keys for movement and a/s or z/x for interaction/attacking. you could have kept the general flavor of your control scheme intact though by having movement be done with WASD and interaction be done with left/right or up/down or some combination of those. it would be odd but it would be far better than what you chose. i think a lot of time authors try to impose their notion of what the "right" controls should be based more on nostalgia for the old NES days than anything else. if you were objectively trying to create a fun gaming experience on the flash platform, you would have gone with a scheme like this: arrows for movement, 'a' for attack, and 's' for interaction. this is the scheme i quickly adopted, but i shouldn't have had to. you could have gone for something experimental but usable enough that people would give it a shot. instead you went with a brand of nostalgia-inspired elitism that simply annoyed me and i imagine, many other people.

-being unable to respec your skills and stats is reminiscent of outdated game mechanics. an age of game design where the player was given less flexibility and room for experimentation because the developer wasn't really thinking ahead.

-i liked the '1', '2', '3', etc. aspect of the interface. it was short and sweet for a flash game. but i didn't like that you couldn't interact with straight forward things (like the quest log) via your keyboard. i personally consider the whole "constantly shift your right hand between the keyboard the mouse simply because i'm under the impression as a game designer that you simply can't do without your right hand being used for both" to be one of the cardinal sins of flash game design. there's really no reason i shouldn't have been able to cycle through the quests with the arrow keys and select with the action key to read.

-similarly, forced mouse interaction for the inventory and items was cumbersome to the experience.

-lack of keyboard interaction for such simple things as saving and warping was also annoying to me.

i'm going to wrap this up for now. i think i've given you enough feedback to polish this thing to a shine. notice the rating i'm giving. i still think this is awesome. now i'm going to play it. if you need more feedback for the rest of the game past the first save point, you know where to reach me.

matakukos responds:

Thank you, your feedback is really valuable for me! I want to make this game perfect =)
Fell free to send me any feedbacks so I can improve the next part of this game.

[Madness Accelerated]

give me a break. this is really terrible.

FetusMilkshakes responds:

Thanks for the review, it clearly states why you dislike it and how we can fix it.

[The Most Wanted Bandito]

lol. wagon came up. i shot it 3 times real fast so it died. it dropped coins but i didn't get to pick them up cuz the wagon was dead so i'd beaten the level.

lol!

how did that stupid bug slip through? something that obvious? rofl!!!!!!

royalin responds:

IF you only knew how many bugs we encounter on each game, thanks for the heads up but why you scored it so low... :(