bcdefg123's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Alula Falling #1]

I like your other stuff, but I think the opening to this series falls quite flat... Alula has almost no hesitation against killing others. She agrees to become a player astonishingly quickly, AFTER witnessing a death almost certainly related to the app. Since we know of no penalty for not pressing the join button or opting not to participate in battles even after you join, the plot feels extremely forced.

Unless you are planning to explain this in future episodes (and I can't really see how that would be done convincingly), I would suggest editing this episode to fix some of those plot holes before moving on.

As for the good, I do like how you do something different for each series, and it's nice that the fights, especially the second one, require a bit more than mindless button-clicking.

Art is meh, it gets the job done, but you make up for quality with quantity, so hey, works for me!

[TDR RPG: The Quest for Xirang]

Well, this was a nice surprise this morning! It's been a long time since I've heard anything from this project. Glad to see you saw it through! :)

Some of the similarities to First Fantasy are rather striking, including the UI layout, battle system, and even the style of humor. Yet there are some nice touches that I wish I had thought of at that time - like green and red highlights for stat changes. The story, though, definitely makes this its own game. Either way, I'm still very flattered that you took inspiration from FF!

And now for the actual review, with far less comparisons :P

I'm impressed with the depth of the story. Not that I have ANY knowledge of Chinese myth, folklore, or history, but it does seem like you have a lot that you pull from here, both in terms of the breadth of folklore and your knowledge about it, and the popup text is great for learning more about a subject - but it's never required (yes, that's a good thing). The popup manner of that text, though, is odd - you could have skipped the popups and implemented the text into the game window itself somehow. I don't have a problem at all with user-initiated popups, but I've been here long enough to know that some people simply just love their adblocker.

Art is fairly minimal but what's there does its job, I suppose.

Music is just about exclusively piano and ambiance. Not too memorable either. It seems like more Chinese-sounding music would have gone great here.

The battle system is solid, and easy to get the hang of, with a couple exceptions - cultivating qi is basically a way to ensure death never happens if you start early enough, so it might have been wiser to limit that capability. Similarly, there is no penalty or chance of failure (at least in my experience, even though the tutorial says it may fail sometimes) for running away. And this was a problem in my game too (actually, a WAY bigger one in my game), but when you attack with the same results as the previous turn, sometimes the text won't change at all, so you don't know if you actually attacked. Some feedback would be welcome when attacking, even if you miss for that turn.

A more visual movement controller would have been nice too - for example, if the 'up', 'down', 'left', 'right' buttons were actually arranged like arrows or something (like Halsaban in FF 1.1). Just for us visual people. Especially if the button text shifts a lot.

I think that's everything I have right now. I like this, and I'll be looking out for a Part 2!

FlyingColours responds:

Thanks for the detailed review! Again, thanks for the inspiration and for the advice you gave me when I was in the middle of making the game.

Art and music... aren't the greatest, as I'm aware, since I'm mainly a programmer/writer and was going solo. If I make a second instalment (likely now, considering the score I got), I'll get an artist and a musician :)

I agree, cultivate qi was OP, and another user has told me about it. It is something I will definitely alter that in the next episode. Escaping depends on the Vision stat, though maybe I made the probability too high.

I agree, a more visual controller will be good. The reason I didn't implement it after you suggested it for the first time was because it would require important changes in the game engine. Implementing it would be tedious and tormenting, so I had to give it up, though this is something I‘ll implement in the next episode.

Again, thanks for the review and everything! :)

[PossibQuiz]

The correct answers and wrong answers counters don't seem to actually count how MANY questions of each, but actually the LATEST numbered question that you got wrong. So only getting two questions wrong (to my knowledge), I had '15' correct answers and '14' incorrect answers because I got question 14 wrong and question 15 right last.

[The Staff of Exile]

Well, this is a good way NOT to do a side-scroller. The point of scrolling is to be able to see an adequate distance in front of you. Here, you can't see enemies or walls even if they're right in front of you - it only scrolls if you're at the edge of the screen. Look at basically any other side scroller for an example of how to do this right. The player should almost always be within, say, the middle third of the screen. Jumping could probably benefit from a bit more floatiness too.

[Run, Jump, Meow]

This is nice. The simple addition of the double and triple jumps, plus the ability to have greater control over your jump, makes it really feel like you have more control over the character - after all, you can't only jump to one height in real life.

FateModified responds:

Thanks for playing, and for the feedback! :)

[[Weekly Mouse Maze 3]]

You say it's a glitch, getting a super fast time, but... nothing happens if you go through the walls. At all. Try some collision detection, should be easy enough for rectangular walls.

genevrarose responds:

0_0 Nothing happens? <_< At ALL?! Strange, the billions of times I tested it it did a whole lot.

*EDIT*: Found it, and fixed. Thanks.

[Pokemon Beige Version]

It's like Pokemon meets I Wanna Be The Guy.

[Wooo..aw]

Hitboxing is really bad here... try jumping, you just fall right through the ground, and then when you respawn you'll fall through a couple MORE times until you get lucky and one of the frames has the ball intersecting the ground hitbox. I haven't watched the video you took this from, but try a bigger ground hitbox, or a combination of higher framerate/slower player speed.

[Second Star to the Right]

Niiice!

This is definitely my favorite game out of all the competition. The player can control Pan smoothly, and I like the overall effect once you get a lot of fairies. The bad thing about this is fairies seem to be random. In my three games, I had two where I got at least five fairies, but for the other one, I only found two before I died a fair way into the Neverland part. Perhaps change it so you get at least three fairies at predefined points, and leave the rest up to random numbers. Also, Wallross says the game is too easy. I disagree. I've never beaten it yet :P

Besides that, the music's great, and Hook's laugh is worth a chuckle. It would have been nice to see what you could have done with those extra 24 hours, but regardless, this is a real decent game.

[Hunters - Stage 2]

Getting better!

I liked this one more than the last one. I was absolutely not expecting that change in gameplay at the start of this stage - that was a pleasant surprise.

*insert graphics stuff here. F*** your life, kill your children, and all that jazz I'm apparently supposed to say because you have bad art. I missed the memo.*

Once again, you seem to have trouble balancing difficulty. As awesome as the first part of the stage may be, I found it to be one of the more difficult parts of the stage - so much that when I was playing it, I wondered for a bit if stage 6 was going to be pretty near impossible. The good part is that this stage is a little more balanced in difficulty overall, and is just how I like it: you will probably die the first time attempting any part, but it's never too hard as to be discouraging - it just takes a little memorization or experience. And the fact that this is practically twice as long helps.

My requisite Weird Thing I Noticed That Probably Should Be Fixed with this stage was in the scene before the robot walker boss. When it revealed itself, Carina was
staring off into space, unconcerned with impending doom.

Bottom line: anyone reviewing with a score of 0 simply didn't play the game past the first 30 seconds.

This one's favorited. Keep them coming!