Score: 5

"Good enough to beat, and yet..."

submission: Zombie Exploder

date: November 4, 2009

I love beat-'em-ups, and the general concept of the game is nice. "Hey, let's punch out a lot of zombies in an office building!"

It's not a BAD game, it really isn't- but a lot of things that didn't bug me upon first loading the game starting bugging me a lot more as I kept playing to the point where I was only beating it to see what the "First Floor" option was, although I knew long before I reached that point that it was just going to be a 'fight until you die' mode.

The controls. Let's start with those. Using the mouse to use your attacks is definitely something new in the beat-em-up genre, but as I played more and more, I began to realize why "jump/attack/special" has lasted the test of time as a control scheme. Quite simply put, I KNOW what you're going for- the ability to air-juggle and knock enemies away farther and farther based on how you move the mouse- but the problem is that it's just so damn imprecise and you can never really tell just which way you're attacking, or in many cases, if you ARE attacking. Many a time I've tried to prep a kick that would send a zombie flying out the window, only to accidentally stomp him to death simply while rearing the hero's foot back for size-thirteen justice. The fact that you have to get so damn CLOSE to enemies before any attack besides "flail mouse around while jumping like a Cirque de Soleil acrobat all over the screen" does anything worth a damn simply turns the game into a pointer-based version of a button-mashing game.

And that in and of itself doesn't begin to describe how repetitive the game begins to feel, VERY quickly. You have ONE enemy type throughout the entire game. Even the worst beat-em-up I've ever played had FIVE unique, non-boss enemies to fight throughout the stages. The moment you realize that not only are you fighting on the same level for all 20 stages, but you'll also only ever be fighting the same enemy in ever-increasing amounts 20 times, the game starts to feel like a long, annoying slog- especially since, as I implied, there's really nothing you can do but pointer-mash once the enemies mob together. And oh do they mob together.

Short version: You have something going here, but the control scheme is pretty awkward for a beat-em-up, and the game is simply the same level 20 times with increased amounts of the one enemy the game possesses.

It's really too bad, since I DO rather enjoy kickin' zombies out a window. =3

Score: 6

"Um, well..."

submission: Magic Pink Man

date: June 29, 2009

This is a good game.

I like the combat system a lot, even though the last guy doesn't really call his attacks with the bite in any way that would make it feasible to dodge... not that it matters.

I like the whole 'adventure game' feel from the old days where you just pick up any ol' item you find and see where they get you... all three of the items.

I like the concept of the game, how not seriously you take it without going so far overboard that the randomness somehow becomes routine, and the aesthetics... for what little you see.

If you haven't figured out where I'm going with this... Seriously, everything comes together perfectly, but the game lasts MAYBE two minutes when you know what you're doing. When you DON'T know what you're doing... it takes MAYBE three.

I don't understand how everything could come together so well, and ultimately mean next to nothing when you've seen absolutely everything, without exception, in LESS than the time it would take me to eat an orange. You may as well have given the game no story at all. I mean, it sounded GREAT, but you just... stopped after the last boss!

This game could have been an easy '10', but the obscene brevity of the game, not to mention how it just STOPS with no real ending, chop several points off for me. If you make another game, stick with the concepts you have going on, but make it longer.

Score: 8

"The controls need some work."

submission: Magnetic Defense

date: May 3, 2009

I actually really like the ideas that this game puts out; there's nothing else quite entirely like it. The leveling system is well thought out (by the time you need to sweep the entire stage for junk parts to level up, you can GENERALLY just start flinging enemies), and your mode of attack is quite unique.

But DAMN is it hard to control your plane. It's easy early on when you can basically just hover above an enemy and drop stuff to kill them at your leisure, but once you start getting to enemies that will shoot your ass out of the sky, mouse control feels VERY imprecise and dodgy. It does not help at all that in your frantic attempts to sweep the field of vaulable EXP/ammo/goodies, your mouse pointer- which you cannot see or even BEGIN to determine the location of- will FREQUENTLY go flying out of the Flash window, confusing a player greatly and making it hard to sweep around like you need to in order to live beyond the first three or so missions. I also think it's a VERY questionable decision to force a player to 'cash in' all the scrap that they didn't pick up for Ultimately Useless Points. At least give us a few seconds to make a mad dash for what's left, or better, don't remove it from the playing field at all. The game seems to be able to handle all the sprites.

Honestly, this is a really good game, and it has to potential to be incredible. But whip up a keyboard control scheme or something, at LEAST as an alternate mode of control. With that, I think this game could be one of the greats.

Score: 7

"Well..."

submission: Karate Blazers

date: March 30, 2009

As far as I can tell- I've played the original game before, and the game you provide is basically a dead-on Flash conversion, small graphical layering errors aside in some of the text. Nothing seems to have changed, and aside from some minor slowdown issues, the game runs EXACTLY as it would in MAME or what-have-you. Obviously, this took quite some talent and skill to do, especially if you had to reprogram the engine from scratch.

Buuuuut the thing is, well... For all your technical skill, the game itself just isn't that interesting, and it's definitely a game that needed a LOT of sprucing up in the first place. It's incredibly dull, repetitive, and you are swarmed by such huge numbers of enemies that your special attack is really the only option you have for getting out of most situations with the least overall health loss (and this ends up making Mark the most useful character without question, and Glen completely useless). All of these were problems pre-port, and it would have been nice to see some of these issues addressed.

I really want to give this game a ten based on the incredible porting job alone- you've even got the game's music in!- but I'm sorry. The game itself... seriously, you could have picked better, or done more with what you had.

Don't let me discourage you, though. If you want to take another shot at doing something like this game and want to stick with Video System's stuff, may I suggest "Spinal Breakers"? Fun shooter, that! =3

Score: 7

"Good, but kind of flops near the end."

submission: Neverending Light

date: February 25, 2009

I won't deny that the game's got crazy-awesome atmosphere, and I love the use of lighting in this game- there's really not much else like it that I've seen. Going as far into the game as I did, I was propelled by a desire to find out what happened next (even WITH that mystery claw creature that attacked in some of the corridors scaring the crap out of me every time it seemed to come out of nowhere for me).

Note that I said 'as far as I did'. I ultimately didn't beat the game. The moment you introduced combat into the game, everything just... fell apart. You lost the feeling that you were completely powerless and desperately searching for a way to get out, even though as badly as the combat handles, I still felt quite amazingly powerless.

Maybe there's a trick I'm missing. I'm sure there is. I'm sure someone will call me on this. But I have no idea how in the hell I'm supposed to FLANK a monster that outranges me close to 3-to-1, and both turns and attacks every bit as fast as I can, knocking me way the hell out of range of any hope of counterattack. Even WITH your actually being invincible- and I suspect that playtesting this fight is the reason for this being the case- this fight feels so tacked-on and annoying that it changes the atmosphere from tense and brooding to frustrating and annoying- so much so in my case that I just gave up after three minutes of utter failure to score a third hit after it backed into a corner.

If you MUST include combat to future games of this variety, you really, really need to do something to not give the enemy the complete and total advantage over you. I wish I didn't have to dock the game three points for this; you've got the hard part of storytelling and atmosphere down.

Score: 10

"Awesome parody."

submission: Clinically Obese SMB

date: January 29, 2009

This is one of those things that shouldn't be nearly as good as it sounds. Hold right until you 'complete' the game is all you need to do, but everything just works.

You can't tell me that you didn't get a chuckle out of the pipes breaking and spraying water everywhere, and the boss battle, well... when you see what's coming up, you just KNOW what's gonna happen yet it's still funny.

Hey, at least I took Fat Bastard Bowser down with me!

Score: 7

"Well, it's not BAD..."

submission: Dark Cut 3

date: November 12, 2008

There just doesn't seem like there's much to it compared to the other two games. The storyline is intriguing and bizarre in a cool way, and despite warning signs present in some of the earlier games (I won't spoil anything), the final surgery took me entirely by surprise.

But it seems like more went into the story than the rest of the game. Compared to 1 and 2, I agree with many that this installment feels ridiculously easy. There's not much you have to do in any given one of the surgeries, the game picks out the tools for you rather than making you grab them yourself (a little thing, but still...) and it bears repeating again- all of the surgeries are really quite short and don't require you to do much in order to beat them- the ONLY tricky parts come when you're removing objects impaled through people and one false pixel resets the object INTO ITS ORIGINAL POSITION.

I ALSO think it's a bit lame how three of the surgeries are blocked off unless you go off-site; I guess if that's what you've gotta do for your sponsor and you didn't make those operations vital to the story, more power to you, but still. And I ALSO think that with sedation being so vital to beating the surgeries, you'd make it a little easier to figure out where it is BEFORE you've lost your first surgery by an embarrassing margin, and ONLY then being told, 'oh, by the way, the 'sedate' button's in the upper-right'.

This really ISN'T a bad game. The gameplay itself is solid, there's just not enough OF it. You had something good going with the first two games; once you make Dark Cut 4, seriously, I love the story; I hope the next installment brings us something just as cool... but bring back more game to go with it, okay? =3

Score: 10

"Hehe, nice!"

submission: :the game:

date: November 5, 2008

I don't know how you made a game where the goal on nearly every stage is simply "jump off the floating grassy knoll and die", and make it an enormously fun laugh riot, but with all your titles and puns, you somehow kept it fresh the entire time.

Great work. For making something that should in no way be amusing one of the better times I've had playing Flash games, the 10 is yours.

Keep it comin'.
(AKA "Porn: The Game")
(AKA "Yeah, there's a reason I didn't make this")

Score: 6

"It's OKAY, but..."

submission: Jump !

date: October 24, 2008

There's... just not much TO it, and some of the game elements are a bit annoying.

There's exactly two types of platforms; one that falls and one that doesn't, and it's obvious which is which. There's no real surprises or variety, which I assume is why you added in the enemy.

And said enemy. It's nice to have an element in the game that complicates things, but he's just too damn unpredictable and there's really not THAT much you can do to avoid some of his attacks. I'm thinking specifically of the missiles he fires. They track you way too fast and are almost guaranteed to hit you, especially since your only real options for avoiding it are moving forward and up (down obviously kills you and left just sets you up for a fall. Personally, I think you should just make it NOT home in on you. Maybe you could make it a spread-shot once you've gone far enough, or something like that? And also, some indication of when he's going to attack would be nice as well. Mostly I just have to hope he doesn't when I'm in a bad spot.

Aside from that, there's not too much to say (although I would suggest a much faster "return to game after dying" option- it seems strange that "try again" would throw me back to the "play/instructions/whatever" prompt after a screen transition). It's not a bad game, but making it a bit more exciting and toning down your enemy's cheapness would help a bit.

Score: 8

"Not too bad."

submission: Body Ladder

date: October 24, 2008

While the presentation is fairly minimalistic, it works for this game- after all, the sheer body count you amass over the course of the game means that anything more would probably bog the game down into an unplayable mess.

It's a great concept- kill ragdoll enemies and use them as platforms to climb as high as you can get- but it needs a few tweaks to be "10" material.

-First, add some more weapons. You've got a nice, logical progression set up - 2-hit melee kill, 1-hit melee kill, 1-hit melee kill but with longer range, and shooting attack. Anything more than 2-hit melee kills in the beginning would make the game stupidly hard, so you've got a good starting point... But you've already seen everything the game has to offer once you've reached height 30. Tedium starts to set in once you've filled the height bar and realize that "hey, it's not stopping and nothing new is happening". The fact that the shooting attack is just too damn effective at killing enemies means that the game just gets easy beyond that point, unless your relentless clicking leads to problem two.

-Second, I understand the need to credit a sponsor, but can it be done in a place where I don't have to fend off enemies? It is WAY too easy to click that link that throws you off-site and interrupts your game WITHOUT PAUSING IT, making you easy prey for anything that shambles your way. What's more, the link's hitbox is gigantic and enemies can easily hide out behind it as it overrides and blocks your shot! Move it near the top of the screen where nothing's ever going to attack.

-Third, and this would go best with the "more weapons" thing I mentioned, perhaps some more enemy variety would be nice. The "one type of enemy" thing DOES work for the game's rules, but this IS an endless game, and right now, your enemies all act the exact same- the only complicating factor being the terrain and how easy it is to hit your enemies in spite of it.

This isn't a bad game by any means, but it could use a little beefing up. DEFINITELY follow at least the second thing I mentioned, and at least consider the other stuff, and I think we could see a "10" in the future.