ible's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Bango!]

Good game

Hey, great game you've got here. I know you don't think the walkthrough pop-up is annoying, but I think it insults my intelligence. Most of the time it was simply the timing of jumps and such that got me killed, it wasn't the planning or anything. It's a >puzzle< game, it's the point of a puzzle game to be puzzled! It's nice to have a walkthrough on the internet, but you don't need to link to it midgame, when most of us will just see it as a distraction to our purpose (getting timings right, etc.).

Some of the other features took me a while to get used to, and frustrated me at first: that when you touch a block on the side it will disappear, even if you want to land on it. I realize this is an important part of one of the levels, though.

Also, I agree with Keslen that the timer shouldn't start ticking immediately: you should wait until the player starts to move, or, taking that idea further, you could only count the time that the character is actually moving.

But overall, good game.

[Meat Boy]

Great Game!

Overall a fantastic game that's stolen quite a bit of my time, in quite a good way.

But a few things keep it from being absolutely perfect.

For one thing---at least with the PC keyboard (I don't know how well the joysticks work)---it would be nice to slow down your movements. E.g., hold shift as you move to move slower. A few levels were rendered difficult only because they required precision movements that required just the right amount of tapping of the keys.

Secondly, hit detection was sometimes off. Once or twice a projectile flew right through me. And more than once or twice I hit a bad square when it seemed like I shouldn't have. (I realize this just requires you to "learn the game" and avoid them a bit better, so that's not my biggest qualm.)

Third, I thought you could have had a sizzle sound effect for being consumed in lava :) --- rather than the standard gloopy sound effect.

Fourth, I don't think you should be able to wall jump off the side of the screen. You should either die, or start falling off screen and die if you don't recross back into the screen play area (on a non-death surface) before you reach the bottom of the screen. The first level in which I came across the requirement to wall jump off the side of the screen, I was confused.

Oh, and in the twin towers level, there's a "glitch"/cheat where you just immediately run right, and you can get to her before your invulnerability runs out.

But a fantastic game overall (I'm being picky except on the first point), loved the "retro" artwork and visuals.

[Orbitrunner]

good work!

As a physicist, I enjoy this sort of nature's laws based game. Of course, it would be incredibly impossible to move around the sun like we do in this game, but at least it's partially physics based :).

It was a great puzzle, I think I got to about level 21 and quit on that with about 189 faults. Sometimes it was frustrating, but other times I had the twisted enjoyment of seeing (and hearing) planets blow up. (Also not physics based, since there is no sound in space, but I like it anyway.)

One thing that would be nice is, before the failure level screen popped up (maybe call it "retry" rather than continue, and "continue" for moving on in levels), if we could have a second to look at the paths that were taken--maybe click through for faster replay--but nonetheless something to see the carnage that ensued, for enjoyment of the scene and possible planning.

Another type of game might arise out of two suns fighting each other by throwing planets at each other--if two planets hit, instead of exploding perhaps they form up, with appropriate momentum conservation, and the goal is to hit the opposing sun. I don't know if the game would be feasible or fun, but just another application of gravity physics.

[Aliens Must Die]

very smooth!

The control was very smooth; though as a physicist I have to say that you're neglecting inertia... once you accelerate in a direction, you would continue to move in that direction until acted upon by an outside force. In plain empty space, there is no friction or anything else to slow you down. (Except asteroids, I guess!) But it's your liberty to have the physics be whatever you want; again, it was very smooth, and it would be a bigger control challenge to be more realistic.

Some complaints:
About a third of the time I wasn't quite sure what the lady co-pilot was saying, so her voice could have been clearer.

When starting waves, having stuff appear right in front of you and getting run into that way isn't fun. (Stuff should come from off-screen at all times, unless you have cloaking/teleporting units.) In addition, it might be nice to have a bigger field of view.

Something about your game's graphics just quite didn't mesh together. Half the stuff (ships, asteroids, the background) tried to look "realistic," and the other half (bullets, the meteors), looked very stylized. I'm a big fan of stylized, so I really liked the way the weapon upgrades looked.

LongAnimals responds:

Thanks for your comments.
I didn't neglect inertia - I just had lots of complaints from people who were unable to play it when it had intertia, so I gracefully removed it :-)

[Bubble Tanks 2]

great improvement!

Fantastic improvement over the old; especially the new-and-improved upgrade system, which adds replay value.

A couple things that might have been nice:
I played it through a couple times, but I wanted to be able to see all the different tanks without doing it all over again--maybe there could be a way where beating the boss unlocks the tanks, and you can switch between them at will.

The first time through, I got stuck at the end with the drone tank, whose rate of fire is really slow, and hard to get used to. Maybe each time you lose a tank level, you repick the tank you want. The way to avoid crossing the line back and forth annoyingly if you're in the middle of battle is to give a bigger starting amount of bubbles for each tank (and just make it more bubbles to level up).

The second time I played through, I went for the sniper; especially for him, it would be nice to have a bigger field of view. But I think all tanks would benefit from that.

Also, as you probably know, sometimes the action gets slow, because of all the bullets and stuff onscreen, but I don't know if you can help that so much.

But overall great ideas and effort went into this, you can be proud of it!

[Nameless THE GAME]

good story, bad game

it seemed like there was not enough agility for the demands of the game; i don't know if there were attack combos, but something like that would be good. whenever i came up against fellows (besides the boss), i threw things at them, because hand-to-hand skills aren't that great. also, there seems to be no point in jumping, since you can't jump and attack (besides at the beginning, when you need to jump around).

but good animation. overall, it was a bad experience for me, but it was very smooth.