One-Dollar's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Space Invaders Flash]

Good remake, but not as hard

A good recreation though the invaders need to speed up a bit more when there are fewer of them. They're still really easy to hit when there's only one left, whereas in the classic game the final invader always moved really fast. As it is the game is rather easy and I gave up by getting bored, not by being killed. Also the exit button doesn't seem to do anything.

I'm not accusing you of stealing the flash, but with something this common the idea's bound to run through several people's heads and might get you some whistle blowers. My suggestion is to change the title screen to make it more obvious that it's your submission.

Gage001 responds:

i will tell you that i saw a flash game of invaders and made my own version.
So if that answers your question...

[DCorp's Cursor Tut V.2]

Not awful, but still not perfect

Ok, first off a bug I found, the Amusement Ride and Ante Up music descriptions appear when you scroll the mouse over the area they are located in instead of just the buttons

In terms of style, it tends to be a bit heavy and insulting. You're aiding people, so calling them 'noobs' and swearing a lot might not help that much.

The second page could be a bit clearer (by "a * sort of thing" I assume you mean the centre-point of the movieclip), in which case you could point out that this is the 'clicking point' of the mouse or whatever.

Overall its as lot better than some tutorials I've seen, but you don't cover a lot of ground. If the text for your tutorial can fit into essentially two pages, why not stretch it out with step-by-step screenshots and things?

The best thing about tutorial is the look. It's very easy to read and looks nice too. It seems reasonably friendly and accessible, which is what you want from a tutorial.

One other thing I'll mention is the music issue. Its a problem whenever people submit tutorials with music - the ballance between variety, length and loading times is a hard one. In this case I'd say a four page tutorial is not worth 6 MB and the loading time that comes with it. I'd just pick one song.

I hope this isn't all too negative, I'm just trying to give you a fair amount of feedback and as many pointers for areas to improve in as possible.

DCorp responds:

I'm am glad you like it! Remember to sumbit it to the flash tutorial collection!

[Sound Control Tutorial]

Very useful and indepth

I didn't see your original, but I thought this was great. Really in depth and helpful, covering more or less all I can think of that you can do with sounds. I hope any further tutorials you do are this well explained. In terms of graphics I reckon they aren't absoloutly essential, but screenshots are very useful and nice looks help to make the whole thing seem more friendly. Nobody would read a tutorial that was all black text on a white background.

Lockdude responds:

Thanks, well my last one wasnt just black text on a white background but it was sorta along those lines and it had no pictures, so it's all better now I reckon, and keep an eye out for more tutorials. Thanks for the great review.

[The Ultimate AS Tutorial]

Not bad, but a bit awkward

It's pretty good, I guess, and coveres quite a wide range of topics. My main problem is with the presentation - its all text. You need some diagrams/pictures/animations and probably also some examples (like you did with the car game). The other main problem is the copy-and-pasteable actionscript - I think almost all of the text boxes you put it in are far too small to see the complete line of code, which makes it hard if people are trying to understand your explanations. Everything is also black and red, which gets a bit boring after a while (though better than having lots of styles). Perhaps make it a bit more bright and colourful - in its current state the flash looks a little daunting and offputting. Controls for turning the music on and off (plus tutorial)? The final thing is the menu buttons. Its not obvious which are buttons and which are text, so its a little hard to tell what you can click.

So basically the content's more or less fine, but the presentation needs a bit of work

micsa responds:

Thanks for the tips.

[Photoshop Tutorialab beta]

Change the text colour

You shouldn't submit test stuff like this to the portal. Still, here's my advice - change the text colour. You can't read black on the background you've chosen, so make it white or something

Zeppekk responds:

Really? i thought it was prettey damn easy to read, easier than greay, because grey/white/red is the backround colour.

[Space Invasion]

Pretty faithful, though with a few bugs

Couple of things I noticed. Firstly you missed an important part of the space invaders game - the speed. The invader speed should depend on how many are left on screen; when there is only one invader it should be moving very fast. The second one was a small bug - when you shoot a UFO it stops the music. They should (I think) be pretty easy to fix.

Other than that it was a nice and fairly accurate space invaders flash remake (even if most of the things on screen were constantly changing width or spinning). You get points for not making a horrible 'Sonic has to shoot the badniks before they invade green hill zone' (or whatever you happen to be into) version.

Seandadj responds:

haha nice comment at the end, it does get faster when you get down to 1, and i should be able to fix that bug quickly, thanks for the review :P

[Lock'd In]

Very very bad

That was, unfortunatly, really bad. The graphics sucked. The instructions were longer than the game. No matter what answer you clicked to a question, you got the number. You made the number pad have buttons which was just confusing. The questions had no relation to anything. The story and scenario made no sense. Even when I got the combination it didn't work. There was a stop music button but no restart music. The only redeeming feature was the randomly generated code. This game was awful.

spex13 responds:

try getting all the questions right, then using that code you tube :p

[PME Tutorial]

Too much missing from the little that's there

Everything you know is basically four tutorials?

Ok, my first complaint is something that annoys me on so many flash movies and games - use a hit box for all buttons! I hate it when you have to click exactly on the letter for something to work.

Secondly you've missed a semicolon out from the button tutorial - the script should read 'gotoAndPlay (desiredframe);'

Right, thirdly your pausing tutorial is neither descriptive, complete or correct. People who don't know how to use the stop() function will not understand "Put this actionscript in the frame you want to pause". You don't cover resuming and simply putting 'stop()' in the actionscript wouldn't work anyway, as you've missed another semicolon - 'stop();'

Now to your other tutorial, and again you are covering simple topics but skipping on the basics. Make sure your graphic is a movie clip - how? Now make it glow - how?

Its more of the same with the blur tutorial - you're basically saying that you can do things, but not explaining how in any way that a complete beginner would understand

On a more positive note the style is quite nice, and its nice that you've gone to the effort of putting in copyable actionscript text.

Overall there's not enough here, and what is here is so limited that I don't think it would help anyone. I hope you improve in your AS abilities though, and can contribute some indepth and helpful advice in the future, but sorry, this isn't it

rox0rz24 responds:

In my version of Flash (8 Pro), the semicolons are not needed. And, I just started it this morning. I'm gonna update it more and more...

[Hunted]

Boring

There's more or less nothing to this game. By this I mean there's no score system (like time stayed alive), no progressive difficulty (like more bad guys turning up after certain lengths of time), no variation in gameplay (like collectibles - missiles? - to get rather than dodging). I aprechiate the 4 difficulty levels, but even on the hardest setting simply holding two directions down (up +left/right or down + left/right) moves the ship fast enough to outrun the aliens. The graphics are average, and there aren't too many sounds either. Although you've got the basics down, I couldn't find a reason to play this for more than a minute or two. In short, it needs more.

El-Jacko responds:

Fair enough. Although, as mentioned earlier, there is supposed to be a score counter. It just didn't work after I uploaded it.

[Natural Satellites]

Good work

That grey sattelite (or however you do spell it) is rather hard to avoid. My technique of rapidly circling the moons at a short distance away didn't work on that one.

Good job, and probably places for loads of creative additions. Personally I'd like to see some collisions between moons, and between moons and asteroids, maybe wormholes that periodically appear and teleport you to a random screen location if you hit them...

Anyway, good game

Numenos responds:

you have some nice ideas there...

yes, i am aware mr. Ice Planet is a little hard to avoid, his inertia is .7, the blue planet is .6
for a while i but Ice's inert to .65, but then it was too easy, so i stuck with .7.

you're right, i'd love to enlarge this game as you say, and i did contemplate making a neverending game where you can destroy moons with the asteriods, but that would require a lot of "random" codes and shapeflags, which i didn't use for this simple game. wormholes sound like a good idea, but wouldn't work, as the Earth is stuck to the cursor and it is impossible to move the cursor's position on a computer screen using code... well... at least to my knowledge...

thanks for the nice long review and the constructive critisizm.