Ectonaut's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Coffee Party]

Fascinating Concept

I always love to see it when a designer takes a familiar game idea and turns it squarely on its head, which is exactly what you've done here; very big props for doing something original. I like your art style as well, for both the guests and the little mini-game creatures. The mini-games are a nice way to break the action up, though some reward for completing them would be nice and they're the source of a very frustrating bug: if you finish the level at the same time a mini-game pops up, some of the creatures will be hidden by the new message and you won't be able to do anything. The pause timer moves further and further into the negatives. While I'm sure this doesn't happen very often, anything that causes a piece of software to freeze up is bad news and should be taken care of.

[Mouse.]

Great take on a classic concept

A mouse avoiding game with... wait, no, it can't be... some semblance of a theme? Much less a plot? Scandalous, absolutely scandalous. we can't have that here.

The level design, visually an mechanically, was very well done. The music fit each level as well, which is a big plus (not just some random too-fast techno tune from the audio portal like most of the games here... pick something appropriate people!). I'm normally much more long-winded in these responses but there's not a whole lot to say... looks good, fun and challenging to play, a solid variation on a well-tested theme.

To everyone: try this kind of game with a tablet sometime. it's interesting to see where one fails with a tablet as opposed to a mouse, although this may just be me (I rarely use a mouse anymore, and when I do I have the sensitivity way low so I often don't move fast enough... with a tablet and absolute positioning on such a small window, moving too fast is a more common problem).

username0hi0 responds:

Thanks for ur review. and the last level actually has a random "too-fast techno" tune from the audio portal. except its a good one though. I never thought u could play these games on a tablet. wish i had one though.

[AstroFlyer]

Wonderful, but I don't believe you

I find it very difficult to believe that this is your first game. Whether or not you're new to programming or a veteran, though, this is a very impressive achievement. While looking at the crosshairs rather than the ship is a little counterintuitive, the visual style and the music more than make up for it, and I had a lot of fun playing. The only thing I would fix is to have a slightly better way of gauging your distance from the object in front of you, which is always difficult to do in a 2d game, even one as well-made as this... perhaps a shadow or something? I often found myself crashing into objects that I thought had at least half a second left to hit me, which led to a lot of deaths (and subsequent restarts) that could have been avoided.

Overall, fantastic effort and keep up the good work! If this really is your first game, I suspect Newgrounds will have to keep a very close eye on what great things you bring us in the future!

[Pandemic II]

Mwahaha

I can just imagine the evil mastermind sitting at his evil desk watching his evil engineered virus bring the free world to its knees! Excellent idea!

...but there are a few annoyances that really detracted from pure evil enjoyment. The first and most frustrating is that once, a clean country's closed itself off, there's no way to get in at all, ever, for the rest of the game. It would make sense for an airborne disease to be able to travel at least to the border, perhaps infecting the folks that enforce that same closed border and spreading from them to the rest of the population... while it does make sense for islands to be nigh-untouchable if they decide to be (curse you, Greenland!), having a mainland country sitting in a little enclave of safety in the midst of infection is a little farfetched for such a realistic game. The second big gripe I have is how long it takes to get more evolution points later in the game, something else that flies in the face of logic; it would follow that the more the disease spreads, the more it reproduces and thus the faster it can evolve. I have no doubt that this was done for balance's sake, but there are other ways to do this that would have been a bit more intuitive, like further increasing the costs on the higher-tiered traits to make up for the faster increase.

All that said, I enjoyed myself playing this, which is the highest compliment any game can be paid. You've done excellent work; if there's to be a third installment, you can bet I'll be playing it!

[More Nifty]

Veeeeery Eeeenteresting....

A clever little mess-with-your-head game. Reminded me a bit of Portal; it's got the same feel to it, like you're being put through a series of tests you're not really supposed to be able to complete... because you are.

[Aeternus Lamnia Duo]

Patience is a Virtue

I'm always a big fan of abstract monsters and little-used game genres, and this fits the bill for both. Whatever else I say about this game, I enjoyed myself, which is what you should be shooting for. With that in mind, some pointers:

1. Don't make your players wait so long between strike opportunities. While patience is a virtue, as is written in the title of this review, oftentimes I found myself performing a task that I already knew how to do over and over again waiting for the moment when I could actually make some progress. This is especially bad in the water enemy; I often found myself waiting through a dozen or so attacks before I finally got the chance to strike. This is not good. If the attack/move sets are to be randomized (which, judging by the fact that I sometimes got two hit opportunities in a row, they probably are), at least make the ones where progress can be made come up a little more often.

2. You're an excellent artist, but your images don't look nearly as good animated. While I'll say again that I'm a big fan of abstract monsters, there's a difference between objects-making-a-creature and objects-just-floating-around. I'm going to have to hate on your water guy again; I never felt like what I was fighting was some incalculably ancient elemental force in that battle, I felt like I was fighting bubbles. This is because it didn't really move like a living thing; it just kind of moved. Alternatively, some of the bosses deserved a few more moving parts, like the weather machine. Not everything deserves this criticism; your iron boss was great stylistically and the motion said "creature" rather than "floating stuff."

3. I know video game designers love their multi-part bosses (I know, I am one in my spare time), but players don't. Nothing is more soul-crushing than finally figuring out something's weakness and enduring a long, drawn-out battle only to have to do it all over again because the next, unknown form kills them and they have to start at the beginning. Especially for a game like this, finding patterns in behavior is critical, and to do that one usually needs more than one attempt; if even getting to that second attempt is difficult, your players are likely just going to give up. If I'm stuck on that third form and I think a few more tries would do it, but it takes ten minutes to even get there because I need to wade through the first two, my incentives for getting to that final stage are significantly less.

4. These are just minor notes: things happening simultaneously are sometimes a problem (lave spat at you while the boss is charging at you/using a fireball/ a bomb is about to explode, etc.), as is the lack of a pause button (which is really a good idea for any game) and the poor quality of the music (the same music... over and over... every thirty seconds... at least make the loop longer).

I'll definitely be waiting for the third installment, and I hope to see more improvements. If the difference in quality from the first to the second is any indicator of how the third will turn out, we'll be looking at a game to be remembered.

[GemCraft]

Wow

Very impressive, I like the combining/improving attributes aspect. There are a lot of tower defense games out there and so many of them don't stand out... you've really got your killer application nailed here, though. Excellent work!

[Armed with Wings 1]

Cool but buggy

You have a great visual style going on, but the glitches and gameplay issues that appeared all over the place really detract from the good things you have here. The biggest nasty I found was the "replay" as opposed to the "restart level" buttons, the first of which works fine while the second spawns you dead if you are already, which can be a bit confusing. Diagonal surfaces mesh poorly with the flat-standing graphic of the main character, which could probably be solved most easily by adding a little passable black strip in front of such surfaces to hide the feet and the problem. The scoot from running is a bit excessive (I found myself creeping along at a much slower pace than necessary so I wouldn't slide off the edge into a spike pit before I realized that the edge was even close, a situation that really added a lot of frustration to some levels), and I never found that distracting enemies did me any more good than just running and slashing (which I could do just by holding Z, no need to press it three times as the tutorial states, which is actually a good thing), especially when they would just turn the way they were originally facing when the eagle flew back (perhaps make it disappear into a puff of smoke or "blackmist" at the end?). One last thing: I know no one on Newgrounds seems to care about spelling or grammatical errors in games, but for those of us who do it really gives a bad impression of your language skills (an odd thing to be judging you on, I know, but out in the world of jobs it matters more than you'd think). It's not that difficult to proofread what you've written or have someone else look at it for you if you're not confident in your own abilities, and having well-written (and correct!) intros make folks like me and people looking to hire you much happier.

Whatever negative things I've said, you've got a great start here, keep up the good work!

[Zenon Mega Blast]

Well Done

An excellent addition to the genre; I can't find anything mechanically wrong with it. Stylistically, though, there are a few things that could have been better, the most obvious being the huge difference between your environments and your enemies. Both were very well-executed visually, particularly the animation on the enemy ships, but your static images had a very white, Earth-tech look while your enemies were very dark and organic-looking. On its own, this would be fine, but when said bright terrain is supposed to be a home for these dark enemies (especially the turrets, big dark things on bright white bases!) it forces the player to have to suspend disbelief a bit too much.

Now, I'm probably the only person here who's ever going to dock you on something like that, but you (or this team, perhaps) obviously have talent and may end up in the wide world of professional game-making, where EVERYONE is looking at things like I just was. You've got a great thing going here, and again, your gameplay was smooth as silk, but don't let silly little things like style gaps deprive you of otherwise golden opportunities.

[StormWinds 1.5]

An immense improvement

This version shows a great deal of improvement over the first; the game play is now on par with the visuals and all of the things that I originally found wanting have been fixed. Excellent work!