blarg1's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[All-In-One Tutorial]

too much interface, not enough content

Tutorials are very useful, even to the pros.

Most of the content in this tutorial wan't very necessary, but you were wise to point out a few key things that people might have trouble with, adn that aren't really convered in the online help - like the proper trace bitmap threshold settings for making a 1 for 1 vector reporduction of a bitmap sprite.

On a personal note - I dislike sprite movies. Make your own art. [harrumphs]

However, I would spend less time on the pretty interface, and more on creating more content, and a nice clean menu to navigate with. A lot of your users would probably like to see some actionscript tips as well.

Embed your screen shots at 1:1 as .png's and use lossless compression to make the screens easy to read, (you'll be surprised at how little bandwidth this burns).

Your users might also like to be able to print out sections from your tutorial.

Part of me wants to grumble that so many kids are using [obviously] stolen copies of Flash, since the software is a little out of your typical teen pocket-money range. However, it's probably a good thing that talented young people are getting their hands on software tools as soon as possible.

Back when I was young, (People still had 8-track players in their houses, and Michael Jackson was still a black man), it was really hard to get your hands on decent technology. On the up side, there was a lot less emphasis on network security, and you could have a lot of fun with a modem and a tone generator...

DJRunaway responds:

Wow, thanks! I think I can most certainly do something with it!

[High Flier]

I am disappointed to see another rip here

I feel like I've been had. I voted a 5 on this before I realized that it was a blatant rip, (see the review by compassghost).

There is nothing, to my mind, more disgusting than someone using .swf extractors to capitalize on someone else's work. I hope Newgrounds removes this submission at once.

If you can't code your own work, then piss off.

[DJ Mad Master v1]

Might be interesting if it worked

Make the button hit areas large enough to find - they were only a couple of pixels high. The mixer was completely non-functional, and the presence of numerous controls that did nothing was simply confusing.

I'm afraid that you're in no position to call someone a scumbag for critiquing your work: you submitted it. It's like pop idol - if you don't measure up, it's pointless to call the judges names.

Generally, mixer applications will allow the user to combine samples and will include code to keep them in synch. There's a lot of documentation out there that will tell you how to access the Sound Object in Flash and access its properties. It is impossible to make a workable application like this without using a fair amount of ActionScript.

BLAM.

MD-CHIS responds:

it does fucking work, i said in its profile THE BUTTONS THAT DONT WORK AND ONES THAT DO YOU FUCKING TWAT

[Swedish Saveloy]

Good concept - shows real promise

nice concept, but it's buggy as hell. You could probably use an expert actionscripter to help you.

Some little things:
1) many of the text pop-ups are cropped; remember that system text often doesn't display the same in a published movie as it does inside the Flash development environment. You should always leave some breathing room, or space for an extra carriage return. If you are using multiline boxes, I recommend setting a line spacing of 0px to compenstate for the extra kerning allowance when the movie is published. It might also help to put a translucent box behind the text pop-ups so the text is always readable.

2) I love what you did with the scaling and movement of the character. really cool - however, there are some glitches in hot spots and encounters with other characters which make it impossible to move out of the hot spot. (there's a glitch in front of the counter in the Scud shop). Can't tell without looking at the code why this is.

3) more environmental sound would be a big help to playability. Right now there are some cases where it's hard to tell if an interaction has completed or not.

4) directional control is workable, but not as playable as it could be - especially since you find yourself switching from keyboard control to the mouse and back again when using the inventory. In addition to setting up listeners for the directional keys, it would be great if you wrote a mouse handler that would use onMouseMove to do the same thing, and give users a choice I realize that this would be tricky if the result is that the character sprite has to move in two directions at once, (eg: right and down); but there are ways of handling this.

5) interface for conversation is annoying and could perhaps be improved.

The only reason I bring these things up is that this game is actually worth polishing, unlike about 90% of the submissions here.

[[old] Virtualife 1.02]

How did this get listed as a daily finalist?

This game would be interesting if at least part of it worked properly.

It looks like the only functional aspects are taken from something else with a decompiler. There are simply too many interface elements that are unattached to any data sources for me to believe anything else.