Fro's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[A Christmas Story SB]

Decent soundboard

Pretty good soundboard all around. I liked that you had so many things to pick from. I liked that you used a picture as a background. It was very fitting in this situation in my opinion.

The only thing that I hate about soundboards is that they should stop playing the old sound when you click something new, but only the best of the best seem to do that with their soundboards. The nice stop all sounds button seems to work fine though and it's really not that big of a deal.

The only other tip I can give is to find all of the sounds that you can that don't include any background noise or background music. I know that this can be very hard to do, but it makes for a good soundboard that people can use for pranks over the phone. It's also better to use very short phrases that are only 3 or 4 words in total.

~ Review Request Club ~

Frenzy responds:

Thanks!

~ Z

[Ultimate NG Quiz]

Good design

~ Animation/Graphics ~

Very good design for a quiz. Not a beginners quiz by any means. You tend to see the random ugly background with poor text and a very unorganized manner to everything, but this was pretty organized and was very easy on the eyes. It seems like all buttons worked properly.

~ Story/Content ~

A lot of good questions. The ability to choose a difficulty is pretty cool. Since a lot of questions were possible to be looked up in the FAQ perhaps you could have added some sort of time limit on the questions. The easy questions could have a long time to be answered and the time could go down with each difficulty.

~ Audio ~

I felt like there should have been some sort of song that was playing as soon as it started. I almost didn't discover the music player on the bottom. The choice picking of the song of your choice and the option to turn music off was very nice.

~ Overall ~

Better than average.

~ Review Request Club ~

[Piggy123s flash tutorial]

I learned nothing here.

~ Animation/Graphics ~

Again, very poor design. Looks like it was thrown together really quick with no effort put into it at all. Organization and a good background would make this look so much better.

~ Story/Content ~

This wasn't very good at all in my opinion. When I clicked the top button to go to the move the guy with an arrow all it did was replay the voice of the guy again. When I clicked on the button for the dress up game it loaded the arrow moving thing.

The only useful piece of information was the action script, but because of the way the flash doesn't work very good and the design I wouldn't even trust using the code.

~ Audio ~

Not only can you not understand what the guy is saying, but sometimes if you would click the buttons too fast we would talk even when it went back to the play screen, etc.. The sound was really messed up and you should have used a real voice if you were going to do something with a voice.

~ Overall ~

This needs to be worked on all the way across. The design needs to be so much better, the buttons need to work properly, and the audio needs to be from a real voice actor instead of that weird voice you used.

~ Review Request Club ~

piggy123 responds:

sorry i made it a while ago

[human actions drawing tut]

Crude, but not terrible

~ Animation/Graphics ~

The graphics were terrible in this submission all around. Your drawings weren't great, but you don't have to be amazing to give tips to other people. My biggest complaint was just the organization and lack of it. Things were just kind of thrown all over the screen wherever. Text was sometimes too small to read good and you started getting more and more sloppy as the submission went on.

I think the best thing to do to improve this is to organize it a bit more. Put pictures in one part of the screen, text on one part, and title at one part, etc... Keep it neat and consistent. Adding a colored background would be very helpful also. Something more detailed and not just a random color though.

~ Story/Content ~

I usually like guides and things like that. It did help me a little bit as I saw some of the steps that need to be taken to make some things that I wasn't good at such as legs, arms, eyes, and ears. The lack of good graphics makes it seem like you don't know what your talking about and the lack of organization and professionalism in the submission to me would make me think people may skip over it. Length of the submission was pretty good, but I think a back and forth button would be good along with a replay button. You also spell a word wrong on the ending screen. I just forget which one now. :P

~ Audio ~

Not bad music for a submission like this. Perhaps introducing a mute/unmute button for people who don't like to listen to music while they read would be helpful.

~ Overall ~

Helpful to some beginners, but content and organization made it not so great. Keep on working though.

~ Review Request Club ~

piggy123 responds:

thanks corky i mean fro lol

[Revenge of the Red Button]

Generic push this button flash 10,000,000.

~ Animation/Graphics ~

Probably the coolest set up that I've ever seen with one of these button pushing flashes. It's obviously a bomb right from the beginning so we all knew the ending wasn't a surprise because of the obvious graphic. For some reason when I see the digital clock like that I think of the color red instead of green, but all around there really wasn't any problem graphics or animation wise. Pretty good design all around.

~ Story/Content ~

Like I said pretty generic. Not really much humor like I've seen in others, but a little bit here and there. You spelled a couple of words wrong in the flash itself. There was a time where meant should have been mean and the word be should have been me. Something you might want to go back through and fix. What I was really surprised about in this submission (because like I already mentioned it was obvious that the button was attached to a bomb) was that the ending was just a fade out. I was hoping for an explosion or fire or something, but you just faded out. A replay button would have been nice too for people who wanted to do it again, but I think once is enough for a game like this.

~ Audio ~

I like that you added sound to the button. You tend not to see the sound added to these for some reason. I always wanted to see one of these with voices too, but I highly doubt it would work out for the better. Maybe a couple of different sound effects or ambient music could have been nice in this though. The explosion sound was nice.

~ Overall ~

I think the explosion let down at the end is what really lowered the score here and not only the originality factor. A game like this can still be original if the content was and to be honest the content really wasn't. I guess when you've been on this website for over five years you tend to see a lot of these though.

andy70707 responds:

Thanks, and I did pretty much everything except the fade out at the end with actionscript (ahh why didnt I think of animating the bomb countdown!) I noticed a few spelling errors myself, but I cant really be bothered to fix them, it would take too long scrolling through my huge array. I did think about adding sound, but I couldnt find any good music for this and decidede it would be best without. I dont think you would be able to add voices either, I dont think anyones gonna read out 7500 letters for me, and them having to put them all in the flash, the fillesize would be huge to start out with anyway. Ive been on NG since '07, so 2 years now, and I havent seen many of theese. There was the origional one (which I first saw on adictinggames) and on NG ive only seen about 2 or 3 of theese tributes. For the ending, I tried to find a good explosion, but I suck at animating stuff like that, and ive only got some tiny assets, 1 of thems a filter effecct+motion tweened one ive used countles times, and its really too slow. The other one it hand animated and looks alot nicer with a blur filter, althoguh it designed from side view. Also, being that close to the bomb, you wouldnt really get a chance to see it, maybee a short explosion sound, then just darkness, so thats what I did here, and its kind of like afro-ninjas escape series, at the end theres jsut a horn and then it jsut fades out to black. Anyway, glad you kinda half-liked it :)

[Can you make the maze]

Meh

~ Animation/Graphics ~

Nothing really wrong with the graphics or animation at all. In fact the animation was smooth and the speed of the ball was perfectly fine in my opinion. The ball and the maze were very simple though. Perhaps something more complex would have made it better, but there isn't much you can do with a game like this.

~ Story/Content ~

This is where the game can improve so much. I might write a lot here, depends on how tired my hands get and how many ideas I can come up with. Before I get into all of that though there was an error on level 3. The ball just randomly went away and I didn't have anything else to do. I couldn't finish the level or anything so perhaps you can look into that.

Something that would have made this game better is by making it harder. You could do this by adding more dead ends, making it so the walls make you start over if you hit them, and adding a time limit. The time limit could be done in a couple of ways. You could have it as a simple counter which makes the person start over from the beginning if they don't finish by then. You could also have "enemies" or something else come from the beginning of the maze and start to fill the maze up so you need to finish before a certain amount of time or it will catch up to you and of course if you touch it you have to start over again.

Another thing that you could think about would be giving a purpose to the game such as a score. You could do the score by giving out points for the amount of time that is left on a timer or even by having them go out of their way to collect coins, which would make the game challenging along with a time limit.

Something else that might be good for this game would be being able to select the color of your ball. Even maybe adding a mini game type thing where the people can draw on the ball and make their own custom character.

~ Audio ~

This could use some good sound effects such as a victory noise if you finish the level or a fail sound if you don't make it in time or hit a wall. (Which of course would involve you doing some extra work as you don't have the time thing or the wall as making you lose) Some ambient background music would be pretty good here with a mute/unmute button that would allow people to choose if they want music or not.

~ Overall ~

Your generic maze game, but it needs to be harder and needs some extra stuff to be close to being considered a good game. Keep working hard though.

[The Circ]

Decent game all around.

~ Animation/Graphics ~

The only complaint at all would be the organization of the menu. It looked like it was just thrown together and plopped right in the middle of the screen. In my opinion that could be organized much better and perhaps the text/font that you used could have been a bit bigger to be easier on people when they read it.

Other than that the controls worked fine, the animation was smooth and all around the graphics were decent. Nothing too great, but nothing bad by any means.

~ Story/Content ~

What a simple game, but what a wonderful game at the same time. I personally haven't seen too many games this simple, but yet fun and addicting. That being said it could use some better upgrades and more complex action, but not a bad start at all.

~ Audio ~

It does need audio and/or sound effects. When you get an upgrade you could have a simple sound effect, when you lose a life, when you fly, etc.. At the same time just search the audio portal here for some ambient stuff. I'm sure the search wouldn't be more than 5 or 10 minutes as there is some great stuff on the audio portal here.

~ Overall ~

A very simple, but effective game. Keep up the good work and congrats on getting sponsored.

[The Shark Dossier]

I almost feel like

I feel like when I review your stuff you just end up deleting it later on. Because you use to have a lot of stuff and I remember you requesting it in the RRC, but it just disappears. You shouldn't delete them if your going to request us to review them. It's a little annoying. :(

~ Animation/Graphics ~

Good text, good backgrounds, good color, but not good all together. The text color and the background color really mixes in and it's hard to see what we are reading. That's pretty much all that there is too say because your submission just doesn't contain much.

~ Story/Content ~

Yeah, I agree with basically no point behind this submission. It gave very little information and I basically got the impression of, "It was boring, nothing too exciting, very little content, etc... I don't think I want to watch another submission." And that is never the feeling you want to give to someone when submitting something like this. I just basically don't get anything from it and it may even turn a viewer off from viewing future submissions.

For some reason a lot of the buttons just had question marks on them or just led to question marks. That almost seemed like a waste as you could have filled that in with something to give it more content.

~ Audio ~

You didn't have any. Probably would have helped if you had some ambient background music that people could have chosen to mute/unmute themselves and/or even some sound effects for when you click buttons.

~ Overall ~

I leave this submission kind of feeling disappointed. That's not what you want to give off on this type of submission let alone any type of submission. Nice layout and everything, but just not really needed for anything. Sorry for what seems to be a harsh review.

~ Review Request Club ~

Celx-Requin responds:

Hello,

I actually agree this isn't my best work,
If I could go back in a machine, and spend my time working on something else I think I would.

About the review thing, I could see how that could get annoying, I'll refrain from posting anymore,
that said with the newground alpha site being down it's quite difficult to get an unbiased, professional reviews, which is why i've posted in the past.

In an ideal setting I could ask for criticisms before I release my films.
Anyway thanks for the review I really do appreciate it.
- Celx

[The Big Green Button]

Hmmmmmm

~ Animation/Graphics ~

No problem here at all. Very simple, but the button looked very good. I liked how it gave way when you were clicking it like a real button. No critiquing on any art or graphics at all.

~ Story/Content ~

Perhaps the idea isn't original, but to be honest no idea ever anymore is original because it's all been done before, so marking down on not being original almost seems a bit idiotic in my opinion.

I think it's more how you approach the the submission even if the idea isn't original and to be honest this is the best one of these submissions I have ever seen.

There was a lot of humor and I laughed throughout a lot of it. I really liked the part where it made you think you were going to start all over from the beginning, but it kept going and laughed at you. I really did fall for it and I'm sure many others did too.

~ Audio ~

I think the parts where you used audio sounded great. I would have liked to see a little bit more audio used in this though. Perhaps something like a voice for all of the clicks so people don't get so bored or have to read the whole thing. If you didn't want to do that then you could at least put on some nice ambient music and have it loop throughout the entire thing, changing if it was necessary in certain parts.

~ Overall ~

Yes it's not an original idea, but the way that you approached it was original and funny. I think audio was the only real thing to improve on. Other than that a decent job all around.

~ Review Request Club ~

[BBS and Review guide]

Omg a Corky52 rules and guideline flash

Information was gold, the presentation was bronze.

~ Animation/Graphics~

This is probably the biggest problem with the submission at hand. The background didn't look the best to me in my opinion. The white lines just looked odd and out of place, but I do see that you were trying to represent the newgrounds background as best as you could. The buttons looked pretty fancy I'll give you that. I think you have buttons down pretty good. Keep up the work.

~ Story/Content ~

The information was gold like I said and I really like these being put out there so people can see the information and learn how to improve. Hell looks like we got a couple of decent reviewers just out of this submission itself.

The biggest thing to improve this submission right along with the graphics would be shortening the information. People don't read the FAQ or other guides for a reason and that reason is because they don't want to read a lot.

If you were too take this information and cut it in half, maybe more by putting it into your own words then it would have helped a lot. It probably would have people been more interested in it too.

The third and final thing that would have really helped A LOT would be to add a quiz game that they can take after reading all of the guides to see what they had really learned. Probably something giving them some sort of score at the end would have been cool too and things telling them what they did wrong and everything.

~ Audio ~

I think that something you could look into the future, even though it may be out of your coding league right now would be to have a voice read the selection out loud so people didn't have to read it all themselves. And always having choices to mute/unmute or not having them play at all would be needed.

Something else would to still be able to find out how to loop that song. :P It stopped playing while I was in the middle of reading.

~ Overall ~

Maybe finding an artist, writer to shorten the words, and maybe another coder to help you with some more difficult things and a submission like this could win a daily award. You never know. I gave you an extra bonus point for improving since last time and signed it just in case it was requested in the RRC.

~ Review Request Club ~

NekoMika responds:

Thanks, I could see it happening.