JonFawkes's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Wickebine Kigyouden]

Love this game so much, the gamefeel is awesome. I can't believe how long I've been playing it.

Far from perfect though. My biggest complaint is that there's no way to know how close you are to 100%. A way to keep track of items dropped or maybe a beastiary (like a lot of people are suggesting) that showed which monsters drop what would be really helpful and would add a lot of replayability to the game

ShadowWhoWalks responds:

There are couple of drops and secrets that can only be encountered through sheer luck. I didn't think it through when I implemented them. Will include an item guide when I can.

[Fixation]

I absolutely loved The Company of Myself, and I must say this is a wonderful prequel. The story is very engaging, and the puzzles are well designed. The puzzles are fairly intuitive, and I'm glad that you trusted your audience to be smart enough not to include a tutorial at every single step (although for some places like the rain it might have been useful to get a hint).

The visual style works well. There is a very nice variety in the levels and I never got bored of any one particular set.

The one thing that bothered me about the puzzles, and Company of Myself suffers from the same problem, is that sometimes certain elements will be used only a few times (for example, the rain) and so learning the mechanic was a waste of time.

The story overall is well paced, but in some parts it felt a little slow, and I found myself missing parts because I was progressing through the level too quickly. The dialogue was very lengthy but not very engaging. Perhaps something like voices could help players in that sense.

Finally, I absolutely loved the character development and ultimately the tie to The Company of Myself. A wonderful payoff, and a great game overall

FreeAsANerd responds:

Thanks for writing!

Voice acting wasn't really possible for this game. There are more than 700 lines of dialogue and the swf is already close to 15MB with all the sounds and art assets...so it would have gotten pretty rough.

[Myosotis Chapter 1]

Interesting Story wrapped around a tedious game

I know the story is good because I want more. I look forward to seeing the next chapter. The story makes a great foundation for this game.

The puzzles weren't very intuitive, and I solved most of them systematically rather than following the clues. I was disappointed that there were only a few puzzles before the game fell into a straight shot to the end. They were well designed puzzles, though they could have been better incorporated into the story.

The music was top-notch and fit the atmosphere of the game. I may be a little biased since I am a huge fan of Hania's work. No criticism on the use of music.

The game comes nicely together with its aesthetics. The minimalistic noir style snugly accommodates the story. It is very crisp and consistent throughout the game.

Overall a good game, though I couldn't play it again. I do look forward to Chapter 2 though

[The Lance!]

Good, but east

I found it extremely fun starting out. I got tired of it pretty quickly though. I was able to beat the champion at level 9 in the second generation. I feel like it should have been harder than that. I didn't even have the best equipment. Nonetheless, it kept me entertained for a little while.

[Vulpin Adventure]

Cute, Simple, Fun

I noticed a couple of items don't actually give the stat bonus that it says they give. There was also a lack of variety in the items. I think this game could work as a basis for a very nice large game. As of now, it is extremely cute, fun, and kept my attention the whole time.

[Alight (in dreams)]

Beautiful Story, Frustrating Gameplay

I thought it was a beautiful story, and the variances when you select the different items gave it a nice replay value. A lot of the times though I found myself out of the story because I was frustrated with some of the navigation puzzles. The difficulty needs to be pulled down a little to add more focus on the story, because I think that is what makes this piece strong.

[Shmusicup]

I wouldn't pay for this

It's a game riddled with too many bugs or is otherwise too uninteresting to be considered good.

First, a lot of my MP3s didn't work. I suspected it was because they weren't in stereo or otherwise weren't compatible. That's one bug that needs to be majorly worked out.

My next biggest complaint is that the bullets didn't actually seem to generate in line with the music. It seemed more like a bullet-hell with a customizable music feature, and I do that already by muting the game and playing my own MP3 player.

The multi-flash bug is another big problem. I would like to be able to play without having to close everything else.

I will say that the game is visually amazing. The graphics are very clean and it's obvious a lot of work went into it.

It's not a game I would pay for, I think it's well supported by the ads alone, and I would certainly play it for a long time

Tzai responds:

Hi JonFawkes, thank you for playing Shmusicup! Apologies for the bugs you faced, there are quite a few technical challenges to overcome to create this game on Flash, and although we spend every effort to test and fix bugs there are certain areas which we were not able to catch. The multi-flash bug has been a great headache, we are suspecting it might be the plugin since most people had it working, but we are still investigating and testing to iron out this issue so that everyone can play. We hope that you can understand that. The download version also has better support for mp3 and other formats such as aac, m4a, flv, mp4 etc, maybe you want to give that a go, it's free to try.

The syncing is partly due to balancing of the game to cater for a bigger audience. The music syncs a lot better in later stages where the bosses are harder. They fire more bullets and crazier patterns when given an intense track.

Thank you for your feedback and glad that you are enjoying the game!

[Byte It]

Boring

You mentioned a prize at the starting screen, and I played for a little, but the game is really slow and really boring, and I didn't think any prize was worth playing this. I opened the calculator program that comes with your computer and had more fun with that.

You shouldn't rely on a prize being the only drive for someone to play. A game should draw someone in and keep them drawn in by being fun. This isn't fun at all: it's slow, it's mostly pointless, and overall needs some major improvement.

It's smoothly programmed though, I see little bugs, so I can give you 2 stars for that.