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.

[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!

[Dino Jeff Adventure 2]

A decent start, but far from perfect

This feels more like the start of a game rather than the product. I did watch the video, but I found it quite boring after watching the walkthrough first. I thought the point of the challenge of a game was to figure out yourself. Is the game really that hard and unintuitive that you need to show people the walkthrough first? I think that's a sign of poor design.

The biggest problem is that the hit boxes are WAY too big. Most of the time you can get hurt or collect coins when you're not even touching them, as you can even see in the walkthrough.

The puzzle elements (all of the different buttons) were unclear. This goes back to the poor design I was talking about earlier. If you're going to include a puzzle, make sure there is at least some visible sign of how to solve it and what the reward is, otherwise, there is no motivation to even play.

Regardless of the fact that you put several months of work into this, it looks like a beginner's effort an there is so much that can be improved.

[The Rolly Ball Game]

3 weeks? Really?

The game was very simplistic. The menu didn't look too fancy. The gameplay was very fundamental and unchallenging. The graphics were mediocre at best. It's a well programmed game, but it's got a lot more potential. Good try though, I'll give you that much. Hard to believe it took 3 weeks though

DrPepper246 responds:

lol three weeks of school and hw not just making it!

[Nimian Garden]

Quite pointless

The game is KINDA pretty. I say kind of because the characters look like crap, the actual garden looks like crap, and the only thing that looks nice is the huge landscape. The gameplay is simplistic and actually not very challenging. I completed the whole game twice in probably less than an hour. Overall, it's quite a pointless game. There was nothing at the end, not even a sense of accomplishment.

Also, I wish there were a mute button. The music is nice the first time through, but the looping is not smooth and gets annoying.

popopt responds:

The mute button is a great idea - Ill be sure to add one in next time:)Thanks for the constructive crtitique as well.

[Evacpod]

Some minor flaws

It's a very basic game. Visually, it's fantastic, I like the consistent style. The preloader doesn't seem to work correctly, and in the end, the game is very essential and basic. If you could fix the preloader problem, I think it would be a good game

ZZR responds:

I'm glad you like the visuals, thanks. Sorry, I have no clue what's wrong with the preloader T_T