Score: 10

"Heh"

submission: Blockhead: Quick Shot 2

date: July 15, 2008

Best Blockhead episode I've seen! I identify with you on this one. :)

Score: 9

"Nice job!"

submission: Nightgun -The Prelude-

date: July 6, 2008

I liked this! It provided some good, basic backstory, and I felt the animation style was much improved from earlier episodes. Character movement was more fliud, and it was much easier to tell what was going on. However, it definitely left unanswered a few of my questions from the earlier episodes, which I can only assume will be addressed in future installments.

Score: 6

"Not bad"

submission: Hedgehog Launch

date: June 27, 2008

I beat it in 8 days, first try. :)

This game is well done, but it's just another "fling the randomly chosen animal" game. *shrug* Meh.

Score: 8

"Well-made but derivative"

submission: Wooglings

date: June 12, 2008

This is obviously just a Lemmings clone, but it's very well-made and easy to play. I didn't take off any points for the extreme easiness of it, since this is obviously targeted at young children. My only question is, since when was it Woogi World? I thought it was Wiggi World. Did someone make a decision that it sounded too much like it was making fun of hairpieces or something?

Score: 10

"This is really impressive!"

submission: Alien Slayer 3D

date: May 21, 2008

This is, to date, the coolest 3D game I've seen in Flash. For a Flash game, the graphics look superb. The guns and enemies are well-designed, the engine runs smoothly, and I didn't experience any bugs during my time playing (except for bugs of the man-eating alien variety, of course). I also like that you included options to mute the sounds and music, though the music is a) good and b) changes periodically, both of which you get points for.

I only have a few suggestions for you to improve this game:

1) The textures for the walls could have been much nicer. I don't know if you deliberately chose something extremely low-res to improve processing performance, but they look muddied and generic. The doors, by contrast, look fairly sharp, and have a real 3D feel to them.

2) The mouselook/aiming system feels like it was designed for a Wii-mote. This isn't compiled in Flash 7, is it? If not, you can forget Wii players playing this. On the other hand, people with computers will probably find it somewhat irritating (as I did) to have the camera pivot when their mouse approaches the edges of the screen, and remain stock-still the rest of the time. I suggest opting for a traditional mouselook control: just have the perspective shift every time the mouse moves and keep the targeting reticle locked in the center of the screen. It would make aiming much, much easier.

Overall, great job. I look forward to seeing an improved sequel!

Score: 8

"Interesting--I like it!"

submission: Planet Platformer

date: May 12, 2008

I assume this game was inspired by Super Mario Galaxy? Regardless, it's great. As far as I know, there is no platformer like this in Flash. The experince feels somewhat bare-bones, but it's definitely enjoyable. The graphics are simple but nice. The physics engine works, though the character feels a bit "floaty," and the collision detection sometimes acts a little strangely.

My one major beef with the design of this game is the lack of checkpoints. It's a pain to get most of the way through a level, die, and have to go go back through the whole thing all over again. The levels in Planet Platformer take a little while to complete, so that's no small inconvenience.

Overall, you've got a solid concept on your hands, one that you can easily improve upon if you decide to make a sequel. (Which you should, incidentally.)

Score: 9

"Awesome job!"

submission: We are the ONE.

date: May 9, 2008

Your animation is top-notch, and while this definitely felt a little cheesy in parts, I think you got your message across very well (to everyone except Happy-Evil, apparently). We're all human beings, we all have families and mothers. We all have people we love, and who love us. Why should we kill each other? Why are we in a "real combat situation" to begin with? Nice job.

Score: 5

"Okay"

submission: Pico & Pals

date: April 30, 2008

Nice game engine, great animation, and very funny, but this game suffers from a few fatal flaws:

1) The controls. It is extremely uncomfortable to have both hands sitting in the same spot on the left side of the keyboard during the whole game. A WASD to move, JK to punch and kick scheme would have worked much better.

2) The enemies are not even a little challenging. Just mash F and you'll hardly ever take a hit. The second form of the final boss is the only enemy this didn't hold true for, though even there I was able to pound him with impunity for 10-second stretches. I liked the idea of the Camper Alert, which (theoretically) would force you to keep on the move, except that it just didn't seem to do anything.

Fix those two things, and this game will be a blast to play!

Score: 7

"Nice production values"

submission: Tainted Kingdom

date: April 12, 2008

This game is well-produced: nice graphics, nice interface, good music. I recognized the voice actor for the commander from Sonny. The cut scenes were nice, and while I didn't get a very strong sense of plot from them, they did help add some character to what are otherwise very impersonal missions.

I wasn't blown away by the actual gameplay here, though. I can tell you were going for a deeper version of Age of War with the skirmishes. However, having to physically drag each individual unit to each lane means that I'm not free to keep my eye on what's going on on the battlefield. And because the units move so fast, I end up spending far more time clicking and dragging than I do strategizing.

Perhaps the large-scale troop movements would have involved more strategy, but I didn't get much of a chance to try them. My initial play experience was cut short by a rather nasty bug in the 2nd mission: I won the battle for the outskirts, only to have the game kill my remaining men on the battlefield and behave as though I had lost. Rather than try to conquer the outskirts again with 75% of my infantry units dead, I decided to quit.

Anyway, maybe this game will get better with time. I'll try playing it again later.

Score: 8

"My interpretation"

submission: Filtered Reality

date: March 16, 2008

First of all, really nice job! I enjoyed watching this quite a bit.

Now, for my interpretation of your dream. I don't know what stage of life you're in, but this strikes me as representing some kind of dissatisfaction with your daily routine. I'm going to assume, to start with, that you're working. This dream could easily stand for your dislike of your work. The fact that you see yourself from the outside, that you can't even really see yourself clearly, stands for your alienation from your own body. Working a job you hate day in and day out will do that to you. You start to feel as if you are not even under your own control--you are simply on autopilot, and your mind is an impartial observer. That's why you see yourself from the outside in the dream.

The running, meanwhile, is the work. You're alienated from your own body, yet the work still pains you, and you wish you could stop. However, you never get to stop because the consequences of stopping (represented by the volleyball nets) are inescapable. Dream logic can be odd, and perhaps these were "nets" that could trap you, maybe symbolic of mounting bills and debt. I'm not sure what the totem and the house stand for, but to my mind, the whole scenario represents some sort of wish fulfillment: you wish you could find a way out, a safe haven from the need to constantly prostitute yourself to your employer in order to survive.

Well, that's my interpretation, and maybe it says more about my own life experiences than it does about yours, but I figured I'd give it a shot!