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!

Score: 8

"Good, but has some flaws"

submission: Canyon Defense

date: March 13, 2008

First, the good. This game has some great graphics and runs very well. I love how the enemies don't just line up and walk in a straight line, but rather move like I'd expect actual vehicles to! It's also nice how you uncover new weapons by unlocking them in little mini-challenges.

This game has some problems, though. First and foremost, missiles that have been fired from your basic turrets need to move faster. Early on in the game, there are enemies (the sped-up versions of tiny ground units) who can actually outrun the missiles, and there is nothing you can do about it, since they outrun shots from your goo cannons as well, and you won't have other weapons at your disposal at this point. This is an issue with balancing, and ought to be fixed. Even with normal tiny ground units, though, on certain maps, they can get far across the map before missiles chasing them from turrrets at the edge of their firing range catch up to them. This adds to frustration more than it does to challenge! I strongly suggest that you speed up the missiles.

The second problem is that on easy and medium difficulties, the game is so short that you go through roughly half the waves before you get a selection greater than 2 turrets. This means that half of the game feels like treading water until the real game can begin. Compared with the immediate selection you get from Desktop Tower Defense, Xeno Tactic, or even Bloons Tower Defense, it doesn't hold up well.

Finally, as a reviewer below noted, the Howitzer is all but useless. It's so slow that it can't even hit a big, slow-moving enemy vehicle unless it's been hit with goo at least twice, and the howitzer doesn't lead its targets. Conclusion? It will never hit the target it's aiming for, and if it hits anything at all, it's only because some unfortunate unit happened to be trailing behind the target by about 10 seconds. Given how sparse the selection of guns is early in the game, it is not good to have one of the first ones you unlock be next to worthless.

In conclusion: this is a good game, but it needs to be balanced some more before it will rank among the top tower defense games.

Score: 10

"Great work!"

submission: Synapsis

date: March 9, 2008

Excellent graphics and seamless integration into Flash; great design work; cool, mind-bending puzzles and great atmosphere. This is a near-perfect Myst-style puzzle game. My only advice for next time would have an ending that makes slightly more sense. Otherwise, amazing job on this!

Score: 6

"Nice idea, except..."

submission: Climate Revenge

date: March 5, 2008

Nice retro graphics, catchy sound track, funny animations, and pretty good use of a resource management dynamic to make the gameplay a little more challenging. This is a pretty good effort, overall.

I was enjoying it, in fact, up until I reached a level where I wasn't allowed to leave more than a certain number of survivors. Okay, easy enough: I went through the city striking down every car and person I could find. So here's the weird part: every time my storm picked someone up and flung them to their death, the survivor count went UP. As in, by killing them, I had somehow caused them to survive. I just don't understand how that's supposed to work, I'm afraid.

Also, I understand that this is an arcade-style game, but I didn't like that it didn't save my progress so I could just try again from the last level I played after I died. Not letting people save is a holdover from the days where game systems didn't have the memory to save and load games. In other words, it ain't a feature. And not having it kills replayability, since no one wants to have to redo everything just to get back to the one level they didn't beat again.

Score: 7

"Not bad"

submission: Zelda: Heroic Rage 9

date: March 3, 2008

First, the good: you made great use of music, and I commend you on incorporating Zelda sound effects into the proceedings (though honestly, some of them seemed a bit out of place given the movie's style).

I do have a few complaints, though. Although the graphics were decent enough for the most part, some of the character poses were extremely awkward. I do think you did a better job on making the characters move in believable ways than you did in past installments, however.

--SPOILERS--
There were certain things about the storyline here that did not make a lot of sense. For example: Young Link gets impaled on the Master Sword. I don't see how he could survive that. And Zelda used her one Triforce wish to bring old Link back from the dead. So how is it that Young Link is not only alive, but indeed, without even a scratch on him, after all the fighting is done? Was that Old Link's Triforce wish? I'd believe it if it were, but I never got to see that happen in the actual movie, so I'm just sort of left scratching my head and wondering what the heck happened.
--END SPOILERS--

On the whole, this was a good effort. With a bit more polish, this could have been downright great.

Score: 5

"Mediocre"

submission: Grid16

date: February 17, 2008

Nice presentation, but this is just another Warioware clone, and not even one with original minigames. Vastly overrated, literally.

Score: 8

"Mindless but fun"

submission: Squidgy

date: January 30, 2008

I like the way the game plays, and the graphics are really nice. There's only one problem with the presentation here: the enemy bullets are the same color as everything else, making them extremely hard to see (and thus, avoid). Overall, though, nice job!

Score: 6

"Decent"

submission: Light people on Fire

date: January 17, 2008

I agree that the sound in this game is really great. The way the music changes when you change forms is hilarious.

However, that's about all that really stands out here. There are already many flash games where you run around destroying as much as possible within a time limit. The rain, while it adds something new to the genre, also hampers the gameplay, since you spend half your time just sitting around as a tree. Moreover, the play area is very limited, the graphics are only so-so, and you quickly run out of people to burn. All in all, this doesn't stand up well against games like Cantankeroustank.

Score: 9

"Sweeeet"

submission: FFVI - Who Is Gogo?

date: December 13, 2007

This was hilarious, and incredibly nostalgic for me. There aren't nearly enough movies like this, playing off FFVI. :) Also, I totally agree with you that this was the best final fantasy game. The plot, the characters, the music--just about everything in it was superior. IGN.com agrees with us, too: on its list of the top 100 games of all time, FF7 is ranked #76, FF6 is ranked #9. Hot damn.