MalTheDestroyer's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[BR's Climate Chaos]

Great engine, not sure about the game itself

Well, this is obviously a game with an incredible engine--certainly, one much more sophisticated than I'm likely to ever create. The ability to take pictures is, needless to say, cool as heck. The art, also, is simply fantastic. Really, top-notch. I feel immersed in a strange land when I play this. The cutscenes, which are frequent, are well-animated and funny. These add a lot to the atmosphere and character of the game as well.

Unfortunately, not everything about the game is this good. The music, while appropriate in a cutesy way and very well-composed, started to get on my nerves a bit after a few minutes.

Also, I found the icon-speech detracted from the game much more than it added. Language just doesn't work in a visual way like that--it broke the immersion to have to puzzle out what they were saying every ten seconds--and usually it was not worth deciphering in the first place: "I don't like rain. Rain makes me angry!" Gee, thanks.

Ultimately, though, the biggest issue with this game is the gameplay. Once the novelty of running around in a 3D world in Flash wears off, there's really remarkably little to keep my attention. Even the quest for the Lampshade of No Real Significance had more urgency and coherence to it than this did, and that was a parody with a deliberately pointless plotline.

It's a shame. I'd like to rate this higher, but it simply isn't very much fun, and at the end of the day, that's what matters.

[Sudoku]

Uhhh....

Okay, this is a very good flash version of Sudoku except for 2 things:

1) The repetitive music gets annoying as all heck after about 1 minute. Please include other music tracks or at least a mute button.
2) There's no button to submit your answer when you're finished! I ended up hitting the "Solution" button, and all that did was make the game freeze. It kind of defeats the purpose of competing to finish the game in the fastest time when you can't actually say "I'm done, stop the timer." Big issue there. Fix it, and you've got a winner on your hands.

[Flames of Fury]

Good, but could be better

This is a very cool game. Nice music, nice graphics, decent gameplay.

The biggest problem, as a lot of people have mentioned already, is the Endurance meter. It adds nothing to the gameplay, for one thing. The need to return to the nest to create ammunition (er, "fire"), coupled with the limit on how much hydrogen and sulfur the dragon can carry back with it, effectively serves the same purpose as an Endurance meter: the player will be returning to the nest frequently whether that meter is there or not.

Assuming that there is some kind of compelling reason for having it, though, you should definitely make it deplete much more slowly. It's truly annoying to suddenly start flying around like a granny dragon in the middle of gathering elements, or returning to the nest.

What would make this more interesting? Make it a little more like SimDragon! Since you're the last surviving dragon, I don't see how any amount of military success on your part is going to save the race. No reproduction = no survival. You need to raise the stakes a little: make it so your spouse dragon is at home guarding the whelps. This could also play into some interesting gameplay elements: the more battles you win, the more time you buy, the more your whelps grow up and start having whelps of their own. You'd have stats on the growing population of your nest, and you'd see the effects on your colony if you start letting too many attack helicopters make it through. There could be rewards for having more whelps: maybe they help defend the nest. Maybe they'll harvest nearby elements for you. Something like this would spice things up a great deal.

Good luck!

[Snack Dash]

Awesome!

This is an excellent game, though as you say, obviously a Sonic clone. The only thing that I find annoying is the junk food. Not only does it slow down the gameplay considerably, it makes me feel like I'm being peddled a message in high school wellness class or something.

One other minor thing--if you could decrease the inertia just a little bit, it'd make it easier to recover when you screw up in an area with inclines and loops. OvEr all, though, great job!

[Dreams Chapter One]

I am incredibly impressed!

What this game lacks in storyline and character development, it more than makes up for in gameplay. These are the most interesting turn-based game mechanics I've seen in a long, long time. That you would have dreamed up such a system in the first place is impressive enough--that you actually executed it in Flash, however, and did so this well, is simply astounding.

The bottom line: Squaresoft only wishes they had thought up something this cool. :-)

[Night of the Living Blam]

Good, but too easy.

So, I had to literally try to die after my score topped 1000. It was just starting to get dull. Why? Two main reasons.

1) The gameplay never changes. If it sped up as time went on, that would make it more of a challenge to rack up a really high score. As it is, I got the top score without even trying.
2) You never had to go anywhere. All you had to do, really, is run back and forth along the bottom, jumping over that plateau thing in the middle. There was never any good reason to go jumping onto the mid-air patforms, since the undead blams would always drop down onto the ground sooner or later--usually sooner.

As it is now, it's a good time-waster, and little more. I'd like to see how it after it's been tweaked, though!

[Avoid the Lava]

A great game...in progress.

What you're got here shows a lot of promise, but there are some big problems with it as it currently stands. First, the graphics are awesome. Second, the gameplay is smooth and about as fluid as I could expect from a game of ths sort.

Now, the bad:
1. The game starts without any input from the player, so you're pretty much guaranteed to die at least once. Which reminds me--do you ven have lives in this game?
2. There are only 3 levels--after beating the third one, you just go to a blank level.
3. The music is annoying. (Sorry.)
4. The physics are a little wonky--for one thing, it's excessively difficult to change the angle at which the rock will reflect off the paddle, which generally results in it taking five minutes to hit that last remaining block and exit the level. Also, the rock will "teleport" up onto the top of the paddle if you hit it from the side, for some reason.
5. There are no power-ups or special obstacles. It might be cool for the lava to occassionally belch up fireballs that will explode and take out blocks if you hit them with the rock.

Keep working on it!

[QuibeLand]

Not too shabby!

I like the game! You kept the controls simple, which is always a good plan. Some people might not like the characters, but I think they look fine. There's nothing wrong with cartoony characters, as we learned in Super Mario and Wind Waker.

I do have one rather substantial problem with the game, though. It's really frustrating to be transported back to the left side of the screen every time you take damage. I didn't make it to the first boss battle, honestly, but I can't even imagine how annoying it would be to have this happen while fighting him. And then, of course, the the wtf factor--what possible explanation could there be for being teleported every time we take damage? It doesn't make much sense.

Anyway, that's enough from me. You've got a good base game here, and if you find a way around the teleporting issue, I think you'll have a bona fide great game on your hands. :-)

[Gravoor Perfect]

Excellent, except...

I found it highly obnoxious that you'd die just from touching a wall. The fun here is in solving the puzzle elements of each level, not in slowly maneuvering a blue blob around with the mouse. If you want there to be things that can kill Gravoor, make specific spiky walls of spiky balls. Avoiding every single wall is just too nitpicky and annoying.

[Megaman Zero Alpha]

Great, but it needs a tutorial!

This game is very well-made, and I especially appreciate the ability to customize the keys, but it simply poor design when you assume that players will know how to perform complex maneuvers on the very first level without any sort of explanation at all.

It took me a full five minutes to figure out how to use dash and jump in combination to scale high walls--and while that got me from one end of the screen to another, I now can't figure out how to get past the part where there's a high ledge but no wall to dash-jump up. Rather than spend another five minutes of my life figuring out what combination of key presses will allow me to advance, I simply gave up, as I'm sure many of your players will. It's too bad, really.