night-raider's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Don't Look Back]

Excellent work.

This is a perfect example of a game that masterfully weaves together visuals, story, presentation and gameplay to deliver a moving experience. I loved the art style, it reflects the character's drive to succeed. Though no words are spoken, you understand and sympathize right away with his motivation "I will find her, and nothing will stop me". Spoiler: Not being able to look back and see the woman he's trying to save is not only an interesting gameplay mechanic, but it reminds one of the fragility of life and how easily it can, was, and will be taken away. The game was challenging, but a bit of forward thinking and experimentation was more than enough to handle it. The music and sounds played their role in conveying the story as well.

I hated the ending. But I understand exactly why you did it, and therefore it was the right choice to make. As I go about my week, I know for a fact this will continue to be on my mind. If anyone playing this game doesn't like it at all, vote 5 anyways. This is art, and it deserves the best score possible. Moreso, it deserves to stand out amongst the general bloodbath we've grown used to.

[Weird Bicycle Game]

Funny, yet oddly a bit terrifying.

I never ever want to ride in the middle of a valley and have hundreds of teddy bears staring at me. I can already tell what my nightmare tonight is going to be like,

RVWD responds:

whahaha, sorry aout that:$ :D

[Ghost Motel 11]

Needs improvement in key areas, but still not bad

What you did right can only outwiegh what you did wrong to some extent. First the good, the music is creepy and extremely fitting. As tempting as it must have been, Im pleased to see a resistance to some rocking guitarr riffs or repeating techno beats, you get kudos points there. Sound on the other hand doesnt fare so well. Voice acting still stinks, still no lack of emotion, the big fault here is that what they say doesnt help the situation, they only thing they seem to do is point out the obvious. For example, when in the woods maze, youre given the chance to speak with your buddies, instead of giving some advice or hints, they seem to, point out the obvious. Ray says that we should try to find a way out, why thank you Ray! I hadnt thought of that, all I was looking for was somewhere to take a dump.

The story, you still earn points for continuing a storyline thats original and somewhat thoughtful. You lose points for how you go about the story. It seems as though all the characters and npcs in this are completely aware of whats going on, you need to work on your directing skills. When the old ghost lady is chasing them, instead of having them exclaim some sort of fear like "Holy shit, get out of here now!" They just sort of took off even though the lady was already halfway to them. I mean, what if she wanted to give them candy? And then theres the people just sitting around waiting for you to speak to them. Apparently they are aware of a demonic presense and that you're a demon hunter trying to protect them. But not only do they seem to not be afraid, or even concerned, you actually have to play their riddles in hopes of gaining some info from them. If a cop came to my place and needs information, Im not going to give him a god damn conundrum, Im going to tell him what he wants to know and hope he doesnt find that body I hid.

Whats with being able to click on everything? Its really not that important, it seems like something straight from resident evil. I mean do we really need to zoom in on every can, cookware or turd-in-a-bag that is lying around? How about being able to click on those paintings on the wall to learn some interesitng backstory, Id love to know what the hell that ghost was thinking when he painted a bunch of feet. Having too many hotspots makes finding the important ones harder and more tedious when you realise you had to actually find something important on 1 out of every 10 things you can click on. Oh whats this? One of the unremarkable objects has some sort of number or letter imprinted on them and in order to proceed, I simply must find it.

Combat reminds me of the quicktime actions found in Shenmue. One thing you should probably know, for parts that require you to constantly hammer the spacebar (because destroying your keys is fun!) I could just hold it down and easily pwn the loincloth wearing menaces.

Animations are far too weak to be considered decent. For whisps of smoke and matter, the ghosts are waaay too stiff. I cna expect you to use tweens for them floating around, but whatever happened to ghosts being agile? Theyre just way to stilted. I laugh at your swinging animation. Come on man, give frame by frame a try, theyre ghosts, can be that hard to do. If you like, Ill do the fbf animations for you, Im not too good, but if I try I can make something that is much more enjoyable on the eyes than up-middle-down swinging animations.

Graphics are stlyish and shading is nicely done.

I might be too harsh on you, but thats only because I still really like the series and I want to see it get better. Im not going to just sit here and eat up what I dont like. So am I still a fan, depsite my denouncing? Ehh, I guess, perhaps it was blind rage that made me say that.

But, rage or not. You need to improve, 11 episodes and still havnt fixed up everything that keeps this series form being a true classic of our time. Ridiculous no?

Violet-AIM responds:

Originally, that old demon lady in the house was going to yell at them to tell them to get out, but then we decided to just get rid of that at the last minute. I enjoyed reading your humorous review, which was a bit brutal in parts, but good advice I suppose. I'm no expert on how to animate someone swinging a sword, but I'll try to do better on that next time maybe. I never played Shenmue so I don't know exactly what you mean by that. Maybe hitting keys on keyboard isn't the best way to have a combat, but I try to think of some way to do it, since I don't know actionscripting. Clicking on things and searching for clues is part of the interactivity that I've had for awhile, and although some ppl think it's tedious, others like it. So for now, I keep it there. Would it be better if I just made a straight story, or is it better having some kind of interactivity as well? So yeah, I'd like to make some changes to improve it, but if it doesn't work, then I guess I can't do much about that.

[RoadCarnage BETA DEMO]

Good overall, but could use some minor touches..

Id like to hear a crashing sound effect when the car hits a person alongside the screaming. also, Id like to see the other cars move around and try to block you, then you could smash them and rack up more points.

[FlashWars: Star Wars Game]

Best. Game. EVER!

Regardless of whether or not its got the Star Wars liscense in it, it still would have been amazing. The first, and best thing about it, is that you actually have allies. This is by far the best strategy game on Newgrounds. The allies can think for themselves mostly, not like those one hit kills in Crimson Warfare (not that that was a bad game either).

I just cant believe you managed to program those allies to fight like that, with a little modifications, you could make a Secret of mana Or Tales of Symphonia type game.

but, depsite that, there are still a few errors or problems Id like to see fixed or worked on.

- In the level creator, It would be great if you could set how many enemies the computer starts out with, I had to go play something else while I waited for my opponent to build an army big enough for me to fight.

- The A.I, while a breakthrough, could use some fine tuning. Id like to see the enemies not always gang up on me, even if my guys are shooting at them.

- When I turn invisible with the invisible craft, I find that I cant fire, and I dont know how to turn back. Plus if I were to switch it with say, the Falcon, it would become invulnerable and I could go in and shoot all the enemies without them even seeing me coming. And since I cant turn visible, I got nothing to worry about.

- When I destroy the mothership before the enemy ships, they charge to my mothership, and my allies dont even bother shooting at them. Which sucks when theres 6-7 of them going kamakazi on my base, its not easy to take them all down.

-Id like to have a hold position option.

-Id also like to be able to form my own formations, like have the A-wings in front, with the corvettes at the very back. If thats possible.

Thats all I can think of, keep up the good work.

vex-xiang responds:

First, thank you so much for the extensive review.

The level creator does let you set the number of bad guys the enemy base starts off with, not sure what you mean. Discuss it on my boards if I'm misunderstanding!

Cloaking disables your weapons. I never even THOUGHT about transferring ships while cloaked, so consider it a bug, and the version on my site will be updated so that you decloak when swapping ships ;)

Good point...the AI isnt perfect and needs some perfection, like you mentioned. A solution is to go to red alert and press HOME to send your fleet back to your base.

Formations would be good, but I dont know if the effort would be worth any benefit in fleet combat.

[Ghost Motel 8]

I hereby denounce my status as a fan of GM

If you remember, I asked you ever so nicely to NOT make a crummy adventure game where you go around collecting crystals. Infact, I have the exact line I wrote.

"hopefully you wont make a platform game were you have to colect crystals"

So, you can imagine my sheer terror and anger when I saw Joseph standing there with crystals floating aorund waiting to be taken. But, any pro reviewer would atleast play half the game, I tried to play the full game but something came up, more on that later.

I'll start with the intro. Man, that office scene looked kindy crummy compared to the rest of the games artwork. Ok, so Joseph talks, do I dare turn off my speakers so I dont have to hear the terrifyingly bad voice acting? No, I decided to see if anyone has learned from my reviews and try better next time. I regret leaving my speakers on. The voice acting seemed to get worse rather than better. Look! Waynecolt! You have to change your pitch! It doesnt sound natural. People do not talk on the exact same level of emotion all the time, people change the tone of their voice! Its not that fucking hard! Ok I think Ill play the game now.

Ive already told you about the crystal part, no need to repeat that part again. So off I go, hitting the ctrl key, slashing some stationary demons who look like theyre firing kidney stones. Hey, those archers are SAMRT! I'm kicking thier ass, youd think they'd atleast try to retreat. The level design wasnt very unique, you have a happy place, a sad place, a sadder place etc. Oh and then there was that one level with dragons shooting kidney stones out of their ass. I found that so funny that Im going to give youre humour rating a ZERO!

What a genius concept! The evil crystals take life off! While the pink (now that I think about it, why pink? White makes more sense) crystals heal me. The black crystals didnt move, whats the point of them if you can simply walk over them? If you had them patrol left or right, up or down, maybe then they'd be a good idea.

The enemies, are stupid for the most part. Ive already talked about the ranged guys, Now for the non-rangers. Who would have thought that a walking tree has the exact same thought patterns as a demon knight? Not me! How about having the tree extend his arms as a special attack? Or have the entire fucking game as one long level. Theres no point in changing the level if it doesnt exactly add new challenges. Oh whats this? The level design layout changed slightly? WOW! It doesnt matter, blue crystals that are on the top always have to be reached by backtracking and jumping onto a platform that leads to there. Heres a problem though with the backtracking. THE ENEMIES ALSO START OFF AT THE BACK! Maybe if they started in the middle It woulld be more fair.

And the final problem was in that lava level (which one? that one! THAT that one? No the other one! Oh that lava level) there was a blue crystal suspended in mid-air over a vat of lava. I only had one life left. Infact I didnt even know the crystal was there, I jumped from one side just to be safe, I retrieved the crystal and boom! hit the water. Ahem, cough, etc.

GREAT LEVEL DESIGN YOU DOLT! MAKING A KEY ITEM IN AN AREA THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SURVIVE! Unless I am colour blind and that was not a blue crystal I retract the "key" part of that previus statement, and also add an N to the end of a to make it proper punctuation.

Graphics and sound require no further commentary. Just refer to my previous review. Never have I played a game where I could feel my IQ actually dropping at an alarming rate. Good bye.

Violet-AIM responds:

Sorry night raider, but when you said your comment, that game had already been in production for awhile, so what could we do? Stop production just because someone told us we shouldn't make a game like that? Like I said, it's just one game for one episode, mainly to show Joseph going thru some kind of training. It wouldn't be enough for him to just listen to a bunch of lectures and take a written test, if he never actually had any practice to fight demons with. So the story would have a big gap if it was one second Joseph filling out an exam form, and the next second, he's super powerful and slashing away at demons. What about his training? So that's what ep.8 is about. About the game, since this was the first type of this style game we were making, we did want to keep it simple, and yet even as simple as it was, it was very complicated for everything to be just the way it was. Have you ever tried to program or make a game yourself? Me, I don't know how. That's why Istvan did all the programming for it and he did a great job at it. It's a lot harder than it looks. That one blue crystal you referred to as being in a dangerous place... well the game is meant to be a challenge, if you were that good of a player, one life sacrifice is no big deal, but if you were down to 1 life at that point, then you were not mastering the way the game was, as simple and dumb as you think it may have been. It might not be the perfect or best game in the world, but it had its own objectives, you just had to go thru it and accomplish it, rather than be bitter. How can a game make a person so angry? Anyways, you're probably not going to see another game like this in ghost motel, rather just the usual interactive story puzzle stuff.

[Proximity]

fun, and simple, but could use more visual appeal.

The game is a fun and easy to learn strategy game, but it feels more like the game relies on the luck of the draw rather than pure strategy. I think you should have it so that you can only draw each number once. Ive lost a few times due to a large sequence of crappy numbers.

Anyways, the only thing that can really be fixed is the graphics, it looks alright I guess. But some small, simple effects would make a big difference. One idea I have is when you take over an enemy tile, have the red color seep onto the blue tile and paint it over. or, since its technically and "army" why not have a fun animation of some soldiers shooting at some other soldiers?

Overall, fun game. But it could use a face lift.

[Ghost Motel 10]

Waaay to tedius.

Right off the bat the game has you going around hunting for clues on pieces of paper, this is a game right? Because it isnt very fun. Each and every part has you clicking on random objects, hoping that one of them starts some pointless event. The biggest offender of this is easily the weapon shop part, i spent five minutes of my life trying to choose the right weapon, it was even slower because each time I hit the wrong one Joseph would tell me he doesnt like that one. Just as easiy you could have made it so that he says it right on the spot he doesnt want to choose that weapon. I just got pissed off when I had to choose one sword out of a bunch of twins. That required no skill whatsoever, heck it didnt even need luck. It was just click click and, you guessed it, click!

It looked alright I guess, nice shading and the environments got the job done. But it lacked an art style, it was so bland and lifeless, even if it is a ghost world.

Voice acting, was stilted and unemotional, the voice for Tabatha is not doing a good job at all, she just says her lines without ever changing her pitch, even slightly, to make it sound like she was once human. Now that a think about it, pretty much everyone sounded dull.

And to top off this bland cake, there was no story progression, atleast as far as i got, i couldnt get the locker open because one of the notes was blank. I mean, come on? Note hunting?? Not cool, not fun, not what I was hoping for.

Violet-AIM responds:

If you get stuck on the puzzles or get impatient, then just go to the scene selection menu and skip to the next scene. Then, you can finish watching the story. One of the notes was blank because it was really nothing. There are 6 notes and 1 blank one. Are you saying I should make it easier? Anyways, thanks for the long detailed review night_raider.

[Where's Waldo?]

Waldo is really better as a cartoon..

The whole point of waldo's funny attire was to help him stand out more. I know that drawing a crowd wont be easy, but hey, what flash movie is easy to do? I would automatically vote a five if you were to take the time to do a nice cartoon bakdrop for our red and white hero.

The head just isnt enough to spot. Im sorry, but I had to cheat, its just too damn hard. Still, keep it up. and if i were you, id make parts of the area become a bunch of buttons, so if someone presses tab, he would have to scroll through maybe a hundred false buttons. Thatll show em! Also, the blurry effects arent good. Maybe you should reduce the quality and make everthing distorted, it might look better, or worse..

That-Is-Bull responds:

Ok, I'll remember that.

[Balloon Duel]

An awesome update to a great original

Dont think Im being rude with some low scores, theres reasons for those.

Graphics 10, great effort, customization is extremely impressive.

Sound 5, Sound effects are good, but since you have to use your own music I give it a five. But still, thanks very much for programming that however.

Interactivity 10, Its a great effort with awesome play mechanics. Making your own ballon warrior is entertaining.

Style 7, Even with the nice graphics and fun. Its still Balloon fight at the end of the day. And i dont think you came up with balloon fight.

Humour 3, some wisecracks by the characters, and watching someone flap their arms is always comic gold.

10/10 awesome work.