Lambtaco's Reviews

[Rick and Morty: The delicious taste of ice cream]

As much as I enjoy Justin Roiland's R&M riffing, Turning it into a full animation just brings out the flaws. I mean, it works as something to listen to on a podcast or while playing a game, but when you listen to it and look at the characters as they're saying it, it's just kind of boring. I hesitate to use the term, but it just feels like it's trying too hard.

Judge Morty was great, because it was based on a scripted piece, so the pacing was good. Even though the characters weren't actually doing much, but it really stands out in this one. The repetition and realism in the dialogue really works better in small doses.

Four stars for effort, and the details/references. Not many people will do an on-model fan animation. Props to you for that. It's actually a lot of work. It just din't pay off as well as it did with Judge Morty.

Constructive criticisms: The linework on the characters seem a bit off. Maybe they're a little too thick? Not sure but they just seem slightly off. And sometimes the characters seem a bit too expressive. Their facial expressions are exaggerated compared to the plain dialogue. Though I understand animating the same expressions and poses gets really boring.

Troll criticism: You can't hear a voicemail in the vacuum of space.

tiarawhy responds:

Very fair points, thanks for the critique!

[The Spongebob Squarepants Anime - OP 1]

This is actually amazing.

I don't usually like these "mashup" type videos. But this one is just perfect. The level of juxtaposition is juuuuust right. Well animated, and not too in-your-face. Really captures the feel of a recentish anime, right down to the overuse of digital effects and closeups.

What I think the magic ingredient is, is how serious it seems to take itself. It's not trying to be overtly funny and just let's the absurdity of the content speak for itself. Apart from the very beginning and end, plus a few minor background gags. Gags that aren't distracting.

This is how it's done, people.

P.S. It's a good thing Patrick's a star fish.

[The Legend of Parodies]

While I don't think the Ren and Stimpy style really gelled with the point of the cartoon, I have to give you five stars for the point you were making alone.

It's too bad children exist. And by that I mean, it sucks that there will always be people new to that sort of joke, that will cause the rest of us to suffer such jokes existence.

[Super PSTW Action RPG]

Still a brilliant satire over a decade later. I especially like how the enemy health values are on a completely different scale than the player.

[Labyrneath II]

Preface: Apologies for how negative this review is, but seeing this meh game on the front page for a month with so many awards has gotten to me.

This was pretty mediocre. I don't get what all the hype is about. Full disclosure: I quit playing not long after the first boss, but I believe that's more than a fair shake.

Sound:
The music is good, but that's about all the praise I have for this. The sound effects are so obviously Chiptone presets. Chiptone is great, but you have to learn to use it, or at least fiddle with it a bit, to avoid your game sounding like every other quickie retro game jam project.

Graphics:
Pretty generic pixel art. I've definitely seen worse, and there's a good use of contrast. But the tileset is so bland and repetitive. The background is often 80% one or two solid colours. Every area basically looks the same. It just appears unfinished and empty.

Gameplay:
The movement and controls are fine, but this game falls into a weird area in between puzzle-platformer and action-platformer that doesn't really satisfy either. It's too slow to be an action game, but too simple to be a puzzle game.

Why it fails as an action-platfomer: It's all about waiting. Waiting for spikes to recede, waiting for platforms to move, or waiting for a boss to kill itself. The plant enemies projectiles move so slowly that it feels like low-grade bullet-hell, but with gravity instead of the top-down movement that makes bullet-hell games feel fair and challenging. Not that it matters because there's virtually no penalty for death... most of the time. There is some bad check point placement where the player is forced to wait through a boring scrolling section before getting to the bullet dodging section that is actually difficult. It's like Super Meat Boy but with cycles that make you wait all the time instead of letting you back into the action immediately. The challenge of the first boss isn't dodging its attacks, but rather staying engaged until the fight is over. The level layouts are overly open and too straightforward, so there's very little choice in how the player approaches the challenge, thus there's very little variety on repeated attempts. You just have to do the same thing over and over until it works. Every platforming challenge is just avoiding timer-based instant death obstacles or movement-based instant death obstacles.

Why it fails as a puzzle-platformer. There's basically no choices to be made, only dead ends to run into. Particularly in the first switch level, this creates the illusion of choice while it actually just wastes your time. The game's gimmick (the level doesn't reset when you respawn) didn't even become apparent until a couple of levels after the first boss when I encountered the down arrow blocks. So for a significant portion of the game I was under the impression it was n indie retro puzzle-platformer that just didn't have a gimmick. The game is so spread out in the nonlinear sections that the player often has to travel between multiple screens to do things that should really all be visible at once Puzzles are only fun when the player has access to all the information and can then use their wit to solve it, not when they must wander around blindly to collect information and then do the only thing they can do to advance. By the time I got to the part where there was an actual puzzle (with the switches and the blocks with down arrows on them) I was just so divested with the game that I couldn't be arsed to solve the unnecessarily spread out puzzle. I had no reason to carry on.

In conclusion: It's a bland and muddled game that's only spent so much time on the frontpage because of its clickbait thumbnail. I don't hate it, I just hate that no one else recognises how bog standard it is.

[GRAV]

Is this unfinished?

Ten seconds into the game I hit an invisible wall, in a 2D platformer. Would it have bee so hard to make it a sheer cliff instead of a pile of rocks you clearly should be able to jump over? Or even just have the screen stop scrolling so you hit the edge? It's also really easy to get bugged onto pretty much any vertical surface by just jumping into it and holding left/right. At the start of the cave segment I jumped off the top of the screen and never came back down, so I had to restart.

This wasn't even a game. This was like the intro to a game. The story would have been served much better by a one or two page comic. Presented as a game it's just disappointing (and even a little insulting) because there is no challenge or agency, you just progress linearly to the end reading text boxes. This was about as interactive as turning the pages in a book, only less so because you can't turn back, and sometimes it glitches out an you get stuck.

All the atmosphere and world building effort is wasted when it abruptly ends as soon as it looks like something interesting might happen. Art's pretty good for what it is, though personally I find faux-retro minimalist pixel art to be played out and lazy.

In some other medium I might have enjoyed this, but presented as a game it just pissed me off.

[After School, By the Halfpipe, Bring Your GameBoy]

This rocks.

[NSMB - Castle V2]

I'm impressed.

So often VG remixes on the audio portal sound worse than the original song. It's not the case for your song. It's great, it's epic. And the changes are so subtle, but great. Excellent job.

SockpuppetRemix responds:

Thanks! =D

[Tank Man]

Interesting piece of work. Too bad I already did it a couple years ago (As a game I mean, not this picture specifically). But for some reason I never thought to make the Tank Man a robot.

PsychoGoldfish responds:

See, your game just proves this needs to be fleshed out into a full 8-boss megaman game! Nice work