Lambtaco's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[A koopa revenge 1 By MCSMstudios]

Wow, if you're gonna steal my game you could at least steal the latest version.

[Super Dangerous Dungeons]

Pretty fun game. Addicting, and makes failure feel like it's the fault of the player, not the game. Spritework was good, and the music has that old Squaresoft sound. But a few issues stood out.

1. The gates look a lot like ladders, which confused me the first time or two I interacted with them. But the chains were worse. They looked like part of the background and not walls. Every time I started a stage with a chain wall I tried to run past them again.

2. There was no way to adjust your horizontal positioning by just a couple of pixels. Inching forward or making a small correction to a jump was impossible. An instant tap of the directional key causes the character to move 5 or 6 whole pixels, which is annoying with all the precision jumps the player is expected to make.

3. Maybe this was just me, but the water boss seemed much harder than the fire and grass bosses. I died on the latter two a total of about ten times put together, but I must have died 60 times on the water boss because of all the single tile platforms.

(There was also no music the first time I started the fourth area. Just a small glitch I thought I'd mention.)

All the above is pretty minor, and I'd probably give the game the full five stars were it not for the Wind Waker bullshit padding telling me to go back and find some keys. I elected to stop playing at that point. Had it been to unlock some secret or achievement I may have tried it. But blatantly barring progress for cryptic backtracking is unacceptable.

Still a really solid game. Good work in general. I almost finished this one ( I assume) and I usually lose interest in browser games after a minute or two.

[Cathode Raybots]

Really cool idea, but user generated content lets it down. It just felt like fighting Quick Man (too spazzy) or Metal Man (Easy if you know what you're doing) for 90%+ of the bots. Which results in a game that isn't as fun as it should be. Once I was up against a bot with a beam sword in a mazelike arena, that only prior knowledge of the bosses pattern could possibly allow me to beat.

And I found the rating system to be a bit unclear. Am I rating how much I liked the bot or how difficult it was? There should have been rating for each, because there are many difficult but cheap bots, and some easy but fun ones. That way spazzy and heavily memory based bots could be sorted out in favour of legitimately challenging ones.

Bottom line: Relying so heavily on user generated content pretty much ruins the experience for me. when I play a game I want professional -- or at least dedicated amateur -- content.

[CodeName Ezekiel]

Oldschool in more ways than one.

Classic shmup action. The graphics look something like 2003 Flash games, but behind that is a really fun game. Simple and easy to play. The time mechanic was fun and useful.

My loan complaint is the health recovery of the third boss. Without the right upgrades I had to spend a good fifteen minutes hammering away at it.

Overall great job, though.

ThomSip responds:

Thanks for the 9 :)

[Super Mario Crossover]

Great fun.

Two questions though.
1. Why didn't you use the Zelda II sprite for link. You seemed to have used the moves and physics from Zelda II, but the sprite from the original Zelda.
2. Why can the screen scroll to the left? Even when you play as Mario?

Really well made. Attention to detail is great. Megaman felt like he was too slow, but maybe I'm imagining things.

If you ever wanted to add more guys I'd recommend Ryu from Ninja Gaiden.

explodingRabbit responds:

Wow, you have amazing attention to detail. You are correct, Link's movements and physics are from Zelda 2. I originally used the Zelda 2 sprite and used only the small link Sprite for his first power state (before you get a mushroom). But I found that it was much more fun being little Link, and it made me not want to get a mushroom because I didn't want to be big Link. So I kept him little because he's more fun and it helps to differentiate him from the other characters. And it's just my own opinion, but I think the sprites for Zelda 2 Link are kind of ugly.

Making the screen scroll to the left was just my own choice. I don't like in games when I miss something and can't go back, so I changed it. I think it makes the game more fun, but I'm sure some people disagree.

I was going to have 9 characters originally, and Ryu was one of them, but I decided to just do 6 because the game was already a significant amount of work. Perhaps he will be in an expanded version or future game now that I already have the engine created.

Thank you for the questions. :)

[Little Wheel]

Great atmosphere.

The story, the style, and the music were all great, but the game sort of played itself. Not much to do other than click where it tells you to. If it weren't short I probably wouldn't have finished it. Not bad, but not really fun either.

[iPumpkin]

Okay idea. It's got some rough edges.

There are alot of things that need to be fixed with this game. It seems like a novice effort. You need to polish it more.
1) The enemies aren't affected by the walls (except for the one that's killed by the walls)
2) You have to hit the reset button after you die. How hard would it have been to fix that?
3) After the guy dies you can still push him around with the line an finish the level.
4) The levels where you can't draw are just crappy one-screen platformers.
5) Bad collision detecting, specifically with the falling spikes and crawling snakes.

It just looks like you found a code to draw with the mouse and then said, "I'm making a game out of this!"
It's not horrible, mind you. It just needs some polishing. The music was good, and fit the mood.