raitendo's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[One Chance]

Interesting but flawed

So I made "You Only Live Once", not sure whether you played it? Obviously there's not a great load of similarities except the permanency "feature" (you seem to have been a lot more inspired by "Every Day the Same Dream"). I'm really happy to see more people play with the permanency idea (like me and for example Jesse Venbrux did before me) and your twist on the "genre" (if 3-4 games could be said to make a genre) is a great one that hasn't been done before. That said, I think your game has a few serious flaws.

The first thing I find troublesome is the problem of lack of information. I don't mean in the sense that you don't know exactly where each path will lead, which would obviously ruin the game, but for example choosing the "work" option you don't really get any clues what the hell is going on, whether you're wasting your time or if you're slowly edging closer to finding a cure. It feels wrong you wouldn't share this information with the player, because it creates a distance between him/her and the character, who obviously must have some idea whether he's getting anywhere or not.

The second flaw is the misogyny. I mean maybe it's wrong to point fingers at this game in particular but it bothered me in EDtSD as well. The woman stays at home, while the man works. Do we need to cling to these stereotypes still, in every single game? Just give her a job, damn it, or at least a good explanation for having her stay home all day.

The third, most damning flaw is the main premise of the game. Since I've only played it once (naturally) I can't be sure, but there seems to be only three different paths - work, mistress, or family. But even with such a limited set of choices you don't get the option to spend time with your family until a few days in, and I found the game would more times than not not let me do the things I'd want to. To name just a few things I missed: the option to commit suicide (I felt like jumping from that roof, for example), the option to kill your family, the option to go back to an area you left, etc. For being a game that sets out to be about choice, the amount of choices you get is pretty underwhelming, and as a result the game feels like it was under-developed (or rushed?), and unfortunately falls short of its true potential.

Still, I really liked the game and it was definitely interesting. Keep at it.

AwkwardSilenceGames responds:

*Honoured*

Hi!

I actually played your game a while ago on Kongregate (oddly enough) and Jesse's "Execution" a little after. The idea stuck with me I guess. Although the permanecy idea has always been in the back of my mind somewhere. I don't play very many mainstream games because it's very hard to care about anything your doing in them. I find that partly to do with death penalties (and the rest to do with story telling). There is absolutley no consequence for dying or making a decision, since that choice can be undone in a second. It's very hard to care about anything in-game that way.

As for the rest I'm gonna put down to being very rushed. I originally was going to have the game much bigger, bringing in ideas like faith (the ability to prayer), optional suicide and even that option to kill your family. My room mate brought an idea to me that at one point, you can choose to smother the daughter in her bed. I kinda liked that... In a totally not-serial killer way. Without boring you with the details, I basically stopped work on the game for over a month. Then forced myself to completely finish it in a 72 hour period. This lead to a shit load of bugs when the game was first released (there are still some now) and and a general lack of polish. The plot really suffered there.

Thanks for the review though. I hope you don't think I ripped you off. Even though deep down subconsciously I probably did.

P.s. Did you get an hillarious amount of death threats from people? I think I've triggered some kind of flashback to a past even where they made the wrong decision and they're taking out on me.

Thanks again.

[Planet Runner]

Classic

3D World Runner! Classic. I want to do one of these...

ozdy responds:

Wow, Raitendo responded to my game :). Well, I really had much fun doing this game, but the sponsorship money wasn't too great, so I am now doing box2d puzzles hoping to get more cash :)

But I wish you success with retro-game-making! If I was to do this game again, I'd probably use a 3d engine (sandy as opposed to away3d, papervsion, and alternativa3d).

Good luck with your next game!

[Anaksha: Female Assassin]

Appalling

Apalling use of pedophilia and rape just for shock value. Those themes could possibly be successfully explored in a serious game but there's no substance, there's no meaning and the game is entirely devoid of ANY artistic merit.
I can't believe this is made by a 31-year-old adult, rather than a misguided 15-year-old kid.

ArifRocks responds:

Thank you for your review. Its freaky how your mind ONLY saw pedophilia and rape and you paid no attention to the other 90% of the story or gave any heed to the amount of animation/artwork that went into it, nor made any comments on the game's soundtrack or gameplay. The game's so-called "shock" content came from something called "BBC News" which exists in a thing called "reality". Not all of us want to create bright, happy games for pre-school kids where you go around throwing flowers at people and whacking them over the head with Hello Kitty pillows, whilst listening to the High School Musical soundtrack.

I appreciate your input, but I stand by what I've done and I stand proud of what I've done. I'm sure you'll also be overjoyed to know there's a sequel in the works. :)

[Pico's Blam Jam]

OK game, great cutscenes

the game play itself was way too sluggish, but it was worth playing for the cutscenes - they were great! one enormous bug which ruined the experience though - I wasn't able to re-start after I had died! Had the game been more fun to play, I might have paced through the first levels again, but it just didn't seem worth it.

PivotGames responds:

there's a level selection. The reason why there is no retry button is that we wanted the game to be hard; we wanted pico to have a hard time killing the well known animators anound here. You aren't fighting the clock crew :P
-Bas

[Sleepless Knight: Part 2]

Good game

I didn't like the previous one and kept thinking, "wow, this is a big improvement". but then I played the old one again and realised I never played it much at all before discarding it, and that you've hardly improved anything at all. Still, when it comes to welldone platform games like this which are fun to play without a novelty factor, it doesn't really matter. There are changes that could be done though, like a ducknig option would be nice, even if it's completely useless it gives you a strong (false?) feeling of interactivity. The levels could obvoiusly have been more decorative (it doesn't affect the speed at all if you use the bitmap cache flash 8 thing). I'd like to ask you though, how did you do the hitTesting? One giant shape flag for the entire stage and individual ones for the moving platforms? Did you use arrays? If you would reply I'd be very thankful.

The-EXP responds:

lucy had 5 hit points on her, 2 on her feet to measure if she was touching the floor. 1 on her head to measure if she's hitting a roof, 1 either side of her for the walls and one on her sword for the enemies to detect when it is hitting them.
Bitmap caching brought the framerate down to about 5 fps even on my computer. Thanks for playing though and i'm glad it made you rethink the first one.

[deathTrip]

Great game

Really surprised at the low score, but I guess it will rise once you get picked up for frontpage. Here's a bug though, I got stuck between a lamppost and a tree, below the cinema. I liked "bice street" by the way, subliminal messages for the Americans :)

Kianis responds:

Oh wow! Superbrightfuture! Actually I think my love for the word was initiated when I played your games (I rembember there was a pack of cigarettes with the brandname "bice")! Thanks for the bug report. Yeah, we'll see if I get a FP or not, hope so ;)

[Ultimate Robotnik Duels]

Niceness

As a game, I think this is flawed in many ways, the controls are dodgy, the characters fly around too fast, some of the weapons don' t work that well (that grabber thing) and the levels would be so much better if they were bigger (and scrollable), to mention a few.

However, this is such a kick-ass idea I cannot give you anything but a five. The game also has some redeeming features, the graphics are put together in a good way, it's pretty fun to play and we can chose between a bunch of different characters! awesome!

unrelated, why didn't you get this game sponsored?? I bet you could have got at least 200 dollars from armorgames or Crazymonkeygames.

Anyways, I hope you make an even more kick-ass sequel with more weapons, better controls and more interesting, scrolling levels.

Digimaks responds:

Grabber thing is too powerfull- 4 hit points in a row. So I made it Slow.

Having Game Sponsored- 1) don't know how :(
2) Sonic Team might not like that move.
3) Don't want to be depended on armorgames or Crazymonkeygames, because afraid of being dominated by them. who knows.. :\

scrolling levels, .. well i'll think about it. because the graphics are at the bottleneck of chocking the Framerate. and gamespeed.

YES- for sequel.

[Armor Dude]

I kept thinking to myself "what was he thinking??"

This is a good game, but that's a shame because it should have been a great game with a score of 4+!! But it seems you're not getting the frontpage now and I'd like to tell you where I think you went wrong with this game, so you hopefully can learn and get on the frontpage next time!

First of all I wanna start with what you did right. Graphics are really good, menus are frickin' awesome(!!!), character design lovely (I loved the ogres), animation is good, cutscenes a nice touch. It's a fresh take on an old concept, and it's pretty fun.

Now, where you went wrong! The game lagged on my computer and this notebook I bought one month ago (1.6 ghz 1.2 gb ram). The graphics weren't that detailed so the game should definately not lag. I think I can tell who's the culprit though: The Flash 8 filters! You're over-using the blur filter and it's destroying the fun for loads of people who don't have the absolutely greatest computer around.

The controls were so-so. The rolls were good but I wanted to be able to either jump or run, the game felt really really slow. And maybe you could have done a second button for attacks instead of just having combos on one button? That might make the game feel more varied. Varying the control scheme won't take that much time and I think it's really rewarding to do so, in terms of gameplay.

In summary: Less filters, make the game faster and vary the control scheme.

I hope you make more games in the future and reap loads of portal awards! Good luck!

MasterFury responds:

you have a slow computer. 1.6ghz is very slow if you got a computer about a month ago you should have about
3+ ghz. this game was made on a 2ghz comp and only has moderat slowdown at some points in the game.

[Fear Unlimited Full Edit]

great presentation, poor game

but it's flash, right, what you gonna do?

great (GREAT) work on the presentation but the game itself was mediocre. Pretty good work on the different combinations and everything but the same enemy over and over again got me bored on the first level (I gave you a chance and played till the second one as well, which was just more of the same). You might want to add scrolling backgrounds as well. And maybe make the enemies die a bit quicker, that was pretty tedious. Graphics were pretty mediocre, especially animation. The main character was done reasonably well though.

Dizimz responds:

I said it once and ill say it again there are five sidescrolling missions
so play the actual full game

[Petals Around The Rose]

argh that was irritating

it made me go search google for the solution and the cheat I am I found it :( feels kinda bad but I had to, it would have driven me mad otherwise. well ok presentation and everything

LAUBO responds:

Lol, it is a pretty well known game, there are lots of forums made about it.