Score: 9

"Mesmerising..."

submission: Look up at the sky

date: December 18, 2009

I don't see how anyone would find this "boring". It was perfectly done as well as very relaxing to watch.

While I don't normally like crediting flash authors for music they didn't make, you certainly found the right track to use in this. I've never heard something so easy to listen to in a flash before. I wish I could find music this good more often...

As for the animation, it's perfect. The star twinkles / headphone lights sync up perfectly with the music, and even after leaving it loop around for 20 times (yes, it really is that fascinating) it still syncs up well. That's better than most music video flashes by a long way. And that's not even making any mention of the simple yet clever background animations (which were, again, brilliant).

One thing I like in particular is the grainy filter over all of it. It's rare to see filters like that over flashes, and that gives it a kind of uniqueness to add to the already striking animation, without detracting on the enticing subtlety that makes you keep watching it.

There is only one thing I can find wrong with it: the preloader doesn't appear to work very well. It seems to go straight to the 'play' button without letting it load properly, which can cause blank screens to appear if you hit it too early.

Still, it's not a very big file (I'm never going to be staring at a blank screen for long, premature button-pushing or not), and once loaded it's as good as a music video can reasonably get, so it's worth a good score at any rate. Favorited!

(Also, for some reason it seems to take a lot more CPU effort to use that starry picture as a background, which can slow down the animation at times and occasionally mess up the syncing. Then again, that's probably just my crappy computer, so I'm gonna ignore it for the purposes of this review. Just thought it was worth mentioning in case others were having problems with it too.)

Score: 7

"Second time lucky."

submission: Cosmic Crush 2

date: October 14, 2009

Just as good as the first one, only this time it works much better thanks to not getting stuck on things that just clump together and eat you alive.

However, there is one annoyance left in it: the moons can't tell the difference between stuff that's not a danger to you and things that are. It makes absorbing smaller objects irritatingly difficult when you've got a moon on just about every possible area of the planet / sun / galaxy / whatever. Half the time, even with just one or two moons, you have to be really careful about how you approach edible stuff, else all that happens is you end up losing a few moons and obliterating the object that could've benefitted you had you not been surrounded with moons.

The obvious solution to the above would be to program the moons to only hit stuff that would otherwise harm you, and ignore things smaller than the main rock.

There's also the issue of replay value; there isn't very much at all here. Although it is a lot of fun the first time round, there's not many reasons to want to do it again (unless you just really love absorbing stuff). Why you took out the survival mode from the last one, I've no idea (unless it was hopelessly bugged or something).

This file is less than 1/5 of the maximum upload limit to Newgrounds, so there's a lot of free space for you to experiment with new modes / objects / stages / etc. This is a good start, and all it would take to make this potential top 50 material is a healthy dose of creativity.

Keep at it! This is gonna go somewhere good, if given enough time and effort.

Score: 2

"I'm genuinely confused."

submission: A Clockwork Cyberen

date: September 6, 2009

Why, oh why, do you do this?

I'm not gonna complain about the flash (you know as well as I do why it's getting a low score), but after seeing so many of these things I have to ask: why don't you put the comments IN the flash? You know, make some simple comic strip / slide show out of the text instead of writing it in the author comments and just throwing a random pile of garbage in the .swf file as filler?

I ask because it would take LESS effort to do than what these things currently involve, and you'd likely get BETTER scores for it. All you'd have to do is copy / paste the text you write in the comments box into a few frames, and draw some simple pictures to go with the story (which actually isn't too bad, all things considered). Add a couple of back / forward buttons to go between the frames, and you're done.

After you've got the first one done, all you'd have to do for each new one is change the text to whatever you were gonna write in the comments anyway. Ergo, once you've done one (which would take the bare minimum of work in the first place), you'd have to do practically nothing besides what you do anyway (i.e. write a half-assed story).

I know you probably won't listen to this, but given the fact that the only redeeming feature in your flashes currently is the preloader / intro screen, it was worth a shot. As the intro screen proves, you CAN draw and animate worth a shit; it wouldn't be hard at all for you to do any of the above.

Just consider it, m'kay? No? Ah, whatever; I tried. :/

Score: 8

"Lolwut?"

submission: The Hammer Collab

date: August 27, 2009

I'm sorry... I had to...

This is great for a stickman movie. But then again, I would think that....

Anyway, it'd be good if all the parts had sound effects (the silent ones just aren't as entertaining without all the splattering noises), and of course the animations were pretty simplistic, as per usual for this kind of movie. There are ways of making a stickman flash look more professional, but then again that kind of detracts from the fun of these things (most of the time they're funny BECAUSE they're so simple).

Still, there's a fine line between humourously simple and lazy, and you managed to get it right here, so I like it. I gave it a 4 vote, because there is room for improvement, but it's pretty good as it is all the same. Good job; kudos to everyone who made it. :)

Score: 6

"Um... random much?"

submission: King of the Kill

date: July 22, 2009

I never would've guessed that I'd be starting my day by watching a velociraptor go on a chainsaw massacre. Guess you really CAN find anything on Newgrounds.

The randomness alone was a plus point; this is original even by NG standards. However, there were a few obvious areas that could've done with improvement, most notably the use of such a badly cropped, static image of the raptor. Judging from the rest of the artwork, you could've probably drawn a chainsaw-wielding raptor and it would've looked better than what I'm guessing was the 'easy' option of the static picture. You could've animated a drawn one much better as well.

Aside from that, it was actually pretty good (especially if this is your first flash). The animations of all the drawn stuff were good, as well as the drawings themselves. The voices were spot on and true to character, and the only things wrong with the rest of it were the fact that it was a bit short, and could've involved more gory animation details.

Still, all these little things add up, so it's far from perfect. For a first flash, though (one that doesn't rely on sprite sheets and is over 5MB in size just because the latest Linkin Park track was thrown in it for no good reason), it's definitely one of the better ones I've seen. Keep at it! With practice, you could make some amazing stuff!

Score: 5

"Sorry, no."

submission: Gar@RRfG@KeerrFFjj@@@@@@@

date: May 21, 2009

This is just a bad video-rip of the PS1 game 'Vib Ribbon'.

I know it's become a part of Clock Crew history through its sheer weirdness, but all you really did here was put some pictures of the Vib Ribbon intro into flash, and set it to the intro song (if you even did that much).

However; that much, I'm sure, has been said already. And it's not like I hate it for what it is either. Vib Ribbon is actually a really good game, and it's nice to see it again after all these years.

If you're still reading reviews (which I doubt, but anyway) and you've ever thought of doing something like this again, my advice would be to make the pictures bigger (not just in a small sub-window like this), and to have the whole thing instead of just the first part. The quality of it in general could do with some attention too.

Thanks for reminding me of a forgotten (yet good) game! If only the flash was a worthwhile tribute, it would've gotten a much better score than this.

Score: 10

"The ultimate time-waster."

submission: Particle Playground

date: May 12, 2009

This is an amasing little gadget to play with. You can play with it for hours on end and never really tire of it, thanks to the limitless nature of the simple-yet-effective physics of it.

I would've liked more options with the 'force' points, though. Right now, you can set them to either attract or repel particles, and nothing else. Having other functions (like speeding up or slowing down the particles, or just changing their direction) would offer more possibilities and make picture creations easier to do. Having more than 4 'points' would also be good, provided it doesn't slow the program down too much.

I remember a fash entitled 'Newgrounds Chat 09' having some kind of audio portal jukebox thing in it, that enabled you to listen to random songs as you chatted with other NGers. Having something similar on this would be simply awesome. Think about it: listen to random songs while making random pictures. The fun really WOULD be endless!

However, this amount of fun is very good anyway, so I can't really complain here. 5'd and favourited. :)

Score: 5

"Another generic sprite movie."

submission: flash fight sakura wooooo

date: April 8, 2009

It's not bad for a sprite short, but that's all it is: a sprite short.

While I dislike sprite movies in general, I've seen much worse ones than this, so it's worth a half-decent score at least.

The last part was indeed slightly out, but that's not the main problem I have with it. The main thing with sprite movies in general, no matter how good they are, is that the only thing they show is the author's ability to cut stuff out, import it into flash, and move said pre-made pictures around the screen. They give no indication as to how well YOU can draw/render your own stuff.

There's nothing wrong with this movie per se, but I'd have to encourage you to start working with your own artwork (since you have two previous sprite movies already). Persistently relying on sprites to do the drawing for you just looks lazy after a while, even if they're animated well.

I think you've got enough practise at just animating things (as this movie is pretty good for animation timings, minor end-glitch or not), and it's probably time to start making submissions you can completely call your own. It may be tedious to do at first, but all it takes is practise.

Good luck!

Score: 8

"This rocks."

submission: Newgrounds Chat 09

date: April 7, 2009

I like this chat room.

As a chat room, it's pretty basic, but it still serves its purpose, so I can't complain. However, the 'mod-bot' thing (that apparently deletes spam posts automatically) doesn't appear to be very good at spotting when someone is spamming. Some way of giving people mod tools (like if they were first in the room or something) would get around this.

Also, I love the random jukebox thing (it serves as a talking point as well as arbitrary entertainment), however it occasionally gets stuck and freezes while trying to load new songs. This might be due to it trying to load deleted tracks, and if so, refining the list of audio tracks to ones that are still in existence may improve its performance.

Overall: simple, and with room for improvement, but still good nonetheless.

Score: 9

"Extremely useful."

submission: Being a Helpful NG'er

date: March 27, 2009

While this is a great way to encourage people to take part in NG more, there are a couple things it could do with:

Firstly, it could've done with mentioning the Google advanced trick when the search bar doesn't work. For those that don't know what I'm on about: go to Google, and hit the 'advanced search' option. At the bottom there's a 'search within site or domain' box. Type/paste "http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/" into that box (minus the " " symbols), and then enter your keywords into the top search box.
This is good for finding things that can't be found by the search bar, or things that are buried in hundreds of pages of results.

Also: you're right, it is a bit text heavy. Considering most of the text-walls are copied from their relevant places on NG, a simple summary would've sufficed here (and if people would want to know more, the links to the full explanations are right there).

All that said, it remains a very good flash. I wouldn't have found half of the stuff it pointed me to on my own.