Jojiro's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[NONDEVICER]

Now THIS. THIS is a platformer. Absolutely love it, though the difficulty does get quite up there. It's a good, exciting kind of difficulty curve though.

I notice a lot of your games have a very retro look. How would you like to collaborate on a more graphically complex platformer with more of a story? I'm decent with pixel art, spriting animations, and story-writing, and you have brilliant ideas for game design.

The response to controls was fantastic, and the save points were placed just close enough to be helpful without making everything too easy. It's really hard to be critical. This was excellent.

[TimeLine Runner]

Jump and time control were brilliant elements to include in the runner, and I liked the checkpoint system. Unlike others, I found the mouse controls to be difficult to use and the keyboard to work wonders, but that may just be me.

My main beef is that it's hard to tell how long one can slide or how much a jump is charged up, using either system. Maybe a meter for both in your next game could change this, or you could even add them to this game.

Obstacles were interesting, and I like the stickart. I do wish that after running for a few centuries worth, I could at least get powerups, but I suppose the minimalism is what makes it appealing as well. Still...one can wish. Haha. An excellent game that is a tad on the harder side, and that I wish had meters to help me gauge what exactly I was doing. Hope this is a fair assessment!

[Obduction XP]

The music was tiresome and uninspired, and the object detection was bizarre. I rode a moving platform for a few seconds and then suddenly feel off of it, without having moved since getting on at all. One of the disappearing platforms, before the disappearing animation was even done, had already dropped me off. Most projectiles don't "hit" you, just go through you while you die awkwardly, via an exploding head almost all the time. This lack of attention to projectiles is kind of lazy.

The animation was strange as well. While smooth, I couldn't help but feel that my character was a robot and not a human. This wasn't a stylistic choice, it was a failure to make the animation look organic. Death animations mostly didn't make sense - you don't explode when you are set on fire.

For that matter, there was no intuitiveness with the jump mechanic. I tried to jump over a flamethrower and got roasted, despite being "above" the flame, and the pseudo-isometric design was a strange choice that was ambitious...but fails to provide anything novel to the game beyond frustration.

Grammar and English. These really aren't that critical to game design, but little things do matter, and as many people have mentioned, the game title is spelled wrong and your Author Comments are awkwardly phrased as well

And I don't care about my character at all. This is contributed to by the lack of a good script, his own robotic movements, and the increasingly frustrating gameplay that isn't there due to good level design, but just inherent in the isometric viewpoint and the awkward hit-detection.

Transparent platforms were even stranger: they don't have a sheen until you get near them, and then they shine continuously? What sort of mechanic is that? It would make sense in a game that advertised continuous deaths, but in this game it just felt like an artificial difficulty boost.

Overall the game was annoying, the level designs boring, and the difficulties I had seemed to be mostly artifacts of poor design. I applaud the smoothness of animations, though the main character leaves much to be desired in terms of organic motion and death sequences.

fliptico responds:

This is a large comment. Love it. Thank you for being polite.

[Traumata]

I'm actually not too big a fan of the music. It's ambient, and even a tad creepy, but mostly boring. The Use/Take/Look system was a nice idea, but really just ended up slowing down the game dramatically. Slow text speed also slows it down. Most of the objects weren't props that even had flavor text with a "look", and were just "nothiing interesting here". The grammar broke me out of the game as well.

Puzzles, the graphics, and the horror element of the game all came together very nicely, presenting a polished package that isn't seen very often on NG, at least not in this length of a game. However, the biggest issue for me was that I was painfully aware I was playing a game the whole time, and a rather slow one at that. The challenge of the horror genre is immersion, and with the awkward ASE controls, item after item that wasn't interesting and wasn't interactable, and bad grammar that kept reminding me of a poorly written script, that immersion was completely lacking.

I felt no emotions for the main character, and while I was creeped out by the red-eyed figure initially, that feeling quickly faded as he just became boring.

Kudos on attention to detail, especially with graphic work. Everything was stylized the same way, the color palette is beautifully understated, and the squares running across the screen at every transition were a nice touch as well. It's just that the game, for all it's polish, was never immersive, and quite honestly wasn't that fun.

[Traal]

Quite the innovative gameplay, and it's unusual to see a blindfold be a power-up in a game. Loved the concept. That final half star I'm leaving off because like many good concept games on NG, it felt incomplete without something to tie all the gameplay together in a package. Either plot, as others have suggested, or just more dynamic puzzles beyond the scope seen here. Or both.

You could really partner with some horror writer and get some more dynamic music to make a game for Steam greenlight. I'd love to see more done with this concept in terms of plot, more music, and more content. The horror element was definitely there.

[Elf Story]

Rated down half a star for difficulty.

Very polished game though, with humorous and well-worded flavor text.

[TheNyanko]

There is no death animation, the music doesn't change at all I believe (nor does it seem to fit), and there is no plot.

Upgrades (if they exist) I haven't seen yet, and the hi-score nature of the game makes it seem like a non-exciting arcade game.

It's decent with the gameplay that it has, I suppose, but just feels lazy. It is your first game though, so it's pretty good considering that. Kudos, and my sincere hopes that you improve and continue creating games.

[Stick Run 2]

The controls work well, and the gameplay is decent, but overall this feels like an experiment in coding rather than a true game. It just isn't fun, to be honest. The lack of puzzles, obstacles, enemies, or a point at all, coupled with the random-seeming backgrounds and non-coherent platforms (blocks, hills, clouds...and more blocks), just make it seem experimental.

As an experiment, it is perhaps notable that sliding down walls looks exceptionally awkward once you are almost at the bottom of a wall, because you are still using the "flush against a wall" frame but you're now "flush against the air" which looks strange.

Also, most games that allow double/triple jumping also allow it when you fall. This game doesn't. You don't get a double jump unless you did your first jump. I don't know if that was intentional, but it feels awkward.

I highly recommend taking the game/physics engine of this, getting a decent level designer and some plot, and releasing an actual game with fixes to the sliding and jumping. This could go far, but as is it's not much of a game.

[Cool Story Bro]

A nice game with enough crazy elements to make me laugh, alternate endings that are good fun, and a final twist at the end that made it all the better.

I do wish you'd had more consistent or just better pixel art in general, as a pixel artist, but it's a fantastic game.

[Kastle]

I am not a fan of the auto-run genre, so take this with a grain of salt.

Firstly, auto-run tends to be more fun at higher speeds, even starting off. This one is very sedate compared to ones such as Canabalt, and while the difficulty remains, it makes the overall experience less exciting. The jump is smooth, but somehow feels awkward, especially when I land on the trailing edge of saws I thought I could jump past. There's also a bug where if you got a boost, and you double jump, he suddenly is slammed into the advancing spikes.

I'm not sure if the bug requires more than one condition - I replicated it twice but failed to replicate it a third
time.