Score: 4

"Barely Passable"

submission: The Hungry Rabbit

date: December 10, 2009

You've got a bit of an error that on every detection of key pressing, the game plays the movement animation, rather than limiting it to when the character actually moves.

The movement is a bit of a pain, as the character can jump as high as a building, but walks briskly at best, barely able to move halfway past a gap before he runs out of ground and is forced to fall straight down. The game cannot register multiple key presses very well, instead just overriding whatever was hit first. You used the key-press function instead of key-is-down. This means that when you press a direction, the game registers a one-frame or so movement, then pauses until the keyboard recognizes the key has been held down, and starts spamming the key. The pause has no place in video games, and the spamming is a sign of shoddy programming.

The scrolling isn't bad, but it pauses longer than it should. The use of gradients is rather taxing on the flash engine, and appears as a sign of laziness when it fails to add anything that couldn't be had by simply adding a few scraps of cell shading.

Even so, I've seen far worse pass.

Score: 4

"Irritating, But Passable"

submission: Sonic Adventure 2 Spoof!

date: December 10, 2009

Given that I seldom give a passing score, I intend this as a complement.

The artwork actually shows effort has been spent, but it ends there. The voices are barely audible over the music past the halfway point, and the subtitles fill a third of the screen with a fog light that entirely covers them, which would have made it more practical to just have them attached to the bottom of the screen, so at least they wouldn't take up more room than absolutely necessary.

Not bad for its length, I guess, but I hardly see anything that merits "spoof", considering that it's taking completely unrelated characters whose relationship doesn't even comically resemble that of the original cast. It's more of an homage, if anything.

Score: 9

"Innovative"

submission: Scribbland

date: December 8, 2009

I'm fascinated that a one-button platformer can be so hard, so challenging, without being purely luck based. It's rather innovative, and quite fun.

Score: 10

"Impressive"

submission: *Prayer*

date: November 9, 2009

This is a rather impressive colab. In spite of its length, it maintains its synchronization to the music, paying attention to audio cues all the way to the end.

The precision of keeping everything on track is impressive.

Score: 6

"Not Bad, But Not New"

submission: Tetris game

date: October 11, 2009

It's alright, but really, Tetris was invented decades ago. This doesn't really add anything to it, so I'm not sure it qualifies as a remake, so much as a clone.

Score: 10

"Nice Short"

submission: Persona 4 - I Can't Wait!

date: October 10, 2009

(Laughing To Hell And Back)

I remember that part. I recall the comment of a passerby who said he was learning more from Persona 4 than from actually going to school.

Score: 6

"Not Bad, I Guess"

submission: UFO Attack

date: October 6, 2009

Not bad for a learning exercise.

The biggest glitch is probably that all enemies have the same hit point counter, i.e. damage one and you damage all of them.

It probably wouldn't to have a more elaborate "next level" animation. Plain text gets kinda dull.

Score: 5

"Might Be Worth Working On Further"

submission: 8BIT Infinity

date: September 24, 2009

Eh, it doesn't have a tutorial of any kind (or even implication for control scheme), which is kinda annoying.

The game isn't difficult, so much as there isn't anything to it. There's just a bunch of ships in a repeating movement scheme that fire automatically. There are no defensive or offensive capabilities beyond just holding down the space bar.

Then you get to level two and die in bullet hell.

This is a game that does not merit a rated difficulty. It plays like a self-imposed challenge, "see if you can win with only one life".

Level one is a cake walk, whereas level two is, as previously defined, bullet hell. This kind of difficulty ramping is a cheap trick, and is frankly irritating.

Now onto the technicals.
This game presents a monstrous memory leak. At the moment I'm not sure why, but the longer the game plays, the slower it gets, until a monster of a PC is entirely drained by it. It's probably either the background, bullets, or the enemy ships failing to be removed properly. Maybe all three.

Not bad for a first project, but it could still be a whole lot better.

Score: 7

"And More Awwwwww"

submission: Love-A Story.

date: April 14, 2009

Cute, if not a ways cheesy.

If only life were remotely like that.

Score: 7

"Awww"

submission: A Christmas Card

date: April 14, 2009

Cute, albeit minimalist.

Some friendly advice I'd like to give, when making a play button, make it readily able to click. What I mean is, make the play button a button, not an oblong shape difficult or imprecise to click upon. An easy way to do this without voiding whatever special shape you present is to place a larger clear sprite inside it.

This allows the mouse to simply hover around the letters "PLAY" without needing to place it on the exact pixel, especially with thin or narrow script.