Yatsufusa's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Little Pony Big War]

It's a working real-time strategy game with understandable instructions, medals and characters from MLP:FiM and Castle Grayskull. That's about it.

I'm sorry, but your game reminds me of a quote from the movie Hudson Hawk: "I'll torture you so slowly, you'll think it's a career!"

Here are some of my observations:
- During the normal levels there are only minor increases in difficulty. The game would have been better off if there where only 3 levels before each boss with three times the diamonds. I'm serious: That change would have made a lot of difference.
- It's way too grindy - either the upgrade & buy costs are way too high or the diamonds are way to scarce.
- The mini-game is the same in every zone. Playing it for diamonds would only make sense if the player was a natural in it. Having to wait for 7 regular levels to play it again makes it harder to 'switch' to that game. A training-mode would have helped; or at least the option to store an unlimited amount of points.
- The bgm is too monotonous and the mute button is missing in most of the screens.
- Pinky Pie and Rainbow Dash have jerking leg animations which didn't look particular 'life-like'. Another example of how there was no attention paid to detail.

Let's talk strategy:
- In general the best strategy seems to be to upgrade the cheapest 'foot soldier' (Pipsqueak) the most and the rank 3 one (Snails) by one level (to fill the cool down period) and then just use theses two. All other troop-ponies seem to be there to leech diamonds away from the Mane 6 Ponies who are the only ones who really need the upgrades.
- Boss-strategy is to die 'just right', upgrade the castle for a miraculous full auto-repair so you can face the boss with full HP. Timing that right is boring and tedious.

As a summary, the whole game seems like a loveless clone of the "Epic War"* series to me - just without any special features and designed so that the player would have to spend the longest possible time playing it without having any feeling of accomplishment or reward. The only reason for players to keep playing this beyond the first encounter with the 2nd boss would be the Newgrounds medals. I can only speculate, but it seems to me you were bored with developing the game and weren't in the mood to playtest it properly - so you submitted the version you happened to have and called it a day. There's a lot of potential wasted on this one and I'm convinced with some additional hours of work, this could have been a fun game.

* And speaking of "epic"... Tagging something "epic" is just pathetic - especially when it's below mediocre...

[Runner]

You should add a mute button and improve the controls. Your game is 'hard' not because the player needs some sort of advanced strategy, but because the controls are so... bad! It's some blend of laggy controls and a far to short time spend in the air.
A pause button would be nice as well.
There's also no background story. Is the character running towards something or is he running away from something? Why are ladders an obstacle? Why should I care about this nameless pixel person that's obviously too stupid to slow down or stop before running into a wall?

I hope you're getting my point and my rating. Right now what I see before me is a poor-quality Atari game. (Sorry Atari...)

Remynfv responds:

ok... (Deep breath)...

I am working on fixing the controls (thanks for pointing that out). Mute button coming soon.
also I am not changing the air time of the player(Sorry). Pause button should be out soon. Background story is good but not that important, think about it, the impossible game has 0% story I mean your just a jumping cube! (btw those are fences not ladders).

I hope that makes it better!

[Space Shooter Squad]

I wouldn't change the graphic or mechanics. The style is one of the things that make your game stand out. Candy-graphics and some generic upgrading system would ruin its unique appearance. so good because NOT like ever other game.
The background music is fitting for the theme, but it actually IS pretty repetitive. Maybe you can find a somewhat more track in the audio portal.
I also noticed that I lost my progress (as well as points) from last time. Pretty much everyone at NG accepts flash-cookies, so that's one thing that could be improved.

[Galaxy Siege]

A few thing bug me about Galaxy Siege:
1) You start out with too little fuel capacity, constantly running out of fuel. It makes for an awkward start and is pretty annoying.
2) The most effective way to proceed in a galaxy is to run the current segment up till shortly before the boss and then start all over again until you're reasonably sure you could farm most of the ore. This wouldn't be so important if after completing a level you got 80% of the resources instead of just 50%. Which pretty much guarantees mayor resource-losses if you 'just want to play the game'...
3) Stars seem to be worth pretty much nothing. The garbage of the universe. They just clog up your collection-stack and eat up storage-space. Fewer stars or a priority-list would be nice.
4) Bosses apparently can grab floating upgrade containers. Since item-collectors are fairly rare, that seems to be pretty unfair, especially since you can't fly into the upper half of the screen and collect it before he appears.
5) You can't fly into the upper half of the screen or fly further down to grab items you just missed.
6) You always get hit. There's no aiming your weapon, no evading... Just slowly meandering from side to side, as if you're not in a hurry. Enemies are just an occurrence you have to pay little to none attention to - all that matters is the ore.

The game has great potential, seems to be bug-free and looks really nice. I'm not saying the flaws ruin it for me, but it could be SO much nicer...

(If I notice other things later, I'll send you a PM.)

[Carrot Hunt]

Cute but a little annoying...

Your game looks nice and has a very smooth and fitting soundtrack, but most people will quit after loosing to level 2 the second time. An unlockable level-select or a 'retry level' button would be a huge improvement. Especially younger players, who seem to be this games target-audience, don't have the kind of patience to replay each and every level each time they want to retry higher levels.

Speaking of "higher levels": For review-purposes I tried to find the carrot in level 2 so that I could write something about the design of higher levels, but in 8 tries I couldn't find it and gave up.

[Super Filly Adventure]

"Let me just over-analyse this..." ;)

The game has a good bgm, great pixel-art, the instructions were easy to understand and the controls were smooth. Right-click cheating was disabled and I didn't run into any bugs or stages that looked like they were rushed, even when I looked for them. You took your time and clearly did some testing before you published - the result reflects this well.
You avoided all those horrible, horrible newbie-errors Newgrounds sees day after day which on itself is already quite an achievement.

However there were some minor flaws:
- Before the game starts there's a brief introduction to the whole cutie-mark topic for those who don't know about their meaning in the pony society. But the majority of the players will hit space before they even know it's there. Maybe a little menu with <Start> and <Story> options would help players to notice the additional contend.
- The cutscene-art seemed rather off compared to the rest of the game.
- There were no puzzles. Since it's labeled as a role-playing game I expected a little more obstacles, but I guess it's appropriate for your target audience.
- The boss of the Warrior Ending was really easy to beat but he took forever. Personally I prefer more challenging patterns. You could draw some inspiration from looking at bosses from the Mega Man series. A more complex pattern and shorter live-bars would make the boss-fight more interesting.
Since I played the game several times for review-purposes, I noticed both yours and the boss's firing frequency went up, once a fair share of life is lost. While that evens out the odds, the fight still takes very long if you don't get hit that often. - The game was over too soon. I had fun playing, but felt it ended rather abruptly. I know, "Good game. Make it longer." is a common review these days which perfectly underestimates the effort this calls for. It is hard to just extend a story while keeping it from going bad and while I prefer a short and solid story over a long but far fetched one on any given day, it just felt a little bit too short.

About the different endings:

Warrior Ending: I would imagine most players will get this. While Physical conflicts and "Eat this" don't fit the theme of the original series very much, I liked what you had done with it anyway. Whether the brony-scene will agrees or not, time will tell.

Muffin Ending: Players who have seen the series will figure it out rather fast. The Ending itself was rather wacky but likeable.

Bank Flank Ending: I don't want to spoil too much... It can only be found under certain conditions which might be a good thing. While you certainly worked out some interesting new ideas, there are several things in it that don't fit to the canon. I'm pretty sure bronies won't like it, so I encourage them not to look for this ending. Trust me on this.

Yet Another Ending(?): If there are even more endings I wasn't able to find them. Yet. ;)

All that being said, the above statement is still true: You did well and created a fun game that definitely has replay-value. Thank you for doing so and best of luck for the upcoming Contest.

Jay6 responds:

No, there are no other endings than those you mentioned. Thanks for commenting that you got them all though! :D

With all of the ideas I had for this game, the Dragon boss was kinda... last. The Muffin ending I thought of first. I had no idea what I'd do for the good ending until just about a week or two ago. If I was given like... 6 months for this contest, I'd probably think up a better story, and make it a bit longer with some puzzles perhaps. Thanks for your input!

[Brony text adventue 1/10]

false advertising

First of all, this isn't a text adventure. Look it up, maybe even play some and you will notice this is nothing but a quiz. I've taken into account that you explained that the player slips into the role of a pony that has to take a quiz before any story begins, but there's no freedom in decision and certainly no adventure. None of the answers can be found inside of the game and anyone who doesn't have a good memory or didn't see more than a few episodes can advance without a lot of trial and error.

"Please ignore the grammar and spelling mistakes" Now you're just plain lazy. You could have just used a spellchecker but instead you chose to submit an unfinished game. You should also work on your attitude. Calmer fans of the series might not care that much when the second season is aired since they will see it eventually, but don't feel the need to rush. Not really a reason to verbally abuse other fans who just wanted to play a game.

On a more technical side it could really have used a mute button. I'm also wondering how you managed to reach 4.8 MB with so little contend. There's no reward, no gallery, no special insight on future MLP:FIM episodes - just a lot of blaming the player if he doesn't get every single question right. You should consider just adding a score-counter and showing the result at the end, since some of the questions are awfully specific.

To round it up again: It's frustrating, insulting, lacks reward and takes unproportional long to load. I'm sorry if you might feel like I'm tearing apart your masterpiece, but in my eyes it's plain horrible.

who-of-who responds:

Well, I know that I got lazy with the Spell check. But it's going to be a text adventure.. And it's 4.8 MB because the song is big. Also, it's just explaining the story.. Oh and Btw, it's a better flash then you have made. I'd like to see you do better. Also. If you're pissed about it not being a text adventure yet.. I'm having troubles atm.

[One Chance]

A formidable game...

First of all: I'm not going to ask for a replay-button. :)
I was disturbed during play and had to leave my computer when I already had started the roof-scene on day 2. Since there was no pause-button I had to let the scene run without me. Luckily I decided to restart the game to watch the scene I missed.
Now that I know the unique nature of the game, I would suggest a pause-button.

About the game itself: Choices had to be made and I chose that life as a whole had to prevail. I regret nothing.