Score: 5

"Some problems..."

submission: RGB Cannon

date: 5 hours ago

Well, for starters, the "skip" button for the tutorial doesn't stop the audio, so even if you skip the tutorial, you still have to listen to the whole thing. Also, at the end of the tutorial, the narrator states "you will return to the title screen".... however, the game just stays on a black, blank screen with no way to return to title. Because of this, the game must be closed and relaunched. Also, the tutorial isn't really complete.. it states "that's all you need to know to play the game," however, you don't cover how to change the pixel colour or how to shoot the cannon. I realize there is a controls section that covers this, but what's the point of having a tutorial if the player still needs to check another section to find out how to play? The tutorial should be all-inclusive, and the "Controls" section should only exist as something for the player to refer back to so they don't have to sit through the whole tutorial again.

This game is also pretty darn difficult, mainly due to the fact that multicoloured emoticons, once turned into a solid R/G/B colour, still deduct from your Passion if you continue shooting them with the previous pixel colour that was used. Personally, I don't think this is fair, as there is no way to tell how many shots it takes to change an emoticon from one colour to another. I think there should be a brief moment, once the emoticon has changed colours (even if it's not a solid colour yet) in which the pixel being fired at it has no bearing on your Passion meter.

Additionally, the emoticon colours are a bit superfluous... why are there C/M/Y emoticons, as well as slightly brighter versions of all three C/M/Y icons? I would think it goes without saying that any brightness variation of a colour would result in the same combination of primary pixels (magenta = red + blue; bright magenta = red + blue... gee, really?). What was the purpose in putting in these extraneous, minor colour modifications? The pastel versions, in my opinion, aren't different enough to be too noticeable; if the "bright" emoticons were removed, the pastels would definitely stand out compared to the regular C/M/Y colours.

Overall, an interesting concept indeed, but I think the colour combinations make the game get too hard too quickly, and having the powerups as white blocks (i.e. requiring all 3 colours) takes too much focus away from destroying the emoticons; more often than not, trying to get a powerup involved a great loss to my Passion meter.

Score: 6

"Interesting take"

submission: Pongnop

date: August 31, 2008

I like the new take on Pong, essentially playing two games at once. I realize the game is only to get the highest amount of points possible, so I'm guessing that it's impossible to actually get the ball past the AI paddles, correct? Anyway, it does get decently difficult fairly quickly; I could only make it up to 1605 points on my first try. However, this game lacks replay value; after that first try, I really didn't feel motivated to play it again. I think the music was a little overbearing as well; with music that loud, why even bother to add sound effects?

Score: 3

"Speaking of too slow..."

submission: Erebus The Hedgehog

date: August 31, 2008

The animation leave a lot to be desired... I personally like sprite animations, but there's no background, no music, no story, and the tweens for some reason are horribly slow. I'm not sure what the purpose was for submitting this... do you plan to follow this up with a movie or a series about your fancharacter? Honestly, this looks like something that should've been submitted to NG Alphas instead of the Portal.

As an unrelated sidenote, a roommate and I did actually own two hedgehogs, one named Erebos (an alternate spelling) and the other named Aether, thus essentially representing Shadow/Darkness and Bright/Glowing Upper Air. One was black and the other white, so we thought it was appropriate.

Score: 7

"Pretty decent..."

submission: Pandemic II

date: July 20, 2008

For the most part, I like this game, although it would be nice to be able to increase the speed even further than it can already go (even with the second fast-forward clicked, sometimes I had to wait 5-10 minutes to get enough Evo. points to do anything). One big detractor from this game's score is the fact that certain situations cause the game to be unbeatable... when countries start closing borders and transportation, it seems to be a cascading effect, thus shutting down any further possible infection. Also, Madagascar is *way* too hard to infect, as it only has a shipyard and the traffic is minimal at best (I watched for 2 straight minutes once and not a single ship arrived, and then they closed the shipyard).

Both above situations, the cascading global panic effect and the near-impossibility of infecting Madagascar meant that if either of these situations occurred, there was absolutely no point in waiting for the game to play itself out, as it became at that point impossible to beat. Also, if the vaccine is successful, if you've not infected absolutely every single person in the world, then you might as well restart the game, because it's impossible to win.

In future installments, you should add in the ability for nations to reopen their borders and transportation, add more routes (or at least more frequent routes) to Madagascar, give the disease the ability, if a successful vaccine is deployed, to mutate and regain the ability to infect, and allow insects to infect across borders. Also, maybe increase the rate at which Evo. points are obtained... as stated previously, even with the Virus, which states it has the fastest Evo. point accumulation, I would leave the game running for 10 minutes only to come back and see I'd only gotten 30-40 points. With the expensive tiers and disease traits, 40 points can be spent very quickly, and then another 10-15 minutes would be spent just waiting for more points to accumulate.

A decent game, but as I have tried it maybe 10 times and have not yet been successful, this says to me that too many factors cause the game to be near impossible to beat.

Score: 7

"Not bad"

submission: DBZ-PE 2.3

date: July 1, 2008

This game overall was enjoyable for one or maybe two playthroughs, but honestly there's only so much button-mashing people can take. Add in the ability to duck and kick, and the game would be a lot more fun to play. The "Register" link didn't work, it just sat at "registering username" forever, and "Login" crashed my browser. Adding the ability to choose which stage to play instead of being forced into a linear stage progression would be great; the player could get some extra experience for tough boss battles by playing stages already completed. Also, the A and D buttons to switch skills were extremely spotty... sometimes they wouldn't work at all and I was locked into Energy Ball, and sometimes they worked too well and went past the skill I wanted to select.

Add in a delay to the enemies' ability to attack at the start of a fight and at the spawning of each enemy; it's not fair that the enemy can attack you while the screen is transitioning into the fight. And please, fix the transition; it takes way too long. Seeing it once wouldn't be so bad, but as every screen uses the same transition, the game is much longer than it needs to be, and it really hurts replay value. Remove the "now playing" message every time the Save screen loads up; it's just annoying. It was always playing the same song, so there's no reason to beat a dead horse.

The teleport skill, once activated, can still be manipulated after the player decides where to move to; if I release X to finalize my teleport and start pushing left or right, it changes my teleport destination. Also, you may want to have the teleport skill automatically face the player towards the enemy; basically, I had to turn my back to the enemy before proccing the skill so that I wouldn't teleport behind them with my back already to them.

Score: 1

"Ahgh, my ears!"

submission: The Amazing Maze

date: June 29, 2008

Wow, first off, PLEASE fix it so that when the game is restarted, the music doesn't overlap itself! A huge, huge problem in my eyes (or ears, as the case may be). You might want to indicate somewhere, maybe in the description, maybe in the game itself, that's it's a mouse avoider-type maze; at the very beginning, it wasn't clear what to do and I was pressing keys on the keyboard trying to get the button thing to move, until I moved my mouse into a wall and died. Also, level 4 was damn near impossible; think about your players that use laptops with the touchpad or trackballs. This game would be impossible for them to play, as they simply lack the pinpoint accuracy needed to pass certain levels. Why is it that clicking the green button on the first level causes the player to die? Why is that button even there?

On maybe level 6 or so (2 levels after the checkpoint), clicking a yellow button brings up the message "stick to the rules dumbass" and doesn't allow the player to go anywhere, so the game must be closed and reopened. Also, checkpoint 2 didn't work, as it just sent me back to checkpoint 1 and I had to redo those levels.

This game needs a lot of work. And why Mario music? It doesn't fit in with this game at all.

Score: 0

"Wtf?"

submission: The best optical illusion

date: June 29, 2008

What the hell is this? A slideshow of text? Also, apparently you do not understand the definition of an "optical illusion." I don't even know what your point was... to tell people that some fictional guy is imaginary? Uh yeah, we already knew that. This was seriously a waste of my time... if you're going to submit things such as this, at least put in some form of navigation; maybe make it more like a PowerPoint presentation, in which the slides don't advance until the user wants them to. Definitely add background music so it doesn't get boring in 5 seconds like it does currently.

Score: 0

"Pointless."

submission: Epilepsy Ball

date: June 26, 2008

Well, when I started playing, I was actually trying to play. As I realized that the ball was growing, the game starting becoming easier until the ball got large enough so that it was touching the computer's paddle and my paddle at the same time, and thus never moved. I let the game sit for a couple minutes until I had around 3000 points, and that's when it dawned on me... this isn't really a game at all. It's a waste of time in a nutshell. If you're going to make something with flashing colours such as this, at LEAST give the game a purpose. Pong is one of the most boring games in the history of games, and this is actually WORSE than Pong. This may as well just be a bright flashy Tic-Tac-Toe, that's how useless this game is as a "game". The music got old very quickly, and if you ever let the ball get past the paddle and decided for whatever masochistic reason that you wanted to continue to play, the ball started at the same size as it was when the last game ended. It would have been easier to just make a looping animation without any interactivity if your (obviously) sole purpose was to focus on the bright flashiness. You get a 0 for unoriginal idea and pointless "game."

Score: 5

"Problems."

submission: Glam Poker Deck 6

date: June 25, 2008

I guess it's okay, but first off, the $5 bet button doesn't work. Also, in around 30 to 40 hands, I never once got anything more than a single pair. You might want to make the game a little easier for the player. I mean, you have a $50000 bet button, but from what I saw, it wasn't really possible to get any winnings. The deck shuffles after every hand; maybe go through an entire deck so the player can actually get a sense of playing a straight game, rather than "hand-shuffle-hand-shuffle etc." Once a hand was finished and the "Next Hand" button was displayed, the player could still click the cards and flip them over... it didn't do anything, but it's an oversight regardless.

Addition: Whoa holy crap, after around 60 hands I got a 3 of a kind. That 2:1 payoff rocks! No, seriously, make it a little easier to get a pot every once in a while. You may say it's my playing style, but I've mixed it up considerably (I've had a few hands to change my style) and a pair is usually the best that can be gotten, it seems, aside from this one fluke.

Score: 8

"Love sniper games"

submission: Tactical Assassin 2

date: June 5, 2008

Ok I normally dig sniper games, and this one is fun in its own right. However, I do have problems with it. First off, your scoreboard is either wrong, or it's been hacked, because the lowest score I saw on there was just shy of 200,000 points, which is impossible to get. Even getting 100% accuracy, no failed missions (except for the mandatory 2 fails you get from mission 8), perfect mission bonus (which is impossible, since it always counts down) and spending no money at all, it's still impossible to get 200,000 points. Let's say 5000 mission bonus, plus cash 95650, plus accuracy bonus 500, minus mandatory mission failure of 500... that's 100650, getting perfect mission bonus and not spending any money on ammo. 200,000 is just not possible.

And what's the point of giving codes for the levels? The game doesn't save character information, so you can't resume where you left off... you just get 6 bullets, the starting gun, and a preset amount of money when you enter a code. What's worse is that you can't submit your score, because it calls you a cheater. I put in the code to the last level, and got a lower score than when I went through the whole game, and yet it called me a cheater. Cheaters usually boost their scores to unreachable levels (like 200,000 points), not lower their scores.

Additionally, a little exploit I found was if you want to click the Reset button at the beginning (which is useless, since the game doesn't store your information anyway), you get 6 free .308 bullets every for every click. If you do this maybe 10 times, you'll never need to buy ammo, thus saving money. It's a good thing for you that you don't include a "sell" feature, otherwise 200,000 points would seem small compared to the scores of the exploiters.

The high score counter doesn't reset, so if you go through the game, then start a new game, your bonus doesn't start at 5,000, but rather whatever number you were previously at.

Showing the Crazy Monkey advert twice in a row is duplicitous and unnecessary, and rather frustrating. We understand they are a sponsor as they are included on the "Play" page... don't show us the exact same advert we were JUST looking at half a second ago when we click the Play button.

Mission 8 seems to be bugged... I've let the game sit for a moment to see if anyone else comes on screen or if anything I haven't previously seen comes up, but I don't see anything... so, shooting the guy behind the glass counts as two failed missions, and deducts 500 points... why? Isn't that the whole point of the mission?

Deducting bonus points for the training mission is just stupid... the player is forced to wait for targets to appear. Even firing as fast as possible when the targets appeared, I lost 600 points in the training mission alone. At least in other missions, if the player knows what to do (i.e., mission 5) you can avoid the waiting. In some missions, waiting is necessary, such as waiting for the dude on the plane to walk past the guard or waiting for the guys in the park to match heads.

I think you put too many options in the store for such a short game.. 5 weapons, 3 scopes, 2 add-ons and a consumable when the game can be pretty easily beaten with the original equipment. My first time through this game I bought the bipod and the sling, saved up for the best scope, then saved up for the best gun, as I thought that was the best money-saving solution. As it turns out, you don't really need the upgrades. That's like 30,000 bucks that you save right there.

Finally, accuracy doesn't seem to calculate properly... in one go-around, I missed 3 shots in the training course purposely and hit everything else, and completed the game with 100% accuracy rating... in another attempt, I used the code to get to mission 8, purposely failed 3 times (those audience members deserved it), and hit 100% in mission 9 and I ended up with 0% accuracy... um, if I beat the game, how could I possibly have 0% accuracy?