Score: 8

"..."

submission: Professor Layton pt.1

date: August 17, 2008

... nice to see your latest movie, Skaijo! And I was just about to PM you asking if you were working on something, the coincidence is almost creepy. Fortunately, the movie's a keeper. =]

Anyway, I'll keep this short and sweet:
- The movie had some very nice use of different camera angles, the "bottom looking up" being particularly different and interesting.
- Some nice drawings and animation.
- Great voice acting as usual, with the "...Hey, I'm going to *** in..." and the "...b**** c***** is <pause> totally bad..." parts exceptionally well executed!
- Very funny, even more so the second time you see it! And the movie has a nice flow too.

It also parodied the Professor Layton pretty well (the "puzzle screens" come out perfectly!), as far as I can tell, never having played the game but seen gameplay videos and screenshots before.

I do have some criticisms, however:
- The backgrounds were far less detailed then from your previous movies and the fact they lacked colour (I know that it's a doctors clinic, but they have some colour) made the movie at little "blander". On the plus side, this is only a criticism because I've come to expect more of you!
- The fact that the voices sometimes played out at the same time, although realistic, was slightly confusing.
- I also found the cell phone part, although funny, slightly clichéd and slightly out of place with the rest of the movie.

So, over all, although not your best movie, it still was pretty dammed good! Cheers and kudos, and I hope this movie gets the recognition it deserves!

Score: 0

"..."

submission: The Last Hour: Chapter 9

date: August 17, 2008

... right, this might sound a little harsh, but for reasons that will come forth, this is definitivly my last and final review for your "The Last Hour" series. So I'm going to kindly ask that you no longer send out any more PM's requesting reviews, ok? On the other hand, I will give you a detailed review.

Right, let's start with the good. The voice acting for this movie shows improvement when compared to previous efforst, specially in regards to recording quality. However, it still sounds 'forced' and is exagerated, not to mention the fact that your voice actor has the voice of a pre-teen.

Also, the animation and drawing quality of this movie is a definitive improvement over the last movie I saw. The drawings were much more detailed and overall better, the look of the planet was pretty good, even the ship had some style.

However, if I'm not mistaken the leg animation at the end was traced, right? I so, then I should tell you that tracing dosen't really improve animation techniques and you should really try to get the hang of things without using it. If not, then I'm sorry for the accusing on doing so and, in which case, I'm greatly impressed by how your animation has improved. It's much, much better than before (although the ship could use better animation).

The biggest problem with this movie, however, is it size. It's short. It's beyond short. It's mindboggling short, made worse by the fact that the intro is probably longer than the movie although, thankfully, you've included the vital skip button.

However, the fact that after 9 chapters you're still making movies that ridiculously short, despite being told before by several reviews that that is completly unacceptable, means I'm forced to conclude that you simply don't care. Which is a shame, since you have shown significant evolution and I belive that you can become a good flash artist in the future.

But this disregard for your viewers means that I've stoped caring too. So I'm going to give you one last piece of advice: make your movies longer. It's as simple as that. It dosen't have to last 10 minutes, but a movie as short as yours are have to have something significant to be real movies.

Allow me to explain. A movie that lasts twenty seconds can be considered reasonable (for example) if it is a humourous movie, or is extremely intense (action wise), or has beggining, development and an end (there are other possibilities too). Your movies, in comparison, are all ridiculously short developments of an ongoing story, having none of the previous elements.

So, in short, you really have improved and I wish you luck, but I'm not going to review any other movie from your "The Last Hour" series. Please don't PM me again requesting a review as such, unless you want to be blocked.

Score: 8

"..."

submission: asdfmovie

date: August 10, 2008

... that was suitably random and funny! Nice use of non-sequiturs certainly brought a smile to my face and quite a few laughs too. But let's get technical:

- The graphics were very simply drawn, but were quite polished and had a 'clean' look. A bit more detail could have been nice, but might have clashd with the style you used. The animation was spot on, very nicely done.

- The voice acting was very good. Just over the top, but not excessivly so ("Daddy!"), so that the humour worked pretty well. This, with the humour, was the best aspect of the movie.

- The use of sound effects and music was sparse, but well placed, with adequate sound effects (i.e., the gun shot sounded as such etc.). The music was itself pretty good.

All in all, quite simple, but still a very nice execution of good jokes, with abundant use of non-sequiturs, which make for a fine movie! Cheers!

Score: 3

"..."

submission: The Last Hour: Chapter 5

date: August 9, 2008

... let me honest with you: you've finally shown some real improvement. Although the movie was far, far from perfect, certain elements were improved, such as the voice acting, which was slightly better then before, the animation was a bit more elaborate and the drawings were a bit more detailed. Don't get me wrong, all these things still are quite poor, but have improved from before.

Above all, you reduced the intro length to something quite reasonable (i.e., you explained what happend in other movies briefly) and you put a skip button. All these things are a definite sign that you're making an effort.

But the movie still was way too short. I mean, from what I've seen in your previous movies, you'd need about three of your movies together to achieve something satisfactory.

In short, you've finally shown real signs of improvement, but you still a lot of practice. And practice is, literally, what you need, together with (even) more effort into each movies. I.e., next movie, try making it about twice the length of this one, with more polish to everything (specially the drawings and animation) and keep at it.

Score: 1

"..."

submission: The Last Hour: Chapter 4

date: August 5, 2008

... that was no better than the first movie, to be honest, in fact I think it's worse, much worse. Why? Simply because you padded the movie with a ridiculously long intro and recap. That's a cheap tatic to make things look better than they are, a sign of a poor quality movie and a way of insulting your viewers.

The "movie" itself was very, very short, with terrible voice acting, terrible animation / drawing, with no significant plot or characters and, to brutally honest, was simply awful all round. There's so much you need to improve that I don't even know where to start and since, via your intro, you've delibaratly "insulted" me, I'm sorry to say I won't go any further with my review.

Now please stop sending PM's with review requests unless you actually make an effort next time.

Score: 1

"..."

submission: The Last Hour: Chapter 1

date: August 2, 2008

... nothing against a christian based movie (on the contrary, being a christian I welcome them), but that was ridiculously short, pure and simple. And not particulary polished or well made. Give it a bit more effort before you submit a flash like that to the portal.

Score: 5

"..."

submission: Taco-Man the Game Master

date: July 21, 2008

... that was just brilhant. No, seriously! You managed to put system shock (with really, really good voice work!) into a Captain N parody and just for that, you get extra kudos and cheers! I'm seriously in love with the sheer cleverness of the movie.

The choice of parody characters (dig-dug for megaman, derek for belmont, ... and most of all, fulgore for king hippo!), the use of a complelty random piece of music for the 'action sequence', the ridiculously way the 'boss' is defeated and amount of time the screen takes to disapear... all really clever and humourous choices!

The animation was, as usual, pretty good, but I must admit I'm not a big fan of your drawing style. Nothing wrong with it per se, since it's pretty detailed and quite polished, it just dosen't please me.

The voice acting was, overall, very good and (as I mentioned before) the voice work was excelent! I do think, however, that you should maybe think of finding a 'real' female voice actor, since your range on that account is quite limited (I couldn't stop thinking of a certain flash involving a certain game programer and his man crush on a singer...).

So, overall, that was very clever, well thought out, quite funny and very well executed! Big cheers and kudos! It's just a shame that the movie currently has less than 30k views, it surely deserves much, much more!

Score: 2

"..."

submission: Quick01

date: July 4, 2008

... honestly, that wasn't badly drawn, but a one second long animation? I'm sorry, but the only thing I can point out as criticism in a second long animation is that it is too short for anything, including detailed criticism.

Score: 9

"..."

submission: Collin & The Wishing Tree

date: July 1, 2008

... that was very funny and very well made! Really good stuff, no doubt. But let me break down what I thought of each of the movies aspects:

- The voice acting was really, really good, it was the best part of the movie, no doubt! Massive kudos to Tomamoto for really nailing it, because he narrates the whole thing in a <quasi> dead pan style that really fit the movie (as did the accents).

- And since he also created the "magical" story, he also deserves acolades, because the story was the second best part of the movie! It's down right silly story, of course, but with a grim sense of humour that works and, importantly, it there isn't the exageration (i.e., making things overly over the top) that's typical of these things. It also had a pretty decent length and a nice flow.

- The animation / drawings were overall pretty good. The character design, in particular, was really good (loved the look of the tree!) and the drawings showed a great attention to detail (like the backgrounds). What I didn't like was the animation style you used, you know, where people's arms keep flailing about. I felt it didn't really fit in and distracted the viewer from the quality of the drawings themselves.

Overall, really funny and well made, a (close to a) epitome of a humourous newgrounds movie. Cheers and kudos to all those involved!

Score: 10

"..."

submission: Megaman vs Ghosts&Goblins

date: June 6, 2008

... since I never got around to reviewing these games when they first came out, I decided to do so now. And after so many years (and countless playthroughs) I still feel that both your "Megaman vs" games are among the best flash games ever made. And for some very simple (and good) reasons:

- The controls for both games are extremely well done, being very responsive and offering just the right amount of control of megaman.

- The level of dificulty is a bit on the easy side, but feels very rewarding and challenging at the same time. And the games themselves are pretty dammed fun!

- The level design is pretty creative and offers a nice amount of variety. Before you can even begin to tire of one type of design (and challenges!), the game changes things.

- The soundtrack of both games are really good. It's a shame that OCRemix decided to remove them from their site (although I understand why they did it), because I feel they fit the games really well.

- The overall level of polish and presentation of the games is great.

- The sprite ripping and animation is pretty much perfect.

- The replay factor, because of the secret weapons, is just head and shoulders above most other flash games. And even without them, I'd still probably go play them now and then.

So, overall, they're both really polished, fun games that really show off your flash skills. It's quite dificult to find any significant flaws to them or to make sugestions on how to improve them. I'll always hope for a Megaman vs Contra game, even thougth the sprites from the games aren't all that compatible.

Cheers and kudos for the excelent games!