VENGEANCE-GGG's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Battlefield]

Obviously takes a lot of cues from 'Invasion'.

Instead of just making it like Invasion with real-time unit purchasing, I reckon you should've taken this opportunity to take the genre a bit further, maybe with some more unique ideas of your own.

Hoeloe responds:

Yes, it was based on invasion, except the unit purchasing is different, and it is more fantasy - based with wizards, trolls and dragons

[AntiEbaums Tutorial]

Mmm...

In response to the guy who said you could Right-click and choose 'Rewind', 'Play', 'Back', or 'Forward' to get around this, regardless of whether or not that would have any effect, you can simply remove the Right-click menu with a Stage.showMenu = false; statement (there are other ways, too, but I like this one the most).

However, putting a script like the one featured in this movie won't help against a good decompiler. Even if you obfuscate your code, the bottom line is that there is no way to fully secure your movie. We've been over this many a time at Flash Kit, approaching it in every possible direction, and we came to the conclusion that there's no way to get around a dedicated hacker.

The best way to combat SWF hackers is just make their life as hard as possible by making your movie load in its data from loads of external files, which will make it nearly impossible to use on most movie portals, and force the hacker to look for all the parts of the script that load in the essential files. I'm not saying don't add the URL protection. On the contrary, put that in as well, and use it in each file the game has to load in. Then obfuscate the lot. Makes the hacker's life a lot harder (although admittedly it also makes your life a lot harder).

[Winzows BETA]

Looks like you only spent about an hour on it.

The alternatively coloured backgrounds don't appear in the same place as each other,
the windows aren't draggable,
the buttons don't dip down when you click on them,
there's a strange blue line in the middle of the preloader,
the login screen isn't anything like the real thing,
the task bar doesn't react to opening windows,
there's no minimize or expand button, the start bar is nothing like the real thing,
normally you would have to double-click on something to open it,
you can't select or click and drag stuff,
for no reason (other than laziness, I can assume) the desktop icons are inside the Recycle Bin,
you used a Single Line Input Text Box for the Word application instead of a Multi Line one,
you didn't put a scroll bar into the Word app,
you didn't make the buttons in the Word app functional (could be done using HTML text),
you didn't do anything with the cursor (make it so that Mac users see a Windows cursor, you can achieve this with System.capabilties.os and Mouse.hide();).
you didn't make the windows stretchable (could be done with masking or bitmap fills).

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Also, never release a BETA. if your Flash is unfinished, submit it to Newgrounds Alphas.

Sorry about the long list of things to fix, but each thing would only take a couple of lines of code to fix.

Zerobeam responds:

uuh yeah. i know al of this things. but my AS sucks. Really, this was just meant to be a AS training for me but then it turned out to be a game that i now posted. It's good that you know so much AS but i don't. I don't know how to fix 9/10 of al the things you just sayd making it so that even if i realese a v 1.00 it still would be bad. So realising that i need to know more and better AS. Ask around on the forums and put more time in it as you say. I worked hard on it and still i spent a few days on this.

[NG 1337 Translator!]

Buggy.

A character such as M is turned into //\//\ because you didn't take the special backslash characters, such as \n, \t, and \\ into account when programming it.

I made a l33t translator myself (I wonder if you saw it?) It's portal submission 274386.

Good graphics, well integrated into the NG environment. However, the audio doesn't loop particularly well.

You need to be careful about the order in which you translate certain characters. I translated |2 from l33t into English, and it turned into |z. This doesn't happen on my translator, as I don't go through the characters in a standard alphabetical order.

If you used a while loop instead of an onEnterFrame event, it would translate instantly, and more accurately.

[Commando Arena]

VERY poor collision detection...

Here's how to improve the collision detection. Not sure quite how you got it to be so inaccurate, perhaps you're not using relative/global coordinates correctly, but still...

Circle to circle frame-dependent collision detection, ActionScript 1.0:

MovieClip.prototype.function = circle2CircleCollision(targ) {
var xdist = targ._x-this._x;
// Find the x distance between the two targets
var ydist = targ._y-this._y;
// Find the y distance between the two targets
var distance = Math.sqrt(xdist*xdist+ydist*ydist);
// Find the real distance between the two targets
var maxGap = this.radius+targ.radius;
// Find the maximum distance that the two targets could be apart from each other without colliding
return distance<maxGap;
// Return true if they're colliding, and false if they're not.
}

Using the circle2CircleCollision function:

Put the above script on the first frame of your movie, and all the movie clips that you use after that point will have that function.

For it to work, you must give a 'radius' property to each of the things you are checking for collisions with. For instance:

_root.ballMC.radius = 10;
// Gives _root.ballMC a 'radius' property of 10 pixels.

Last but not least, to run the function, do this:

if (_root.hero.circle2CircleCollision(_root.bullet) == true) {
// If _root.hero is touching _root.bullet...
}

It also took ages to start again after dying. Take care of that.

Another thing you should add - brakes. I don't want to be flying into the enemies I'm aiming at.

I noticed that some bullets I fired weren't removed after the game ended. Use this script on the 'you lose' frame to fix that:

for (var i in _root) {
removeMovieClip(_root[i]);
}

It'll remove any dynamically attached or duplicated mcs.

Try using vector explosions instead of bitmap ones, even if they look less realistic - the bitmap ones you used seemed out of place an unsuitable for the type of explosion that was happening.

That said, I think this game is good and has a lot of potential.

[How to draw yoshi.]

Mmm...

Your drawings of Yoshi weren't actually that good, you know. Some of those poses are way off of what Yoshi actually does. Good music. View portal submission 175354, 'Draw Like a Pro' by KorteX to see what a real drawing tutorial should be like.

[METROID: Genesis]

Not compatible with Flash Player 8?

I'm using the latest Flash Player, 8,0,22,0, and no enemies were appearing. On Easy or Medium difficulty modes (didn't check Hard mode). I waited a few minutes, shot around a bit, right-clicked and chose Play, etc. I couldn't get much to happen, except I was able to make the background animation progress a bit (e.g., the door got closer after I pressed Play a few times).

Put this script on frame 1 to disable the Right-click menu:

Stage.showMenu = false;

The only part about the graphics that I really liked was the weapon. By the way, I wouldn't think it would be impossible to make a 'change weapon' function - you just need to put a bit of thought into how you structure the hierarchy of the movie clips. I didn't hear many sounds, because not much really happened, but the sounds you had were pretty good. As for having a password to play the game? Ehh... bad idea.

[Family Guy: Soundboard]

Could have been a lot better.

My review is over a thousand characters longer than the maximum review length here, so I'll give you a URL to view it from (replace -dot- with . and -slash- with /).

gamesgamesgames -dot- co -dot- uk -slash- Review -dot- txt

killstation433 responds:

hmmm i wonder, is this a good review or a piece of garbage

[Flash4beginners]

Pretty good, but nothing I didn't already know.

Tutorials are always a pain to make, due to all the screenshots you have to take, and scaling them so that they fit in, but are still recognisable.

I suggest that you show how to add easing to a tween (select first keyframe of tween and look at Easing in the Properties panel). This is a VERY useful feature, which everybody should learn.

Also explain Soften Fill Edges, Convert Lines to Fills, and Expanding Fills. They're very useful for special effects, and it's good to know how to use them if you're trying to make impressive text.

The only problem I really had with it was the fact that it didn't show EXACTLY what was supposed to happen (like when you click on a frame, it turns black to show it's selected, etc.) but this kind of stuff can get very tedious after a while, and forces you to take many more screenshots, so I don't blame you.

Also, try to make the mouse move at a more constant speed, and make it move more naturally, by using a curved motion guide instead of just a regular tween.

GAMECUBICLE responds:

yeah, i probably could have shown easing, I did show Expand fill etc.. btw.

The screenshots were of a good quality, so i dont know why you are complaining about that.

Thanks for the comments. Making mouse move at a constant speed is irritating to do, cause you would have to time all the actions more precise, and i think it was good the way it is.

[Orc Siege]

Very good!

Nice work. If only it had a 'save' feature. If you don't already know how, give me an email and I'll show you how to have saving and loading.