FlashN00bie's Reviews

[Skitzo-The Buddy System]

Not entirely sure why, but I didn't find this one as creepy as your others. I think the ones that have some major turning point where things are clearly progressing, but highly off-kilter (like the scene after Skitzo kills the rich ostrich in "Spare a Dime?") are the most effective — where it feels like something "else" has taken control of the story and is perverting it.

However, at the same time, your choice of music was absolutely perfect for this one. This cartoon, out of all of the others, sounded the most like an old 1920s-era short.

Comick responds:

Ah yes haha I get what you mean! In the case with "spare a dime" the story said that 2 clips were found and sewed together which resulted in a longer and far more demonic clip because it had some of the lost bits that are usually burned right away! That being said, I will take that advice on the next clip :) haha. They dont always have a complete "story" and some are creepier then others yeah. The key is to show Skitzo and his character and how each clip reveals more bits about him lol. Thanks for the awesome review!

[SS - Keys of our Past]

Really interesting stuff, but there's a bug.

Really neat information and a lot of interesting conversational material on the metaphysical. But, there's a strange bug with playback. About midway through "part 3" of your discussion, it just suddenly skipped through all of the frames until it reached the end, playing the music over the credits on top of your voiceover.

I ended up re-watching it on YouTube, so I don't know what happened. Other than that, really good series - I'm interested in what else you have to say.

[Rebecca Black - The Movie]

The Cynical_Mass parody was better.

Had this been released first, it probably would have fared better, but in light of the parody Cynical_Mass released onto YouTube, this one pales in comparison. Animation and art-wise, it's fine, but it doesn't really bring anything new to the table.

It's not particularly scary, and it honestly feels a bit like it's "been done before". Maybe if it had been a bit longer and more involved with the video itself, it would have been able to stand on its own a little better.

[Nodiatis]

This game has tremendous potential to be a very, very engaging game. Its depth of character creation options, skills, abilities, equipment, and massive map give it a tremendous amount of fodder to play with from the respect of storytelling, thematic content, and replay value.

So what kills it? Three things:

1. Absolutely NO use of the larger story. All of your "quests" are given by this "seer" inside a church who tasks you with collecting objects, killing monsters, and killing bosses. And by the way, there isn't any rhyme or reason, and worse, the quests are one-shots, meaning that you will outrun the "content" before you catch up level-wise.

2. The outrageous profiteering angle. In most MMOs, "rest time" is bonus XP you're awarded from being responsible with your time by logging off. In this, "rest time" simply means you make full XP and gold. Once you run out of that, it drops to =one-sixth= of normal. The only way to get rid of this? Pay $54.95 for the "grinder" upgrade, and then keep dropping money on "time cards" that allow you to run with a smaller "out-of-rest-time" penalty. After buying the upgrade? Instead of one-sixth the cash/xp when you run out, it's now =half.= No thanks.

3. Most egregiously - THE GRIND. Dear God, the grind. The amount of grinding in this game manages to match the early days of EverQuest's famous grinds, and that's a very, very bad thing. In order to progress from one level to the next, you must advance four "stats" skills up to move forward. You can only train one at a time, and only in combat. This is fine. What isn't are the 300 other skills that are required to use virtually any equipment at all in the game can't be trained through combat, but only by sacrificing drops gained from killing monsters. There is a "passive advancement" skill that gives you a paltry 3XP per 2 seconds (which is halved for any "non-learning" skill) but it's not really worth it.

It's one thing to warn players that they'll need to slow down and read descriptions, do the math, and think while playing. It's entirely another to =force= the gameplay to such a crawl that you could write the next Great American Novel while waiting for your character to earn enough XP to get their next skill point. Seriously - even MOVING from square to square and looting items after combat has a global cooldown!

This game completely misses the point of F2P. If you want them to pay money, say it outright, don't force them to do it through a thousand cuts of annoyances you've coded into the game that only get better if you pay for it!

[Alien Splatter]

Pretty good, but there's a game-breaking bug with the pause function. If you pause the game, then click outside of the window, it gets stuck in pause mode. Pressing Enter to unpause advances the game by one frame, but it also ticks down the timer by one. So after about 200 or so presses, regardless of where you are, you're dead. And after that point, the game gets stuck in a loop and won't go back to where it was. I'd made it to the third screen of level 1 before this bug bit me.

I applaud the Nintendo Hard idea, but let's make the game Nintendo Hard because of challenge, not bugs, eh? ;)

SinclairStrange responds:

Mmm, I tried last night to re-create the bug on here and offline and I just can't do it? So that's a big puzzle to me. I'll look into it further but I can't see anything wrong. (Isn't that always the case sometimes.) Sorry about it happening to you though :(

[Aetherpunk 1.1]

Pretty good, but still some flaws in the gameplay.

Overall, it's a good game, with some interesting mechanics that help keep things interesting. However, there's still some things that are broken. For example, getting one-shotted by the mad bombers or the skirmishers - I found myself with roughly 90% of my HP, suddenly getting one-shotted by the a skirmisher around wave 16-18.

Healing is wonky - it stutters, stops, and doesn't really work properly. The tier 1 healing skill only actually heals you if you wait, then tap an arrow key to move. The tier 2 healing skill that lets you regenerate all the time works up until your health is about 90% full, and then it stops.

The tier 4 (hellburner) turret is absolutely useless; it does no more damage per hit than the tier 2 turret (impaler) and fires 5 times slower (1 shot every 5 seconds) - I bought it for one wave and then scrapped it because it was utterly pointless to keep.

Upgrading barricades seems like a waste of aether because the damage enemies do continually grows, to the point where a single striker can clear through a 100-HP barricade in two hits and a juggernaut can clear it in one by wave 18.

Fire-rate upgrades don't seem to affect single-shot physical damage weapons even when the instant reload skill is purchased. It would seem like they should.

So, overall, pretty good, but there's a lot of small issues that keep it from being great.