Age/Gender: 18, Male
Location: QLD, Australia
Job: Uni Fheg.
I'm Mark.
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Flash Reviews: 1,163
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All Flash Reviews
1,163 Reviews | 215 w/ Responses
Well, this was a bit confusing. The humor reminded me a lot of my friends, just without the cool British accents.
The animation pathing was quite basic for this one, the visuals were below par. But this was all fixed up with the pointless, immature humor... which totally suited me.
Nice job.
Author's Response:
Thanks. :)
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"That's my general reaction to free soda..."
I love your humor. It's so pointless and uneventful but at the same time... satisfying. Who doesn't KILL someone after they steal a Dr. Pepper?
The thing that annoyed me was the walking path of the other characters, it's almost as if they didn't have knees :S
Anyway, decent animation. Great humor! Keep this shit up!
Author's Response:
Hmm, 2 comments about the knees. It is definitely something I'll have to work on. Anyway, thanks for reviewing. :)
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I quite liked this. The thing that appealed to me most was the consistency of the humor throughout the episode, it never lacked. The sprite animation was basic, but very fluent, so it helped the humor in on parts.
The only thing I could suggest would be to turn up your voicing, it might be my headphones, but I could barely hear you guys :o
Nevertheless, good work!
Author's Response:
Yeah, it's just your headphones. The volumes of the voices are fine.
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You did the tankmen series justice, this was a great cross over of Newground nostalgia and Halo love :)
Great work!
Author's Response:
Thanks man, I love both.
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This would of been a decent idea for Madness day actually if you had put some time into it. The visuals were above par before it went to the over exubrant smiley face.
Author's Response:
sorry.. i dont understand words like "exubrant" maybe Extreme, and from there i say. thanks for watching.
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First off... MY HAND HURTS!!!
This game was great. The originality was something that appealed to me. Nine times out of Ten you see remakes of classic retro styled games such as Tetris, Pong etc. But you took that unique and addictive style and made it your own, that's the main reason the game appealed to me. You took the generic, cursor controlled creativity, and made it something so much more unique.
The visuals throughout the game were bittersweet to me. The good part being you continued with that retro gaming style I mentioned before. The bad part being there was so much more room to improve on the Skears. It would of been quite easy to visually advance the transparent little red and purple squares to something more compelling. This could of helped with distracting the player, or just made the Skears more distinguishing.
The file size was nice, this insured quick and fluent animation, allowing me to play the game with ease. Which is something you would despretely need for this style of game, the last thing you want is to be getting angry at the uploaders.
Ok, now into the game:
Another main aspect that got me hooked was the uniquness of the levels. At first, obviously, they displayed simplistic and symetrical counterparts to allow the user to get use to the game. They then evolved into more enjoyable and challenging enviorments, that allow you to be enticed by them and at the same time, hate them :)
My favourite level would have to be the last one. While I spent more time on this level than all the other ones COMBINED, the challenge created and sense of rhythm I had to use to destroy the purple Skears was fun. The way you changed each part of the level from Random to Symetrical to Timed, was quite an enjoyable mix.
You clearly have a good knack for making levels, which had me quite dissapointed to find out there were only 10. I'm quite sure you could of made many more to mess with my head.
The obvious room for improvement here would be sound, which I feel is essential to a game of this theme. The use of a hard techno/electronica song in the background would do wonders for this game, perhaps even a mix to from song to song. With this, you could easily create more levels solely on the rhythm aspect of the music, this would be far more interesting and would allow the user to connect to the game more, as they are using more than 1 sense to control the game.
As mentioned before, further level development would of been nice to see. This would allow you time to introduce additional items that could of been added, such as powerups (avoid all red skears etc), a scoring system, perhaps even a high score table. These things would allow the player to have a sense of self gratification, and above all... being able to gloat to other people.
Upon opening the link I was somewhat shocked to find the score at 4.03. After mere minutes of the game the reason for that score was answered. The people of newgrounds have voted well on such an original and addictive game. With the use of music and visual fix-ups I'm sure that this game would score higher.
I'm glad to say this was my 1000th review. GREAT GAME!
Author's Response:
Thanks a lot! I didn't actually realise at the time how many avoidance-based games there were. It was all originally an attempt to make a fast-paced shooting gamje and I realised asking folk to roll-over rather than click on targets meant I could up the tempo. I like to think that having approached it from a different angle shows in the level design.
At the time, I used Squares (hence 'Skeh-ars') to ensure the collision detection is exactly what you see. Also, it meant that I could concentrate on making levels rather than graphics, which I prefer. Although my visual creativity is a bit better these days, I'll be keeping all objects fairly simple, both because I like abstraction and also to let me have 50+ skears on-screen without slowdown, although I'll certainly be attempting to prettify it a tad.
I think all the levels have a great amount of symmetry other than levels 3,9 and 10. And 8 maybe. So maybe you're using the word to mean different things than I do? I'll have to ask about that.
In any case, I'm really glad you like the level design. The fact that it was a remake of a short game with 1 year of additional hindsight and experience helped me a lot!
This is essentially a remake of rolovir2 - the original 'skears' - and in trying to keep the filesize as low as I could, avoiding any music was an obvious choice. I did actually put music into 'Mini Skears' 3 and 4, but the general consensus was that it got irritating if you were playing badly. At this time, I still had no idea how to 'properly' use music with stop buttons and streaming-enforced timing.
Scoring was also something I introduced in the Mini Skears series but abandoned here as it is a remake.
Although I don't think powerups are necessary, Skears 2 will contain everything else you've asked for, as well as many things you haven't. Scoring and sound will return.
Thanks a lot for the review. It's great to have an occasional fresh perspective of how the last installment holds up today.
You covered pretty much everything and apart from the categorisation of levels a 'random', 'symmetrical' and 'timed', which I wasn't entirely clear on, I was never in doubt of your meaning.
An awesome review and I give you're review 9/10.
Congratulations on reaching the 4-digit milestone and greater congrats for writing reviews of such a quality.
Stay funky.
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You've brought your own style to the skating theme. You didn't only use skateboards! Holy shit, that's a first!
The character designs were simple, but quite nice, showed a very cartoony sense to the animation path. The skating scenes were great, but my favourite part would have to be the irrelivant helicopter hanging :)
Good job.
Author's Response:
Haha, I did the helicopter thing in the first series too :] Thanks for the long review (longer than the others.... Which were short :3)
Thanks a lot for supporting my style, I like it!
.M.
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Good observational humor here. The animation was nice, though it seemed a bit glitchy, though this was made up with the decent frame by frame work on the character...
And yeah, I got most of them :(
Author's Response:
it was made in ms paint asssn
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Well, the animation lacked any real plot or storyline to begin with. It just showed a number of pictures being tweened around a screen with a flashing background, it's almost as if you put no effort into this. Try come up with a new storyline so it gets a higher score.
The visuals wern't that great either, I suggest you try making your own images instead of importing pictures, and from there use frame by frame for more fluent animation.
Good luck.
Author's Response:
It's only my 69th flash, I'm still learning.
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The sprites were just above average as the animation path of them was smooth, so clearly you were tweening at a high frame rate, though this was for a collab, you should of made something a little more interesting.
Author's Response:
Actually, I believe the only tweens used were the camera scrolling, the talk bubble fading, and the credits rolling. And I think the framerate was 24 for this. Hard to remember, considering it's from 3 years ago.
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