This particular entry includes two games which I don't necessarily like, mostly due to their long, long, loooooong nature - and in flash, with only so many ways of varying the same thing, having a long game is not always good.
(although replayability is fantastic)

So yes, it may come as a surprise to some Newgrounders, but the two games I chose were The Arrow of Time by the Super Flash Bros, and Medieval Rampage 2, by xdragonx10 - both have seen the front page, and have some very good aspects to them (in fact, I may have rated The Arrow of Time quite highly at the time, maybe a 9 or 10?)

The difference between these games and others I haven't liked is that there are obvious reasons to like and enjoy these games - they're done very well in their own ways. The Super Flash Bros are a pretty great group, and have a nice animator, writer and programmer, making a good group of people to make a game.

The Arrow of Time is an action-defence game where you are a static lone whistle-knight-prince named Peep, armed with a bow that seems to fire an endless supply of arrows that you can upgrade, along with various other upgrades that all have some sort of little fun or strategic mechanic to them. Not great at actually hitting something? Get lightning - it arcs to any near target - and in some cases a single arrow fired can do a lot more than several arrows could have otherwise.

There are far too many options and upgrades to go through here - but the game just wasn't for me after playing it for a little while - the levels are all the same deal, with you in the middle firing arrows off frantically - and after doing the same thing for that long with one to five simple mechanics going on, it gets a little stale.

Cheers though, guys, for making a well published little game there - few bugs, if any (I haven't found any), good animation, good general art, nice ideas, mechanics, decent and humorous story - just playing the game got a little old too fast for me.

The second game, Medieval Rampage 2 is top-down monster-masher game, where you are a little person on the map, and monsters spawn and try to attack you. Clicking will attack towards wherever your cursor is (which is replaced by a crosshair), and there are various other methods of attack, healing potions, spells, mana potions, different ammo types, different bows, different melee weapons, etc.etc.

There is little story to the game, but the name gives a good idea of what you have to do if you don't want to die - go kill those rampaging monsters.

Once again, the game is pretty good, but just not, I'm not sure, catchy enough? Catchy enough to grab my attention for the whole campaign.

Those are my two entries for this, erm, fortnight? Month? Fortnight-month? Blog-post
I believe I have to get another one up soon, so I will.

Cheers, all.
-Blaise

If you enjoy Flash games, and attempting to hook up with chicks on the internet, you should totally head over to Taboo Snaps and play the game!

You can select the photos you want to take - from a selection of beautiful women, all women, men and women, and men.

The game plays a bit like pacman, but scales in difficulty with how many mushrooms you eat... you know what? I can't do the game justice.

Check it out, today, Tuesday, when they update their archive of photos! Because hey, everyone has a little pervert inside of them.

I'm back, with two games that I dislike this time!
Although, just because I dislike them, doesn't mean they're bad, just that they're not for me.
(So there you go, Uni dudes.)

The first one is Naruto: Ultimate Battle - a fairly well done little fighting game in flash by Cha0tic221

My problem with it is there is like, no balancing done between any of the characters, and certain power moves seem to be able to be done over and over again... I have never seen Lee doing his Initial Lotus so many times =/

That said, it was pretty solid (good art, combat, special moves, etc.) apart from some bugs, likely caused by it being their first serious submission - good job, Cha0tic.

People could like it due to the IP characters used, and for the reasonably well done character moves, but I just dislike it because I'm picky... others could dislike it purely due to the IP used.
Naruto... it's a love or hate thing (or in my case, love, then hate)

The second game is My Pet Protector by Noxins. Once again, it's not a bad game by any means, it's just a bit too grindy for me.

The game is like many other Sim games on Newgrounds, and requires the user to train their little squire in a certain way in order to, I don't know, win at life?

Eventually, your guy will become a fantastic hero, if you train him well enough, and sit through the same relatively boring animations, dungeons and monsters.

It's like a really terrible MMO, but it's not massively multiplayer or online - it just has the generally terrible gameplay of one.

But hey, if I really liked MMOs and didn't want to play one of those too-intensive 3D ones, I would probably love this game - but I have a nice computer, and dislike the grindy carrot-on-a-stick nature of most successful MMOs.

Anyway, that's all from me today.

So hey, I'm back (um, finally?) from... doing whatever it is I was doing!

I plan to make this a reasonably continual blog from now on!

BUT! I'm going to shake things up a bit! By including... GAMES ON FACEBOOK.
Actually, I'll just open it up to any ol' game.

So here's the two games I'll be talkin' bout, that are on facebook.

Scramble by Zynga and Bejeweled Blitz [Beta] by Popcap games.

Scramble is a boggle rehash for the PC. That's it. I can not say any more about the gameplay. Oh, you can vs. your facebook friends, and you have a "ladder" of your facebook friends. There, that's about it. My high score is 138 [as of typing this].
It's pretty fun for a competitive guy who almost failed English and now thinks it's his duty to prove to the world that he is not incompetent at the English language - apart from that, you don't need a physical boggle board, and the sand-timer isn't inaccurate! Perfect for the facebook-user who also happens to like boggle - probably boring for everyone else.

Bejeweled Blitz [Beta] is what it sounds like. You get one minute to, erm, play bejeweled. BUT THERE'S MORE! Popcap games has decided to give us POWERUPS, in the form of getting 4 jewels to explode at once to give an extra-exploding jewel, that when exploded, explodes all the jewels around it! Woo! And if you get FIVE jewels, it turns into a HYPERCUBE! Switching a hypercube with anything will activate it, and will use it to explode all of the coloured jewels of the one you swaped it with.

It's a pretty crazy game, I am terrible at it - but once again, it has the ladder system, which switched my competetive side on (and made me waste several hours playing it and sucking badly).

To top it all off, it gives you a "speed bonus" - you have one minute, are you just going to lolligag about playing bejeweled? Or are you going to BLITZ!?

It's alright, a pretty good game for those who happen to possess the insane ability to find good combinations of different colours - my mathematical mind sucks at this, though. It is also good for those who like to prove to everyone that they're better than people - due to the ladder system. I think there would be a great many people who would enjoy the game - it appeals to the masses with its crazy speed mixed with mild strategy and sparkly colours and sounds.

That's all for now - maybe I'll come back later tonight? Not likely, though.
Cheers

-Blaise Guy

[Edit]: Oh yeah, Uni guys! Bejeweled Blitz is a game that I don't like, but can definitely see it's appeal. I play it for the competitive nature (my ex-girlfriend plays it - her score is nearly double mine... BITCH!). I play Scramble because I like to learn new words and test myself, etc. It is a game that I like.

That keeps the tally at 3 that I like, 1 that I don't like... need to get to five of each - BRING ON THE CRAPPY GAMES!

You should all go and click this link if you haev a digg account, and DIGG it! Yay!

The Digg link says it all!

So hey there, I'm going to start a blog, as part of my university assessment! Yay!
In a few hundred words, I'll try to disect a game or two (or three?) every few days, or weekly, that
I find here on Newgrounds.

I'm going to be looking for all sorts of different games to review and tear apart, and tell you about the organs of them, so tell me if you think you know an interesting one or two!

For now, I'll just go with two ones that I know of, have played, and think are pretty cool.
(And for you uni tutors, I suppose these would both be games that I like)

First game: Pixel grower by joeybets

The game is a very casual, fast-paced game with an interesting design and nice doof-doof music going on in the background. It does get repetitive after the first few levels (say, level 4+?) and ends up being a bit boring, especially with flashplayer (or the engine)'s limited capabilities considering the ability to pick up the little falling dots.

I can play it to level 4 without getting bored, but the amount of powerups that drop, not to mention the unchangable movement and lack of customisation (because, let's face it, by level 5 your thing will be a tree shape) make the game a bit easy and repetitive, and just competing for a high score on a game like this that doesn't require much skill doesn't seem worth it - especially with how long the later levels take to complete.

Come to think of it, this is a bit of a mixer game... if I were ten years old, I could play this game for hours, but to a mature audience, it shows some good design and fast-paced, interesting action, but not much else.

Replayability and longevity (or lack thereof) destroyed this game - let's see what they can do next, perhaps.

If anything, I would suggest having a few more of the larger sized block levels (first level, second level), in order to actually allow the player to customise their block with the powerup/healing blocks - an inbetween level or two would give the player a chance at maybe creating something other than the standard tree.

Second game: Gobtron

This game is one of those action-defence games, you know, the kind where you have a bow-and-arrow, or a gun or something, and have to stop hordes of enemies destroying you/your tower, brought to us by Juicy Beast.

It features a lovable guy called Gobtron, who enjoys using his boogers to capture and eat people, in order to gain DNA points, as well as to survive their wrath. Journey through the game to continue through various levels of difficulty in each little timeline increment and upgrade Gobtron with various abilities!

Apart from animation (which is fantastic) and music/sounds (which are appropriate and lack that annoying factor, IMO), the gameplay is pretty great. It is a simple click-drag-release style of "launching" your dangling booger from your right nostril down at the ground, in order to stick those small morsels, I mean people, and bring them back to your mouth (hey, a guy without limbs has to do something!)

I can imagine the game might be difficult for some people (some Newgrounds users have reviewed saying that the game was a bit hard) but the game is fairly easy for anyone with fast enough, and accurate enough click-drag-releasing action powers.

I suppose, for someone not so adept as I am at playing video games, there would be quite a bit of difficulty and would find the game quite interesting... perhaps I'm jaded against simple regards in this regard, but the timeline moving along gives a slightly different feel, and the spaceship picking people up from the ground is enough to probably keep players like me intrigued.

Overall, the game is the same throughout the whole game, with little enemy unit additions, and a few abilities that are pretty cool. The design of the gobtron character is pretty great and streamlined enough to allow for fast and intuitive gameplay - even the "tutorial" was pretty great, and disappeared pretty much when most players would want it to.

I could rant and rave on about this game, erm, moreso, but suffice to say it's pretty solid, and has many good points.

Perhaps a "hard mode" would be good - just making enemies run faster towards your gobtron, increasing their damage, or something along those lines.

Well, for now, that's my first entry into this little series (that I may continue with for a while yet, maybe?)

Let's see what you flash developers have to offer in the future (and in the past, if I get a move on looking through some of the games made over the years here)

I hope to get some variety in here - and I'm pretty sure Mastermind: World Conquerer is on that little mental list I've got, for sure, as it is undoubtedly one of the most well produced games on this site.

I will also probably mix in a game or two from outside of Newgrounds, but for now I'll try to keep it to the Newgrounds developers - you guys.

-Blaise

that Alien Ant Farm made a cover of Michael Jackson's song, and not the other way around.

Alternatively,

It is sad, but true.

Mentioning a name of another flash inside of your flash description or blurb will nearly never give people the incentive they need to go over and see the flash for themselves.

That being said, I have made a few flashes as jokes to other flashes and they have been recieved very poorly... but I mean, I thought they were at least grin worthy.

But it seems that some people prefer to ignore all suggestions and warnings of "this is a parody, if you haven't seen the original, you won't get it" and stuff.

A guy called "sidorio" makes a fair bunch of spam flashes. I have grown accustomed to his work, and now find myself laughing with him (if he's even laughing... if he's a he)

Anyway, he decided to make Muffin Dating Sim. I found it pretty humourus (after getting over being called gay when I lost)

So I worked hard for a while, and made A Muffin's Story

After I came (hehehe) out of that one, I decided to see what would happen if I went with spams and observational humour a bit more

Two nights later I decided to spam Newgrounds with two little monstrousities.

There is a parody video made in flash, "Zig take photo of himself", it is a flash parody of the man who took a photo of himself in the same place at the same time every day. His hair would grow etc.
He did it for three years. It's quite an achievement for someone to have made to do that ritualistically like that.

So yeah, that's that flash.

I decided to go with a good ol' cock joke, with "Zig takes photos, eh?"

I'm pretty sure the joke explains itself.

Afterwards, someone decided to upload le parkour (short).
After watching it, I decided to respond with The Parker.

I decided that I had destroyed the respectability of Newgrounds enough for that night (despite that I found them humourous) and called it quits.

Since then, I had decided that I didn't really want to create spam flashes, or even observational humour flashes, because people won't get them.

This, I believe, is because of the lack of links in the description page.

I mean, I said what the other flashes were... I suppose I could have put in the full addresses of the other flashes. But oh well, what's done is done.

If you read all this, hopefully you, sir, will understand the humour behind some of my works.

Oh, and I have a plan to make a "The Parker - REDUX" in the near future. STAY TUNED FOR THAT ONE!1!11!!

And Ninja'd 2 is probably never coming out, unless in game form.
And even then...

of, while up late at night (5am and such ridiculous times), I end up just making tiny flashes that are based off a small observational bit of humour I've come up with.

Like the muffin's story one - made that one (although, there was some character animation and a fair bit of code in that) - that was based off of the muffin dating sim.

Just little crap things... I should make another music one.
I've always been good with synchronisation.

And now tonig.. this morning, I made another two.

"Zig take photo of himself" -> Zig takes photos, eh? - a silly bit of flash that shows a man's penis in various different states - much like he's taking a photo every day, no?
"Le Parkour" -> The Parker, just a simple spiderman-esque animation.

But yeah. I've been getting more productive - even if most of it's just shit.
But that's cool.

If you start feeling threatened in a relationship, don't pull her closer.
Don't try something to keep her with you.

Let her decide... at least that way, it's not your fault.

-First relationship
-Candice
-5 months

Ended the day after my 18th birthday.
Perfect way to ruin a great memory.