Score: 10

"underrated"

submission: Crows' Life Episode 3

date: July 2, 2008

I can't believe that this flash movie received the weekly 6th, it's really underrated. You guys understand a lot about animation, the timing is off from time to time but who cares the product is good.

Great job guys, I usually don't give out 10s but this one really deserved it.

Score: 0

"This was really bad"

submission: Radio/Video

date: May 1, 2008

The animation started out ok, I thought. I thought something a lot more interesting would happen through out the movie. Can I even tell this a movie? It was about 20 seconds long, not even a loop or anything. It was seriously badly made. The animation was very repetitive and boring. The text was the only thing that was partly frame by frame and it must've been traced, too.

All in all; 0/10 for being lazy and bad animation. Sorry for the short review but I have to go now.

Score: 10

"I love flashes that entertain me"

submission: Star Day: Garfield & Jon

date: April 25, 2008

I usually wouldn't give such a high score, full score that is, for a flash with animation like this but it was so funny and entertaining that I just couldn't do anything besides giving you the full score. This was a great flash and it contained a nice song, too.

Score: 10

"Incredible work Star Syndicate"

submission: Night in Hotlanta

date: April 23, 2008

I know how hard it must've been to compile the whole flash and all around. Flash must have lagged like hell during the whole editing, I know how that feels, I have experienced that myself with a big school project.

The voiceacting was really well done. There have barely been any background noises and there was a lot of emotion in the voices. Duffeknol did a great job with Pop's voice.

The art of the whole movie and the animation was really great. The frame by frame and tween mixture turned out to be really great. The black white scheme with cr0m colors was great. Added a nice feeling.

The humor of the whole movie was great, just as expected from the Star Syndicate. There must have been a lot of inside jokes but they weren't really hard to understand.

The plot and storyline as well as the dialog were incredible. Amazing work on that, to the writers. The backgrounds were outstanding.

This is definitely one of the top 10 flashes on Newgrounds. All of the music was 100% original and great, too.

A lot of people should make movies that are more like this one.

Score: 6

"It's alright"

submission: The Creation of High Art

date: April 18, 2008

There wasn't a lot of animation in this one, the intro made me think that this would be a very professional flash. Guess I was wrong. The art in this flash was pretty nice, besides the drawing of the person looking at the art. The voice acting was really nice, it gave me the feeling of one of these educational movies which was probably supposed to be. I don't really know why that person was wearing a Shades Gang T-Shirt but it didn't really annoy me, even though the Shades Gang does.

All in all it was well explained. I am not sure if it's true the way you tried to explain it because I do not have a lot of knowledge about the history of abstract art but it seemed to make sense in one way or another. The backgrounds, not sure if they were traced, were nice.

Score: 7

"Nicely made"

submission: NiGHTS journey to Dumbnes

date: April 18, 2008

The animation was pretty choppy but I really love the fact that it's almost all frame by frame animation. The drawings weren't very clean but once again, the animation evened this out. The voice acting of the boy, Will(?) sounded horrible, it had some background noises. The voice of NiGHTS, I couldn't tell if that was a very young male person or a female person. I liked the jokes about the item collecting but besides that the humor wasn't really my taste.

Once again, keep up the nice animation work. I can imagine a lot of work had been put into this.

Score: 2

"Not very good"

submission: Marios New Secret Weapon3

date: April 18, 2008

I have watched the whole movie and it wasn't the slightest bit interesting. The most interesting part were the things from Abe's Escape (?) or what the game was called. They were very nicely animated. The sprites were very bad animated, whenever the tweens in the movies had some kind of easing it was used wrong.

You should try to concentrate on animating other things, you have great potential, I was able to see your talent in the animation of that thing from Abe's Escape in the beginning. If that is a sprite, too, what I doubt, then don't mind what I said above.

The music in this submission was glitchy from time to time. It would just stop for a second and then start again from where it stopped. It wasn't sync with the animation most of the time either and it looked like you aimed for that.

The fight with Bowser didn't really make any sense to me, nor was it very interesting at all. It was just like Mario hits Bowser, Bowser transforms and tries to hit Mario and then repeat. It was very predictable. The 3D Bowser sprite that came from the Super Mario RPG game for the SNES I think didn't really fit. The way he walked was very weird, it looked like he was walking towards the audience but it was just tweened to the left or the right.

The sprites of the whole movie didn't fit as a whole. The Mario sprite looked by FAR different than any of the 4 Bowser sprites. The background images were Mario sprites I assume but they were not fitting either because they were from a different age Mario game. That tank from Metal Slug was entirely out of place. It looked so much more detailed but still not 3D, you had an extremely detailed animated and drawn sprite, the Metal Slug one, a badly drawn sprite, Mario and a 3D sprite, Bowser on the screen at the same time and that on a very unfitting and incredibly repetitive background.

Have you asked the owner of the sprites, which would be Nintendo, Capcom and the person who made the custom Mario sprite (it doesn't look like it's from any game) if you are allowed to use their artwork? If not it qualifies as copyright infringement, stealing that is.

The action of the whole flash movie was pretty basic to low level. When Mario ran away from the gradient ball which was probably supposed to be an explosion, I felt nothing. No hype, I felt kind of bored, wondering when he'll be done running away. The close up of Mario while running away was annoying because you felt the urge to know what was going on outside of the screen, too. It looked like you were too lazy to animate any kind of environment in that scene.

The joke at the end was really stupid and so were Luigi and Mario's reactions to it. The same overused sound clips , the ones you hear in about every Mario movie. You should have gotten voice actors like Yoshi-1Up who is perfect for Mario and Luigi voices. Instead you used text bubbles that were drawn in flash with a non-pixel font which looked out of place, just like the detailed sprites because the text bubble was too detailed as well. You should keep the style and the quality of a flash movie constant and not change it over and over again, especially not 2-4 different styles in one camera shot. It doesn't work, it looks very unappealing and unprofessional.

It's kind of tiring to see all these Mario movies being basically the same all over again. Mario going to Bowser, they fight, stupid and unnecessary joke. That all coming along with a wide range of sprites going from 8-32bit all mashed up in a huge .swf with uncompressed sounds and images, a horrible looking menu, sound effects and backgrounds that are just unfitting and that all with music that is so annoying it makes you want to close the window.

The only song I liked in the whole movie was the song at the end, not the credit rolls song, the song before that. The song that played when the Goombas were dancing and the two spotlights from Dynamite Headdy were in the view.

All in all, it's not really a very good movie in my opinion.It was boring, used the wrong sprites and it was the same stuff you see everywhere on NG.

Score: 4

"It's alright"

submission: Sprite_Tutorial

date: April 16, 2008

You used edited sprites which is better than using completely stolen ones. You forgot about the most important part though which would be the compressing. Your .swf file is 6.3MB big so I believe you don't know too much about it either. You should read up what I am talking about and maybe check if your audio is set on stream, that would lower the file size, too.
I am not a huge fan of sprites but as long as they're greatly customized or 100% self drawn, it's alright
Next time you are making a tutorial, make everything a little bigger. I am not talking about the text, what I meant are the characters. They are a little small, I had to zoom in to see every step of the simple walking animation clearly.

Score: 2

"Honestly not that good."

submission: Super Mario bros Z intro

date: April 16, 2008

I really disliked this movie. You must have put a lot of effort in it, but it really doesn't show. The beginning was horrible, you used pictures of the characters from video games. You haven't even tried to draw them or anything. Google Sonic, paste to flash. That is no real talent.
Then this extremely annoying music started. Anime music I suppose. The quality was nice for the filesize. The background effects were also nice, that's why I gave you 2 stars.
90% of the sprites in this movie are ripped or just very slightly edited. You should really try to completely draw your own sprites and animate them, that would definitely be better. Once again, I don't want you to give up your hobby. It's just an advice that might help you in the future.
I am not really sure if you actually made the backgrounds or not, they look nicely made.
As for the fun factor, there was no fun.There was not the slightest bit of humor in the whole 'intro'.
The action in this movie was alright, you could've expressed it all WAY better. Next time, maybe.

I hope you actually read some of the reviews on your movies. You should because you could improve greatly if you actually would listen to what some of them have to say.

Score: 7

"It wasn't as good as everyone says"

submission: Nameless 6 Vol.2 Part 2/2

date: April 16, 2008

The animation was really nice, I didn't really like the humor but that's probably because I am not into this random and parody kind of humor. The art was rather simple, it was suiting the situation most of the times but almost all of the backgrounds were bad looking, the gradient ones especially. I guess you re-used them from your older flashes, I can't tell though. I like the story behind this flash, it actually follows one throughout the series unlike a lot of other animations on newgrounds.

I don't really understand why everyone is giving it 10/10, a review score of 9.9 is pretty much ridicules, even for a submission of this quality. The drawing of the truck driver was good and it proved that you can do by far better than the simple shaped cripple boy and chocolate man. Maybe you should think about redesigning them a little to make them more interesting.

The voice actors, egoraptor mostly, were pretty good. I am not exactly sure why, but it sometimes sounded like there was no emotion in the voice at all but that might just have been part of the humor, I don't know.

The timing on this cartoon (first and second part) is pretty good, the 180° turn when chocolate man is standing in front of the hostel is well made, too but after that it seemed like you got a little lazy again and kept the animation style of the first part.

All in all it has lots of good parts but also bad points here and there.