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: 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: 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: 9

"This is sad"

submission: Home Movies: FFS

date: April 15, 2008

This is so much better than your Zelda movie. It's really sad that this one gets left alone with 11 reviews and not even 2000 views while your Zelda movie gets a couple of 100 views every day. This proves, once again, that Newgrounds is about fan service, but once you do fan service only people will grow tired of it. Hard to survive on here.

Almost the same art style than before but this time it suits the people better. I am sorry for suggesting you to do something more original without checking out your other flash movies first. This is really good and it should have a score by far higher than this one.

Score: 3

"Animation and art..?"

submission: Zelda: Heart for the Hero

date: April 15, 2008

First off, I do get the joke, I don't like Zelda though. This movie builds up completely on the Zelda games, there is no creativity in the jokes whatsoever. The art in this movie is really not that good because it's very edgy and there is no shading on the characters. The animation at the end was really nice, where Link is slashing the store keeper but besides that it seemed all to be tweened up and down, back and forth, left and right.

The voice acting of the store keeper was very quiet compared to the ripped Link sound clips. The background art was ok but that doesn't really make up the rest of the movie.

I would appreciate something more original, something that isn't entirely based up on a video game.

Score: 3

"It's ok"

submission: Duel of the Ages

date: April 14, 2008

It's pretty bad but compared to your other really bad submissions it seems like you have actually tried to create something nice this time. You should keep up the effort, the "CAI" series don't have a bright future, you should entirely stop with that and with the other spam, too. I don't know why people are spamming Newgrounds with that stuff anyways. Spam is only fun as long as you get angry reviews and that doesn't happen on your spam anymore.

Score: 1

"It wasn't that well made"

submission: The Tutorial Collab '08

date: April 13, 2008

The menu interface and overall style and chose of colors were really bad. The text on the buttons was unreadable or barely readable. The menu animations, when you click a menu point takes too long. There was a huge overuse of blurs in the animations, too. It didn't make my computer lag but it looks like a 12 year old who just figured out these 'awesome' effects made it.

The actual tutorials varied from extremely bad explained and wrong to well explained and nicely made. The running cycle tutorial was horrible cause it didn't even contain any kind of explanation about weight. The product looked very wobbly, too. It just wasn't right but besides the weight it was ok. The weight is a very important factor though.

Then there was the 3D drawing tutorial which only covered a ball and it was bad because the ball didn't even look 3D. The bounce animation of the 3D art was incredibly badly made.

The gun tracing part was also not too good. It's a possible way of doing it but not the best. It'd be by far easier to just create two layers, put the picture of the gun on the bottom layer and lock it afterwards and trace it with red(or any other bright color). Change the colors afterwards and color the actual gun. Your method works, too but it's very annoying when tracing pictures with a low contrast.

In "UnknownFear"'s Hazardous BG tutorial it says "Now open Photo Shop CS 2", what if someone doesn't have it and only has Photo Shop CS 3. It should be explained that it works for newer or older versions, also if it does or that it doesn't work with newer or older versions if it doesn't.

In the variables tutorial it said "NOTE: I did not copy off of the 2006 tutorial". It lead me to the conclusion that the 2006 tutorial must've been very similar. Why add a very similar tutorial to the '08 collaboration if the '06 collaboration already covered it?

Now for the actionscript part

I think the Setting Paramiters tutorial was pretty nice. The blue cannon example was truly an efficient way to prove the author's knowledge on the topic. Same goes for the trigonometry tutorial in which the author states that he "[doesn't] know why, but it makes you add 90".

By the way, how did you determine the order for the actionscript tutorials? Why not sort them by difficulty level? And also, why put a chunck of AS3 tutorials in the middle?

Speaking of AS3, you might wanna get someone competent to write the "AS2 to AS3" tutorial next time. "_root" isn't actually dead... You'll find out it has been replaced by... guess what? "root". And you don't need to put "this." before every property you want to change. Also, interesting idea to import events for the MouseEvent.CLICK example, but not for the Event.ENTER_FRAME.

Oh and another thing, the webcam tutorial is also really minimalistic. It redirects me to google at the end of the tutorial if I want to know more about the subject. Why? I don't know, he could have added by far more but it looks like the person who made it just wanted to add another crappy part to the project to make it bigger. Quantity is not better than quality.

I was just covering few of the about 80 tutorials. Most of the people who wrote them had no idea what they are talking about and it's easy to figure it out. Next time do something like a quality check, so only people who know about their subject get in.

All in all, I give you one star for quantity. Zero stars for quality though, this was absolutely atrocious.

I hope you will change something about what I mentioned if you are going to make another collaboration like this.

Score: 10

"Pretty!"

submission: Metropolis Circuit

date: April 13, 2008

I really like the style and the use of colors. Very well made! Impressive for a one man project.