Hmm, I know it's nice to have a large list of nominees to vote on, but I reeally don't have the time to watch all of those. So I'm very sorry to all those who's movies I didn't get around to viewing. I did watch more flash movies than I have ever watched in one day though!!

Also, does anyone know how the movies were ordered on that list?? Are they just randomly on there? It's not alphabetic and it's not by date.

At 3/3/05 12:51 PM, Matt_Merrill wrote: It's not alphabetic and it's not by date.

Yes, it is alphabetic.

All I remember is I picked:
1st -Play-
2nd: Stick Slayer

I Forget teh rest

At 3/2/05 11:50 PM, gfoxcook wrote: We're only human, man. Not robots.

So says one of the guys who voted on thousands to raise the judgement level.

Took me close to 40 minutes in deciding my vote. Some top quality flash choices make it hard to decide.

So, tomorrow gonna be the BIG day, I guess ;)

At 3/3/05 05:47 PM, Regis_Cartoons wrote: So, tomorrow gonna be the BIG day, I guess ;)

Yeah, good luck to everyone who is an author of these very hard to do flashes. The talent level on this site is incredible and I am actually (as gay as this sounds) honored to be creating with you all.

At 3/3/05 10:04 PM, Micol_Rankin_Games wrote:

At 3/3/05 05:47 PM, Regis_Cartoons wrote: So, tomorrow gonna be the BIG day, I guess ;)

Yeah, good luck to everyone who is an author of these very hard to do flashes. The talent level on this site is incredible and I am actually (as gay as this sounds) honored to be creating with you all.

Likewise!!

At 3/3/05 12:58 PM, liljim wrote:

At 3/3/05 12:51 PM, Matt_Merrill wrote: It's not alphabetic and it's not by date.

Yes, it is alphabetic.

Oh wait... you're right. Mine was out of order because it had "- -" around it.

I was eligible, I just casted my votes.

At 3/3/05 10:41 PM, Matt_Merrill wrote:

At 3/3/05 12:58 PM, liljim wrote: Yes, it is alphabetic.

Oh wait... you're right. Mine was out of order because it had "- -" around it.

Yeah, I saw that and wondered to myself - will a few folk be tempted to include punctuation before their title, just to have it higher on the list?

I doubt it, but it was an interesting thing to ponder for a few seconds.

Me and my exciting life... :-/

Just to check, there's slightly under 25 hours left now, right? I mean, I presume the deadline's the NG roll-over, i.e. around 5amGMT?

At 3/3/05 10:41 PM, Matt_Merrill wrote: Oh wait... you're right. Mine was out of order because it had "- -" around it.

Righty. :)

Just wanted to make a quick post saying "Thank you, Tom" for putting me on the panel. I haven't been a NG user for too long and have yet to submit anything other than my own opinions, but thanks for giving me the chance to make some flash artists happy. ;-)

Wow, this sure was a surprise. I usually don't get picked for anything :P

I already made my choices and I'm happy to be a part.

I'm eligible for some reason. Hm.

At 3/3/05 12:06 AM, PimpMasterKDOG wrote: Yes I am insane. Yes I have free time. I didn't really mean to watch all of them, just something so you can browse through them easier. I want this to be as efficient like german sex.

Oh, well that's true. It WOULD be nice to have a special custom viewer set up to just cut to the chase and be able to view the flashes up for the monthly voting without having to go through their actual pages, but... on the other hand, doing it this way means we get to see what award(s) the flashes already won, which... I dunno about for everyone else... but for me had an effect on what I voted for (if I was torn between two flashes for a spot on my list... and if one already got daily 1st and a weekly award... but the other one only got daily 3rd place... and I like them about the same amount... I'm going to give a higher vote (or a vote, period) to the flash that got "only" a daily 3rd).

So anyway, it'd be nice, but I'm not sure how easily that would be created by liljim. German sex, eh? o_o

At 3/3/05 12:58 PM, liljim wrote:

At 3/3/05 12:51 PM, Matt_Merrill wrote: It's not alphabetic and it's not by date.

Yes, it is alphabetic.

No kidding! It's alphabetic in the exact same way that the BBS users online lists are alphabetic, I should add.

That is, SOME non-letter characters will drop your name/flashtitle at the FRONT of the list... and others will drop it at the BACK of the list... but NO NON-LETTER CHARACTERS will be ignored and placed in the middle of the list.

IOW... (character)Hello! is never going to be sorted in with the H's... it will either be before the A's... or after the Z's. Hope that's helpful to people like Matt out there who were confused.

At 3/3/05 10:41 PM, Matt_Merrill wrote: Oh wait... you're right. Mine was out of order because it had "- -" around it.

Heh, there ya go. "-yourflash'sname" is going to be at the start of the list. And, I might add, "_yourflash'sname" will be at the END of the list. For whatever reason, dashes get counted as pre-alphabet and underscores get counted as post-alphabet... and that was no surprise to me due to it being--again--the same way on the BBS users online list.

And they all lived happily ever after.

At 3/3/05 11:17 PM, Bezman wrote: Yeah, I saw that and wondered to myself - will a few folk be tempted to include punctuation before their title, just to have it higher on the list?

I doubt it, but it was an interesting thing to ponder for a few seconds.

I thought of that yesterday, actually, but didn't want to say anything for fear of giving any jackasses ideas. I suspect that we will find more and more flash authors placing dashes or double-quotes in front of their titles... or making sure to start their titles with words like "A" or "An" or ones featuring other high-up-in-the-alphabet letters. The only question is... how many of THOSE flashes are going to be good enough to get on the front page and/or win one of the top 5 daily awards each day? That remains to be seen.

Just to check, there's slightly under 25 hours left now, right? I mean, I presume the deadline's the NG roll-over, i.e. around 5amGMT?

liljim said it will end at 11:59:59 PM ET (i.e. NG time) tonight, yes.

At 3/3/05 02:22 PM, Bezman wrote:

At 3/2/05 11:50 PM, gfoxcook wrote: We're only human, man. Not robots.

So says one of the guys who voted on thousands to raise the judgement level.

I had too much free time back then. :::swallows:::

Plus, um... most of the time I was just voting 3 or whatever was close enough to the flash's existing score... and not spending a lot of time watching them, reviewing them, or thinking about them all that much (though I did find some old gems while doing the process).

So, yeah... voting in the templist to get NG changed over from 100 votes UJ to 200 votes UJ... was nowhere near as tiresome as trying to watch 150 movies in a couple days. At least we had several months to do it, yanno?

At 3/4/05 04:48 PM, scottmale24 wrote: I'm eligible for some reason. Hm.

Experience: Ranked # 2,792 out of 693,193 users!

There are 792+ people ahead of you in experience who weren't active enough during February to qualify as one of the "top 2000 active exp users." That's the only reason, it ain't a mystery, man.

And I'm not that surprised by that, personally. Just look at the top 50... there's at least 5-10 people who aren't depositing at all, and a few more who deposit every now and then. If you go from there down all the way to #2000, you will find hundreds of non-depositing people. Trust me, I've passed quite a few of them to move up to my current #134 spot in exp.

So anyway, I basically watched flash, scored flash in a text file, and rated flashes as "No," "Maybe," "Probably," or "DEFINITELY" in that file in regards to their potential for my top 5 for February.... and I did that in one huge final spurt from around 9 PM last night until 5 AM this morning. I rewatched many flashes I saw early in February, and I saw other flashes for the first time ever. I found some new faves like "The Bounce" and ""Shame"" and "-Obsolete-" and "Quantum Foam," among others.

After all of that, a vast majority of the flashes (which I rated 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, or 10/10... nothing fell below 7 IMO) were rated as No or Maybe. There were around 15 Probablys and 5 Definitelys. I spent some time going over all of those flashes and I ended up swapping out a probably with a definitely at one point after much consideration. The manner in which I chose what merited and didn't merit a spot on my top 5 isn't very easy to describe... As I said in the above post, if two movies were both equally good in my estimation... but one had already been rewarded and acknowledged with a daily #1... and the other one got only a #3, 4, or 5... I would lean towards helping out the underdog in that case. Also, if I'd already voted for something by the same author, I wouldn't put another thing by that author in my top 5 unless it was REALLY necessary (for instance, I loved Cosby Fun Game, but Destination Mouth was a LOCK, so I wouldn't put both on my list). And... well, I thought about how others' might vote, and what movies would get enough votes and which wouldn't, but in the end I decided based on what I personally wanted to reward and which movies I enjoyed the most and for different reasons. Thus, my top 5 reflects the variety of things I enjoy about the NG flash portal and have for years. Comedy... Action... Gameplay... Cuteness... Violence... and everything in between. I kinda neglected drama, but perhaps I'll make up for that next month (though Orbox, a game, and 3 3ast 3 3urious, a comedic movie trailer parody... are likely to be 2 of my 5 votes as of right now).

In the end, after 12+ hours of watching, considering, thinking, rating, and debating within the past few days... I have ended up with my current listing.

Listing explanation: #1 is #1 because while I'm not a huge comic book fan, it is a great flash, and it was the more deserving of the two flashes by that author. #2 is #2 because there wasn't enough insanely silly comedic flashes in February, alas. There was no new BEEBO episode, unfortunately... there was no new Marc M flash... there were no new ZekeySpaceyLizard flashes (well, solo flashes that won an award or got frontpage, that is... I strongly considered the "5 Shades of Red" collab, though. It was a Probably)... IOW, my top 3 fun authors on NG didn't have award-winning flashes up for consideration. So I went with a Lokken flash, and there were three to choose from. The one I chose (and its sequel) I had seen the days they were uploaded, and loved them both. I had to go with it, even though it probably won't receive enough votes to be rewarded. ;_; #3 is #3 because it's a perfect cross between the Madness series and insanely cute white fluffy bunnies. Pure Genius. And well deserving of a reward that it will probably receive once this voting is complete. #4 is #4 because I just discovered it yesterday (or early this morning), and it is a simple and pure flash game... that everyone from the age of 2 to 102 could enjoy. I mean, steering a giraffe back and forth as it bounces up to the moon and collects stars along the way? Awesomeness. And a perfect comparison/contrast to Bunnykill, as well. And finally, #5 is #5 because it's the best Mausland game I've played since Squirrel Smash.

So, three movies... and two games. Bingo bango bongo. I think, now that it's the final evening of the vote, that posting our votes is no longer (if it ever was) much of an issue, since no one is likely to be very swayed unless they're trying to cast their votes at the last possible minute, and that would be... well, a huge mistake. What if the server seizes up? #;-}> Anyway, thanks to all the authors for submitting such great stuff throughout the month. I wanted to include some other flashes (such as Stick Slayer VIII by the great creator of the PEE MAN quadrilogy... or the aforementioned 5 Shades of Red collab... or Over Under Sideways Down... or Faust Ep 2... or... etc. etc. etc.), but such is the pain of a top 5 culled from 150. Good luck to the 20 or so games and movies I wanted to squeeze into my top 5 but couldn't. And to all others, as well. Here's my screenie:

What about Sky Boarder III..............what about me.................what about me.............oh well I wasn't expecting to pull a win out. It is now obvious to me that X-men and Interactive Buddy are locks for a win. Also, I think that there is a HUGE CHANCE THAT TMST'S ONE AND BUNNYKILL will grab a spot. This is more than likely 4 of the 5 that will make it. .....................sigh.................I thought I had a chance.

At 3/4/05 07:21 PM, Micol_Rankin_Games wrote: What about Sky Boarder III..............what about me.................what about me.............oh well I wasn't expecting to pull a win out.

You never know, man. Don't give up hope before the votes are even counted. That's a bit premature, dontcha think?

Anyway, the reason I didn't even play your games, let alone vote for them, is pretty much summed up by the last game of yours I DID try to play (Skyboarder II)... well, the comments you put for it, I should say:

"--Sky Boarder is a series in the works and this is a test copy,the further you get the better IT gets!;SLOW COMPUTERS NEED NOT APPLY!!!;"

I've got a P2-266 from late 1997. I could barely even get your game STARTED (it stayed on the instructions page for so long... and by the time the game started, it was lagging horribly, even at low quality).

So, my advice to you is to find a way to make games that are still playable on up to 10 years old computers (like say the Powerfoxes are... and most of the Mausland games such as Alpine Skiing... and so forth). If you did, I'd definitely be checking 'em out, the current ones sound like fun. I just have no way of playing them. ;_;

You may get a ton of votes from people with Pentium 4s for all I know, but... you'd definitely expand your audience if you made the games less graphically intensive or whatever bogs them down so much on old CPUs. Just a thought.

It is now obvious to me that X-men and Interactive Buddy are locks for a win. Also, I think that there is a HUGE CHANCE THAT TMST'S ONE AND BUNNYKILL will grab a spot. This is more than likely 4 of the 5 that will make it. .....................sigh.................I thought I had a chance.

I don't like Interactive Buddy that much, but if everyone else does? Then yeah, it could be a lock. X-Men definitely is UNLESS... the vote gets too spread out between the two parts. That's something you have to consider. For any artist who has more than one movie/game in the 150 nominees... ESPECIALLY if those movies/games are part of the same series... like say the two X-Men movies... or the dozen+ Broken Saints movies... then that person's chance of winning with any given movie has now dropped, as the vote's going to get spread out.

That said, from what I've seen, most people are voting for the SECOND X-Men movie, and that's the one I voted for as well. It just had more of a plot and more characters and so forth. Funnier, too.

TMST was one of my Probablys, but I couldn't see knocking out any of my top 5 (or even top 8 or so, really) for it. Bunnykill2, IMO, is more of a lock than Interactive Buddy, but maybe that's just my wishful thinking.

Come on, people... isn't anyone else wondering about the results yet, or wanting to post their choices (if they didn't already, that is)...? #;-}>

Around a couple of hours ago, I finished watching every animation at least 2x (apart from the Broken Saints series).

Finished nearly all the games, or at least got to the stage where it was just recycling previously seen material. Some game I just didn't bother with obviously. Kerberos' games really disappointed me as 'Quantum Foam' and 'Fleets' are rip-offs of 'Squares 2' by Gavin Shapiro (with keyboard control rather than mouse control) and 'Floats' by Ferry Halim (the latter not on this site) respectively.

I also stopped playing Blockslide after level 12 as the slow speed makes it horrible to play imo and there were a couple of others I just couldn't finish.

I never finished Aggressive Alpine Skiing.

Anyway, I'm dithering over 8 possibles. 3 are fairly certain, but I don't know which 2 of the remaining 5 to stick in.

James/Tom/any of the NG team: If it's a tie in my mind, could I take the author's other work into consideration and give preference to that? Or is that something you'd rather we never did?

With some of these 5 entries, there may be technical issues (no play/replay button or voices running over each other, although subtitles are provided) but they do seem thoroughly beautiful to me. It's hard to decide which is more worthy of the prize between the few it's boiled down to.

At 3/4/05 07:21 PM, Micol_Rankin_Games wrote: []

You may want to check your inbox. Yours was the one (sorta one) game I had a problem with and gave up, but I'll re-evaluate it if you bother to explain what the problem was. I was probably doing something wrong but after finding no help in the comments, and trying various things, just gave up.

I'd hate to think I treated your game unfairly, as I played far more of any other.

At 3/4/05 08:52 PM, Bezman wrote:

At 3/4/05 07:21 PM, Micol_Rankin_Games wrote: []

You may want to check your inbox. Yours was the one (sorta one) game I had a problem with and gave up, but I'll re-evaluate it if you bother to explain what the problem was. I was probably doing something wrong but after finding no help in the comments, and trying various things, just gave up.

I'd hate to think I treated your game unfairly, as I played far more of any other.

........what do you mean? What was the problem you were having, my inbox is having issues...........was it the tutorial thing...........or.............I can help you now. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner.

At 3/4/05 08:52 PM, Bezman wrote:

At 3/4/05 07:21 PM, Micol_Rankin_Games wrote: []

You may want to check your inbox. Yours was the one (sorta one) game I had a problem with and gave up, but I'll re-evaluate it if you bother to explain what the problem was. I was probably doing something wrong but after finding no help in the comments, and trying various things, just gave up.

I'd hate to think I treated your game unfairly, as I played far more of any other.

Oh okay..........so your stuck at the beginning. Well, one way around that is to just press "q" and skip tutorials at that point (that is the last part of the tutorial anyway). Or, make sure you don't have your caps lock pressed in. Or, kill some enemies and get your meter more full. I don't think I have ever run into this problem before, but I would just skip tutorials if I were you and it didn't work with that.

........okay...........I see the problem.............a glitch that seems to have magically slipped its way in, just press 'q' and skip the tutorial at that point.

At 3/4/05 09:11 PM, Micol_Rankin_Games wrote: Oh okay..........so your stuck at the beginning. Well, one way around that is to just press "q" and skip tutorials at that point (that is the last part of the tutorial anyway). Or, make sure you don't have your caps lock pressed in. Or, kill some enemies and get your meter more full. I don't think I have ever run into this problem before, but I would just skip tutorials if I were you and it didn't work with that.

I could have sworn I did that... must have not used the 'exit' option and thought I had... :-/ Well, that's what I get for being up 48 hrs...

Stupid, stupid me.

Well, I was pretty surprised when I first saw the link in my Grounds Gold Menu.

I truly wish I could've given all 150 Flashes a watch before voting, but didn't have the time and having a 56k connection severely cut down on how many I could watch. Still, I managed to see at least 50 of them and voted on five from them, so that's something I guess.

But, next time round, I'm going to be prepared! Like GFox said earlier, since I now know I'm part of the top 2000 users that get to vote, and that the Flashes are all of the Daily Top 5s, I'm going to start watching those whenever I can so I won't fall into this mad rush of trying to fit in over 150 Flashes in four days on a 56k connection. :D

But anyway, love being able to be part of this.

On a side note, I wonder how many users are now going to restart depositing in order to get into the Top 2000.

At 3/04/2005 brassyjoe wrote!

Thanks for the vote of confidence in my selection to vote on the top 5 ! It pays to read tom's postings or I would have just loged ,watched,voted as usuial and moved on. Of course my taste may differ from others . So congrats to the winners !

Well, I finally decided and my votes are in.

I made a small effort to have a decent mix of genres, but concentrated on how much enjoyment it gave me.

2 games, a short sketch, an experimental music-thing and an animation bordering on a nostalgic drama.

The Bounce - it's such a brilliant game. After the .swf was changed to fix a couple of problems, I'd almost call it perfect. It's a fantastic game and it is just such a happy-go-lucky feel-good sort of game.

It's made me smile more than any other 'unchanging thing' (so exc. experiences and various other things) this year. Maybe since I got the original GBA Wario Ware.

Eatin' Toast - it's just hilarious. It's rare that I let out a good old-fashioned belly laugh, but I did so the first time I saw this, and I still chuckle each time I see it now.

Bump Copter 2 - An enjoyable game throughout once the basics have been gotten to grips with, with some excellent level design and a few nice extras. It feels really packed and the levels do well to provide variety and form a reasonable difficulty curve.

-Play- - So stylish, so fun to watch, so unique. I've never seen it done quite like this before...

Fresh Aqua - It makes me giggle and yet feel a real empathy for the sense of waste and a misdirected life. I actually bumped it down a place due to the lack of a play button. It's very close and tbh, my last 2 could have been arranged either way.

The other 3 I was considering for 4th/5th place were: 'Over Under Sideways Down' (fun throughout with a great style providing nice visual interest), 'glen said' - thought-provoking stylish piece - and 'Noah - a short film', which is beautiful and would have definitely been in there had it not been for some technical issues (voices running over each other).

Aggressive Alpine Skiing and Sky Boarder III v.2 would probably round out a hypothetical top 10. Though I've completed neither game I shall resume trying to do so when I feel like playing an online game.

I'm rooting for all those submissions and though I did feel there were a few daily top 5s which disappointed me (speciallly the 3D explosion and the intro without any content), the quality of the content over the past month was far higher than I had realised before.

As is constantly stated, the quality has improved significantly over the past few years and I'm excited to see how the prizes turn out. Not just who the winners are (although I'm eager to find out) but the ramnifications and general effects it may have on Newgrounds. Furthermore, on the whole online Flash entertainment community.

After all, any change on NG will surely send ripples across the rest of these waters.

I have to agree with you as I was chosen to vote ,but did not find it necessary to toot my own horn who I voted for . Most childish I feel as spoken from a big kid at heart (me)

At 3/4/05 06:06 PM, gfoxcook wrote:

At 3/3/05 11:17 PM, Bezman wrote: Yeah, I saw that and wondered to myself - will a few folk be tempted to include punctuation before their title, just to have it higher on the list?

I doubt it, but it was an interesting thing to ponder for a few seconds.

I thought of that yesterday, actually, but didn't want to say anything for fear of giving any jackasses ideas. I suspect that we will find more and more flash authors placing dashes or double-quotes in front of their titles... or making sure to start their titles with words like "A" or "An" or ones featuring other high-up-in-the-alphabet letters. The only question is... how many of THOSE flashes are going to be good enough to get on the front page and/or win one of the top 5 daily awards each day? That remains to be seen.

I'm sure loads of folk would have instantly thought of it the moment they realised how it was ordered. As you imply though, most decent artists wouldn't bother with such things probably.

A more meaningful question would perhaps be - will there be any corellation between placement on the list and score? If not, it doesn't matter either way.

Obviously some will have been seen beforehand, but for lesser-known things, the folk who only have time to watch some may well have watched those at one end of the list. Then again, maybe not...

Just to check, there's slightly under 25 hours left now, right? I mean, I presume the deadline's the NG roll-over, i.e. around 5amGMT?

liljim said it will end at 11:59:59 PM ET (i.e. NG time) tonight, yes.

Cheers for the help with clarification. I wasn't sure, knowing little about US times...

At 3/3/05 02:22 PM, Bezman wrote:

At 3/2/05 11:50 PM, gfoxcook wrote: We're only human, man. Not robots.

So says one of the guys who voted on thousands to raise the judgement level.

I had too much free time back then. :::swallows:::

I think we both spend too much here now. Specially over the past 4 days...

Are you sure you don't still have too much free time?

Plus, um... most of the time I was just voting 3 or whatever was close enough to the flash's existing score... and not spending a lot of time watching them, reviewing them, or thinking about them all that much (though I did find some old gems while doing the process).

To be honest, I still don't understand what the point in having the votes be cast by humans was, if all the humans weren't bothering to watch the entry anyway.

Not that it matters now.

So, yeah... voting in the templist to get NG changed over from 100 votes UJ to 200 votes UJ... was nowhere near as tiresome as trying to watch 150 movies in a couple days. At least we had several months to do it, yanno?

Yeah. It certainly took far longer than I'd have expected. The vast majority of the past 4 days for myself. I certainly won't be spending quite as much time on March's submissions. I'll probably just watch them once and not leave reviews so it could be a fairly pleasurable day off.

When I review I like to make sure I put some thought into it, so I stopped reviewing around the 'e's, then went through the rest in a comparatively reasonable amount of time.

I don't think I could ever bring myself to vote not having given them all a chance and knowing I may be missing out on some other gems though.

Congratulations Tom. You've succeeded in brainwashing me. Soon the process will be complete and I'll be but a minion.

Seriously though, just because I know how it'd be if I was up there, I like to be as considerate to the authors as I can afford to be.

At 3/4/05 04:48 PM, scottmale24 wrote: I'm eligible for some reason. Hm.

Experience: Ranked # 2,792 out of 693,193 users!

There are 792+ people ahead of you in experience who weren't active enough during February to qualify as one of the "top 2000 active exp users." That's the only reason, it ain't a mystery, man.

I think some dude in ranked #3,0xx was able to vote thanks to experience points.

Are accounts kept open forever? I remember back when I used to frequent chat, some dude passing by who stated he'd last logged in 3 years ago, or something like that, and was amazed to see his account still existed.

That was a few years back though. If still no accounts have been deleted through lack of use, it's rather amazing and impressive.

Still, I suppose the space used is negligible considering the content hosted here.

Speaking of which, I noted the population of the portal is no longer shown. Let's see... 55,173? Is that right? I remember when Blam points were introduced, it went down to around 16k, didn't it?

Crazy... O.O