Good Game
It was a very good game. I liked playing as a lizard character to. The controls could be better. I also enjoyed how you made it seem like a classic SNES game. It was fun with a good chalenge. One of the best 16-bit games on Newgrounds rright with Outzone. I didnt get as far as I hooped but I did get far enough to give an average review on such a masterpiece. Keep up the good work :)
For future reference, remarks like "The controls could be better" could actually be useful to me if you were more specific. In what way could they be better? What was wrong with them? I don't know what to fix if people don't give suggestions, since the controls seem fine to me...
Very retro
Reminds me of a better time. Glad the controls were customisable though.
Signed up for rating this!
Hi there,
being a long time lurker on Newgrounds, I signed up to leave a review for this!
First off, I really liked this game and played through it in Intermediate mode after a lots of tries (mostly spent on the boss).
Because I did not choose "beginner", I had to play through the platforming part again three times or so after the boss ate all my lives, because there was only a green checkpoint before the boss.
Actually I felt that this was a bit over the top, because you _will_ die some times if you meet the boss the first time. However with the understanding that the "beginner" mode is not an "easy" mode but a mode for first-time players of this game, and the fact that in that mode the green checkpoint before the boss essentially becomes a purple one, I can live with that. It was just that I selected the wrong mode.
Maybe you should really have written on the mode selection window "It is recommended for first time players to use beginner mode". Or instead name them "Default", "Advanced" and "Expert" or something like that to make people understand that choosing the first mode is not something to be ashamed of.
I initially thought so.
I thought "I am not that bad a player, so I'll be able to cope with the intermediate mode", rather than "I am playing this game for the first time, so I am essentially a beginner".
Then there was another part that was bugging me: in my opinion the first phase of the boss was just too long. You have to be perfect at the pattern of the first phase anyway to beat the boss, if you don't know what you're doing you'll be grilled before you can land 5 hits (speaking from my experience in intermediate mode). Once you know exactly when you have to jump where so he doesn't hit you in phase 1, it doesn't matter anymore how long the phase is. It's no extra challenge to make it longer.
BUT then, surprise surprise, comes another phase with entirely new attacks. Of course you again need some time to understand the pattern(s) and practice until you can reliably do the jumps. And there, the length of phase one comes into play.
Summing it up, making phase one that long does not add any extra challenge (to phase one itself), but is annoying for practicing phase two because it just takes too much time doing a repeating task you have already mastered.
And (unless you've lowered the boss'es life bar) that's the same on beginner mode.
So that were my only two complaints about this game. I don't criticize the difficulty, because this is intended. But there's a thin line between difficulty and annoyance, and the two points I criticized imo add much to annoyance without adding much difficulty.
Please don't think that I hate this game because my review sounds negative, I only think it's worth more pointing out the (few) negative things, than just compliment on all the other things (graphics, music, gameplay) that were great.
So I hope you take this as constructive criticism for things you can improve in the next episodes of this game, which I am very much looking forward to! :)
Thank you for the review!
I've taken these things into consideration. I won't change this episode right now (I might do when I release episode 2 though), but in episode 2, I've made it so that the difficulty modes are explained better as being based on amount of practice with this specific game rather than games in general, and also so that the boss is MUCH easier because if you die, you just respawn in the room (with the boss's HP unrestored) until all your lives are gone.
Reviews that do point out what needs changing are the most appreciated, of course; I've just been reading through all the reviews on this game to check what I need to do better in episode 2 (which I'm working on now), and ones like this are the ones that actually help me to improve.
So, uh, appreciation, yes!
Not Hard
It didn't seem to me to be hard at all. It was actually the default keys. Once I gotten use to those, and once I changed them to custom, I completed the game (Twice!) Still fun though. But it needs to be more pixelated to be considered "old skool".
It was good, but...
...there is a fine line between "challenging" and "ridiculous". I love platformers, and this one has a great thing going for it, but the spikes... the goddamn spikes. You don't get hurt from touching the long part of a needle, do you? No, only if you touch the point. Challenge is only good if it makes sense.
You're speaking of 'making sense' in a game where a blue dragon man jumps-too-high and fights his way through a ludicrously designed spaceship of some sort? o_O
In old games, spikes functioned like this and you got hurt if you moved into the side of them. Yes, it's stupid, but it amuses me and I consciously decided to keep it to seem more like those old games.