TL;DR this doesn't belong in the game portal. Please add more content to justify it as a gallery-type submission, as right now, it's no different from a series of animated gifs.
I know this is 3 years after the fact, but I find it bothersome that this is presented as a game, and was uploaded into the game portal, despite having zero interactivity. Slapping links on thumbnails does not count, and while games that are little more than just galleries or art trinkets, dress up games, gadgets, etc. tend to blur the lines of what is considered a "game", at least those have a measure of interactivity to justify it. Galleries have multiple pages of art and sometimes commentary or special things that can't easily be conveyed in a static image.
Here, though, despite the line being blurry, it is obvious that you have crossed it. It's just a single page of a few pieces of thumbnail art with animated sprites and static art. There is nothing in this flash that separates it from a static art piece, or an animated GIF. It could have easily been uploaded into the art portal as 9 consecutive collages of each character. E.g. on one, show the menu with the character select box on Dr. Bees, showing the animated sprite and background art along with it. IIRC Gifs are allowed in the art portal, so it'd be just fine.
I get that this is a collab, and you have this gamey aesthetic in mind, but something like this really ought to have more substance to it. I would be perfectly okay with the thumbnails instead going to an in-game page for each character with trivia, concept art and a link to their respective channels. I'm not fine with just a link, though, because it is confusing and makes it seem like you just designed the menu poorly. So I'll press a bunch of buttons on the keyboard and my controller in attempt to troubleshoot the menu to find out why the game won't start. But there is no game. There is no disclaimer, either. There's a tiny passage in the description, but the fake patch notes completely undermine that. I'll get to that in a sec. The point is, I'm clearly not the first to be misled and get stuck troubleshooting the menu because I'm not sure if there's a game here or not. It doesn't help that the description lists fake patch notes. It's misleading, and I refuse to play along. So I hope you can understand why I'm rating zero. The zero doesn't reflect the quality or artistic merit; I voted zero because this simply does not belong in the game portal. It's not a game. It's not interactive. It's just a fake character select screen with nothing worthwhile to justify its presence here.
I will be happy to change my rating to a 5 if you...
1. upload this to the art portal as an image or series of images
1.5. (optional) upload this flash to one of your dumping grounds so users can still play with it and post a link in each of the descriptions of each of the art portal submissions
or
2. add more content to this. To recap, my suggestions are:
* add a disclaimer to the menu to make it absolutely clear this isn't a game. You can't expect us to quickly figure that out on our own. We're stupid sometimes.
* instead of linking to the newgrounds page of, say, HappyHarry, when you click on Dr. Bees, have it throw up a personalized "info card", like a case file or something, showing history, facts and trivia about Dr. Bees. On that page, you could have a link to the original Dr. Bees sketch and a link to HappyHarry's newgrounds page, youtube channel, etc. Do this for every character. I don't care if it's the shittiest looking info card possible. I don't care if it's just black text on a white background. What matters is that such a thing would meaningfully differentiate this from a static art piece.
If you did that, I would happily change the rating, because then there would be actual justification for this to be here and to receive a score based on its artistic merit. If you wanted to make a game, that could be a separate project. I do not think it would be a good idea to replace the flash on this page with a functioning game.
Also, I saw that response to a May 2016 review where you said it was a week's worth of work, with coding as one of the pieces of work. I'm not trying to flex, but as far as coding goes, I could replicate the functionality of this menu in 10 minutes. It's just movieclips and mouseover events. The point is to say that whatever interactivity you have here is bare-bones. The work really went into the art, which is why it kills me to leave a score like this. But again, it doesn't belong here, and I would rather leave a negative review than use the report button.
