Score: 9

"excellent"

submission: Flash-DooM 2D

date: June 7, 2009

when i saw this on the front page, i was a little cynical, especially after Mike's Doom port. but this was a very fresh and fun take on the classic game. the use of actual sprites was excellent and it was fun. i also very much liked the background and the parallax was nicely done. i found it a little odd that the enemies could see you no matter what when you entered a room they were in, even if they weren't facing you, but health packs were generously littered throughout the levels and it wasn't a big deal. the controls were tight and responsive and i didn't find any glitches regarding them.

i think the one thing that REALLY bugged me was the omission of the health portrait. you had the sprites (like in the icon for this and for the difficulty selection), so i'm a little confused on why you left that out.

other than the small annoyances above, this is a fine tribute to id and to Doom. awesome work (:

Score: 8

"an excellent, if basic, game"

submission: super sweatshop mastar

date: April 7, 2009

this game was a very fun use of about 10 minutes. trying to get the medals improves the replayability, although i think you could have added more creative ones. i very much like the lack of music - it's actually fairly atmospheric when flying your shoe across the Pacific. the calm roar of the shoe's "engine" without any other sounds or music playing definitely makes for an interesting atmosphere. the lax hit detection also helped out a lot. i'm glad you didn't just hitTest movieclips together...it definitely would have brought this down a bit. i had a lot of close calls and it made the game much more fun when i would have that slight sigh of relief over narrowly avoiding something, even when it clearly touched part of the shoe.

the only thing i really didn't like was the size of the shoe and the inability to move around left and right, but it's not a big deal since you're not flooding people with enemies.

the graphics were, well...not bad, i guess :P it worked for this tribute to Soviet Missile Mastar.

overall, i'd say it's a very fun little game. the medals make it worth playing more than once, for sure, but the game itself is solid. good job. :3

Score: 5

"way too short."

submission: Shamoozal: GFGames #4

date: October 4, 2008

you are a great artist, and a great animator. but you have a problem regarding the length of these shorts, in that they are way too short. they are the Daisy Dukes of short cartoons. people aren't on the edge of their seat waiting for the next Shamoozal cartoon to come out, and if they care at all about these movies you make, they will wait longer than four days for something that is longer and higher quality. everything else you have is top-notch - your characters are memorable, you're a good writer, the voice-acting you have is good (when it's present, anyway :P). you just need to work more on the length.

also, how can you get more HD than vectors? HD video is one thing, but nothing will ever beat the clarity and sharpness of vector art.

Score: 1

"terrible cartoon with an equally dumb message"

submission: Learn to Vote Responsibly

date: July 23, 2008

i'm not even going to mention the fact that popular vote counts for nothing (even the last review by FireSoCold pointed this out, so i'm sure many others have, too), so i'm just going to rag on how sloppily this was made.

it's pretty obvious that you put next to no effort into this. there's no real animation, so there's no excuse whatsoever to have not drawn some decent-looking characters. their lip sync was horrible! did you even bother with it? the smarmy guy just repeated the same 2 mouth movements throughout the entire movie, and what was with the hick's mouth? you actually shape-tweened it? you're pathetic. take some time and actually draw it out instead of half-assing it.

everything about this sucked, except for the smarmy guy's voice acting. that was pretty ok, but the redneck's voice acting was terrible. he was too quiet and had no emotion whatsoever in his voice. did you even listen to it, or did you just throw in the sound file and assume that it would be ok? did you even listen to your movie before you submitted? jesus christ.

maybe if your art, animation, voice acting, and political message didn't blow so bad, you'd have a decent cartoon. too bad you half-assed everything and thought our votes counted in our election at all.

Score: 8

"thought provoking"

submission: Break of War

date: June 14, 2008

this was definitely one of the more interesting flash moves i've seen in a while. the message i got was a bit different than Lancekatre got from this - i saw this more of an analogy, in that we are to bombs, what balloons are to sharp objects (in this case, light bulbs).
the art was ok. the clouds are ALMOST great - i think you went a little overboard with the filters. the lighting also seemed a bit too contrasting. you should make the colors a bit lighter, and a bit more like the color of the cloud itself. shadows are never pure black - they get color from ambient occlusion. there's an art "tutorial" online that might help you out with that: http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tu t.htm#light_stuff

regarding the art of the last scene, with the balloons...i really, really didn't like it. the balloons seemed too...for lack of a better term, "noobish." the gradients were amateur, and after spending so much effort to give off a sad atmosphere, that's all i could focus on, was the gradients. it really took away the atmosphere. soften up the color so it's more orange, to fit the general lighting scheme, and don't make them stand out so much.

the animation itself was ok. there wasn't a whole lot of it, but what was there served its purpose fine. the only thing i thought looked a bit off was when the bombs were first being dropped. it's hard to explain, i guess - it just looked "off."

other than that, the movie was pretty good. the message was interesting and the way you presented it was great - it gave people room to interpret it without being way too vague. great job!

Score: 7

"a little bland, but otherwise ok."

submission: Watch Out Obama

date: June 5, 2008

people seem to forget that this space isn't for political commentary - it's to review the flash itself, regardless of the artist's opinions or what-have-you.

the art was very clean and pretty stylish, although it could have done with some more color. it didn't hurt my eyes, though, so it served its purpose. i think you went a little overboard with Hillary's accent, though. the voice quality was crisp and, other than the fairly annoying accent, it was perfect. i think the funniest part of this was Hillary actually pulling out a rifle, but other than that, the humor was pretty bland. political jokes can only go on for so long before they start getting stale.

you obviously have talent - i've read for blog for a while now, and it's really interesting, the way you create these. i think you should move on with the political jokes, though, and do something different. just looking at the titles of your movies, i see 6 that are related to politics.

Score: 10

"that was genius!"

submission: Chuck's New Tux!

date: May 27, 2008

i would have given you 9 stars, but that ending took me totally by surprise. just because you (or your friend, rather :P) managed to be unpredictable, you get an extra star.
the art in this was pretty much great, but not amazing. it was fairly basic, but it wasn't too minimalistic to the point where the lack of detail was annoying. it could have used a bit more, but i understand you were on a deadline, so it's all good. the animation was amazing, though! it was fluid and it looked spectacular. i loved Chuck's twitching at the end, and his barfing was pretty funny. his voice was only a little annoying, but it's not because of bad sound quality (it was perfect) or bad voice-acting (also pretty much perfect), but rather just because of his character, which was charming at the same time.

all in all, a perfect short. great work!

Score: 0

"terrible."

submission: Flash Action Script Tut

date: April 23, 2008

like positiveelectron said, you don't learn anything from this. all you do is tell people to copy and paste shit.

this is a worthless tutorial.

Score: 6

"that was...odd o_O"

submission: Gaylord of the rings

date: April 11, 2008

before i go onto the actual content, i'm gonna go on about the actual flash, itself.

the graphics were pretty much horrible. you gradient-raped just about everything and it looks awful. the characters look marginally better, but not by much. the lip sync was lazy - i don't remember flapping my mouth like some dope with down syndrome and having professions of rape coming out. your frame-by-frame animation isn't really all that great, either. it's sloppy and it doesn't look very well. also, work on your character animation. they were far too stiff and robotic.

now that that stuff is out of the way, onto the actual content. it was hilarious, i gotta say. the whole "sam getting it on with frodo" thing was drawn out a bit in the beginning (i saw that joke coming from a metric light-year away). however, gollum really makes this cartoon worth watching. i can't say i was expecting him to get the ring and, um, use it like that. the fbf on that part really just made it funny, even if the animation was really, really bad. gollum's crying out sounds very well - i think his voice-acting was the best in this toon. sam's voice was kind of annoying. frodo's was, well, ok. it wasn't bad like sam's, but it wasn't quite as good as gollum.

also, this is the first flash i voted on with a voting power of 8 O: so congrats, i voted 3 eight times.

Score: 9

"nifty!"

submission: OLD Tywo At Large Ep. #1

date: April 1, 2008

yeah, i agree with the previous reviewers; this is way underrated. the only thing that irked me about this flash (and i'm a pretty picky guy) is the lip sync, which wasn't done very well. that's really my only critique that i can offer this. your art was fantastic - cartoony, but very well-defined and realistic. i love how you did the lighting, too. it was excellent. small touches like Tywo's shadows when the cop cars come by really show how much you pay attention to detail.

excellent work. hopefully the next one won't be so underrated (: