Score: 9

"Masterpiece"

submission: Madness interactive

date: August 2, 2008

Mowing down legions of your fellow man seems to be a popular basis for games, but rarely are they done as brilliantly as Madness Interactive.

I've been coming on and off to this game for quite a long time now, which makes me wonder why I never got around to writing this review until now, I guess reviewing things can wait when I'm slaughtering hapless fools.

Firsly lets talk about the graphics, okay, so the Madness style has never been the Mona Lisa but you could probably call it classic in Newgrounds, and while there is next to no variation in the character models they're still all very well done, especially when they spasm in a hail of automatic fire, or go flying when you smack them one with the 'arnold' cheat on. The backgrounds and environments are all in monochrome but I can't really expect anything else, and I doubt anyone else would be, on the downside though corridors are extremely bland, the only real difference is if there are a few pictures on the wall, the blandness may be intentional but I don't like it and feel like mentioning it, if only to make my ego swell nicely by having a high word count in this review, anyway, enough blabbering on about how it looks, lets move on to all the sexy violence.

The gameplay is fun, and solid, making for many happy returns and while the control system may take a little while to get used to for some people playing it makes the combat extremely fun and unique, and while it makes trying to throw things a total bugger it does give you a nice feeling of acomplishment when your opponent goes down with a switchblade sticking out of his forehead.

The story is pretty simple, the Sheriff has stolen your pie, go murder him and murder tons of various different looking dudes on the way. Feh, fair enough, someone steals your pie, you kill them, speaks for itself (no, I'm not being sarcastic).

I also want to make some (well, at least one) recommendation(s) to anyone playing.
1) Be a man, yeah, you've got a gun, so what? Try playing through the game (or at least on experiment mode) using only melee weapons, personally I liked using my fists/a switchblade and a baseball bat, if you combine playing like this with the 'arnold' cheat then the effects are maximized, if you get shot up a lot then just use the 'willis' cheat and your balls (or metaphorical balls if you're a woman) should still feel as big. If you suck and get shot up and don't want to cheat then theres a consolation, you'll either go down looking like a real man, or go down looking like an idiotic dipshit, it all depends on perspective really.

2) This one isn't really a recomendation, but I found it pretty fun to try and showboat, for example throwing my switchblade in the air and catching it before stabbing some poor sap, do it right and you'll look stylish as hell. The scenario I'm about to describe was more of a very stylish accident, plus I want to boast about it - I was playing in experiment mode using only melee weapons and threw my baseball bat at some tit with a pistol, it hit him in the face and bounced back, when I, showing some amazing reflexes (fluking), cought the bat and smacked him with it, killing him, this made my ego swell with pride but I couldn't help but be disapointed because I was the only one who saw it, if you pull something like this off then kudos to you.

I'm running out of characters so I'll finish up now so you can stop reading. I give this game a huge recommendation to just about anyone, those looking for sophisticated gameplay will be disapointed but I can't see why anyone looking for sophisticated gameplay would even think this contained the slightest trace of it. So there we have it, Madness Interactive, a shining example of games about killing people.

Score: 6

"Meh."

submission: intrusion

date: July 31, 2008

Ah, at last, something to review. Well, lets get this trainwreck moving then.

First of all the graphics, they look nice and the main character is well animated but allow me to say this - photographic backgrounds are never good, at best they look horrible and out of place, at worst they make your own art look shit, worst of all you seem to have put some photographic obstacles in as well, maybe you're bad at drawing that stuff, maybe you're just lazy but that doesn't really make it excuseable.

The gameplay is adequate, pretty much extremely standard sidescrolling shooting gameplay and it got rather dull quite quickly for me, maybe it didn't for some people but then I'm used to more intellectual or more fast paced games.

The ragdoll physics sometimes seemed to make the game ridiculous or unrealistic, for example; You're shooting at the enemy from quite far away with the pistol, you kill them and they fly several metres back. The physics would be a lot nicer if the engine (or whatever) for them was a lot less broken or more sophisticated, although I'll appreciate how insanely hard that will probably be to do. Another thing regarding the physics, the starting crash cutscene thing cut to them far too quickly and I was half expecting to have to go through the game with my character in a wheelchair after seeing it.

Overall we have a slightly above average sidescrolling shooter, it could be a lot worse I guess but it's just a bit, meh.

Score: 8

"Fun"

submission: Create a Gun V2

date: July 28, 2008

Well, I've never seen anything like this before, looks interesting.

First of all - Bugger me that's a lot of gun parts, I think I'm in over my head but I seem to be making some progress, although I'm not really sure how most of these will fit together, I scrapped trying to make a futuristic shotgun so I've moved onto a lightweight looking assault rifle.

The gunparts are well drawn and certainly numerous, it's actually quite fun to play around with all the different gun parts, and I have a feeling that this may become useful to me. The gun noises are an interesting little addition, althoughit'd be better if it associated a different sound with each gun barrell so you would know the way the gun would sound simply.

This is a nice little program and I'll probably use it again in the future.