Big-Boss's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Jingle Clicker]

This game is pretty bad when it comes to the 'idle clicker' type of games. First of all, it's only suitable for one time of year. I understand that you made this game to be suitable for the holidays, but I feel that it was a miss with this game, personally.

Secondly, The idle clicker games that I've played didn't have a sound effect everytime you clicked the cookie, pizza, etc. and that's what makes this one kind of annoying. Having the bell make a bell sound everytime you clicked it really annoyed me.

Next, with how many presents can gather up due to upgrades, I don't want to click the 'Open!' button several hundreds of times. Make an improvement on that because nobody wants to click a button THAT many times.

Also, the idle clicker idea is getting VERY old. Not a good idea to base this game of off. Unless someone can make an idle clicker very appealing somehow, the genre is dead and you're not going to get a good score since you made a below average idle clicker game.

I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but you really need to improvise and come up with your own ideas for games. Not to mention that it seems like all of your games have bugs where users can't progress or earn a certain medal. For example, I can't get the 'Season's Greetings' medal here and I'm really sick of playing your games, hoping to have a good experience, and then it's all 'oh, I can't earn this medal' or whatever the issue is.

It seems that you really need to learn how to take your time when creating games to make sure that they don't have any issues. I try to enjoy your games, I really do, but there is always a problem with them. Your quiz games always give the user a wrong answer when it's right or a medal doesn't work or whatever. I'm sure you can be a better game developer, but it always seems like you either rush things, you don't care, or you just don't know what you're doing 100% of the time.

Again, sorry if I'm being harsh, but you've had so many issues with your games. I've played most of your games and I've had a problem with all of them at one time or another. It's getting unacceptable with how many games you've put out. I really hope with your next game that you improve ten fold and don't have any bugs or medal issues because at the rate you're going now it's embarrassing for you and irritating for the users who want to enjoy your games.

applessmillion responds:

Well, I can't honestly disagree with many of your points, so hear me out. I'd like to first point out that I have no intention of associating the word "Idle" with this game. In my opinion, it's a cruel holiday game. After testing the game before I threw in the API, I noticed the game was nearly completable in 10 minutes with a karma need of 10 million. So I buffed it. By a lot.
After the buff, I noticed the game was lacking something - a noise. It's kind of my own cruel joke not to even give the option to mute anything in this game - sure, I could throw in a mute button, but I feel it'd destroy the purpose I want this game to have, if it even has one. The reason there's even an upgrade for a type of "idle" karma is because I felt it was a bit too harsh and repetitive (already is, but would be way more) without some form of gain other than clicking the Bell.

The reason this game is holiday themed is simply because I like this season. I wanted to make a game for the Christmas season without completely destroying a good and developed game. So a week long project of a clicker came to mind instead of another concept I wish not to discuss.
Yes, it's another clicker game, pretty much the same type of game I've been milking ever since my time here (except the "rubbing" idea seems to get way more attention). Why not ring (no pun intended) out the year with another one. The year of clickers/rubbers is over.
Now, for your deeper and more constructive critisims. I did test this game. Check the players who won the metals. I've won all but the Polarized one, simply due to the fact I found that I had named it "Polarizing" in the code. Fixed it and moved on. I'm not sure why it skipped you in rewarding the metal. If you had a present in the second month (month 1) of playing, the game checks about 5-8 times if you qualify for the metal.
Moving on from that, my response to your other points is this - I am learning. You're right, I don't always know what I am doing. Often times I find solutions or ways to do things by just playing around, which probably isn't the best way to make a game. Around April of this year is when I started looking into ActionScript again, after taking about a 3 year break. Hell, I just learned how to locally save data this year. Being used to how Kongregate works (usually low view counts and almost no comments), I am not that experienced with the deployment and feedback from games, and am slowly getting into it. I actually found my way here because I finally felt like I needed to expand on my reach. Updates are scarse to my current games because my earlier games never were designed to receive updates well. I'm used to a 1-2 patch system then it's done. Main reason Electric Rubber currently has bugs is because I've added roughly 7-8 patches and checks to see if users need them or not (which has gotten very screwey), and adding another could easily destroy saves. The quiz games I've made are nightmares but much easier to go back and edit. They're very low priority now though, and do want to make a better base that I can just throw questions and possible answers into, and have gotten closer to that with the more I make.
Simply put, I am learning. Idle games are not the only things I make, they just seem to do the best from what I've seen. I do have ideas for 2016, but this winter break I want to fix things. It was never my intention to irritate people, but yes, it is my intention to keep any work that is approved to this website. I am embarrassed by most of my games, but they stay because I made them. It gives someone a chance to see my failures and successes, and judge me from both of those sides. We'll see how this game goes, but success or fail, it'll still represent me. It's always been my idea to throw something weird into an already strong concept (Mystery prizes with clicking :o), and sometimes it doesn't always work out to be something good. But I do promise you this - more variety will be in 2016. I can't promise bug-free games, but it'll be as bug free as a lone tester can make it.

Thank you though. I'm glad someone took the time to say this.
And you write a lot, you get a lot :p

[Cupcake Empire 2]

First of all, it's definitely an improvement from the first one. The artwork is better, there are a few new features, and personally, I like the animation of cupcakes falling when you're clicking on the cupcake.

Secondly, with the new features you added, a couple are not that great. The tax feature should've been left out, since it kind of contradicts that this is supposed to be an idle kind of game. You can't idle that much because you have to pay the taxes. To add onto that, if you don't pay within a certain amount of time, it triples. If someone let this game run for an hour while they watched some TV or did whatever, they would come back and have to pay a lot of money, thus making it harder to buy the cars, houses and earning the medals that you can unlock by buying all of the cars and houses. I know you were trying to make the business aspect of the game more realistic with this feature, but it really just bombed in the end.

With the test drive feature, it's very boring and unappealing. You can only drive around a very small parking lot. Also, once you're off the screen you don't know where the car is. You could've made it so the car came back from the other side or something. But what I'd actually recommend is making into a race track or something else that isn't so tiny and dull. Not to mention that all of the cars go the same speed, making it very unrealistic.

Finally, the 20k/cps medal is outrageous and not worth getting. The only people that will unlock that medal are people who actually want to spend the time that it takes to get that medal or medal hackers (leaning more towards the medal hackers). You had the same medal in the first one, but that one is very easy to get because someone found out that you can just click the 'R' in the title menu and you get the medal. Maybe there's something like that for this one, but I couldn't find anything. Nonetheless, I suggest changing it to maybe 4k/cps or something around there. Otherwise, nobody is going to think that medal is worth getting, which hurts the score of your game.

Overall, this game is not bad, but it's not good either. If you make a third one, I hope you keep a couple of my suggestions in mind. Just keep improving!

jejkobb responds:

Thank you for the review, I will definitely keep improving! <3

[Candy Whacker]

I'm sorry, but this game is such a pain to play and that should never be the case when it comes to a video game. The problem I have with this game is that it takes WAY too much time to earn enough candy to be able to purchase new areas or upgrades. Why can I click a ghost or zombie multiple times and get a score change of more than one, but not a bag of candy? For each bag of candy that pops up you can only earn one point. But for each time I click a zombie or ghost, I can lose multiple points. The player should be able to earn multiple points for repeatedly clicking a bag of candy, not just one point. It makes the game far too difficult.

[The Deepest Sleep]

Definitely the best game of the series! Even though I was expecting it to be longer it did not disappoint. The sound in this game is very eerie and nerve wracking and you never know what's in the darkness until you shine your flashlight upon it, creating quite the ambiance. I wasn't expecting the twist towards the end, but it wasn't that shocking of a twist to me, I thought it was kind of cliché. I do give you credit for what you can do in the end, though, because it's just a devious thing to do, but I loved it.

But of course, the best part of the game is the jumpscare at the beginning because it gets me every single time. Jumpscares don't get me very often so you really get credit for that. :)

You make great pixilated horror games, so I hope you continue to make them for a long time!

[Famous Paintings Parodies]

This is a very creative game that is well made with Stencyl. I'm a lover of art, so it was extremely cool to see someone make a game about famous artworks. For the creative part, it was very artistic to make little parody paintings and put them into this game to make getting the right answer more difficult (if people didn't view the real paintings to get a better hint anyway). The two flaws I see with this game is that it's laggy and I would sometimes have to click more than once for the buttons to work (you did make it in Stencyl so it was kind of unavoidable). Nonetheless, I hope you keep on making creative games!