Every month I see to review all of the games that were nominated as the Best of that month, which you can view in the link above!

As a game developer myself, I know how difficult it can be when you are starting out and how tricky it can be to tell how your game will be received by users. After all, you know how your game is meant to be played, and you can't just wipe that from your memory when you're building and testing it!

Therefore, I record myself playing all of the games for 15 minutes and try to voice how I'm feeling when I'm playing it, so that developers can see how a user might experience their game for the first time, especially for things like tutorials. I also try to provide some advice as well, but it might not always be the best: what I'm really hoping is that developers can draw their own conclusions on what might need work from how I stumble through their game.

When I first started these reviews, I would send an email to each creator to let them know about the review. Now, however, I realized I could just use the tagging system to notify them all in an instant! Yes, this is the level of technological intelligence you're dealing with here, people.

Game devs reviewed: @DrGeraud @Bretterick @porwaltz @GoodL @tozy @PsychoGoldfish @HealliesGames @MoeAnguish @KilledByAPixel @Rob1221 @YellowByte @SominStudios @MostlyMadProductions @LeSam @itsnotsimon @LeviRamirez @MDEV0 @Dezue @NicedenGames @AKTStudios @rmkubik @GuyUngerNL @ChacsGames @kbvpneofit @PatrickOReilly @dlodz @OmiyaGames @Munguia @JinxSpell @nightape @IceDrumGames @StonesOfAnarchy @Airdorf @b-random9

While I do love all of the games (they are the best of the month, after all)...

TOP 10 BEST GAMES OF FEBRUARY

My top 10 was (in no particular order and based on my own criteria which is nonsensical and changes constantly):

Dr. John Black Smith -

Great crafting game with goofy voices that has an excellent multi-ending setup where the choice is made cleverly through the game mechanics!

Blooming -

For hardcore people who love old school games like Out of this World: figuring out the really unique mechanics to get to the end of this game is a treat!

Bogus Roads -

Wish I had more tracks to play through in this fun retro obstacle course!

Resizer -

Rob1221 delivering yet another great puzzler: how do they do it every month so well!?

Guitar Munchers -

Starts out really hard, but once you get used to it, you just can't resist this game's retro charm and challenge!

GRIEVOUS -

Cool 'Binding Of Isaac'-ish roguelike shooter with some fun exploration and combat scenarios!

Bubu & Chida -

Charming, cute game that is over too soon! I need more adventures with these characters!

Spell Guardian -

Great dungeon crawler with some cool movement and combat abilities to use in the challenging obstacles and boss battles!

EXTRAORDINARY -

Excellent presentation and variation of gameplay mechanics - a real smooth and professional experience!

Sarah -

That story! WHAT A TWIST! And delivered effectively without sound or music, and without beating you over the head with a long cutscene!

Hope the feedback helps the devs out there!

SIDE NOTES

I did so bad reviewing Dezue's game: I was wondering the whole time whether I'd need to censor it or whatever that I missed so much, haha. Sorry!

I plan to be back soon with the final version of Final Fharmacy!

Got my new game finished just in time for Pixel Day 2020!

It was down to the wire and I'm still planning on making a few updates that I wasn't able to, such as hiscore tables. Technically it's not finished-finished, as it is just a vertical slice of the game that I plan to enhance and polish with a cool story among other things, so feedback is welcome to turn the final version into something great!

It's a small game, but it was a big step for me in a lot of ways:

*First time working in a completely new engine, Unity! So long, Flash, and thanks for all the fish. Can't believe how much easier it is to work in these new things: I kept catching myself doing things the hard way because I didn't expect there to be an easier way.

*First time keeping the design scope constrained to a reasonable level and finishing it quickly! It's no game jam game, but keeping it contained to a few months in a far cry from my decade-long project before. So long, feature creep: creep on me no longer!

*First time working with another person (apart from family)! I worked up the guts and reached out to Vincenti Zghra for some chiptune music and boy howdy did I get some! It was a pleasure to work with them and now I feel like it isn't so scary to work as a team with others!

I look forward to taking this newfound energy and making even greater games and working together with others! It'll be like a wonderful perpetual energy machine of happiness where everyone working together keeps building each other up until we explode like the brightest star in the sky! Ok, I think I'm high off release fumes.

And of course, I look forward to reviewing all these Pixel Day games in an upcoming video!

Hooray I finally finished the game that I started like a decade ago!

Balls to the Brawl, a side-scrolling arcade beat-em-up that aims to give everyone a well-deserved ego-trip, has finally been launched! Enjoy playing as Mike as you stomp across Shonen Island, crushing all manners of wacky enemies and bosses in your way to reach the end and face off against Ryu himself!

As stated before, the main core of the design was built around providing everyone a wonderful feeling ego-trip (aka power trip) to brighten up their days. I wanted it to be challenging, but in a feel-good way. This manifests itself in two different ways:

• For people who love games of old that had cheat codes galore, powerful heroes, and haphazard chaos: we have a bunch of modifiers to let them have fun in their own way. Want 99 lives to be as reckless as you want? Infinite power so you can spam specials? Just want to skip to a certain level? Go to the options and activate these cheats! The normal difficulty is also built to make enemy AI more scared to attack the player.
• For people who love games of old that were incredibly challenging and required fast-thinking and careful planning: we have a special hard difficulty that doesn't turn enemies into damage sponges, but gives them more aggressive AI that you have to stay on your toes for. Not only that, but bosses have all-new moves and patterns that they utilize! And if you're really looking for a challenge, you can even make it so that you can only coolly swagger around, cutting out running completely.
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The game has also been designed in general to have satisfying controls (cancels, subtle movement adjustments during an attack, momentum) and special effects (hit stop, screen shake, explosive gibs) to heighten the satisfaction of pummeling the snot out of enemies. Minimal downtime is also achieved by allowing you to do things like strike enemies when they are down, instead of waiting for them to get up, among other things.

This has been a long development for me, as the game was originally started a decade or so ago before being left in the dust for several years due to technical difficulties and real-life responsibilities. It was only a year or so ago that I dug it up from my old hard drives and worked to not only fix the game, but elevate its design to new heights to fit modern sensibilities. I'm glad that I've finally been able to release it, less than a year before Flash is dead! I'm also glad that my brother's soundtrack will finally see the light of day after being buried in my computer for so long.

I hope everyone has a good time with the game!

Got my reviews for the Best of May 2019 games from Newgrounds up on my Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhlX68ucZHI!

Once again, I blind-reviewed all of the games nominated for Best of the month on my Twitch and then edited it down for Youtube, and once again, it was a bunch of fun! One of the more difficult things for creators to get feedback on is first impressions, and I hope that my blind runs help with that. I'm also hoping my chit-chat and feedback during gameplay will give some tips to creators on how players move and experience their games, which they can use to move their works onwards and upwards! Just trying to pay my dues by helping out the community since I've certainly been helped by it as well in the past.

In other news, my new game Balls to the Brawl is practically finished now! I'm just gathering some feedback and polishing off the minor things that come up from that, and then i'll slap it on Newgrounds for you all to enjoy/ridicule! Look forward to it!

Got my reviews of the Best of April 2019 games from Newgrounds up on my Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ROc96__6D0!

I dedicated a day to blind-reviewing all the games on my twitch and then I edited it down for Youtube. It was a lot of fun! It can be so difficult to tell how people will interact with your game for the first time, so I hope it provides good feedback for all the creators here so they can move onwards and upwards! I feel like I didn't reach out enough to people back in the past when I used to be on here, so I'm trying to pay my dues and help out nowadays in any way I can. Hoping to keep this up for the months to come (though I might need to limit my playtime of each game to cram 'em all in, haha)

And yes, I'm still working on the game: Balls to the Brawl! The core of it is all pretty much done! The only thing remaining is some cinematics and such, plus a balancing pass after I get some eyes on the beta build. Hoping to get it on here for you all to enjoy soon! And if I rated any of your games badly, you can feel free to get some revenge on me then, mwahaha!

Man, it's been a looooooong time since I've been on here! I'm trying to get better at updates, I swear; moving on from being so anti-social. I've even got a twitter now! (shameless plug @futurecoplgf)

Anyway, I'm working on a game! It's called Balls to the Brawl, and it's modeled after the character Mike from my L337 kr3w animations back in the day! It also stars Ryu as the antagonist, same as before. It's a side-scrolling brawler in the same vein as Streets of Rage and all that. It'll probably be the last entry in this weird series I've had going as it does have a pretty cool and definitive ending, but we'll see.

I actually started work on this game years ago, but it fell into disrepair and I gave up on it. Classic recipe for disaster: I was really new at it, and yet I was overly ambitious. The fla library and such got bloated and corrupted and yadda yadda and I was spending more time trying to get it to publish than I was working on it. Then, as it is for so many other artists, real life and jobs and such came in and I scrapped the game, moving onto other things.

Several years pass, however, and I come across this old game during some hard drive transfers. Using my newfound knowledge and more powerful computer, I've been able to revive the game from it's dead and corrupt state to start working on finishing it in earnest.

Anyway, I hope to have it out soon(tm). It's a 7 level game and I'd say I've got around 6 levels done at the moment. I'll try to post some previews of it on here or twitter.

Just posted a new L337 Kr3w movie! Was a lot of fun to do, though I apologize that it took me a long time to post (thanks for people like robbie and others for checking if I was still alive, haha). I ended up having to split it into two parts due to Flash desyncing the sound as the movie went on. From now on, I'll probably try to make my movies more condensed, perhaps leading to faster releases. Please let me know of any comments or criticisms you have on my art direction; I'm trying to improve it bit by bit and experiment with new things.

New flash called Microcosm is now up! A bit different from the usual stuff I do, but I hope it still has enough of the old action for everyone to be satisfied :)

At the risk of being spoilers, it was a ton of fun to do the "comic book" look for Microcosm. It's been something I've always wanted to do ever since I was a kid, and it was a great experiment with masking and other Flash techniques. A big inspiration came from the FLCL "manga scene," which is a great scene you should check out.

I'm still working on the L337 kR3w series, and I expect the first one, Josh, to be done by...probably January. Look forward to it!

Finally, I'm back! Feels like ages since I had any time to do Flash, but I've been brimming with new ideas to do while being stuck with college junk. Trying to keep to a tighter schedule now, and hoping to bang out several flashes over the summer, so keep an eye out!

New flash called Ryu's Revenge is pretty much a teaser to introduce the new plot of my future flash submissions, being L337 Kr3w flashes (I might do some other flashes here and there). If anyone wants, feel free to vote on who's flash I should do first! Here's a list to help:
(Name - basic premise)
Lucas - DDR runnin' and gunnin'
Tim - clean, precise, multi-person swordery
Eric - over-the-top burning passion
Mike - knives, fists, and glares, oh my
Aaron - sparkles and hair swooshiness
Josh - pure randomness and luck
Adil - genius plans and bad puns
Berns - 24-style Hollywood action
In each flash, I hope to do a unique style and personality to differentiate them from each other, while
tying them together with a central storyline (instead of just beating up Ryu for who-knows-what-reason).

Also, feel free to comment on my latest art style approach. I've slowly been trying to enhance my drawings bit-by-bit while keeping them simple. Besides anatomy, I've tried to enhance the faces to be a bit more realistic so I can use a much wider array of facial expressions. It is a bit anime, but ah well :).

Hope you enjoy the new direction!

Woot! Finally got the balls to submit my first flash! Hope everyone enjoys it!

Also, look for me in the Metal Gear Collab!