Jeremy Dower = Awesome Art

Jeremy Dower has a brand new site design, and he has a nifty gallery of unique creations. Although it is somewhat irrelevant to the Flash scene, it is E-Art so enjoy!

Jeremy Dower

He does excellent lighting effects which make some works look 3D almost.

JCB Music Video

Every now and then there comes these quant animated shorts on the internet that don’t have to be violent or funny to entertain us, sometimes it is just nice to have a unique animation.

The animated JCB Music Video is a neat little animation to the song JCB. It has a rough sketch style with the webpage fitting the lined paper background that adds atmosphere to the animation, and the song itself somewhat fits the animation style.

If your feeling like watching something a little slow paced or just like these kinds of touchy animations, then this is perfect for that. I give it an 8/10 for great quality of animation and music. Worth checking out for sure.

-P.G

Grow Island

I picked this game up from Casual Gameplay, the developer itself is in Japanese, but there is a button in game to switch to English which is a nice touch.

The game is Grow Island, an interactive game centered around you making the right choices to help develop an island. That is essentially all you do; you have a series of buttons to make choices on what you would like to advance, however making the right choice is very important. If you don’t press the buttons in the correct order, your island won’t develop properly. Its pretty easy to figure out what to pick though.

Click to enlarge picture

There are fun little animations after you have clicked a button that show the development of the island, and its just fun to watch. There is a fun sound track, and the animation is really good, if you get far. Its somewhat of a useless game though, its not big, you just push buttons and watch, but it is oddly attracting so I give Grow Island a 4/10.

-P.G

UPDATE: I got rid of the fan expo post, the picture was too big and such and irrelevent.

The Turtles of Time

Sure we all know the teenage mutant ninja turtles, and how they use weapons to fight other non-turtle ninjas, but have you ever heard of a Turtle of Time? You probably haven’t but thats ok, because I can help you out.

Casual Gameplay had a competition and one of their submissions was this unique physics game The Turtles of Time.It is an epic adventure about turtles who collect points by swimming around an enclosed pond, and they absolutely must collect enough points before time runs out!

If you don’t manage to obtain enough points in time you can simply grab the replay tab and move it backwards to go back in time and fix your mistake. That is what makes this game unique among all others. While the controls are somewhat unresponsive when you lose control over your little buddy, the game does a good job at turning back time. You can easily beat the first level by just holding the up arrow key (would not be as fun, but a level is a level) but the levels do change nicely each new round and gain more twists and turns. And a cool bonus is that as you advance there are more turtles to use, which is very handy if one gets stuck.

And when I say stuck, I mean in a glitch in the second level top right wall. I took control over the second turtle and shot him quickly to the right and he got sucked into the wall and I lost him forever.

All complaints aside, playing as a turtle that can go back in time to fix its mistakes is fun, and thats all that matters. I give The Turtles of Time a 6/10 for being original and ok visuals, but it could use some music, better controls and there was that little glitch.

-P.G

Street Skating 2

Lets face it, even if you can not skate board you still like playing skate boarding games. Its fun to perform the tricks with impossible air and accuracy, but mostly its fun to make them whip out in ways that would kill a man in real life. The wonderful folks over at Teagames have quite the selection of games, but their latest venture, Street Skating 2 cought my attention.

It is your basic Flash game based on physics, but this time no motorbike going over boxes, your a skate boarder in the street raking up points by performing simple tricks. Like many games in this genre you use the arrow keys to keep balance, but now you can jump onto things with the space bar and grind on objects. The controls are good, but the game feels slow and even the skate boarder looks like hes just taken a few Tylenol PMs. When you jump, the gravity sort of lifts you up gradually and is not very realistic, making it somewhat hard to jump onto objects to grind.

Click to enlarge picture

Other features have been added to the game, such as pressing x will allow you to perform a kick flip. Small things like that give something new to players who have been over exposed by a genre of balancing trucks and bikes.

The graphics on the character are simple but pleasing, and there is a nice amount of detail in the backgrounds. The style is consistent which is nice and the sound fx are accurate but there is no music.

Though the controls feel slow the graphics are appealing and with some new tricks to the balancing vehicles genre this game is kind of good. Its worth your time to play for 10 minutes or so but it feels like it could be better, I give Street Skating 2 a 5/10.

-P.G

Are you ready to rumble?

Newgrounds Rumble is what I’m talking about, and it is a game all about rumbling… and Newgrounds! This is an exceptional example of when Flash games go right. The combination of talents behind the creation of the game make for a unique fighting game with characters from the Internet that we have come to love.

First of all, the graphics are above the current standard. The backgrounds are pieces of art and the frame by frame animation of the all the characters moves is flawless. Each character is well known for their own respected series of Flash and are re-drawn to a tee. Their moves (and movements) accent on their style as well as their personality which makes the graphics smooth and unique with each different playable character.

The sound fx are great, timed punching and pain sounds with a sound track that suits the atmosphere of violence and yet gives you the feeling of a good arcade game.

The game play is also superb. The controls are responsive and each character does not feel like a clone of the other one. You can clearly see that each character was given attention, as they all have different moves even though you use the same keys. The only “flaw” I found in the controls was turning around while fighting, its not responsive and can affect how well you take out your foe.

There are plenty of power ups to obtain during combat, and as you progress through story mode you earn points that can be deposited to unlock characters, levels and even game modes. Newgrounds Rumble is definitely up there as one of the top Flash games on the internet, with tons of detail and only minor flaws, such as more unique unlockables would have been nice rather then the standard kind. Summed up, Newgrounds Rumble gets a 9/10 for being so great, but I find it hard to say its perfect.

And you may notice a nice flashy new banner up at the top, I whipped that up today after school. I had a break there, got my computer back but having trouble re-installing a few things. I have a trial of Flash CS3 now and it is pretty cool, the blur tool is so easy to use that it almost begs you to use it even if not necessary. I’m back and posting with a fresh new look and some good content ideas and some good article ideas.

-P.G