Psychopath's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Marmalade of Hobbit]

Why does Gandalf the White make an appearance in the Hobbit?

[Descent - Level 03]

I would tell you that this belongs in the audio portal but you clearly already know that seeing as how you have submissions in the audio portal. Since you didn't categorize it correctly it no longer merits honest or fair critique because this isn't where it fucking belongs.

What's worse is that you had to augment the liquid idiocy with that fucktarded MP4 player. You could at least do well enough not to insult my intelligence by learning how Flash works and insert your song into a SWF file before uploading but you had the gall to upload a still frame from MS Paint with the old film grain effect with Windows Movie Maker. It's not even like you took to animating something in MS paint as an animation challenge, it's one frame, an album cover no less. I don't know why it even has the film grain effect, it's not like it adds anything to it so why bother?

Back in the day a song without animation would've gotten deleted so fucking fast half the people bee lining to zero bomb it wouldn't have even gotten the chance to score their blam point. Of course it's gonna pass anyway, most shit does, which is why I'm writing the review to begin with because I know this shit is gonna pass and you're gonna get to read it and all the reviews bashing you are gonna make you wish you never came to this site to begin with because we're a group of mean poopy heads.

Let me ask you something, if you're not going to acknowledge how the system is meant to be used then why should I acknowledge your work and the quality of it? Get your shit in gear, take this down and do it right.

[DOOM - I Sawed The Demons]

I would tell you that this belongs in the audio portal but you clearly already know that seeing as how you have submissions in the audio portal. Since you didn't categorize it correctly it no longer merits honest or fair critique because this isn't where it fucking belongs.

What's worse is that you had to augment the liquid idiocy with that fucktarded MP4 player. You could at least do well enough not to insult my intelligence by learning how Flash works and insert your song into a SWF file before uploading but you had the gall to upload a still frame from MS Paint with the old film grain effect with Windows Movie Maker. It's not even like you took to animating something in MS paint as an animation challenge, it's one frame, an album cover no less. I don't know why it even has the film grain effect, it's not like it adds anything to it so why bother?

Back in the day a song without animation would've gotten deleted so fucking fast half the people bee lining to zero bomb it wouldn't have even gotten the chance to score their blam point. Of course it's gonna pass anyway, most shit does, which is why I'm writing the review to begin with because I know this shit is gonna pass and you're gonna get to read it and all the reviews bashing you are gonna make you wish you never came to this site to begin with because we're a group of mean poopy heads.

Let me ask you something, if you're not going to acknowledge how the system is meant to be used then why should I acknowledge your work and the quality of it? Get your shit in gear, take this down and do it right.

[Pokémon Walkthrough Rap]

Preloader. Learn what it is. That's all I need to say.

WordWizard64 responds:

Had to educate myself on that. Good to know.

["to Have Soul"]

I would tell you that this belongs in the audio portal but you clearly already know that seeing as how you have submissions in the audio portal. Since you didn't categorize it correctly it no longer merits honest or fair critique because this isn't where it fucking belongs.

What's worse is that you had to augment the liquid idiocy with that fucktarded MP4 player. You could at least do well enough not to insult my intelligence by learning how Flash works and insert your song into a SWF file before uploading but you had the gall to upload a still frame from MS Paint with the old film grain effect with Windows Movie Maker. It's not even like you took to animating something in MS paint as an animation challenge, it's one frame, an album cover no less. I don't know why it even has the film grain effect, it's not like it adds anything to it so why bother?

Back in the day a song without animation would've gotten deleted so fucking fast half the people bee lining to zero bomb it wouldn't have even gotten the chance to score their blam point. Of course it's gonna pass anyway, most shit does, which is why I'm writing the review to begin with because I know this shit is gonna pass and you're gonna get to read it and all the reviews bashing you are gonna make you wish you never came to this site to begin with because we're a group of mean poopy heads.

Let me ask you something, if you're not going to acknowledge how the system is meant to be used then why should I acknowledge your work and the quality of it? Get your shit in gear, take this down and do it right.

[M.M.A.C.C. sneak preview]

If it's unfinished then why would you upload it? Voice acting clips belong in the audio portal, not here. Since you didn't categorize it correctly it no longer merits honest or fair critique because this isn't where it fucking belongs.

Why are you still using the Brush Tool? It looks like shit and I can see where you didn't erase lines that cross into each other. Flash doesn't acknowledge that shit as an actual outline, it acknowledges it as a color thus making excessive outlines almost impossible to fully delete without outright selecting all of it and deleting it at once considering how since it was done with the Brush tool and it's considered a color that means that all of your outlines are considered a single entity meaning that you cannot delete one without deleting all of it without the Eraser tool. By the way, the Eraser tool is utter shit too, why? Mainly because when you use it, it tends to leave shit behind all the fucking time, including stumps. The only viable way to erase that Brush tool shit is to use actual outlines, while zoomed in at 2000% mind you, to drive a wedge between the outlines you want to keep and the ones you one to delete so you don't delete all of it.

Question: is it better to use a tool that allows you to delete the lines it creates individually by merely clicking them and hitting delete such as the Pencil tool or the Line tool or is it better to use an outlining tool that you can't erase without sloppy ass results or taking on painful measures such as the Brush tool? Obviously the answer is the big fucking self imposed handicap because stylization is more valuable than quality right? I just love the concept of struggling to edit a single frame because the tools I use are fucking shit. *Middle Finger*

Also, make your own fucking backgrounds shithead. You have the tools, you have the software, there's no reason for you to not create a background from scratch even if it turns out shitty, it'll still look slightly better than a poorly compressed JPEG.

You're still not using an actual preloader and while I appreciate that you have at least a play button to get rid of that autoplay shit but I still can't monitor when the movie is actually ready to play and the fact that it doesn't preload means that playing to soon can cause loading errors to crop up like aspects of the movie going missing and the content just stopping in the middle because that's where it stopped loading when you started. Again, I don't know why that until you actually learn how to design your own preloader that you just don't use the Newgrounds preloaders, they have them for FREE under Community; Downloads; Flash Loaders. I even gave you one over a fucking PM when I salvaged that other Flash you submitted. Seriously, this isn't fucking rocket science.

Here, I can even provide you a fucking link numbnuts: http://www.newgrounds.com/downloads/p reloaders/

[Things Bax the Orc Says!]

Okay seriously? You're inserting animation into Movie Clip Symbols and then bringing them back to the main timeline? Why the fuck wouldn't you just leave the frames on the Main Timeline? At least then you can properly synchronize the audio together with the animation instead of just an endless, moronic loop that I cant stop, especially since it never goes back to the supposed preloader screen but it's programmed to just stop at the last frame where he flaps his jaw endlessly yet he never says anything. Ass.

Why are you still using the Brush Tool? It looks like shit and I can see where you didn't erase lines that cross into each other. Flash doesn't acknowledge that shit as an actual outline, it acknowledges it as a color thus making excessive outlines almost impossible to fully delete without outright selecting all of it and deleting it at once considering how since it was done with the Brush tool and it's considered a color that means that all of your outlines are considered a single entity meaning that you cannot delete one without deleting all of it without the Eraser tool. By the way, the Eraser tool is utter shit too, why? Mainly because when you use it, it tends to leave shit behind all the fucking time, including stumps. The only viable way to erase that Brush tool shit is to use actual outlines, while zoomed in at 2000% mind you, to drive a wedge between the outlines you want to keep and the ones you one to delete so you don't delete all of it.

Question: is it better to use a tool that allows you to delete the lines it creates individually by merely clicking them and hitting delete such as the Pencil tool or the Line tool or is it better to use an outlining tool that you can't erase without sloppy ass results or taking on painful measures such as the Brush tool? Obviously the answer is the big fucking self imposed handicap because stylization is more valuable than quality right? I just love the concept of struggling to edit a single frame because the tools I use are fucking shit. *Middle Finger*

You're still not using an actual preloader and while I appreciate that you have at least a play button to get rid of that autoplay shit but I still can't monitor when the movie is actually ready to play and the fact that it doesn't preload means that playing to soon can cause loading errors to crop up like aspects of the movie going missing and the content just stopping in the middle because that's where it stopped loading when you started. Again, I don't know why that until you actually learn how to design your own preloader that you just don't use the Newgrounds preloaders, they have them for FREE under Community; Downloads; Flash Loaders. I even gave you one over a fucking PM when I salvaged that other Flash you submitted. Seriously, this isn't fucking rocket science.

HereWiiGoAgain responds:

Wow dude, thank you so much for taking the time to write all of this out! It really means a lot to me. I really do like this in depth critique and will take everything to heart man! WOW!

[Intro For TV Spot]

Not bad but not thoroughly good either. I noticed a lot of motion tweening especially near the end and I really shouldn't have to explain why motion tweening sucks by now. I also noticed that not all your outlines are black; that kind of inconsistency is very annoying and since you're using Brush tool and Flash acknowledges that as a color and not as an actual outline, recoloring it shouldn't be difficult at all considering you can just change it all to black with the Paint Bucket tool.

Also, preloader, get one and use it. This very website hands them out for free under Community; Downloads; Flash Loaders and you now have access to a myriad of FLA files each containing a fully functioning, preprogrammed preloader. No augmentations needed, no additional Action Script necessary, just copy and paste that one frame to the first frame of your "Intro For TV Spot" FLA file, albeit you'll have to grab every frame on every layer and drag them all up by a frame, I digress. There's no annoyance quite like an SWF that autoplays as not only can I not stop it, decide when it plays but it can also cause a myriad of other problems like the movie not loading all the way while it plays causing it to stop at the middle or worse it loads its content at different points causing things like the lip syncing to go out of alignment with the audio.

[Cover Nigthmare]

I gave this a pass because at the very least, unlike a lot of other authors, you've shown some competency in your work, most notably your background art. However, there's a myriad of other things wrong with this that make it unbearably bad.

First and foremost, learn what a preloader is and learn how to use one. This very website hands them out for free under Community; Downloads; Flash Loaders and you now have access to a myriad of FLA files each containing a fully functioning, preprogrammed preloader. No augmentations needed, no additional Action Script necessary, just copy and paste that one frame to the first frame of your "Cover Nightmare" FLA file, albeit you'll have to grab every frame on every layer and drag them all up by a frame, I digress. There's no annoyance quite like an SWF that autoplays as not only can I not stop it, decide when it plays but it can also cause a myriad of other problems like the movie not loading all the way while it plays causing it to stop at the middle or worse it loads its content at different points causing things like the lip syncing to go out of alignment with the audio, speaking of which that brings me to my next point of criteria.

Secondly, you have the audio on fucking event mode. That's not just annoying, that's fucking obnoxious. To those who don't know what event mode even does, it causes the audio in question to play while removing any kind of ability to stop it and if you restart it from the beginning, it will not, in fact, restart at all, it merely plays it from the beginning as a separate entity, this means that the newly started version of that track will overlap the other one that had already been playing causing them to intermix with one another an amplify the pitch and volume of both tracks, God help you if you restart the audio a third time.

It was originally intended for sound effects in video games so it would allow said sound effect to play without interruption despite the number of times it was played. This fixed an otherwise bad problem where the sound effect would continually restart and never play through to it's full capacity until the command that caused it to play would stop being given and you'd constantly be hearing only the slight beginning of a sound effect or worse, nothing at all. In other words, it's not meant for dialogue or animations.

Since event mode is Flash's default setting for audio, that leads me to conclude that you don't know how to optimize audio in the slightest, therefore I'll instruct you on how to fix the problem. Select a frame from the layer you have the music stored, go into your properties tab and you'll see a group of tabs next to the word "Sync". The drop down list to the immediate right of the "Sync" label determines how the audio is played, for an audio track for an animation you'll want to select the "stream" option from this list as it's designed to play the audio and animation together thus not allowing them to breach their, as determined by you, synchronization.

Now I'm going to teach you how to optimize your audio since the stream option causes Flash to impose it's default audio compression features to any audio that's streamed. You'll want to go File; Publish Settings; select the Flash tab and now you have access to determine how Flash will compress your photos and audio upon creating the SWF file for your project. Click the set buttons for Audio Stream and Audio Event, select MP3 from the compression drop down list, select 160 kbps from the bit rate drop down list, select Best from the quality drop down list and deselect the check mark from the "Preprocessing / Convert Stereo to Mono" option. This will allow your audio to be heard at it's full capacity for quality.

You should probably save these settings as a profile so you don't have to repeat the process for each and every new project you start. At the top of the Publish Settings window you'll notice that between the tabs and the window bar that there is a drop down list labeled "Current profile". Next to that you'll see a group of buttons, after you've set your compression settings you'll want to select the plus sign for "Create new profile" and Flash will prompt you to label your new profile. After you've labeled your compression profile you'll want to select the "Import/export profile" button to the immediate left of the the "Create new profile" button. Clicking the "Import/export profile" button will produce a drop down list with two options, among these you'll want to select "Export", then Flash will prompt you to name the new file you're creating. After you're finished creating your new compression profile you can import it by selecting the "Import" option from the "Import/export profile" drop down list and automatically readjust the new project to your preferred settings.

You may also want to optimize the audio settings for the track itself rather than just every track in general, to do this you'll want to select the audio track in question from your Library tab, right click on the track and select properties. From here you apply the same settings as before, deselect "Convert stereo to mono", select MP3 for the compression setting, select 160 kbps for the bit rate settings and select Best for the quality setting.

You also seem to have a problem actually animating things beyond mere lip syncing. It appears as though it stems from coloring things in before fleshing out the animation thus handicapping you from making an animation that isn't purely stagnant save for a few motion tweens. My advice would be to never color anything in until the animation is complete as this will allow you to use the Onion Tool properly. If you don't know what the Onion Tool is or where it's located, it's right next to the garbage underneath your timeline and it's depicted as two squares, the one behind being colored white and the one in front being colored purple.

You also have bad problem where the background doesn't fully encompass the stage, either that or you gave the wrong height and width proportions. This typically occurs either at the top of the stage or at the left; either stretch out the background fill in the empty space or type in the right aspect ratio in your publication settings.

Although I praised you for your backgrounds, they're few and far between and in some instances, such as the vampire scene, all but the window is absent from view, I can't get an idea of where the corner of the room is and that just makes it seem half assessed. Not only that but despite all the self imposed animation handicaps limiting you from fleshing out the animation you still couldn't finish the song and quit half way? That sucks.

Albeit this isn't bad in draw of comparison to a lot of the shit that gets passed such as WillieD, HereWiiGoAgain, Markhansaven or HardHart submissions, it's still not without its myriad of shortcomings.

In essence this is very poorly made and it's something I'd expect to see in the early days of Flash movies such as when Icecube.com was prominent between 1999 and 2001 but at least they knew how their software worked. It's like Flash movies in general are reverting back to that period, only without the added benefits of knowing all the arcane shit that came with it.

[Astralojia Trailer]

Oh great, you're motion tweening shitty JPEG files you brought in from Photoshop. Note this folks, this is supposed to be comprised of highlights, the good points, from the main show; just imagine what the rest of it is gonna be like when these are supposed to be the most awesome parts.

Also, fuck this dumbass astrology plot device, astrology is about reading your future from observing the stars. Are they reading their horoscope loudly at each other? Do they inflict damage by making other people deaf with their inept bullshit? Stop ripping off Naruto, Harry Potter and Death Note.

*Middle Finger*