Psychopath's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[All illWillPress Episodes]

I'll be honest, I have mixed feelings regarding the matter of Jonothan Ian Mathers and his work. For one thing I share the sentiment that Mathers has more than abused the dead gimmick that made him famous to begin with, the Foamy Rants. In all honesty, his fame being derived from yelling about vapid shit was probably the worst thing that happened to him because the show became less and less about satire and actual comedy but rather more about whatever the hot button topic was at the time. In case you can't tell, I'm never the last person to critique Mathers.

However still, you've fully admitted to only watching a fraction of his work, not even knowing he existed prior to his reemergence in the portal and you think it's fair to critique his work on the grounds that you've barely even seen any of it? That kinda puts you in beneath Mathers' league when you think about it but then again, thinking about anything these days is it's own punishment.

Let's not pretend that this was made for any reason other than trying to garner attention from spitting in the general direction of an award hog on the off chance that they come back into relevancy and your material generates attention by means of area effect from the obvious backlash from the vocal minority that would ensue, which to some extent, it already has. At this point, what else could an intelligent person be left to conclude?

If this was made to truly satirize Mathers then I'm sure you would've been wise enough to watch all of his content to critique something other than what every other parody has already said. I warn you that it'll be hard to rebuke the critique I give you now as you've already said this:

"I hope that's not an edgy reference to something said by illWillPress because I've never watched more than 10 seconds of anything created by them."

Methinks you watched a couple Neurotically Yours parodies and drew in only the most common elements among them to create this parody.

Regardless, it's ironic that you're critiquing Mathers for never writing anything new and in creating this parody, you've done exactly that; said nothing new. Thus the focal point of this review.

Before you do, don't resort to the obvious ad hominems that I know are bound to come my way by pretending that I'm only giving you negative critique as a means to defend Mathers, because to say that I'm on either side is to try to validate a false conundrum by insinuating that there are only two sides. Yes, I'm very well aware of the type of mindset this topic tends to attract.

By which I mean either you the author will reply to me yelling whatever tween stereotype comes to mind, despite the fact that I'm an adult, without actually rebuking any point I made or someone else attempting to ride your dick will leave a review telling me to shut up and accept your opinion. Somehow I doubt that despite "the urge to express yourself" that you'll defend the opinion that opposes you if the latter were to occur, despite whatever glaring difference in intelligence there might be. I thought I'd just let you know what I expect.

I suppose the point I'm attempting to convey here would be 'if seeing someone challenge your position hurts your feelings, you might consider never browsing Newgrounds'.

In all honesty, if it weren't for the fact that you only critiqued Neurotically Yours for being repetitious like everyone else ever and you actually knew more than ten seconds of what you were talking about before talking about it, there wouldn't be a problem, mainly because substantial critique would be prevalent.

If I had to draw a comparison, I'd say that your parody on Full Metal Alchemist was better simply because it didn't ape off of other parodies and had an original gag. For that you receive applause but this? This is just lame.

Also, yes, I watched everything in your back catalog before writing this. It is too bad that you don't run ads in any of them, you would've made a about a buck. If you rebuke that advice saying "Moneywhore" then you'll bring me to know just how 'totally underground' you are.

BoobMarley responds:

When I said that I've never watched more than 10 seconds of his stuff, I meant it. I didn't have to watch the entirety of the man's works to start feeling that they are all the same thing (monkey cheese random LOL + shock humor). I was able to gather that feeling from the twenty he posted to the portal in one week (for you mathmagicians out there, if he posted twenty cartoons and I watched a collective 10 seconds, that means I only gave each one half a second to wow me).

I've never seen a Neurotically Yours parody. The moment I felt compelled to animate this, I just sat down and did it. Didn't search out previous renditions, didn't even sniff around for factions to pander to. Didn't really care that much about other people (except of course inflaming his cult). Making this really came down to getting this annoying thought out of my head.

The fact that there might be several NY parodies out there, and this is but another match on the fire, has meaning only to someone who would know that prior to watching this. And that did not include me at the time of making.
I'm ultimately standing in the same place you say I am right now, only I didn't come by the same road that you have supposed. Does that make sense?

I really appreciate you taking the time to write a lengthy and well thought-out review. It speaks a lot to your character as well that you would go through my previous submissions to get a better idea of who it is you'd be speaking to. You seem like a decent guy.
That FMA parody was a work of pure love, and I hadn't given a thought to advertising with it. I was so exhausted by the end, I just wanted to post it. Of course after it started to garner so many views I thought it'd be awesome to make a little dough with an ad, but I wasn't sure how long it'd be featured on the front page and I really had no idea how much profit might be involved. I have a full-time job completely unrelated to animation or art of any kind, so the thought seldom crosses my mind, but I'd definitely do it if I thought it'd be worth my while.

Anyways, just to let you know how totally underground I am, let me leave off by saying fuck the police, you moneywhore.

Cheers.

[Pikachu goes for a stroll]

This is moderately decent.

First off, you need a preloader for obvious reasons, you can get them here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/downloads/p reloaders/

Just in case you don't know, you put the preloader of your choice at the first frame.

The button at the end also doesn't work, you need to add actual ActionScript to it. The easiest way to program an external link in Flash is to go to click Window; Behaviors; Web; Go To Web Page and then insert your URL address and also be sure that the "Open In" option is set to "_blank".

I also noticed that you're using the Brush Tool, Brush Tool isn't your friend and the reason why is because it lacks the same kind of control as an actual outline; outlines created with Brush Tool are regarded by Flash as a color and not as an actual outline, meaning that if you want to use the blueprint method of animation by creating all the animation without filling it in with color until the project is effectively completed, then you're gonna be faced with the problem that you cant individually erase Brush Tool outlines by merely clicking on one of them with the Selection Tool and hitting delete like you can with an outline made with either Line Tool our Pencil Tool, specifically because since all the outlines created with Brush Tool are considered colors, that means that they'll automatically merge together when they're broken and made available to hold color, so if you delete one you delete them all.

This means you have to use the Eraser Tool to manually wipe away excess outlines that would otherwise hinder the quality of the finished product and the Eraser Tool is known to leave behind small remnants of the outlines you tried to erase which removes any attempt at producing clean and professional looking animation that you wanted to make.

Brush Tool is also known to leave gaps between lines, even ones that are supposed to be completely enclosed with each other, meaning that they're a bitch to fill in with color which usually ends up causing the author to resort to filling in the colors by using Brush Tool once again by chicken scratching the color in manually on a layer beneath the actual outlines which also creates the problem that the outline isn't truly filled in with color which ultimately means that it's not fully filled in with color and parts of it are still transparent, this also has the effect of having the color bleed out beyond the limits of the outlines.

In short, Brush Tool is essentially an inhibitor that's borderline unusable in any context. Since the outline tool is inherently straight as it should be, you can use the Selection Tool to bend the outline to give it a an arch, the Selection Tool will give you the signal that bending the outline is available when if shows you the lower right quadrant of a circle beneath your cursor. Although it may sound like a pain in the ass, it's sure as Hell a lot easier than trying to spot that break in the outlines 6 out of 10 times and having all your progress come to a screeching halt just to fix that one problem that you can barely see at 2000% zoom.

I've also noticed a little bit of excess to the far left, you either need to reduce the width in the aspect ratio from the Properties panel, reduce the width in the Submission form by about a pixel or just erase the obvious stage outlining entirely; it's most notable during the end sequence when Pikachu is crushed underneath the rock.

Speaking of which, at frame 235 the rock's outlining changes to the rock's filled in color, you can easily fix this by copying and pasting frame 234 onto frame 235 just to replicate the rock, I assume since you used a transformation tween to create the blood effect that you're also using multiple layers, it shouldn't hurt the other content in the timeline.

But since you're so young and your this inherently good at animation [albeit it is only a six frame loop extended out to one hundred and 3 frames] even with the shittiest tool at your disposal, after you learn all the rudimentary shit you'll probably be producing front page material.

NoahBHS responds:

Wow. First of all, thanks for that very long review. And, I have a few things I want to say. I know this is going in a loop, and I also know you can't click the face, I just wanted it to change when you touch it. It's not a replay button or anything. Also, I like using the brush tool, it's my style. I think the pencil tool makes it look bad, and I just don't like it. Famous Youtube\Newgrounds animators like LazyPillow (Yotam Perel), Oney (Chris O'Neill) and psychicpebble (Zach Hadel) all use the brush tool. No matter how bad people will think it looks, I will use it. But thanks for the review, and the tips. I will also have a preloader and a replay button in my next stuff.

[BBQBBM is BACK]

All hail the burger!

[City Esscape]

The most hilarious part about ramming into cars in that level is that you gain 10 points for doing it, the same amount you get for collecting rings, meaning you could probably just camp at the same spot and wait for traffic to randomly generate and cheese the scoring system out it's ass.

I particularly liked how active all of the animation is in terms of general effect and how attention to detail isn't centered on one detail. I was impressed by the multiple layer movement you used for panning sequences such as the city landscape shot in the background when Sonic ascended into the air to start performing air boarding tricks and when the cars pan across the stage to reveal their back bumpers; seeing that kind of attention to perspective in a sprite Flash is actually a very nice touch.

The only real critique I have for the animation is the fact that at the moment just before Sonic makes impact with the traffic jam that the ramp behind the cars ends up ramming into the flat part of the street and comes to overlap the supposed edge of the sprite during the panning shot to reveal the end of the traffic jam. My advice would be to manually combine the two sprites pixel by pixel into a single sprite to prevent that sort of accident during a motion tween sequence. It would have been nice if you animated each car in 360 angle animations instead of single frame 360 loops as they descended to the ground to give a better illustration of cars falling to the ground, something of which would have truly put you above his level as he never animates anything that wasn't already precreated by someone else.

What I do feel free to critique is that it appears that you lack a preloader of any kind and for a SWF file that's 9.4 megs that's a big problem. If that is the case, then it needs to be fixed. Another thing is how you didn't create vector replica's of the DeviantArt, Newgrounds, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter profile links and you imported JPEG's of their logos instead; very lazy and shitty looking if I do say so myself. It'd be one thing if they were scaled down to the size they would eventually encompass prior to being imported to the FLA file so you wouldn't notice, but you didn't so I can transparently tell that they're JPEG's. Creating replicas in Flash could allow for more intricate animated buttons for each one individually instead of the generic white flashing animated button that fits all sizes. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the whole thing were just that lackluster, but it isn't compared to the main content and because of that quality difference seeing a generic interface is jarring and unsettling.

In any case, it's nice to see new appreciation for a game leaps and bounds better than the vast majority of it's supposed successors. Despite my critique, you've impressed me with your overall dynamic.

[Dora The Expl-whore-r]

I've always loved your work but I have only one critique toward this submission; the border is showing. Either surround the content on stage with a black box to block out the white background and content over-breaching the limits of the stage or re-appropriate the height and width settings in the upload page.

But beyond that, this is gold.

Speedo responds:

Tru dat, yo. When I draw backgrounds, I have a tendency to do them at exactly 800x450, but then end up putting them within the frame arse-ways so they're a tiny bit off and the border is visible. But thanks, I should do that black box thing anymore :D