Psychopath's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Black Book]

Very good

Although I have a few nit picks here an' there, there's really not that much to critique, other than my nit picks.

So, here we go with the nit picking; your backgrounds are beautiful, no debate about it, it shows quality effort. But my one nit pick about it is this; since you created it in photoshop and imported it as such, it's pixelated, digitized and compressed looking. I know this sounds astoundingly ridiculous and would be to ask shitloads of time out of anyone, but what I would have done to avoid this would be to rotoscope all of the background art in Flash pixel for pixel so the qualities of the background art and the vectors used to animate the characters didn't clash as they do, especially when they have to interact directly with each other such as the candle dripping wax.

By this point, I probably sound like a mad man. Allow me to give more... mmm... practical advice; the quotation at the beginning went by too fast for me to read without having to right click; foward from the drop menu. You need to lengthen it so people of an average reading level can comprehend it.

Also the music, it's great but there's no transition between scenes where the music fades out to let the other tracks fade in; they just come to an abrupt end, I don't know if this was intentional to somehow set the atmosphere or what, but it is rather jarring I will tell you that.

I'm sorry I couldn't critique you based on how well you adapted this from the original story, I've never read H.P. Lovecraft before. Matter of fact, I'm only familiar with his character, the Elder God Cthulu and some shit people posing as H.P. Lovecraft have written.

[MOOLT - Computer Love]

This wasn't all that funny.

To be honest, these interview reality TV show styled cartoons you've been making for the past year were funny at first, but now they've become annoying even to the extent of becoming obnoxious.

Here's my point; your characters used to do stuff; get involved in boxing matches; become slobbish Ninjas of legend; mow each other down with horses while paying homage to Mel Gibson flicks, tell the story about The Liar and perform rap songs about food product.

Now, all they ever do is bitch to each other or bitch to the audience about how prima/seconda sucks ass while shifting around on the screen and maybe move their arms on occasion.

I know that dialogue is important in comedy and can make for good or even great jokes but the banter here isn't funny. There's no set up for a joke, the punch line is so weak it requires me to retrace the writing to figure out what it was and above all the joke itself was wooden.

The reason for this is it wouldn't be so bad if the context of why they're being so offensive and defensive wasn't "she disassembled his computer". I don't think that warrants a "You did it asshole" followed by "Go fuck yourself" argument. If it had escalated to that point gradually from the ground up, it might have been funny. The reason why it isn't funny is because they jump headfirst to that level of immaturity in the argument from the very beginning and it had no where to go so as a result, it went virtually no where.

The topic is funny; she's a clean freak who disassembled his PC while he took a shit because she's so overzealous and obsessive over being clean that she'll go to extreme lengths to be clean. But the dialogue is hell; a bland, uninteresting, stressful and generic flame war that ends up going nowhere only to prove that Harut was right about everything; the result; the wife looks touchy and emotionally defensive over something that was entirely her fault = not funny. The dialogue might have worked if her defensive argument wasn't so generic; lines like "Maybe you did it", "Why do you blame me for everything?", "Stop blaming me for everything", "I hate you" and "Shut up", don't cut it for me.

The way I see it, it's just stressful and filled with unwarranted hate; an argument that goes nowhere. Watching characters yell and argue with each other shouldn't make me feel like I'm the one getting yelled at, but I do; bad things happening to people in general isn't funny, it's who it's happening to that makes it funny.

The mother in the series is funny because she's dense; watching her come up with logical folly's and jump to half baked conclusions with deep, deep misconceptions is what makes her funny. Watching her yell at Harut using general argument tactics and Ad hominems, however, isn't funny, mainly because we're not getting to see her flawed, dumbass logic but rather just her issuing fourth a generic flame war. Sure, the topic of why she's being yelled at is funny, but the dialogue that presents and supports the topic isn't. That's why this isn't funny; what banter is supposed to be is clever, good humoured and typically spontaneous dialogue. But this is not clever nor is it good humoured. It's weak, stressful yelling; I don't feel like I want to continue watching, I feel like I wanna get as far away from this as possible, save for the artwork.

About your artwork, although it's usually always good in it's simplicity I noticed an error; it appears as though that you copy/pasted the couch Harut's wife is sitting on, on top of itself. In other words; I'm seeing two couch's with one on top of the other when there's supposed to be only one, the one underneath is on a slightly lower elevation and more to the left than the one on top. I noticed that the error ceases as the argument "escalates" further, but it still occurs in the former half of the movie.

I don't mean to tell you what to do with your time, or to tell you not to do what you want with it, that's entirely up to you. But I really wish I could see the conclusion to Neenja already; I've been waiting for it for 4 years.

[_-+smorg+-_ Nghh Comp Yo]

Very little of everything

substance, artwork, quality in voice acting and just work in general. I see that the backgrounds don't fill the frame, I would say that this appears to be the point in the dynamic the background artwork followed if it weren't for the beginning sequence in which a distant view of a city scrolls across the screen to reveal the by default white colored background stage underneath it, this reveals it was clearly not the point; you either entered in the wrong height and width proportions while uploading this or you didn't make it big enough.

I'm gonna go with not entering the correct height and width proportions because this instance happens with characters and the photograph you used as your icon for the movie. BTW, for future reference, people on the website are too lazy and too idiotic to actually watch the movie before they watch and will immediately determine the movie's quality based on it's icon; using some kids face as the icon immediately implies that this is a spam flash because they're too used to it being the truth that they don't take the time and caring to truly find out, ergo the primary reason why this has such a low score coming out of the portal.

[White vs. Black?]

A very racist joke. But not a good one.

And it was pretty funny. I'm not gonna bitch too much about the visuals but my was this basic; no shading, very little animation and very sloppy artwork. I would go on to say how you should improve on this, but it appears as though this was tossed together overnight and that you didn't issue fourth your best effort.

The audio is good for the most part, you appear to be using a rather high quality microphone, but apparently a weak pop filter if you even have one; I say this because I when the kid said "alright let's go for the white" I heard you broke the wind on your microphone and scrambled it. I see you also used music from Legend Of Dragoon, this flash certainly won't land you ad revenue until you change that.

At first I didn't get the hint that this was a racist joke; I thought it was a beer joke. You see I typically don't read the descriptions for flash movies because I shouldn't have to; the movie should speak for itself. So when I heard him say "we're gonna get fucked up tonight!" it led me to believe he was talking about narcotics, furthermore that he was talking about narcotics that are legal when they went to a store to get it. When the characters were deciding between "black and white" I figured they were referring to "light and bitter" in terms of quality in alcohol. Your characters further bashed the quality of the black version by criticizing it's ability to keep a job; through that I determined you meant to say that bitter alcohol would somehow lead to becoming a dysfunctional alcoholic. I see I was wrong to believe that your aim was a noble joke, although less funny than the racial joke, I wasn't wrong to be led to believe that it was about alcohol, because at every turn it made the implication that it was about alcohol. Therefore your execution was poor because it confused the topic of the joke it wanted to get across with another topic entirely.

Overall it wasn't all that bad, it was just mediocre.

quitestupid responds:

beer? whoa. thanks though, i guess ill try to put forth more effort into my next flash!

[Life with P-bot]

That was great.

I don't feel that I should have to remark the artwork beyond the fact that P-Bot has no outlines, and for whatever reason, he has a metallic penis for a cannon; weak innuendo.

Never the less, that was great. The ony real problem I have with the audio is that I can barely understand what P-bot is saying; half the time I found myself questioning whether or not he really said "tic tac toe". Whatever he said before "I see past this logic" and what he said at the end before killing off that SWF file was unintellible; I have no idea what he said. Point being; subtitles.

[Sonic Gut Feeling]

That seriously couldn't have been 17 fucking megs.

I might be able to understand it's huge file size if it weren't for the fact that it's an FLV; FLV's heavily compress any given video format. You mean to tell me that this, what seems to have been only a 3 minute video, was heavier than 17 megs? There's not a lot going on in the animation if anything at all.

Seriously think about it; the animation is not fluid, motion tween was used heavily, for the most part the characters just stand in one place and pretty much nothing ever happens in the background. Yet, you mean to tell me that this poorly animated and disappointing parody is heavier than 5 megs total, without reformatting it into an FLV? Weak.

The jokes themselves weren't funny at all, not because I'm offended, but there's nothing clever about it at all. Sonic gloats for 20 seconds about how great he is while listening to a song dedicated to him, rams into a spike by accident and yells at Tails.

The only part I thought was remotely funny, original or even clever was the chili dog coming to life after being regurgitated [which after plowing a spike through all of your organs, makes no sense] and calling out for other survivors. That was good.

But the rest of the satire was just lame rehashing of old, tired, worn out and overly abused jokes:

Sonic is egotistical
Tails is pathetic
Sonic uses narcotics to enhance his running speed
Sonic's a terrible after school special
Sonic's a fat ass
Sonic and Tails = Ren and Stimpy
Vomit

Just jokes other people have made, only without their own twists and made of diet product; Sonic parody; light. It's almost as if you found every other Sonic parody to have ever existed and pulled all the one jokes they each shared, removed any differing qualities about them and copy/pasta'd down the absolute basic toil.

And what's this about some software called "Boom Toon"? Dude, drop this piece of shit software because, from what I've seen, it's fucking worthless; just use flash.

Oh and another thing, your audio progresses at it's own framerate indicating that you have it set to "start" rather than "stream"; I noticed because I had it running while writing this review, when I came back to it, I noticed that the audio had grossly misaligned from the animation jumping leaps and bounds ahead of when it was supposed to.

No wait a minute, disregard the above; you have the audio set to "event", meaning that whenever you restart the video, the audio doesn't restart but starts a new loop overlapping the old loop with the new one. Don't believe me? Press the play button; right click; rewind; press the play button again.

Dude seriously, if you're going to format it this way, at least do it fucking right.

Inf act, I'll post it here; upload this to youtube; go to keepvid and download your own video in the FLV format [be sure to select the lowest quality format of the FLV option, for whatever reason the higher settings never work.], then import to flash; bingo, a perfectly fluent, uncomplicated FLV that contains it's own audio so they'll never jump out of alignment with each other.

On a last note before I run myself into 0 characters to continue typing with; why did this get the front fucking page?

[Step Sleeper]

Lol

Would have been a lot funnier though if the cat scratched her while hissing at the end. That would have been grand.

[TONGS]

Eh.

I really wish you could have updated the animation quality a bit by filling in gaps in the animation like when he changes channels, sticks out his tongue, blinks and all that. I realize that it wouldn't authentically be the "original" if you did that, but it would have been slightly better considering our wait for a new flash coming from you following up your other sumbissions to this point. Whatever, to each is own.

The video quality is exceptional for the time it was done.

The-Swain responds:

This is the original "blockhead cartoon". Why would I update the ORIGINAL BLOCKHEAD CARTOON>?!111

[Funky Stick Fight 2]

The action is good.

There's not doubt about that. It's pretty standard for a stick fight. Not a whole lot going on but not much to criticize either. The only visual problem is that stalky walk cycle from the red stickman, it appears as though what should only last for one frame in his walk cycle [the end] lasts for 3 or so frames before the walk cycle starts again.

One thing does piss me off though. The text reads way too fast and the bigger sentences last even shorter than the little ones do. If you're gonna force me to read it as opposed to hearing it, have the frame stop and give me the option to move forward given certain controls so that I can read at my own pace. I don't mean that in the context for when music is going and I can hear the lyrics, just the beginning dialogue.

hikuihito responds:

oh yah. Thanks for pointing that out, I'm just too lazy to fix it now haha. I'll take that into consideration if I make another one.

[Goemon's Thanksgiving]

For a pixel flash

This is significantly better than your last one "RCR: Promiscuous Kunio" as far as things happening are concerned. I see that you made your own turkey and fruit basket. Try to add shading to your MS Paint creations next time. It's not that hard.

Also, why would you use the remix as opposed to the original? The original is so much better than this crap.