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Jonathan Whiting

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TimestampSince previousGameJonathan Whiting's comment
Intercontinental Drift Nice concept, well executed, and pretty amusing. After the first level or two it gets *very* hard though. No-touching is brutal with so many islands in play.
Islands of the Stone God Really great, highly original, atmospheric and fairly fun. Though I didn't feel especially compelled to replay, there's a grain of brilliance here. An impressive achievement in the timescale.
Gaiadi Superb start on a game. It's definitely going to be awesome *when* it's finished, but only moderately amusing at the moment.
A Fishing Adventure Found the lack of reset combined with fish dropping *highly* frustrating.. Which is a shame, because a lot of the rest was pretty excellent.
You are me now A nice, innovative, complete experience :) Superb music. <br/> <br/>The sluggish horizontal movement was a bit of a pain, mostly because it'd have been easily to fix. The back tracking would have been frustrating had the game been longer, but it rounded off at an appropriate time. <br/> <br/>Not really sure I understand the philosophical allusions, felt a bit unfocused to be truly meaningful. I'm just nitpicking though, it was great.
Paradise Fort A truly beautiful sim, but sadly a little let down by it's balance and lack of longer term objectives. <br/> <br/>Rather fiddly to get started with, and the depth I'd hoped would appear never really realised itself for me. For example the cannons were fiddly to setup, and then actually harder to use effectively than thrown items. Also having to manage the location of the pick axe so you don't accidently get yourself permanently stuck somewhere was frustrating too. <br/> <br/>Please don't get the wrong idea though, this was really great, and the nitpicks are only present because of how much was done perfectly. Also exteremely impressive for the timescale.
Beebop The Island Hopper Surprisingly compelling game mechanic, but I gave up in frustration on the second last island. The easier bits could/would work very well if combined with something else though, and it was pretty fun for a while.
Deep Under an Island Really attractive, a well realized and interesting concept. Only let down by the lack of sound and brevity. <br/> <br/>I'd of liked more of the level designs to involve moving through space your tail has previously been. The puzzles were perhaps a little apple+pellet heavy. <br/> <br/>Also, some of the pellets seem impossible to get? <br/> <br/>Still, pretty cool, enjoyed it :)
I HATE ISLANDS Genuine laugh out loud intro, pretty solid gameplay, and generally fun. Without at least some evidence to the contrary I just can't believe you made the music. You'd need a full band of session jazz musicians.
Nuclear Test Got a lot out of this The dull roar of the engines, blink inducing hallucinations, and the ending were all pitch perfect. I also particularly liked the way the gameplay encouraged a sort of phased out hyper-awareness that's familiar from long stints of motorway driving, seemed very apt. <br/> <br/>Didn't appreciate the parting theme stab though, felt needlessly bitter (critism deserved or not), and tarnished the preceeding endgame.
Conquistador The load-out was a little too complicated and didn't feel important enough. The events felt pretty brutal and arbitrary, without deep tactics.. Having said all that I did enjoy pottering about quite a bit, and there's a lot of potential here.
Turtle Ferry As beautiful as I've come to expect from you. Gameplay was well balanced, if not overly exciting. Bonus community marks for being our link to the Cambridge contingent.
Savory Sea Hoss Completely and utterly nuts, but in the great way.
Eden Island Can't rate highly because of the solo only thing. Still an interesting and engaging experiment though.
Tropical Islands of Doom Attractive, good work on the content. Did suffer a bit from the seemingly common unity "find x things" effect, but the inclusion of some platforming elements raised the gameplay a bit.
Monkey Islands Attractive, but sadly very little substance indeed.
Islands: Through the Sweep of Stars I love this, it was viscous, but clever enough for that to be forgiven, and seriously attractive. Really nice take on the genre... and really beautiful. Did I mention it looks great?
Eviction The bots single minded intrest in destroying your island rather than you made this more compelling than I'd feared it might be. Felt pretty tense towards the end. Nice graphics too. Preeety neat all round, despite feeling in desperate need of audio (have a look at getting as3sfxr going, once setup it's pretty much instant good sound effects for flash games).
Radio Silence Adored the atmosphere. It's a bit of the shame the gameplay wasn't a great deal more than "find the objects" but at least you did something cool with it. I loved the sea radio.
Island Hermit Hop! Incredible atmosphere, both graphics (animation aside) and sound worked incredibly together. The difficulty felt all-wrong to me though. First play, dived, caught a few shells, surfaced, tried to move forwards, found the locked door, backtracked, found shark lurking in shallows died, died, died, died, died, quit. Second play, hunted for key first, found it, drowned before surfacing. I persisted for a while longer, but the (often unfair) brutality just stripped the fun out of it I'm afraid.
Is Lands? I loved the whimsical feel of the plane, and the music, and the graphics.. Seemed pretty light on game though.
Pirate Panic Nice mechanics, well combined, good! Found the red guys behaviour a bit too hard to figure out to be able to puzzle my way around them without frustration. Also the elements weren't introduced in as structured away as I'd like, but that's pure nitpicking.
Island Rescue This has annoying similarities with a game I'm working on elsewhere &gt;_&lt; <br/> <br/>Ah well, nice concept (but I would think so), loved the sound, good graphics, and pretty fun. Thumbs up! <br/> <br/>I would say though that the two goals felt a bit contrary to each other, which gave the gameplay a faint dissonance I wasn't so keen on.
Capsize! feat Rep. Johnson vs. DJ Admiral Hah, well, it amused me :)
Iceland and the volcanic ASH of DOOM Rather awkward to control, but an amusing concept. Props for doing something different with unity :)
SautEUR The fish out of water mechanic was hilarious and brilliant. Very silly in very much the right way. The speed of the game, and enemy brutality made things a bit too hard to be enjoyable.
The Forgotten Isles The maze navigation mechanic was pretty tedious, and didn't seem to fit that well in the game. Which is a shame, because some of the other stuff you did (the water, story bits etc.) was quite interesting.
Baby Leviathan: Eat All Fishies The movement mechanic is fantastic, but very unsuited to the precision collection that makes up the goal of the game. Used in something with a more relaxed goal this could be beautiful.
Sheep are Flammable The dragon animation was excellent. The flight was pretty satisfying. Unfortunately the procedural island generation and sheep AI didn't really make themselves felt. Found out you could overtake your own breath which irritated me a little when trying to make high speed bombing runs. <br/> <br/>Still, pretty neat. Sort of reminded me of Magic Carpet
Island Conflict Liked the graphics and AI was pretty good for timescale. Only really let down by a lack of longer term strategic depth, and the clunky menu system. As xeon06 mentioned you can have inferred the actions, cut the menu entirely and ended up with a much better game. <br/> <br/>More than 2 players might have opened some extra depth up. <br/> <br/>Still, a good effort :)
Every Man Is An Island Cute, well realised, and enjoyable. A perfect example of how small but focused is a good approach to LD. Possibly a bit *too* small though.
Artifact Hunt Really very pretty graphics *and* sound (apart from the burp), especially in little details like the flying bird/s. Ultimately rather dull to play.
Island Balance Hah, well it was quite amusing, and certainly pretty great for a two hour trainwreck style thing. As so often with physics-y based things the simulation causes the gameplay to suffer significantly. It's just too hard to predict the causes+reactions to get all that much fun from it.
On an Iron Isle There was some nice touches here, but, GAH, the enemies are b-r-u-t-a-l! <br/> <br/>Liked what happened when I fell off the island. Didn't understand the pink things in the slightest. The death animation terrified me the first time I saw it.
Micro Silent Hunter Pretty interesting but very glitchy and hard to figure out.
Island of Darkness Played it anyway (just to spite you :p). Not nearly as horrible as you claim, it amused me briefly. Also, better attention to theme than a lot of people ;)
Tango Some nice stuff here, but yeah, not a game, barely "almost". Bit overambitious I expect :(
Simon Haigh's Pirates! Uhh, well, LD is a solo competition, you're meant to do all the art and music yourself (even if it hurts!). So this doesn't fall within the spirit or the letter of the rules. <br/> <br/>It's a shame though, because aside from that it is kinda cool.
Pirates Brilliant sprites. Gameplay balance seemed pretty good until you realise you can just sit on the treasure.
Waves Oh shit! Great use of level design to really pull the most of your games mechanics, something too often left out in short-timeframe games. Had quite a lot of fun with it.
WeComeFromTheSkies An impressive amount done in the time, if a little too unbalanced to be compelling for long. Played a couple of games though, failed to work out what to do the first time and lost, zerg *ahem* dragon rushed the second and won. Amusing enough.
Land Ho! Really liked this. <br/> <br/>The wind arrow felt the wrong way round to me (a headwind should have a downward arrow surely?) As someone who used to sail dinghies I found myself wanting a slightly harsher simulation. I loved that you short for something different though, and that you actually made a sailing game rather than a drive your boat around game. <br/> <br/>With a more involved world to explore and slightly refined physics there would be plenty here to act as a full game.
Coconuts Looks like it has the potential to be quite amusing played with others, but, yeah, requiring 3 players makes it rather hard to play. Loved the animation and sound though.
Islands in the Sky Fun, cute, didn't outstay it's welcome.
Needles The links are broken at the moment D:
Banana Joe Hardly innovative, but nicely cohesive. Noticed particularly good use of the bats in the level design.
Island Raiders Having problems running this (running "game.exe"), looks like python isn't finding the Ogre stuff: <br/> <br/>Traceback (most recent call last): <br/> File "game.py", line 7, in &lt;module&gt; <br/> import ogre.io.OIS as OIS <br/> File "ogreioOIS__init__.pyc", line 4, in &lt;module&gt; <br/> File "ogreioOIS_ois_.pyc", line 12, in &lt;module&gt; <br/> File "ogreioOIS_ois_.pyc", line 10, in __load <br/>ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found.
tailspin Once I stopped trying to land 'properly' (line up with run way, slow down etc.) this became fairly fun. Fuel reserved were punishingly small though.
Ascention A very interesting mechanic, but horribly unforgiving level design spoils it somewhat.
Arcipelago Surprisingly polished, especially the fancy intro screen. Not desperately exciting, but certainly fun enough. The level design frustrated me, a bit too much "guess what the designer was thinking" because you often couldn't see the next platform until it was too late.
Roach Route The shock was impressively, just that. Both attempts I died *very* soon after though, so if there was anything else to it it was lost in the difficulty curve. Excellent use of combined audio and graphics for the key moment.
Island Skate Delivery Boy Solid, and alright gameplay (if a bit too tough to read the level enough in advance), but not desperately exciting. A little music would have gone a long way.