FatSatan's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[I Hate America]

Don't lump everyone together.

As a European I can probably take a more sobered view at this than Americans. However, you seem to be claiming the moral high ground here while you're lumping all of America together as a nation of egomaniacal murderers. The fact is that George W. Bush and his administration have started the ridiculous "War on Terror" (note to prez: "Terror" is not a Middle-Eastern nation), not "America". There is plenty of intelligent criticism to deliver in the face of the instigators - the use of cruel weapons like landmines and cluster bombs, the insane media coverage that replaced the horrors of war with more politically correct terms like "collateral damage", the stubborn refusal to understand that, not unlike East-Asia (Vietnam), the Middle East is a completely different culture, if not a different world than the West - but you chose the easy way out: calling the lot of them killers and hitting below the belt. There is no doubt that there have been horrible crimes against humanity over the past two years from both sides, and most of them will never see the light. And sure, there are Americans who will blindly side behind their president or even see the situation as you describe it, that whatever lies outside their borders is inferior and insignificant. But don't just lump everyone together. That's just... dumb.

[The Void II]

Oh my B!!@!

That was truly magnificent. Fifen to the max! Could've used a few more sound effects to accentuate certain stuff though, and why no subtitles? Did they push the filesize too high? Anyway, you are an amazing artist. Rox!

[LOTRTehFellowship Prelude]

Funny, but poor quality sound.

A funny take on the LotR intro. Stuff like the ominous view of the veggie clocks, Mount BLAM!, Olskooldor, all made me grin. But two things kinda ruined the movie for me. To a lesser extent, the graphics. While your drawings were pretty good and set the mood, they would've really been complimented by some nicer effects, like some of the other clocks have done (ie, OrangeClock). Second and big downer, the narrator voice. Lisping, way too soft, way too monotone (you should've closely listened to the real movie intro with Galadriel's voice so you could at least simulate the emotion and get the syllables right), and almost whiny. If there weren't any subtitles I wouldn't have a clue what you were saying. Try and work on that in the future, please.

[Rockman Neo]

The definition of cool.

What's there to say? Awesome style, great choice in music, unique character designs, flashy, exciting, plain cool. I may have missed when you answered this, but ARE you ever planning on doing a series or full cartoon about this, or did you just want to create a trailer with no follow-up?

[The Dr. Wily Show]

Great stuff.

The simple drawings are really effective, and any Megaman fan can recognize the robot masters. The voices are great, their comments funny, excellent work.

[The Picard Song]

hahaha.

Yeah, the song was already hilarious, but you did a great job complimenting it with stuff relevant and simply random. Made me laugh.

[Bob the Ball]

Cool stuff.

Now there's something you - or at least, I - don't see on NG everyday. Original idea, funny execution. When the pirates showed up and I saw their swastikas I automatically said "...NAZI pirates." along with the narrator. Hilarious, hope to see more like this.

mlaskaris responds:

Thanks for the review! You may want to check out my website if you're looking for more like this...

You're the FatSatan from I-Mockery? Cool. I admire your work.

I'm going to check out Fragile-Minds now...

-mlaskaris

[Super Mario Reloaded]

Insane.

I must admit, at the start of the movie I felt a growing dislike. I'm far from a hater of sprite movies, but the constant extreme close-ups made it tough to see more than great moving blocks without concentrating. The lip-sync was spot on though, and the recreation of the scene where Smith approaches Neo was so accurate that it didn't bother me much. Then the fighting started, and for a while I was mostly annoyed by the loud, repetitive sound effects and the fact that it seemed to be only sprites punching and kicking each other over and over again. I think it was around the point where Smith/Luigi takes over the other agent/Toad that I really started getting blown away. I watched the Matrix:Reloaded just yesterday, so the Burly Brawl scene was fresh in my mind, and here I could really tell you recreated the whole thing as close to flawlessly as you can get using Super Mario World sprites. Absolutely stunning detail. If I'd have any criticism, it would be that the sound effects could've been a little softer to allow the music to shine through, maybe a few more different sound effects (though, you probably wanted to use only Super Mario World sounds), and more of those little jokes like the score counts, the other SNES characters watching the screen, and so on. Anyway. Crazy work, right here.

[Bass' Revenge 5]

Shows definite talent.

To get the negative stuff out of the way; in the whole, this series has some weak points. The grammar errors (missing capital letters and punctuation marks, mostly) in the dialogue get a little annoying at times. Whether or not a character is going to open his mouth when he talks seems entirely up to whether or not you have sprites of that character talking. Which brings me to my second point; I didn't see any customized sprites whatsoever (aside from Public Domain stuff), and some situations could've really benefitted from some altered sprite work. Then, there's the mixing of bittages and sprite resizing. I'm not too picky when it comes to that, but when a Rockman & Forte Megaman flies a Megaman Power Battles Rush and transforms into a Megaman 7 Super Adaptor Megaman, it's getting out of hand. Usually the idea with sprite movies is to recreate the gaming experience, and when everything looks different that doesn't work out. This too could've been solved largely by customizing sprites. Lastly, jerky animation. Roll's head bobs up and down when she blinks, Wily's hair changes color when he talks, and Duo actually flashes colors when he's idle. I assume you used "trace bitmap", but I'm thinking that you perhaps didn't cut all the sprites from the same sheet. I think that when all the sprites aren't traced from one image file, their sizes and colors can start to vary. My suggestion is that next time, you save your sprites as animated GIFs with transparent backgrounds. Import them into Flash, and they're immediately lined up right.

Now, don't yell at me yet, I just wanted to get all that out of way. As you can see I did give you a decent score, because what is clear from your movies is that you have a good deal of cimenatic skill and talent. In fact, stuff like the attack of the Bass clones reminds me to a lesser extent of the style of Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom, and though I loathe DBZ-style anything, the final Bass/Megaman showdown was really stylish. And your attention to detail in music and sound was top notch. Thumbs up. I think that you could score some even bigger hits if you found someone to collaborate on movies with; someone to keep the grammar in check, make new sprites when you need them, and fix other such small flaws. Good luck with it. Regardless of my criticism, again I say: you have a great sense of cinematic style.

CheveLoco responds:

Well the srpite thing first, i am not a big sprite customizer. I am no Randy Solem or Paul ter Voorde(the mario reloaded guy)i am very inexperienced when it comes to that,this is just my second sprite series, before that i had no idea at all of how sprite animation worked. And i did try getting someone to do some custom sprites for me and they didnt convince me(not all the frames, details i didnt like here and there) i waited and looked for them for around 3 weeks and nothing, So what would u preffer? a half assed looking 32 bit megaman or sacrifice some graphic quality and go with the 16 bit one that has all the frames i needed for my battle?...yep i thought so..i wasnt going to be waiting months to get a sprite sheet when i dont have a lot of free time cuz of college and my job. And believe it or not,all the frames you mentions were cut from the same sprite sheet, Wily's hair, well blame it on whoever did the custom spritting,like i said i wanted to take advantage of having some free time. And i try hard to animate the sprites, you know how hard it is to animate a running animation?..it's not like the frame line up easily into place. This are not mario frames that consist of 2 or 3 frames per animation. Some of these had around 16 frames, not an easy thing and can get to be annoying. I may be a rookie when it comes to sprite movies but i know that it is IMPERATIVE that you resize all the frames needed, all at the same time so they will all be the same size.The grammar thing, well i cant say anything about that except that i know it sux :P. I'm glad u liked the style of the movie, hopefully you'll review my future projects and maybe you'll see some improvement. Thanx

[Storytime with Tony Danza]

Nice impersonation...

You had a pretty convincing Tony Danza impersonation there... but really, that character you drew looked nothing like him. Still funny though.