IEatBabies's Reviews

[Turing Test]

Scarey concept!

Love your concept. Lots of hard work into the graphics and everything. Nice job!

Jimtopia responds:

Wow thanks very much. I honestly kinda wish I'd put more time in when it came to details but I appreciate the compliment nonetheless. ^_^

[guy walks on street...]

Ohoy!

Wonderful use of music and scene planning to create an enjoyable experience!

Sandremss128 responds:

sure :p, I hope one day I will learn how to work

['Rageous 7]

Love the art!

Great art guys! I'd love to be a part of a future collab. Great stuff!

[Run yagator Run!]

When you get hit

I think when you get hit you lose life or something but I'm not sure because if you go over 100% it stops happening.. Maybe make it so that the player graphic changes a little bit when you are hit?

At any rate, I really liked the music and it was pretty fun to watch and play regardless, nice work, keep working on it and make it into a really cool game! Don't stop here, keep expanding on it.

robextrem responds:

I'm going to make changes, you have very good points.
When you get touched, you lose points... bar is "running power" (when you press space and it´s 100%) Actually you never lose, until 2 mins are done, it's about get points, but I think I'm gonna make it a little more difficult.

Thank you for your review.

[Super Playboy]

I knew it had to be bood.

I just KNEW this game had to rock when I saw all the bad reviews it was getting.

It's an awesome game dude, the glitchy controlling only gets you a minus one in my books because: The art was awesome, the story WAS original, which is very rare on here. It wasn't typical newgrounds crap. And all the angry critical kids who review you here don't even listen to them.

Just because it has some bugs it doesn't demean this work at all. Its a great piece, hope you get the coding all down and fix up the bugs but honestly, nice work man. Nice gameplay, good concept, beautiful art, love the storyline and the comic-style.
Thanks for the game!

[Quick Sand]

Amazing!

What a GREAT game. !

[Greyscale Cloudwatching (Demo)]

Thanks

Thanks for the link to your flute sample.

Nice song. My advice would be if you are into song writing and you don't really do electronic music, there is not much need to try and be fancy with mixing and mastering. So as you know, you have drowned this in reverb. lol

My suggestion would be to not add ANYTHING at all and just enjoy song writing. Level the instruments to your liking, or pan them to your liking, and maybe add a 'touch' of verb to the master track to make it sound like your music is all being played in one place. But other than that don't stress yourself! :D

Lamplighter responds:

You're welcome for the sample.

And thanks for the tips! Most of what I'm doing now is just playing around, and I'm coming out with decent results. Thanks for the reverb tip, I don't know why I didn't do that here.

Thanks for the review sir, and please stay away from my future children!

[-_Breeze_-]

VnL

Very nice loop! ;D

Good work on that guitar. I like how it broke away with those gentle bell sounds somewhere around 50 seconds.

Don't worry too much about mixing and mastering lots of people think that's the focus of making music when they get into electronic and its the farthest thing from the truth. I've been mixing and mastering for 7 or 8 years and mostly every type of musician other than electronic focus on songwriting only and let OTHER people mix and master for them.

So if you feel like learning to mix and master is a hardcore chore that's because it IS. It takes YEARS to become /decent/ at it, let alone good. So keep focusing on the songwriting, and this is very beautiful songwriting :) And just learn mixing/mastering at your own leisure and don't worry about it despite the common critiques on sound quality and sample choices, etc.

[SplitPersonality - Voices (NG)]

Reading your list

I read your list of all the samplers and so on and so forth and this doesn't sound like you'd really need that much. I'm pretty sure you could accomplish the same thing with a drum machine and a single synth. And many fewer FX channels plus a master. If reverb for example shows up more than twice you probably should have sent it instead! ;D

This is a well mixed song, very professionally done. Its too bad it isn't mastered, it would sound absolutely pro if it was. You should have at least mixed the final version at 0db.

The song is very hyper/dance, space-racer type. Unfortunately I think it has a lack of melody or spirit. It has nothing to grab the soul. Its all energy with no spirit. The break down at 1:50 is a nice one. Your song structure is good insofar as progression goes, but emotionally, it leaves something lacking. I feel like I've heard this song a hundred times before in slightly different ways.

So here is my final breakdown and I apologize for being so critical because I am not any better than you by any stretch of the imagination:

Style/Originality: 1 - 0.
Mix: 10
Structure: 8
Emotional Impact: 3
Energy: 8 - 9
Dynamic: 5 (Some parts like the breakdown were very dynamic but the machine-gun dance stuff that made up the bulk of the song was tiring)

Conclusion:

You are a great electronic artist who has gained a very high level of skill at making electronic music, where you fall is it seems you have not spent as much time learning how to write songs themselves, that is, in the compartment of composing.

Solution:

One thing you could try is to start writing songs with MIDI. Don't worry about the sounds or samples or mixing, don't even touch the FX channels, just select for or five instruments with MIDI and start composing songs for the sake of songs, instead of the sake of sounds. Focus more on meaning than energy for a while so you regain that song-writing balance.

Then again I've only heard THIS song from you so I do not know whether or not this is typical of you, but most people who write this kind of music do seem to be stuck. Sorry if I was wrong and again always remember I am NO better than you. I give this critique to help you out if you didn't appreciate it I apologize greatly.

-IEB

Nav responds:

Lemme respond to each part individually. First, though, I'll say that I'm happy to finally receive a constructive review! They're the only way I can improve! :)

"I read your list of all the samplers and so on and so forth and this doesn't sound like you'd really need that much. I'm pretty sure you could accomplish the same thing with a drum machine and a single synth."

Well, to tell you the truth, I could do all that in a drum machine, DirectWave, but when I "get in the mood," the most intuitive thing for me is the Sampler. I really should get in that habit, though. However, I don't understand how I could do all of my synths with a single synth. I have a variety of different synths I used, and some are extremely hard to synthesize on other instruments. I need to tweak them how I want them :P

Also, I'm aware that I didn't have to use that many FX channels, but I did so that I have more visual control over what's going on, as well as more processing control. Also, I would've used sends, but I forgot until the end :S, and it was too late by then.

"This is a well mixed song, very professionally done. Its too bad it isn't mastered, it would sound absolutely pro if it was. You should have at least mixed the final version at 0db."

I did mix it to 0 db, I think. I would've done some home mastering, but I felt that it was fine as it was. I can always go back and do that later.

"The song is very hyper/dance, space-racer type. Unfortunately I think it has a lack of melody or spirit. It has nothing to grab the soul. Its all energy with no spirit."

That's really the genre part XD, check out my song "Space Sequence (Remix)" if you want emotional. No, this is hardcore. Hardcore is about energy, and nothing else. The obvious response would be "well just use 999 bpm then!!!" but the reason is that it's about perceived energy, which is created through use of virtual meters, and ascending elements.

"You are a great electronic artist who has gained a very high level of skill at making electronic music, where you fall is it seems you have not spent as much time learning how to write songs themselves, that is, in the compartment of composing."

I'll respond to this with the next section.

"One thing you could try is to start writing songs with MIDI. Don't worry about the sounds or samples or mixing, don't even touch the FX channels, just select for or five instruments with MIDI and start composing songs for the sake of songs, instead of the sake of sounds. Focus more on meaning than energy for a while so you regain that song-writing balance."

I've actually done that before. It's A LOT of fun! :) I've tried to recreate megaman styles. I did that mostly when I was designing music for small games that my friend made.

"Then again I've only heard THIS song from you so I do not know whether or not this is typical of you, but most people who write this kind of music do seem to be stuck."

Truth is: at the time I wrote this, I WAS stuck :(, I was really pressed for ideas. However, once this track was finished, my ideas slowly started to return. If you'll check out the two songs I submitted after this, Zdarkness and Space Sequence (Remix), you'll understand that this isn't my sole output, it's just one of my preferred listening genres because of it's high energy content. I can still appreciate, and even write different music :P

In conclusion:
- Review marked as helpful!
- Check out my other tracks! They're quite different.
- If you want, hit me up on AIM (NavAudio) or MSN ([e-mail]) and I'll send you the inspiration/genre on which this track was modeled. Genre is an important thing to take into account when reviewing!

Thanks for the review! :D

[The Place Under the Stars]

10

Lovely colors, beautiful composition. :)

[Page 2]

10

This is excellent. Wonderful work. And a great job!

[probably tomorrow]

Nice Drawing

Nice drawing, very expressive.~