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Red Ninja Productions released Pling Plong just a few days after his previous title, Greeny, but there's a world of improvements exhibited. Greeny was a fairly solid beginner platformer that was hampered by some shoddy graphical presentation and bland gameplay. Pling Plong is still nowhere near ledgendary greatness, but its fairly clever level designs, colorful graphics, and moderately entertaining gameplay make it a very nice timewaster.
In Pling Plong, you play a little red ball. Like most little red balls, you tend to bounce off things, and in a world full of spikes and evil faces, that can be more of a curse than a blessing. Luckily, you have the inexplicable ability to control your movements, and even momentarily defy gravity (aka, use arrow keys to move and the 'x' button to "brake"). For the most part, the game's bouncing and gravity physics work, and don't cause too much strife. However, unlike Greeny, Pling Plong can be fairly difficult, and the first level is hard enough that some people might be put off of the game. Which is a shame, because Pling Plong doesn't really hit its stride until a few levels in, where the room design actually becomes fairly clever and creative and the game ceases to be a chore. It's also unfortunate that soon after this, it ends (with narry a finishing screen or highscore list).
Sound...well, there isn't any. Not even any upbeat Mario re-mixes this time around.
The overall design of Pling Plong closely mirrors that of Greeny, and utilizes the same autosave function (which I never ended up using since the game is so short). It's simple and well-thought-out. However, unlike Greeny, there are no in-game tutorials, and only someone familiar with yoyogames would know to press the f1 key to access instructions (which are fairly hard to understand. I assume English is not Red Ninja's first language).
Graphically speaking, as I already mentioned, Pling Plong looks pretty good. It's simple and colorful, but there are no Greeny-esque disappearing characters or strange color choices. It's clean, easy to look at, and functional. Props to Red Ninja for fixing one of the problems with his first game. The quality of the sprites themselves could, of course, be improved, but we can't all be great artists. And Pling Plong succeeds with its visuals, because they never interfere with the gameplay.
Overall, Pling Plong is a noticeable improvement on Greeny. It's still not an amazing game, but it's fun, and sparks of creativity in the level design make me think that Red Ninja has potential. However, Pling Plong is still short of 4 stars, and since yoyogames doesn't allow decimals in its ratings, I'm forced to give it the same score I gave Greeny: 3/5
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