Customer Reviews

Flash 5 Cartoons and Games f/x and Design

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I wrote my original review I criticized this book for extremely sparse games coverage. IMHO, those folks who are praising this book for its games coverage either a) have not read the book or b) are affiliated with it in some way!

Just ask yourself, Is coverage of two games enough? I think not!

The book I'd recommend for Flash games development (in addition to Flash 4 Magic) is Flash 5 Actionscript for Fun & Games by Gary Rosenzweig.

With 17 chapters, 11 of which cover an average of 3 games each, this book has something for everyone. No matter what type of Flash game you want to create this book can help you get started!

And, if you want to learn Cartooning you may want to check out Flash 5 Cartooning.

I hope this review will save a future Flash artist some time. I read the reviews for this book and "Flash 5 Cartooning". I wanted personal experience, so I went to a local store and read through both. I basically looked for things such as Flash fundamentals, reader-friendliness, use of examples, instruction style, and learning material on the CD-ROM. I overwhelmingly preferred (and bought) this book. I found it to be a very informative and readable title. I agree with the Amazon reviewer that this is THE BEST Flash 5 cartooning book. The contributors list reads like a "who's who" in Flash expertise. I can't guarantee your personal preference between this book and others, but I can guarantee that this is an excellent book for learning cartoon AND game creation skills for Flash.

This is a really good book for those who know how to use flash. It's not for beginners for sure but there are many others out there for that. The adventure game covered is truly amazing. I had no idea until reading this book that you could do that in Flash. Like an earlier review I was a little disappointed that the other games did not have the FLA files. However the FLA files that are included will take me some time to digest and could be used in othere situations. Being a decent still artist but confused animator I found the mannequin system supplied on the CD to be very helpful. After setting it up I simply draw over the mannequins with my own character and it works perfectly. Very innovative approach to learning human movement. Thanks guys!!!

On the lower right corner, on the back cover of this book, you will find a small yellow panel announcing that this book is for intermediate to advanced Flash users. If you are new to ActionScripting, wait until you are much more familiar with it to purchase this pricey tome. Written in a soothing informal tone, the co-authors walk the reader step-by-step through the very beginning nuances of the game scripting, explaining each in detail. This is nice even for someone with an intimate knowledge of scripting, as a game vehicle may be new territory.
But then suddenly, and without warning, despite words of encouragement and promises of clarity, the reader is left with no direction, and only a CD-ROM and a tangled web of scripting left to pull apart. A more moderate explanation throughout the entire process would have been much more helpful; the beginner/expert switch in the middle of a project is more than a little disheartening.
Despite the odd art and the organizational letdowns, I still found this book inspirational.

I am normally a very slow reader. I only read quickly with the rare book that I thoroughly enjoy, and will use to the fullest extent. Flash 5 Cartoons and games provided this criteria, and i finished it in a week. It is simply amazing. It was everything I was looking for to get me started into advanced Flash use, and amazing cartoon animation. The authors even provided a CD-ROM to go along with this superb book that gives detailed examples, including games, .flas to play around with, and .swfs to watch and enjoy...it even included an entire music video featuring a pelican singing about pollution! All made with flash.This book is well worth the price and then some!

When I saw this book I grabbed it and ran with it! Cartoons and games covered in a single Flash book! Wow!

My first disappointment was when I realized that there are only two games covered in the book, Trivia and Adventure. C'mon guys, Flash is a wonderful environment for board games, arcade action games, word games, puzzle games, sports games, etc. There is not nearly enough games coverage in this book to warrant the word "Games" in the title.

Oh, and don't be fooled by the list of Flash games included on the CD. Although the CD includes some impressive Flash games like SporeCubes, Ultimate Nine Ball, Flash Golf, Arcade Animals and Field Goal Frenzy you do not get source code (FLAs) for these, none of them are discussed in the book and all are readily available as a fast and free download on the net. Including games like these in the text along with source code would have made this a good book on Flash games.

On the cartooning side its clear the authors know quite a bit about this subject. However, even in this area I found a lot of cartoon/animation instructions that can be found in many art books. There was not enough "how to do it in Flash" for my tastes.

All in all I would probably still buy this book even knowing what I now know because there are a lot of valuable nuggets in there. However, it could have been much better.

If you only want to buy one book on Flash games try Flash 4 Magic. It covers 6 different types of games in only 1/3 of the book!

I also went to the local bookstore and compared this book with "Flash 5 Cartooning". The amount of information, style, image and drawing quality in "Flash 5 Cartooning" far superior. So do your homework, before rushing to buy this book.

I was only interested in the cartooning aspect of this book, not in the games design, so I cannot comment on that part of the book because I did not read it. On the cartooning side, to me it appears as if this book assumes that the reader is already a Flash maven, but that he knows little to nothing about animated cartoon production. I believe that many of us who were seeking a book like this are in the opposite situation. This book mostly provides an overview of Flash 5 cartoon creation, with very little step-by-step "how to do it in Flash" instruction. It does include quite a lot of information on the methods of animated cartooning: however, there are already many books out on this subject (my favorites are the animation art books from Walter T. Foster, and "Animation in 12 Hard Lessons" by Bob Heath). But if you ARE a Flash maven who knows little to nothing about animated cartoons, this might be the book for you!

Look at the prices. Even a used a copy of this book is expensive today (2007), five years after it was current. Flash has moved on from version 5 to 6 (MX) and 7 (MX 2004) and now 8, but these tutorials are still relevant and instructive. Most of the ActionScript used in the examples is still current (not outdated or deprecated), and you can easily open the .fla files on the CD and modify them for your needs.

I had a couple of personal peeves about this book. 1) Its manufacture and illustrations are unattractive. The cover is easily dogeared and the perfect binding does not look long-lived. I really hate the drawing style used for the main animation examples (a duck called Weber, drawn in a style that makes me think of the cruder strips in Viz), though these examples are very useful and do the job. 2) There is almost no Richard Beazley work in the book, and no Beazley working files on the CD. Beazley, a veteran animator who draws in a Ronald Searle-derived style, is featured on the cover. A few .swf files from his 'Edwin Carp' cartoon are included on the CD, and they are nice-looking but not worth the price of the book. I felt that inclusion of Beazley among the authors, with his Edwin Carp character on the cover, was a unfortunate instance of bait-and-switch.

That's enough whining. The book does the job.

You will need a good grip of the functions of Flash 5 to use this book, but it is well worth it. This book takes the mystery out of how to utilize the Flash 5 actionscript to create terrific games and cartoons..... a great book for getting started on a very ambitious Flash game or cartoon project... mine's already in the making!