I’ve decided to change my original mission ever so slightly. When I started this blog, I had guessed that I’d really only manage to get through 10 games a month but that quickly changed to 20 as I realised how much I enjoy it.
I’ve basically changed this again to a continuous cherry picking of releases. I’m no longer selecting titles exclusively from “Top games” either I now include “Top new games”. This is because it allows for a bit more variety and also smaller developers.
Announcement over.
The first videogame I ever played was Sonic the Hedgehog. I got it when I was five years old and had to get my mum to help me beat Robotnik at the end of the first stage. I was probably just exhausted from reading War and Peace or something.
My adoration of Sonic continued until he left the 2D realm. I’ve bumped into him a few times since then but each encounter has been profoundly embarrassing. Either he talks like an overenthusiastic idiot or the game has terrible controls or he kisses a human girl. It’s like bumping into an old friend, only to discover he’s developed an addiction to wood glue and he keeps trying to sell you tapes from his coat. It’s really embarrassing and tragic.
Thankfully, Sonic Fever Jump starts you off as Sonic’s mutant counterpart Tails. It came as a relief to me to find out that you actually never have to play as Sonic if you choose not to unlock him.
Sadly, this is a Sonic game with a nose blocked by hardened Glue and UB40 tapes falling from its sleeves. It’s a clone of the hugely successful Doodle Jump but interlaced with purchasable bollocks and interstitial adverts for more purchasable bollocks. Despite being a shameless copy of Doodle Jump, it lacks the sense of dread associated with losing because it’s sickeningly easy. This is due to the fact that you have to hit enemies from below instead of above which is the direction you’re travelling in anyway.
Room prices discounted when haunted by the ghosts of children who died when exposed to Sonic Fever Jump
It’s not all doom and gloom though, one the aspects I did enjoy for a few seconds was the ability to boost my score by flicking flickies into a basket at the end of each level. Although it’s probably just because I got to say “Flicking Flickies”in fact, that’s definitely the reason.
The game is riddled with the usual parasites of obnoxious ads, push notifications and purchasable tat. I can only assume that the popularity of this game is due to Doodle Jump coming out in 2009 which is five years ago. That’s a billion years ago to kids who just turned 6 and got a new device for their birthday. I bet kids don’t need their mum to help them beat the boss these days, but they will need her for the crippling despair they’ll experience after playing Sonic Jump Fever.
Transformers! Robots in disguise! Run forwards! Shoot your guns at guys! Transformers: Age of Extinction is an irritating movie game tie-in so I shouldn’t have had high expectations but it managed to disappoint me in basically every way imaginable. The core mechanic involves traveling along a straight road while several grey robots stand in your path. The way to deal with this threat is to either dodge them or shoot them. Oh and you can jump over barriers, like in the movies yeah? Remember those two-hundred roadblocks Optimus Prime has to jump over to save the earth?
It feels a lot like a tarted up version of game-and-watch and that’s not a compliment. It’s just so dull. I’ve played transformer games and mech games aplenty but usually there’s something worthwhile to prevent instantaneous loathing. I thought nostalgia might make me secretly enjoy it while I mocked it but nostalgia wasn’t enough to cover up the downright sloppiness of the game’s design. It’s a bore and it has all of the nuisances of games that typically squat at the top of the list: push notifications nag me to play it and you’re encouraged to spend money on worthless shit to boost your powers.
Pictured: A game better than Transforms: Age of Extinction
After about two minutes of churning through waves of generic enemies, you start to question if life is worth living. I wish I could transform. Maybe I could transform into a blender or an iron and get left alone in a cupboard somewhere. I could spend my time in blissful solitude, preparing food once a year like a sentient robotic Santa. I’d enjoy it even more if I could have the ability to turn other people into awful devices. If an old lady cut in front my at Lidl, I could transform her into a Samsung Galaxy Fame and cackle at her obsolescence.
One thing that also bewildered me was that I didn’t see any robotic dinosaurs in this game and I was hoping to see grimlock or at least something lizard-like. Why is it even called Age of Extinction? I imagine there are actually dinos if you stick with it but frankly I’d rather watch Jurassic Park and Short Circuit back to back. At least that way I wouldn’t wish I was a blender.
Actually, the single most disappointing part of this game is the transforming. You have the ability to turn into a car and they could have done loads with that mechanic. What they chose to do was make you go a bit faster. Oh, and if you have the cheek to get slapped by an enemy then you transform right back. It doesn’t feel even remotely worthwhile or fun to transform. It’s like the ability to do so was an embarassing afterthought. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be the coolest part of the whole game.
For an example of a game that does transforming well and is incredibly fun, pick up Future Cop: LAPD on the PSN or buy a PS1 and buy the disc off your gran. If the singleplayer campaign starts to feel a bit rough, try out a multiplayer game but on yer own, Sky Captain awaits.
Don’t install Transformers:Age of Extinction, it’s rubs.
Tiny And Big is a game which allows me to satiate my desire to use an incredibly powerful laser to dissect buildings and anything else which has wronged me.
The game focuses on the tale of Tiny, whose inherited underpants have been stolen by his nemesis Big for reasons known only to Big’s presumably warped mind. The first area in the game is a crater in which you’re given licence to learn how to properly carve stuff up and move rubble around to your advantage. You do so using a grappling hook and a portable rocket but the best bit is faffing around with the ultra powerful laser. You’ll quickly find that your cutting technique matches that of a toddler using his shoelaces to cut through play-doh and once the first level is done, the difficulty sharply increases. You’ll be forced to abandon your clumsy chopping in order to butcher the landscape with architectural finesse.
This needs to happen to every government building ever made.
It’s a game by Black Pants studios and on top of its fantastic fart-around physics and its pleasing comic book stylings it has an utterly smashing soundtrack. However, if you doddle around for as long as I did without collecting new song collectibles, those rather splendid tracks can start to get your dander right up.
The game is littered with collectibles and secret areas to reach, provided you have the skill to reach them. Manipulating the world can be a tough skill to master. Obtaining an out of reach item will depend entirely on your ability to slice and arrange your environment just so but it’s remarkably rewarding. Like spending 4 hours carving up a pumpkin only to find a wallet inside which you lost in 2003 and the cash is still there.
It’s only 7 british dollars (pounds) on Steam and can also be bought DRM free from a variety of sources on the dev’s website. Grapple shot it into your library or I’ll steal your grandfather’s underpants for my own purposes.
I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a Viking marauder. I wonder about it when I’m buying milk or trying on shirts. Sometimes I let out a little battle cry. Thankfully, Mount and Blade: Warband is at war-handand it is a glorious saxon of a game. On my first go I followed the game’s tutorial, purchased the deadliest hat and gloves that my ye olde groats could buy and recruited four stalwart warriors from the local idiot village. We had an unquenchable thirst for blood and cabbages and we launched ourselves at the first group of fools to cross our path. Sadly, we got our heads stoved in by their superior horses and pointier sticks.
Pictured: my army of ginger cabbage rustlers fighting at the beach desperately, trying to win before the sun comes back out
It’s been 4 years since the release of Paradox Interactive’s fantastic action RPG and though its graphics may show signs of age, it still plays like a dream. The combat is meaty and satisfying and there are a myriad of roles to play. Will you be a trader? A noble? A general? A pitiable cow thief? In summary, it’s bloody good fun, even before applying mods. After wiping the tears off my keyboard I decided to start again. One of the local barons tasked me with finding an outlaw. I cautiously trundled off to the village where he was last spotted, expecting an ambush only to find the buffoon hiding (I hope) behind a cottage. I removed his lungs and sauntered out of town, satisfied that I was finally a fierce warrior. Mount and Blade is tremendous. Your army and your nation will probably get burned and ransacked but you can do some ransacking of your own and everyone should get to see what it’s like to deprive a village of it’s cattle. Who needs milk anyway?
Criminal legacy is another gag inducing isometric shit-house with “build a criminal empire” as the shitty layer of paint hoping to disguise and profit from its shitty foundations.
I would have uninstalled it immediately if I had not blundered into an amusing situation where naming my criminal overlord “Nigel Farage” was considered profanity. If there is goodness in the world, this was an intentional fail condition and I am proud to have discovered it.
Name validation seems a bit hypocritical for a game about criminals. Why on earth can’t my criminal be called Fucknuckle, Shitears or Twatknees? Also, as soon as you progress to the next stage, you knife several prison guards so hard that they evaporate. A name has never killed anyone. Actually, they depressingly have I suppose.
Anyway, back to the game – After his dramatic escape, Nick Clegg took off for some drag racing but at first he had to build a car park. I’d like to think this is how the real clegg lives his life, first he helps some homeless people and then he smother a nun. He’s a boring schizophrenic two-face who has to pursue both good and evil to achieve a position of absolute neutrality.
Sadly, Nick’s neutral neuroses didn’t maintain interest long enough to discover if the rest of the criminals in the game ever realise that building amenities like carparks actually benefits society, even if you do race cars in them. Surely if you own it, you could actually close it and host legal races? I didn’t want to continue just in case my imagined dramatic revelation where Nick points out his new dream of becoming a liberal politician alienates and disenfranchises his criminal buddies.
This game is a Chilean Pyura, it’s pretty dammed awful, verging on inedible but damned if it isn’t at least thought-provoking.
I suspected 8 Ball Pool would be notoriously difficult to write about, what with pool being so devoid of skill that it’s not even shown on a dated media formats like television. A game that literally anyone with legs can play. Speaking of legs, I wonder if disabled people enjoy pool. They must do, because demand for pool games can’t just come from moon worshipping maniacs.
Aim stick, adjust stick power and hit sphere into pocket. Man what a thrill. How do sports games manage to innovate time and again? After the pointless tutorial I was tossed into an online 1v1 tournament against my will. The pace of the transition was almost too much for me and with my opening shot I scattered the orbs all over the table, it was chaos. I had managed to pot 2 globes of both suits.
I took a breather, things were getting intense. My opponent “guest 3678555” turned out to be as conniving as her name suggested. In my exhaustion, I had failed to notice that she had in fact taken her turn and my own turn time was almost up! I panicked and fired at random using maximum thrust, resulting in a potting of an ovoid for each team.
Staggered by my unexpected semi-competence, my opponent placed the cue ball into the regulatory rectangle and pondered for half of her allotted time (as per international pool pondering guidelines). Finally she lined up a shot… she was going to pot the black! She wiggled the cue back and forth, was this an intimidation tactic? Was it bravado? Was she going to bring the game to a dramatic climax and suddenly force her own loss?
First rule of pool: Don’t pot the cue ball
Second rule of pool: No giant disembodied fingers allowed.
No.
She was communicating with me. She was demonstrating just how tedious videogame pool is by threatening to liven it up… by losing.
She was right of course. And as she somehow missed and my turn arrived, I realised that I had downloaded a game that was more pointless than Bill Gates’ overdraft facility.
Don’t play this game. Don’t even play it if you like pool. Go and play pool for god’s sake, at least you’ll be within range of a reasonable amount of alcohol and someone who can chuck you into a ambulance if you collapse from despair.
8 ball pool is a packet of peanuts from a pub. Dry, stale and typically only enjoyable when heavily inebriated.
Dino Hunter is a rather pleasant game where one hunts prehistoric beasts with increasingly more blistering blunderbusses. Jolly good! Actually it’s modern rifles and weapons but I think I can forgive that so long as I get to unlock a flamethrower or rocket launcher at some point.
I’m all for shooting velociraptors in the dome, I’ve had nightmares about the bloody things since I saw Jurassic park at age 6. The evil things are fear incarnate. They aren’t slow like zombies or absurdly fictional like vampires or student loans. They can think and move insanely fast. They can leap over buildings and even open doors. Oh and if that wasn’t enough, they hunt in packs, so if one doesn’t get you its friend will.
Check to your left damnit, CHECK TO YOUR LEFT.
The levels consist of brief challenges where you have to bump off various dinosaurs using modern military instruments of death. You get to upgrade your weapons in a number of ways and the goal is to aim for the soft spots or the scalp before they flee or separate you from your digestive tract.
It’s simple and effective, if you get eaten you’re treated to a minor bollocking and you use up one of your turns. There’s only a limited amount of turns or “energy” each day which is not unusual for free games and could be considered quite bloody annoying if you were in any way irritable but it’s preferable to adverts I beleaguredly suppose.
My one point of concern is that some of the herbivorous dinosaurs would rather run away than attack you which puts you in an awkward situation where your only option is to shoot the poor creature in the rectum. This awkwardness is in turn compounded by a Sniper Elite style bullet cam which follows the bullet as in enters the animal’s small intestine.
I didn’t sign up for this.
I don’t mind killing the carnivorous ones because they’re dangerous and terrify me. And don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see other dinosaurs that I recognise (shout out to you Mildred) but killing the smaller, tamer dinosaurs that run away and squeal in terror feels unnecessarily monstrous and barbaric, much like stomping on snails in your back garden while laughing maniacally.
Just to hammer the point home, I enjoyed this game a great deal was thrilled to finally play a game that made good use of my phone’s good specs so I’m possibly biased but daaaamn, this game looks good.
Dino Hunter is a delicious steak sandwich. It’s tasty and lovely and I’d serve it to my friends anytime. Bravo good sirs!
I’ve only recently become aware of the Kardassians and that’s because I don’t get exposed to gossip magazines like the Daily mail and the only celebrity I care about, is Barack Obama.
Pictured.
Luckily it’s made pretty clear in this game that Kim Kardashian is a celebrity charity worker who takes aspiring stars out of their weary retail pogroms into the normalcy of a celebrity lifestyle.
More unbelievable than your fashion sense? Ohhhh sick burn!
After day 1 of working at a regular Hollywood fashion outlet, my character “Arsecalendar” met Kim Kardashian. Kim, appalled by the barbarity of this life immediately invited Arsecalendar to a photo shoot in order to boost her rep. I was a little annoyed that Arsecalendar shamed herself by scrounging money from the ground at every given opportunity. It felt especially embarrassing when Kim was around because although I know that she would not judge me, I knew that it was not appropriate to scrape coins out of peoples vases and plants while I was in the presence of someone so important. Thankfully, Arsecalendar was also to do this via telekinesis. Everyone knows that to even touch physical money is frowned upon in enlightened society.
I progressed a little further but like I really struggled with all the work that’s required as like an A list celebrity. I mean like, it’s just sooooo difficult. I even asked my parents if they’d help me out but they tried to get me to see a psychiatrist again. Oh. My. God. They are just like so insensitive, it’s like they don’t even realise how hard I have it so I decided to move out and stay in our breach house for a little while until they give me the respect I deserve. Gaaawd.
I imagine that Kim primarily provided her name to this game in order to make a little money but I don’t think it’s outrageous to think that on some level she actually believes that it’s possible achieve her level of gormless indirect fame by meeting a celebrity in a shop and then simply dressing to impress.
I find it a bit sad that this boring Kardashian simulator is actually a much more pleasant version of the Kardashian’s presumably unbearably monotonous and self-absorbed reality. It makes me extra sad that anyone could tolerate more than 3 minutes of this farce of a game.
Him Hardassian Hollywood is a burger from a billboard. It looks edible but it’s actually 90% toxic plastic and 10% gas.
I was expecting Angry Birds Epic to be the same “Angry birds” I played and have avoided since 2011 but surprisingly it turned out to be an RPG in the style of Battleheart. This is great! Sort of. I kind of wanted it to be a mildly altered Angry Birds. Part of the catapult-em-up allure is the lovely physics and that’s gone out the window in favour of turn-based RPG drudgery.
It’s got polish but there’s nothing thrilling about the new direction. It’s a numbingly tame RPG and it’s decidedly non-epic. This is presumably to avoid scarring children for life with excitement or to avoid scarring advertising partners for life by introducing some kind of challenge.
Innovative RPG gameplay! well… the same gameplay as every RPG
The inclusion of “rage chilis” is another thing which irritated me. Me, cheery, non-complacent, happy-go-lucky old me. Eating the chilis is supposed to boost the power of the birds because… spicy foods = power I suppose. However, the reason chilli peppers are spicy to our mammalian palates is to discourage us from eating them. Chili plants actually want birds to eat them because birds can’t taste the spice and then the birds will carpet-bomb-shit out those seeds over a wide area. What I’m saying is, birds couldn’t taste the damn peppers. I’m sure Rovio will realise this and patch it soon though. They wouldn’t want to look like idiots would they?
There’s certainly lots of the usual boring RPG faff in this game. There’s collectible tat, critical hits, mages but who has the patience for the repetition huh? You? Your mates? Noel Edmonds? Personally, after battle 3, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see the enemies. I don’t want to waste my time organising the minutia of a battle. I want to be the emporer penguin commanding platoons of… birds over a minefield assaulting an enemy nest castle. That would be epic.
I want too much I think, clearly the game is aimed at the millions of drooling infants who are already besotted with the franchise. You can get angry birds soap, angry birds toothpaste. I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find angry birds vegetable oil at this point.
I don’t know if I hate this game enough to truly slate it and it wouldn’t make bugger all difference to anybody if I did so… good work Rovio, you untouchable goliaths. Consider yourselves told. By me. One man. With my blog and smattering of subscribers. Yeah, just you try and win me back (I will accept cash bribes of any amount).
Angry Birds Epic is the gazpacho soup of games. It’s wholesome, probably good for you but it’s actually fairly unpleasant and in dire need of a kick.
This bird’s face sums up how I feel about this game.
I know that town building games are popular right now but I before I started this process, I didn’t expect for so many of the top games to be so bloody similar. Hay day is another naff isometric building game where you stupidly try to build up a farm from nothing, as tediously as possible.
There are good reasons to avoid building your farm in the middle of nowhere on a field full of rocks. Agricultural reasons, financial reasons, logical reasons. The goal of this game though, is to defy all these reasons and build a farming empire from shit and boulders.
I got as far as raising 3 chickens. I’d be a terrible farmer. All the competition and manual labour. Also, I really hate scarecrows telling me what to do.
Or else it gets the hose again
After realising that this was another one of these types of boring bait-and-switch games and then trying to bite my hands off in despair, I played the game for a few minutes to find specific things to poke holes in and my first task involved swiping to harvest some crops – I said to myself “Oh, they’re going to involve some unique mechanics for each task … maybe this game will be different and instead of spending purchasable coins, I’ll be able to complete tasks with a sort of miniature version of manual labour.”
That button should say “uninstall immediately”.
Since this was the first screen displayed to me, I didn’t really think that pay-to-play was off the table but I did genuinely think that maybe I’d be able to perform tasks with a variety of gestures. What an optimistic buffoon I was!
Yes, I am a dreamer. The “swipe to do stuff” action is the same action for everything. Swipe to feed the chickens. Swipe to paint the barn. Swipe cover up an industrial accident. Swipe to assassinate the belgian health inspector. Swipe to join the choir invisible. Wait, where’s swipe to uninstall?
I didn’t actually give the game the usual 5 minute minimum playing time. I kept hitting connection errors and getting booted out of the game, what a bastard I am! Trying to play the game offline! Do I want the developers to starve just because I am not within range of a wifi hotspot? Yes. That’s exactly what I want. Developers of these games are human leeches… for money, or… a better analogy.
I did try to reconnect a few times, but it didn’t checkpoint frequently and I had to repeat a bunch of monotonous chores and barely avoided headbutting my phone into a thousand shattered fragments in frustration. It wasn’t worth the effort, much like real farm work.
Don’t play Hay day if you like enjoying yourself.
Hay day is a pineapple. It is bloody difficult to consume without a bit of background help, it’s a big nuisance and even if it seems kind of sweet, it’s eating you inside.
A man sits down to play a new game, he dislikes it and decides to download another. Same game, different name. He repeats this eight times, trying game after game from the top of the Google play store. Something snaps. The man takes his shirt off and runs at full pelt into his desk. He damages his torso on a stapler and bites his coworkers when they try to help him. Security drags him out of the building as he kicks and screams incoherently about forests and “fucking shitty match 3 puzzle horse shit”. He is later sent to an institute for mentally impaired individuals. He spends the rest of his life bouncing off the walls. Howling “I’m not crazy, it’s everyone else! Match 3 match 3 match 3. Bwagahaha”.
It’s a common affliction. Thousands of people are diagnosed with matchthrobia every year and the only cure is 5 years in an Amish community or death by snakes.
This entire genre is beginning to ruffle my petticoat. Parents want something nice for their kids to play? If they’re smart enough to use a phone or tablet, they’re smart enough to appreciate a good game. Give them Tetris or Abe’s Odyssee or something that builds and challenges their mind without being so damn nauseatingly mushy. This is the sort of game that makes people think that they have the spirit of a fox inside them. The kind of game that turns people into pony worshipping eunuchs.
Case in point.
If I have to play one more match 3 game, I’m going to have to become a eunuch myself. No child deserves to be brought into a world where match 3 games are the predominant genre in the top 10. No child deserves a bucolic father who won’t stop complaining about match 3 games.
Those are NOT orangutans.
Forest idiots is a crap game for babies and simpletons.
If it were a food, it would be liquorice. It’s nasty over-microwaved goat puke which is mistakenly in the same place as lovely nice sweet things.
This game took me by complete surprise. It defies the current trend of coloured block games and architecture simulators by being a game about murdering little men in a certain order without one of them witnessing another’s murder or death. If you mess the order up and kill only 4 out of 6, you lose.
It’s entertaining enough actually, planning it so that one man opens a window after being awoken by a radio, only to have the window amusingly decapitate him and have his head fall into the pool. The goal is to get the head to fall into the pool while it’s unoccupied so that you can turn on the pool jets to launch the decapitated head through the bathroom window at high speed, killing a bathroom urinater. Glee.
Added bonus, I think I just invented the word “urinater”.
It’s not a game that commands your attention for long. Once you figure out the plan, the game is over. There’s a macarbe joy in messing it up though and having the little stick men scramble away in fear as a little stick skull lands next to them. It’s not a deep game, not challenging or even particularly inventive but it doesn’t matter. It’s still a laugh. It’s alright. Calm down you’re making a scene. Let go of my arm, you’re hurting me. CALL THE POLICE!
The artistic style hasn’t changed from what I remember of the browser based stick man games from a trillion years ago actually. It looks kind of low quality but it seems intentional and in fact more detail would be unnecessary for what the game attempts to achieve. It’s like a lazy 5 minute hitman game.
Stick man click is without a doubt a ready salted packet of two own brand crisps. Bland, devoid of nutrients, not enough to sate hunger, but a nice little nibble even if people say it’s bad for you and you’re embarrassed to eat them on the bus.
Games Whinge 