Shelter

Shelter is a third person badger simulator from Might and Delight and it’s a game which requires you to act as mother to five cubs: protecting them, feeding them and guiding them to safety. It’s more linear than I had expected but the unusual subject matter and pastel palette make it a feast for the eyes and the noggin. The drama of the story has driven me to write an open letter to one of its characters.

 

To Spiky, of the badger family:

Spiky, you were not my favourite of the litter. However, you made it clear that you were a badger with survival instincts. You did not wince when Stripey was battered against rocks by the river’s current. You did not mourn when a hawk’s talons snatched Spotty. You cried out only when your belly craved more turnips with which to fatten yourself.

Spiky, this planet does not support sufficiently large ecosystems to satisfy such a turnip lust. Even as the forest burned and our family dwindled I fed you. I had to, you were the only cub left and your greedy little whelps distracted me from the grief.

When the hawk came for me. I knew you would not help. You hid your engorged belly as best as you could among the grass and ignored my struggle out of cowardice. You left me to die.

My only solace is knowing that your overeating will lead you to some form of badger diabetes and you will likely die hungry and doubtless, alone.

Your mother,

John Hendry

Shelter is a beautiful game. It’s reminiscent of The Animals Of Farthing Wood in its brutality and its charm. I highly anticipate seeing more from Might and Delight. It’s available from the their website or can be added to your sett on Steam.

AdVenture

Good Wednesday whinge fans. Today’s game to gripe about if AdVenture from Kongregate.

It’s a cynical game about acquiring money by buying businesses, that’s really all you do. You buy a business, it acquires money, you buy more. Capitalism! I rather like it, it’s taken the farmville/mafia wars/clash of clans genres and boiled them down to a few taps. Pleasingly, the conceit of multiplayer has evaporated and micro transactions only bubble up once.

These loading bars are more fun than 95% of the android games I've played. No joke.

There’s considerable satisfaction to be had filling those money bars, getting multipliers and hiring managers to eliminate the need to tap but the caveat is that the fun plateaus rapidly. Once you own all the businesses and you’re earning billions a second, there’s nothing to do. There’s always more to earn and goals to reach but there’s not much incentive to continue. Would you keep your job at the local mule food factory if you won all the mule food you could gargle? I doubt it.

It is nicely designed, it’s engaging at the start but it has nothing to keep you interested. I’d prefer a communism simulator, where you get a fixed sum of money and try to divide it equally among the populace while secretly funding your private mansion and sending any detractors to the pogroms.

Dosvidanya.

Monument valley

Apologies to any devout readers but Monument Valley isn’t free. I typically only review android games that are but I did get this game free a few weeks ago in a sale, so technically I’m not breaking the rules. Take that, my own principles!

Monument Valley is a puzzle game based on the artistic stylings of M.C Escher. I want to say that it feels pretentious but this is an unfair criticism. I’d prefer a game based on the surrealism of Salvador Dali. Pretentiousness matched, criticism valid.

Pictured: A complete absence of melting clocks and butts being propped up with sticks

The game feels like its been tailor made to appeal to graphic designers. It’s a game that’s been made with great care and considerable effort. The aesthetic is unusually marvellous for a top android game.

However, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s the Toyota Prius of gaming. All flash and misplaced snottyness. It’s about as engaging as a card reader. Yes, a beautiful, well designed card reader with a bright clear display and lovely intuitive buttons but a card reader nonetheless.

It simply misses the mark for me. Despite being about a princess’s adventure in an unknown world where physics don’t quite matter, it isn’t particularly adventurous. Every level is just another Escher illustration. The puzzles aren’t particularly puzzling, and I never truly struggled. I think that the complexity is limited by the available interactions. There are new interactions and new mechanics  in every level but gameplay boils down to finding areas of screen to touch, hitting those areas in the right order and timing the princess’ movement.

These quibbles separate it from other remarkable puzzle games like Fez which Monument Valley borrows very heavily from and when I think of good puzzlers to compare it to, they always have an advantage. Portal has real-time physics and great storytelling, Fez has exploration and wonder, Monkey island has amazing dialogue and jokes. Monument valley depends on puzzles and visuals and for me, that relegates it to the realm of mediocrity.

It’s missing a hook to make it truly excellent. It is the crossword puzzle of gaming. It’s simple and elegant with lots of mass appeal but it falls just shy of the mark will never be remembered as a classic.

Worth as much attention as any sudoku puzzle or Rubik’s cube.

Crossy road

My relationship with Crossy Road has been fluctuating between devotion and contempt. I mean, she’s a good looking game, the bright blocky characters and objects are pretty. But, she’s always nagging me to buy stuff for her. Stuff like £2.38 rabbit characters to play as.

Maybe I should look beyond her flaws, she is fun to be with but she is so clingy that I had to turn off her push notifications.

She is caring though, she gives me little gift characters now and then from bizarre gumball machine that doesn’t relate to anything, although she sometimes tries to get me to pay for it and that’s just rude and frankly, weakens our rapport.

Sorry Frogger. It’s not copyright infringement if it’s isometric.

Other people seem disinterested in the high scores I show them. Maybe it’s her horrible taste in videos, she even pays for me to see them but it’s all adverts. Terrible boring adverts.

When it comes down to it, I know that I’m really I’m just using her. She’ll never replace my true love, Frogger.

Crossy road is a game you should try but she’ll never live up to your expectations.

Shovel Knight

Ahhh late! Late again. Sorry, so sorry. I was just so busy playing shovel knight that the Monday deadline became a distant memory. Shovel knight is a modern game that is altogether SNESlike. It sports a rather fetching restricted colour palette, a chip-tune audio track and some bloody good retro gameplay to boot. I found myself rather fond of the game for the most part. It has a lovely sense of humour and genuine character that is rare in the modern shit maelstrom of games on steam.

The game requires you to play through well designed platforming levels, using your shovel and wits to down-attack your way to the evil .. castle. I don’t remember its name. Does it matter? Leave me alone I’m tired!

I found the controls really quite excellent and the different unlockable spells really make you feel like you’re making choices and playing the game your own way. Levels introduce new mechanics frequently enough to prevent the game from becoming stale and boss encounters are enjoyable and unique (if sometimes a little bit clichéd).

The check-pointing in some levels needs work. I found a lot of checkpoints were placed in such a way that I had to do a fair bit of faffing before I could get to the bit of the level I was failing on. It’s something Super Meat Boy got right and I was surprised that I hit shitty checkpoints quite so frequently. I also found that the punishment for death (losing money) is overly severe. You can reclaim your money Dark-Souls-style by picking it up from where you died but dying several times in a row means that it’s lost for-fucking–ever… goddamn I’ve lost so much money in this game. It’s really an odd choice for a death mechanic and one which doesn’t really fit. It’s a modern concept shoe-horned into a retro game. I don’t understand the reasoning for punishing players in this way instead of just… letting the money accumulate endlessly, it’s not like money is a finite resource, you can easily just replay levels and accrue what you need with minimal grinding. The floating bags of money are a distraction and the loss of money is adding insult to injury, particularly in later more tricky levels.

It feels like the game is much too short and more emphasis is placed on increasing player punishment with the hopes of pleasing completionists (and masochists). Personally, I would have preferred a greater RPG focus, and more places to go, things to see and ways to spend the money. Most of the map encounters are merely a one-off duel, and I’m sure they could do more with the inter-level dream sequences.

I feel as though I’m digging into the game to much here, it really is quite fun to play and people who don’t nitpick and tear games apart will easily be able to ignore these gripes and embrace the warm blanket of nostalgia that the game wraps around you.

If you liked platforming in the late 80s and early 90s, I’d definitely dig deep into your pockets and give this game a go.

Dark Souls 2

My Christmas whisky hangover is finally over, let the weekly updates re-commence!

I’ve really only been playing one game recently and that’s Dark Souls 2 on the personal computation machine. It’s infuriating to the point where you’ll take several bites out of your monitor but at the same time, it’s a magnificent game which will teach you how to dance.

There are five significant qualms I have with the game:

• The user interface is ugly and cumbersome.
• You cannot easily compare equipment you are wearing with items you are viewing in a shop.
• The icons for stats are confusingly similar to one another.
• Some stats have ridiculously abstract names (Poise? What the hell is poise?)
• Punishment for death is excessive. Punishments include:
  • All enemies respawn
  • Your maximum HP is lowered
  • If you die once then die again without reaching the point of your original corpse, any currency souls you’ve collected are pissed away forever

Besides the issues above you are never told if you are in the wrong place for your ability level, or if you need to use an item to progress. You just have to figure it out or you have to find out how to progress from an internet guide like a great big idiot baby. If your personal honour code forbids consulting guides, the first few hours of the game can feel like being frequently punched in the face from a giant with wasps for hands.

I usually consider the need to check FAQs and guides to be slothful design but in Dark Souls, the lack of information is intentional. From Software want you to talk to people about the game. Not just internet goblins either (although the online community is vast), you’re meant to ignore the repulsive smell of strangers and cohorts and actively discuss the game. You’re meant to have conversations with your even your most hideous neighbours. Exchanges like this:

“Hey did you blow up that wall on the corner in the forest of giants”

“No! I didn’t know you could do that! How can I find it? Can I touch your hair?”

“It’s where there’s a hollow guard throwing firebombs. Please let go of my hair sir.”

There’s real joy to be had learning about some secrets and missed opportunities from social interaction. Even in the game itself there are messages left by other players which literally litter the floor. They inform you of hidden paths, items, and useful cliffs to commit suicide from. It’s a wonderful mechanic which is surprisingly devoid of deviant-speak as players can only use words from a preset list. If only this were the case for all online conversations.

If you’re too useless to make any progress whatsoever, you also have the option to summon in random plebs to help you which is great but pretty much nullifies the extreme difficulty. However, you can return the favour by joining some other poor sod’s game. Ding so can reward you with the prize of returning to full health, assuming you don’t arse it up and let the poor sod die (or die uselessly yourself).

It really is a belter of a game. Every time I get crushed by a mace the size of a horse, I feel like I’m learning something. Usually, I learn fear. Stamina management and fear. The trick to succeeding is to hang back and slowly nip at enemies until they die from 1000 papercuts. There’s considerably more depth to it than that but the natural learning and adapting is a refreshing change from big neon arrows telling me what to do and glowing paths telling me where to go. I have to think, and try stuff for myself and fuck up to progress. That’s brilliant.

Learning to kill the run of the mill chumps is one thing but ridding the world of bosses is another. Bosses have patterns which you must learn but unlike Zelda games, the punishment for failure is swift brutal death. Which is what makes killing them so damn rewarding (apart from all the actual awards that is). Coincidentally, I killed the first boss on my first go so I felt like Zeus for a good 5 minutes before promptly losing everything to the the next enemy with a large pointed stick. I needed a new controller anyway, it’s fine.

Oh and my favourite aspect of the game is that you can kill everybody. Want to kill the shopkeeper? Fine. Want to kill the lady who lets you level up and make the game impossible for yourself? Go for it. Want to bump someone off to take their sweet sword? Do it. Oh except don’t do it if you don’t mean it, people who you kill don’t come back. Ever.

In many ways, Dark Souls 2 is a metaphor for life. You can basically do what you want and you can achieve great things that seem impossible but you will be given very little help and might well get decapitated a few times before you succeed.

Christmas slowdown

Whinges are on the way, just… slower than usual. I may be whingeing a tad less over the Christmas period but whingeing will return to standard frequency in January. I tried to write one for today but I’m too knackered and contemptuous to squeeze out a whole one so here’s a brief summary of the games I reluctantly had a go at:

• Crazy Zombies: Boring zombie premised strategy game. Well, calling it a strategy game is a stretch, it’s hardly Napoleonic warfare. You have to choose which idiots go where tap on a special ability button every few seconds. It’s World of Warcraft where the characters don’t move and you get 2 abilities. Oh and it’s interspersed with dialogue that so bad it makes me want to superglue my eyelids closed.

The only thing that lets this game down is every aspect of it,

 

• Godus: Gag-inducing slime from the perpetually flapping gums of Saint Peter Molyneux. An irritating “god” game where your godly powers are laregly limited to stretching and shrinking platforms to please or frustrate a noisy crowd of hateful minions. Shit on a stick with no ice.

If only real deities were forced to deal with this level of annoying mico-management and… existed I guess.

 

• Five Nights at Freddy’s 2: A nauseating series of jpegs. A slideshow where sometimes when you flick back and forth between the slides and a creepy anthropomorphic animal with dead eyes stares back at you. Genuinely creepy at times, executed with the grace of a donkey.

This game is probably actually terrifying but I played it on the bus at rush hour and the smell induced more fear than this game ever could.

 

• Stick Hero: A non-game created by graphic designers. Very simple, tap and hold to create a bridge, if the bridge is too long, the hero walks to his death and you have to start again. About as deep and engaging as guessing the outcome of a coin toss. I play a lot of these types of the games on the store actually. Games with one concept and then an arcade style game over when you mess up. It’s not good design, it’s lazy and it’s wank.

A simple idea using simple graphics and a simple control scheme for simpletons.

 

• Turbo Dismount: This is like one of those golf games where you tap and hold to control the shot’s power, only instead of hitting a ball, you control a milk van’s speed and it crashes into stuff, tamely, causing a little ragdoll man to get a bit squashed. It reminded me of the crash test dummies and how an actual real game was made based around them instead of a poxy little, minimally interactive half-game.

Pictured: A game with simpler controls and less entertainment value than a plug socket.

 

Both Godus and Crazy Zombies required an internet connection to play too so they both get double shittiness points.

Modern phone games are about as much fun as inhaling glitter and coughing upwards into your own eyes. Merry Whingemas.

Contract killer: Sniper

CKS is a bold new sniping game which breaks sniping tradition by having you do as little actual sniping as possible. You’ll be required to take on a number of targets and, as often as not,  you’ll clumsily gun them down with an assault rifle or other gaudy tool of death, just like real snipers don’t.

“Dad came back from the war a vegetable, I swore I’d never turn out the same way.”

The protagonist is a potato headed berk named Gruffles Testosterone. Apparently he’s too tired of the military’s red tape and protocols and just wants to murder a few chumps. Luckily some private military core bint has hired Grizzle McMurderclogs to take pot shots at thugs in the street. I’m pretty sure there is an actual plot underneath all the stupid pretence of taking down gangs but my brain was too advanced to really comprehend it, I might as well have tried to understand a baby’s sense of humour or what dogs dream about.

I have to say that I purposefully failed to snipe people at most points. I preferred to shoot at people and miss, or get them in the foot. Somewhat roleplaying a bumbling buffoon of a sniper who keeps dropping bullets everywhere. I wanted the PMC to reconsider their hiring policy and maybe screen people for neurological defects before employing them, there’s a game idea in there somewhere.

Speaking of neurological defects, I find shooting dudes in the dick endlessly entertaining.

It’s the small things in life that count. *Raise eyebrows for double entendre*

About 3 missions in I was required to plant a bomb, I did so and then decided to just stand around and wait. The enemy guards riddled me with bullets for a minute and a half. The bullets might as well have been feathers because they did sod all damage and I continued to stand defiantly. They should have been terrified. One day I will play a game where enemies freak out if you just soak up bullets like the fucking terminator.

After absorbing thousands of pounds worth of bullets, the timer hit 00:00 and the bomb hilariously failed to explode. The men kept shooting at me with their airzookas, slowly nipping away my health. At 10% health, I realised that I was actually invulnerable and ended their meaningless lives with a sigh. It really cheapened the already worthless game for me. It’s not a game if you can’t sodding lose. Even my toaster can fail if I press the buttons incorrectly. Oh and then the bomb exploded.

5 human beings died to allow for this beach ball sized explosion to partially scorch a bin and some bollards.
I could literally do more damage than this in real life by myself, without a gun.

Oh and it’s barely worth mentioning at this point but as the sun shines and the grass grows, the leaves fall and the rivers flow, tonnes of trivial bullshit exists to be bought for this game with real money. Nutters and 7 year olds of the gaming world rejoice.

Don’t play this stupid non-game. Chuck on a load of washing, it’ll take more effort but it will be more rewarding that this casserole of bollocks.

The Wolf Among Us

To my complete surprise, a game I’ve been interested in for ages suddenly appeared in the play store, for free. I howled with delight when I saw The Wolf Among Us available for zero dollars. I immediately thought “What’s the catch?” and after googling, discovered the catch to be that all the subsequent episodes are not free. Well, that’s a whole god-damned game for free! Now for the adverts…

It’s really weird playing an android game for an hour and not seeing a single advert. It feels abnormal, like recycling or talking to strangers. Can a game truly be an android game if it’s free and has no adverts, paywalls, or  micro transactions? Perhaps it’s some kind of trick, an interactive wallpaper or hallucination. The developers at TellTale must be shitting their pants, it must be some mistake. Or, perhaps they published a game that wasn’t a total piss refinery and knew that people would be willing to pay for its equally good sequels. Nobody got hurt, nobody had to vomit out their eyeballs because they were asked to spend 79p on gems. They just made a game that was good.

Pay 79p to punch advertisers in the face. Bargain.

Gameplay is, well, it’s more of an interactive story with a few quick time events. I’ve ripped into android games for less and the controls are not the game’s selling point. Having played for about an hour, I can say that the story is interesting enough to warrant further sessions. The game is set in a section of New York where characters from mythology called “Fables” potter about trying to disguise themselves as humans using magic. There’s a gratuitous amount of swearing and violence which I suspect is to quickly dismiss any notion that this is a game for children (despite the character’s origins). It’s perhaps over eager in this regard but these help keep the narrative interesting and the dialogue is so well written that I’m genuinely interested to see what happens to many of the characters as they develop. I also think a bit of ultra violence is in short supply in the mobile games market. In fact, I’ve never seen a full decapitation or axe to the head in any games I’ve played. Such a pity. Come on Rovio, let’s see Angry Birds: Tarantino. There’s a market for it, I assure you.

Some negatives then. The game is buggy. I experienced a pretty severe crash that affected my Nexus 5’s OS and I’ve never seen any such issues from any other game. The autosave was well placed enough to prevent lost progress being an issue but I get nervous when I think about how badly my phone was chugging until I forcibly killed the power. On top of this, minor graphical issues are plentiful and the game caused my device to superheat to a temperature that defies the laws of thermodynamics so god knows what it would do to a lesser model.

I suspect the series will share some faults with the similarly engine’d The Walking Dead, with conveniently converging plot lines, completely illusory dialogue choices and too many unnecessary action scenes but these gripes don’t prevent it from being a largely enjoyable experience with engaging characters and meaningful stories that fans and newcomers to the series should enjoy.

Don’t not download this. It’s a paradise island among the sea of shit.

 

Slap!! Slap

I don’t think I’ve ever actually been slapped and to be honest I’d leave my cave even less if I thought people could dislodge my teeth by slapping me. Slap!! Slap! Is a game about slapping people and knocking their goddamned teeth out. Players must tap on green circles to slap an unfortunate opponent until a sufficient amount of damage has been dished out. This is so that you can collect their teeth like a sadistic tooth fairy.

It’s unclear why these poor souls cannot escape during this painful separation of tooth and gum, perhaps you really are the tooth fairy! A predatory tooth fairy that paralyses its victims before manually extracting your reward. Except that would be somewhat interesting and the truth is, there’s no explanation. It’s so random!

I genuinely thought I’d enjoy slapping plebs for fun but the experience is rather hollow without context or interesting gameplay. On top of that, the guys are already beaten half to death, where’s the sport in that?

My life bar depleted a long time ago.

If you miss any slaps, you lose health. Again, this is never explained or given context. Random! Retrying after a mission failure costs the game’s currency: teeth. You can of course buy teeth for real money, assuming you’re done posting fivers into drains.

I managed to amass a measly 4 molars in total. Sadly, retrying costs several thousand teeth. So if you want to retry, it will cost you real money. It’s an insurmountable paywall for an excruciatingly low calibre game, surely nobody pays for these right? You’d have to be a toothless meth addict to be barmy enough to even consider it. The game is just to shit to deserve money, at least good games with paywalls profit from laziness instead of assumed stupidity.

You could play for free forever though I suppose, assuming you want to give yourself a hate aneurism from the unbearably repetitive and shitty gameplay.

Shittily, when you complete a level, the 2D jpg of your opponent spins and scales into the distance because the developers saw pokemon once and said, “Let’s just do that team rocket thing. Who can be arsed making any thing of worth? Let’s go throw darts at pictures of players faces and laugh for hours.”.

I actually managed to suffer through the first level and was awarded some kind of cauldron. The cauldron shits out small bonuses periodically when it has absorbed enough detritus from enemy gums. This usually consists if teeth and crap like computer chips. The developers must feel like they’ve created such a cheeky absurdity with this many non-sequiturs in a game. It fills me with contempt, bile and toasters (Lol so random hurrhurrhurr).

Sometimes, I consider clicking the ad. It seems more fun than this pile of regurgitated owl faeces.

Slap!!Slap! is about as much fun as having your teeth slapped out by a 69 year old Yorkshireman dressed as the tooth fairy.

Retry

Retry is the latest flying focused game from developer Rovio. Contrary to their last crappy cash-in Angry Birds: Epic, Retry is a refreshing return to the kind of “have a few goes” gameplay that brought them their success and me, my precious seconds of distraction. It’s much easier to ignore bus muggings when you’re playing a nice game of Retry.

Gameplay involves tapping and pressing to control the thrust of a small biplane. The goal is to reach checkpoints and ultimately the end of the level without hitting anything except checkpoints. This is not easy. Navigating through each level is like navigating through plebs at the bargain shelf at an inner city Asda.

The most interesting mechanic however is that checkpoints must be purchased with coins, these can either be paid for if you’re a cretin, or earned by collecting them at awkward spots between checkpoints. Catching them without crashing requires skull, timing and stylish manoeuvres.

I think it’s a particularly lovely mechanic because it feels like you earn your progress. I often run out of coins and subsequently mess up and get sent far FAR back. Unlike in most of the tripe games I play, acquiring coins in this game has real utility. The coins have value for once.

I’ve criticised games before for having a certain difficulty point where you NEED to pay to continue but I don’t see that happening with this game. The game does not rely on luck, so even if the difficulty does increase (and it does), you’ve only got yourself to blame for being shit.

It’s like being at an arcade, if you’re spending all your methadone money for more goes on Donkey Kong, that’s because you’re rubbish at it. Admittedly those kind of arcade games were meant to get too hard to extract more coins from players but let’s just gloss over that terrible analogy.

Interestingly, you can also watch adverts to unlock a checkpoint you’ve reached. I can never bring myself to watch these though because I’m not a brainless idiot. I feel like denying Rovio potential ad revenue is actually a large part of the fun.

Oh and there’s a level which specifically promotes Angry Birds Epic. Nice try Rovio. To make another snappy analogy, it’s like having a new plane to fly and then a bunch of angry birds shit all over it.

Criticism: there’s too much blatant nudging towards paying for stuff, I want the stuff you have to pay for, adverts adverts adverts, the game is super hard.

Play this game, it’s fairly deece.

Cars

Toy story was meant to sell merchandise to kids. Kids see the toys in the movie, then they screech at their progenitors until they appeased or sufficiently beaten. Kids can relate to toys. That’s how children’s evil manipulative brains work. As it turned out Toy Story was also a modern masterpiece.

Cars was also created with the intention of winning over kids and, unsurprisingly, it worked. Children can be such idiots. Go into any Disney store and you’ll probably find that a large portion of the store is dedicated exclusively to Cars merchandise.  Sadly, Cars lacks the theatrical wonder of Toy Story and is about as emotionally gratifying as being hit with a brick.

The android game however, IS actually great. JK, of course it’s not, it’s a streetcar named despair.

Players hold the pedal down to go fast and let go to slow down. So in essence, it’s a less complicated than a YouTube video.

Sometimes an up or down swipe is required to navigate an obstacle but 99.9% of the potential challenge has been removed in order to prevent kids from getting pneumonia or something. I appreciate that they’re aiming for children as a target market but when opening the app itself is more taxing than actually playing it, you’re fostering a generation of kids who’d struggle to operate a light switch.

If the utterly dreadful gameplay isn’t enough to drive you crazy (sorry) then the obscenely conceited world and contemptible characters certainly will. This applies in particular to Lightning McQueen. Even though he belittles his fellow cars and constantly reminds them of his superior speed, all the other sentient vehicles seem to think he’s some kind of automobile jesus.

“Take off your wheels and strip to your chassis.”

It seems unfair that Lightning isn’t judged by the practical abilities of the other vehicles. If I were the tow truck, I’d force Lightning to have a towing competition to prove how pitifully useless he was. It would have double the impact as the cars needing to be towed would in all likelihood be the corpses of his crashed speedy brethren.

I do wonder where all the people are in the cars universe. The fact there are none implies that the cars became sentient, finally had enough and exterminated all human life on earth. How does their economy work? How would they use currency and build tracks? I know they can move their axles but without digits, it seems unlikely they’d be able to construct a loop-de-loop or… anything at all really.

I didn’t continue very far into this game because I found it unbearable. It’s a game for idiots. If you encourage a child to play it, you’re an idiot. Instead of paying for microtransactions, why not give your child something useful like a book or a gun or a beating?

 

“I’ll definitely do that right now.” – No kid who ever saw this screen.

Spider-man

Wooo it’s nearly Halloween, and in that vein I’ve decided to play a spooky game about spiders. Well okay, no. It’s just Spider-man but it is horrifically bad so it still counts!

Gameplay is identical to Subway surfers because original ideas terrify marketing executives. To save on money, Spiderman runs jumps and slides across rooftops in 3 neat little lines. Players must swipe left or right, up or down in order to maintain Marvel’s bottom line. Players are encouraged to buy the usual slurry of free game tripe in order to prevent Stan Lee’s collection of golden helicopters from getting dirty.

 

12 Litres of glowing yellow fluid? Maybe these will cure my sudden urge to run only in straight lines.

It’s not all running and jumping over boxes that appear out if nowhere though. You also have to collect vials of yellow fluid. Strangely, the game doesn’t inform you why this is until after you’ve completed a level so you’re treated to a little introductory section where you can only assume that Spiderman has taken to collecting vials of piss in some kind of deranged urine obsession.

It’s really a shame that Spiderman has become unashamedly shit in this iteration. It isn’t the first crappy Spiderman game and it won’t be the last but there’s so much potential for Spiderman games to be good that it’s a pity to see the opportunity squandered.

Playing this game is like meeting an old friend in a pub who tries to hard to impress you with tales of becoming a writer and then you find out that he works for the daily mail and is looking for people to join his full body massage class. You just want to get as far away from him as possible so you can get back to ignoring him until he has a crisis and threatens to commit suicide by overdosing on Calpol.

When I purposefully killed Spiderman I was given the option to “Continue free” which implies that it isn’t always free which is a horrible thing to know and fills me with pure contempt. I know it’s the standard for free games but it shouldn’t be because it’s shit and Marvel should fucking know better.

That was too cheesy, where did you get your writer’s from- The talentless hack dimension? Woah… meta.

On top of all of the awful game mechanics, the game’s writing is hilariously abysmal. I’ll post a few examples.

Who would have guessed that a person who wears skintight lycra and covers their face with a mask would have body-image issues?

That doesn’t look like “acne” and you know it Spiderman.

If your eyes, nose and mouth are bleeding right now, don’t blame Ebola. Blame Spider-man.

Games whinge YouTube!

I’ve started a YouTube channel where I’ll be playing through the newest releases in games!

I’m starting by playing through Alien Isolation and I’ll be recording through to completion or until I die from a heart attack.

You can find the playlist here, videos will be released 4 times per week.

Let the whingeing begin!

Halloween special

Start putting up your Christmas tree, it’s the beginning of October! It’s nearly time to burn an effigy of a man lived 400 years ago but before that we have to celebrate an old Celtic or possibly Christian tradition which has been fashioned into a western version of Dia de los muertos.

Nevermind all that though. Halloween is really all about encouraging childhood obesity and putting pumpkins on EVERYTHING.

Obviously, small developers have tried to make a quick buck out of the celebration by littering the play store with a plethora of poxy little pustules and I’ve cobbled together a few of the most pestilent.

HALLOWEEN MYSTERY

This game is about as mysterious as a 3×3 tile shifting game can be. Which unsurprisingly, is not even a tiny bit mysterious at all. It’s about as much fun as skating through sick.

Maybe I will, I certainly couldn’t be less lucky right now.

HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE

Picture an adventure in your head. Imagine a treasure, a backdrop, an epic tale of overcoming danger concluding in  a thrilling conclusive apex. Did you picture 3 minutes of identical pumpkin jpegs cascading towards you? Was your backdrop a tiled wallpaper of skulls? Did the music from your vision continue forever? If so, congratulations! You’ve could make Halloween adventure games for a living and/or may have irreparable brain damage!

“Game design is for twats” – The developer

HALLOWEEN SPA

What says Halloween more than a spa where you can dress a woman up in vaguely Halloween based clothing? A spa where you can dress up a woman in Halloween based clothing and draw cocks on their face with makeup.

I’m such a child. Also, can’t believe they used cucumbers instead of pumpkins… amateurs.

YUMM HALLOWEEN

This game has you put your fingers in the mouth of a creepy little 3D demon for as long as you can. Leave your fingers in there too long and his mouth snaps shut and you lose. It’s actually somewhat disconcerting and might give you a psychological jolt for about 4 second but that’s 4 second more than  the other games in this list.

“See? No gag reflex!”

LITTLE COMMANDER HALLOWEEN

As this game loads, the logo for “Intel software” appears so I was briefly expecting a treat but was instead greeted with a trick! This game is the original little commander only with pumpkins lazily slapped into the heads of the enemies. It’s also got some pretty horrendous graphics. Come on intel, you’re supposed to be a giant in the tech industry. Anyone would thing this game was made by a solitary cheese coated recluse.

The luftwaffe’s attempt at fear mongering was weak at best.

FOOLZ: FEAR OF HALLOWEEN

This is probably even more half-arsed than HALLOWEEN MYSTERY. The goal is to save some poorly animated plebs from death by performing a multitude of interactions similar to “Dumb ways to die”. It would probably be the best game in the list if it didn’t force you to sit and watch your points add up after each level. It takes about a second to get through 10 points so if you’ve just scored 200 points, you’ve got a 20 second wait until you can play the next minigame. Shit. Actually horrifically shit.

“Only commies use fewer than 4 fonts per screen.” – The developer

That’s enough horrors for me, I need to go out and buy mini toothbrushes to disappoint this years’ trick or treaters.

I sincerely doubt there’s even such a thing as a good Halloween based android game. If you know of one that isn’t total garbage, let me know about it and if I agree, I’ll review it proper before the month is out!

 

 

The Battle Cats

A game about cats! Purrfect! Let’s see how many cat based puns I can litter this review with! My whiskers tingle with fear when I have to play as a cat in a game. This is largely because I worked briefly in a kennel and cattery while I was a nipper. In the dog kennel there were cranky little terriers, mischievous rottweiler pups and a great dane the size of Denmark itself. Feeding and walking the dogs was an absolute joy. Even the dogs which were initially nervous around me became friendly once they learned that I was the bringer of delicious jellied pig entrails. Conversely, the cats in the cattery considered themselves prison inmates and used every opportunity they had to shank me with their razor claws.

Meow on to the game. There’s certainly nothing immediately abhorrent about it. Levels are brief and fun. Upgrades are amusingly titled, varied enough to provide a unique experience and best of all, don’t cost real money. The game starts off at a decent pace, purring and rubbing itself against your brain legs. It doesn’t dig its micro-transaction claws into your shins right away, although they are there and I’ve got a feeling that the difficulty might unfairly spike at some point* at which point players will be given an unexpected financial scratch unless they the game in a burlap sack and throw it into the river of uninstallation.

*(Tiny Dice Dungeon knows what I’m talking about)

Poor Japan. They don’t even stand a chance.

I’ve played through 10 levels so far without an enemy getting within range of my cat cannon, so I’d say that even if the difficulty does spike to unplayable levels like other games, you do get a decent amount of uninterrupted gameplay furrst. I do like the art stye of the game and the cat cannon is particularly purr-ty. I guess I have to catnip this positivity in the bud and do some complaining! The music and sound effects get monotonous fast if you’re an irritable bastard like me and the learning curve is slow to ramp up, it’s too easy for too long.

“I look forward to disemboweling your entire family.”

 

I would have liked an alternative where I’d get to play as the dogs. That might have been ruff on the developers though. Haha! get it? that was a dog one! I’m so sorry.

If you’re feline like playing a decent android game. The Battle Cats is a tail which is well worth digging your fangs into. Paws for effect.

Games whinge artwork now on behance.

I’ve added all my recent pokemon drawings (as well as my non-games related scribbles) to the behance network. Unbelievable no? Stop, don’t go. Here’s proof!

Pokemon: Status effects

Plenty of people have criticised the pokemon universe for it’s barbarism and shameless cruelty, typically complaints are lobbed at the enslavement of pokemon, a clearly sentient species. Towever, that’s not the only way the universe is deranged. Here’s a brief appraisal of the common status effects which plague the poor beasts during battle.

1. SLEEP

Sleep in non-human animals refers to how the behavioral and physiological state of sleep, mainly characterized by reversible unconsciousness[1]

What kind of sleep constitutes “slumber”? Reversible sleep. Exactly the kind of sleep Pokemon aren’t affected by during battles, because they can’t be nudged back into consciousness. Not only that but they can be attacked and physically damaged to the point that they can’t wake up. This doesn’t sound like sleep to me, it sounds like paralysis.

2. PARALYZE

Paralysis is loss of muscle function for one or more muscles. Paralysis can be accompanied by a loss of feeling (sensory loss) in the affected area if there is sensory damage as well as motor.

Oh yes, pokemon can be (temporarily) paralysed. Any trainer who doesn’t pull a paralysed pokemon back into its slavery sphere is must be some kind of sadist. “Oh no antagonist trainer, my pokemon is merely unable to move its limbs. Please continue to beat it senseless.”

3. BURN

A burn is a type of injury to flesh or skin caused by heat, electricity, chemicals, friction, or radiation.^[1]

Fair enough.

4. POISON.

Toxins are poisons produced by some biological function in nature, venoms are usually defined as toxins that are injected by a bite or sting to cause their effect, while poisons are generally defined as substances absorbed through the skin or gut.

Venom/poison pedantry aside, this ailment represents pure villainy from any trainer who uses it. Ignoring all other barbarism, pokemon battles are meant to be gentlemanly pursuits ideally. Why then, is it socially acceptable to poison another persons pokemon? It’s an effect that persists beyond battles, causing a lasting, pervasive state of unnecessary suffering.

“Hello fellow pokemon enthusiast, your Koffing has poisoned my Charmeleon, do you have anything that might help cure it?”

“Fuck you, it’s your problem now.”

5. CHARM

Seduction is the process of deliberately enticing a person, to lead astray, as from duty, rectitude, or the like; to corrupt, to persuade or induce to engage in sexual behaviour.

Okay, again… this doesn’t really seem like a status effect. It’s not something you’d think could be suddenly employed during battle. I suppose that if you were a Pokémon and another Pokémon batted its eyelashes at you instead of trying to remove your intestines, you might be temporarily disinclined to fight back. I doubt Pokémon want to become bloodthirsty drones for their captors. Trainers must have hearts of ice.

6. FROZEN

Hypothermia (from Greek ὑποθερμία) is a condition in which the body’s core temperature drops below that required for normal metabolism and body functions. This is generally considered to be less than 35.0 °C (95.0 °F).^[1] Characteristic symptoms depend on the temperature. In mild hypothermia there is shivering and mental confusion. In severe hypothermia there may be paradoxical undressing, where a person removes their clothing, as well as an increased risk of the heart stopping.^[1]

So, if you actually froze, your body functions would cease. You’d die. Instead, the condition Pokémon get exposed to is more likely to be hypothermia, which is still fairly capable of causing death. Surely the only reason this status effect is even legal is that it’s comparatively rare. I doubt deaths get reported much. From the wiki article it seems like the most common aspect of hypothermia is actually confusion.

7. CONFUSED

The term, “acute mental confusion”^[1] is often used interchangeably with delirium^[2] to describe a pathological degree in which it usually refers to loss of orientation (ability to place oneself correctly in the world by time,^[3] location;^[3] and/or personal identity^[3]) and sometimes accompanied by disordered consciousness (loss of linear thinking)^[3] and loss of memory (the ability to correctly recall previous events or learn new material).

Ah, now this seems like a good old fashioned case of mental breakdown. Probably a result of repeated brain trauma from events where Pokémon get paralysed, burned, frozen, beaten or poisoned.

I think it’s safe to assume that everyone gets confused from time to time but it’s rarely the case that someone would punch themselves in the face as a result. Surely Pokémon would just forget where their keys are or wonder why it has to fight for beings that would happily leave it for centuries inside of a computer. No wonder confusion is one of the most common effects.

Tiny tower: Vegas

One day I hope to review a game called Tiny tower: Blackpool. You’d be able to stir in some really unique mechanics and aesthetics. Think of the gameplay opportunities:

• Upgrade lamp posts with modern sculpture illumination to provide the local seagulls with somewhere classy to shit
• Entice stag/hen parties to keep irritating families away
• Install blue/UV lighting in public toilets to deter heroin addicts from mugging stags and hens
• Discard all town waste into the sea, nobody will notice the difference and you’ll save a lot of cash
• Repaint the tower to commemorate something, it’ll take a few years and cost a fortune but it will look slightly different so it’s worth it

Just a few ideas.

Instead of that realism you’re encouraged to create a Vegas casino to entice tiny plebs to spend money. Snoozepocalypse.

FREE PLAY! Or pay £0.79 to avoid waiting 45 minutes until you can play again!

Construction of your tower isn’t particularly engaging. The tiny gamblers spend their virtual life savings and booze money at your casino and you use that money to buy new floors and fruit peddlers to entice gullible punters. Outside of commissioning new floors your duties extend to restocking and acting as a bellboy to your guests, ferrying them between floors for tips. I suppose that’s a mechanic in that you perform an action and something happens. It does seem a little half-arsed considering people often demand to be taken to floors which are still under construction.

What little gameplay there is, is dragged out between purchases. You ordered a floor to be built? 60 minute timer until it’s done. You ordered more fruit? 10 minute timer. It’s like playing Theme park except you can only build one thing every 30 minutes and the only thing you’re trusted to control is the price of the fries. Obviously, this is a free game so you can opt to speed construction up with “bucks” but these accrue slowly without paying real money for them. You can’t do that though, that means that the terrorists have won.

The pay-to-do-things-now business model ruins the entire pace of the game. Management games like Theme Hospital and Rollercoaster Tycoon got it right because you’re never waiting, you’re actively trying to manage payroll, customer happiness, profits, entertainment, cleaning, safety, finance and geography. You’re very rarely short on things to actually do or get involved in. Even if you’re some kind of sadist who creates rollercoasters that end in nothing but death.

Conversely, Tiny tower leaves you with nothing to adjust or alter or tinker with. There’s no managing or  … fun. You simply build things, then wait until you’re bored enough to return to the game and build more.

If I were Blackpool council I’d catapult this giant turd into the local drinking supply where it belongs.

 

My Newborn – Mommy and Baby Care

Pregnancy simulator 2014 is probably the worst game I’ve ever played and I’ve recently played a game about toilets. After being exposed to the initial onslaught of nauseating music and colours, you have to pick a pregnant women, none of which seem capable of closing their mouths.

Free Baby Samples eh? Well I couldn’t eat a whole one! Hiyoohh!!

After you’ve selected a unit factory, you’re presented with a selection of minigames. I chose one which prompts you to interact with objects from a table. The first thing I chose was an mp3 player which played burbling music to the baby, and it was burbling and specifically not classical music for some reason. Not that that does anything anyway. You can also offer the brood mare some food to eat. I tried to force her to eat nothing but hot dogs, chicken and radishes but to my annoyance she never refused to eat anything. Maybe it’s a phantom pregnancy and the woman I chose is just fat and looking for a free meal. I did hope I’d have the option to force to her to drink some booze but the game enforced a strict moral code upon me and only let me make boring fruit smoothies. You can also comb your DNA replicator’s hair, rub her feet or deal with hours of verbal abuse and crying, well no… not those two last ones.

Oddly, you never have to deal with morning sickness or the ravages of hormones or the nightmare/beauty/trauma of childbirth. Come on guys, let us have a comedic PG-13 version of the app. I’ve seen Schwarzenegger go through pregnancy in Junior, I can handle it.

One unusual element is that you do get to go to the hospital and huff a nondescript gas from a canister. Evidently, some thought has gone into this because you can’t huff it repeatedly. Oh, unless you chug a vitamin tablet between huffs. Huff is a great word. You can actually eat as many vitamin tablets as you like though even though that itself would almost certainly kill you. I guess the developer’s concerns didn’t stretch beyond “Probably don’t let players huff gas twice in a row”. I’m surprised they didn’t think to try and monetise it in some way.

Condolences. It’s got irritable bowel syndrome.

In the third minigame you’re charged with performing some horrific baby maintenance and little baby Goat-stench is covered in welts and has shit itself. I reluctantly provided it with a new nappy but within seconds it had vacated its bowels again. Unimpressed, I decided not to cure it of its rashes, change it or take it to a hospital as it clearly needs.  I hoped that my character would get arrested for neglect but no matter how long you leave it screaming in smelly pain, the cops never turn up. I suppose this could be a realistic, I’ve seen Trainspotting. No marks subtracted game.

The game explicitly states “For parents” which seems strange. I would think that real parents would have too many things to think about, what with having to deal with a real milk-addled screeching machine. Obviously, this is a game designed to bait reviewers who enjoy poking fun at games designed for children.

Well I hope I feel happy with myself, me.

Aside from that it throws adverts in your face, has loads of purchasable content, demands attention  with loud and annoying notifications  and is generally unpleasant. I suppose it is quite like child rearing after all.