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.

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.

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.

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.

Batman: Arkham Origins

Batman lives in a strange universe where he basically beats up people with less money than him as some kind of sick entertainment and gets away with it. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy his lunatic escapades. Videogame Batman is different to Film  and Comic Batman. Although he’s not meant to invincible (but is really) videogame Batman gets beaten up and slapped around in real time to hilarious effect. There’s no dramatic recovery or montage, he just gets his head kicked in and that’s brilliant.

I’ll be he would. Nice try Bruce.

Batman typically uses a certain amount of stealth and cunning to defeat his foes but in this game he’s decided he’s had enough of that boring shit and that he’ll rid the city of crime one fisticuff at a time. The android version of this game plays a lot like Hercules whereby you tap and swipe to pulverise strangers one on one. Enemies are awfully good sports about Batman’s new approach and kindly fight you one after the other in a single file line. It’s awfully nice of them considering his obvious wealth advantage. I guess criminals can be pretty noble if you give them a chance.

I do enjoy most Batman games which similarly allow for unbridled brawling so I can’t bollock the developers too much. The reason that the console games are better though, is that they allow you to use stealth and misdirection. You’re given an option other than brandishing your knuckles. If you develop a game which is just about battering idiots in the street, you might as well play as Hercules or John Prescott or Peter Molyneux.

Wanted in 41 countries.

The thing I love most about Batman games though is how amusing it is to see Batman fail. It’s hard not to chuckle when playing as the world’s greatest detective, only to see him get slapped in the back of the head with a baseball bat and kicked unconscious by a smattering of gormless thugs. There will never be a film where the The Dark Knight navigates beams in the roof of a steel mill, only to clumsily slip and fall into bucket of molten metal and subsequently burn/drowning to death but in games it happens.

I know Batman is owned by Warner Bros. but come on guys.. stars?

There’s a worry in my mind that, similar to other genres at the top of of the list, that people will outright copy Batman. They really shouldn’t though. Because that would be Robin.

I’m so sorry.

Hercules

Hercules is a game loosely affiliated with the current cinematic of the same name. I say loosely because the film stars Dwayne Johnson but the game stars a steroid abusing fitness instructor from Leeds.

It wouldn’t have made much difference to the overall quality even if the artists had ever seen The people’s champion really. The game is a tedious repetition of quick-time-events. Players must swipe in various directions to deflect attacks and then brutalise their opponent when he gets a bit knackered. Both fighters do this while rooted to the spot; making the game about as exciting as sleeping on a soiled mattress in the street.

Your oiled legs won’t save you this time Hercules!

I didn’t play it for long enough to notice if the game tries to get you to buy stupid tat  but it’s safe to assume that it does at some point.

I’ve not seen the movie. It too seems doomed to be awful. That’s not a jab at The Rock mind you; it’s just that it’s competing with existing Hercules’ is probably not a good idea. Here’s a conversation that’s never going to happen: “Hey Carl, did you see Hercules last night?” -“Yes Donald, it was pretty good.”

I feel like I can guess the plot right now. Hercules is dicking around Athens doing nothing in particular or having a rough time. Some evil git (maybe Hades) turns up and starts kicking old ladies into nettles and maybe he weakens Zeus and the other gods using some kind of enchanted megaphone. Hercules tries to batter him but gets twatted back to the dirt he came from. Hercules goes for a long walk, kills several plebs. Hercules then finds greatness inside himself and maybe a magic item too. Hercules stomps on evil guy’s nuts to great applause and then impregnates a female character. End.

Nobody insults my oiled legs.

I could write movies. It’s a piece of piss.

Toilet and bathroom rush

Wow. I didn’t expect to see a game about toilets, not this close to the top. What an unexpected turn of events!

Bathroom and toilet rush is a quick paced series of minigames.  Each minigame requires the player to tap, swipe or tilt to succeed at some bizarre aspect of doing one’s business. You’ll have to sort out seat preferences for men/women in a unisex bathroom. You’ll have to roll bum paper under a door while avoiding floor turds. You’ll even have to wipe piss off a seat.

Great…

The worst minigame is tapping the screen while a man forces out a highly dramatic shit. It actually doesn’t come up often but it’s his facial expressions that make it mortifying.

Nobody sits on a toilet like that, you animal.

The game is not particularly graphic or obscene. Poos often appear pink in colour and so it’s difficult to tell what the game is trying to achieve. It doesn’t try to repulse you, even if it ends up doing so by mistake.  It’s certainly not funny. There’s are no comical fart sound effects or embarrassing situations. In fact, sometimes the game is frustratingly tough. The motion sensing minigames are unreasonably difficult on a Nexus 5 and they are easily one of the top three games chosen.

To top off the bewildering lack of direction. You can also purchase stupid tat. Ahh that’s what the game is trying to achieve. Profit from idiots.  Hooray, hooray for mobile gaming. 

I don’t think gold is even absorbant.

I thought I would have loads to say about this game but I actually don’t. When it boils down to it, it’s just a boring version of  Warioware but with about seven rubbish minigames.

I wouldn’t wipe my arse with this game. It should be flushed down the bog where it belongs.

Transformers: Age of extinction

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.

Criminal legacy

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.

8 ball pool

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.

Bioshock infinite

This is the Gregg’s sausage roll of gaming. A highly sought-after, publicly adored tube of greasy badger meat.

Farm heroes saga

Oh, it’s another saga game from international shit manufacturer: King. Well I’m currently on holiday on a remote island on the west coast of Ireland and I’ve actually seen a few farm heroes in the flesh.

A woman in a rusted car pulled up to my friend group as we struggled up a hill with our luggage. She offered to take our bags to our hostel in her car. It was an act of rare selflessness which renewed my faith in humanity (a bit). It was a good feeling too know that kindness was still in existence. Then I played this game and was encouraged to buy fucking ” hero powers ” and I vomited until I passed out.

You collect points for matching vegetables and whatever. It’s piss. Contrary to the more popular Pet rescue saga this game looks lovely, lots of nice animations and vector graphics but this doesn’t disguise the shitty core of this shit apple of a game.

In the farming industry, we call this “cooking the books to receive government subsidies.”

I wonder why pet rescue is more popular than farm heroes. What does it say about the players? That people are more attached to their pets and obedient creatures of leisure than the domesticated foodbags that they require for sustenance? What a bastard everyone is.  Actually since these are both meaningless videogames with as much cultural significance as a lamp, it doesn’t say anything about the players. Oh, I suppose that the overall popularity of these games might suggest that the public craving for tawdry pointless drivel will never, ever be sated. Good news for me at least!

I think as anyone who’s ever been within 1000 meters of a farm knows, that there’s one thing common to all farms and it’s that there’s shit everywhere. King have done a fantastic job of replicating this in every way imaginable. Their games are shit, their legal policy is shit and they just give off a really stunning  impression of being the corporate embodiment of shit. I wouldn’t be surprised if every King employee was encouraged to roll around in shit and throw it out of their office windows at passers by, well.. after they’ve got the blood out of their clothes from their daily robbing of elderly blind people of course.

Can’t wait for the sequel guys.

Don’t tap the white tile

Don’t tap the white tile is a game about how people are diagnosed and treated with sociopathy in modern society. Players interact with psychiatrists and psychopaths to determine the current state of psychiatry from the layman’s perspective. Players must deal with the over-zealousness of psychiatrists in creating disorders out of normal behavior, prescribing drugs to children and the moral difficulties surrounding people who have dangerous mental disorders which cannot be cured.

Actually no, that’s a book called  “The psycopath test” by Jon Ronson. Don’t tap the white tile is a game where you tap black tiles and you try not to tap the white ones, wheee!

When you do tap black tiles, a piano key is played, often to the tune of “Mary had a little lamb” or other simple tunes. At first I thought this was rather nice, then I made mistakes and the notes turned sour and it was like listening to someone with OCD learn how to play piano, one who couldn’t recover from mistakes and had to start over every-single-time they played a note incorrectly. I changed the sound mode setting to “default” and the notes were replaced by inharmonious bleeps and bwarps.

It felt a lot like playing as a defective player piano or  a little man, inside a player piano, trying to hit notes as I was instructed to although this didn’t feel like the intended design.

I’d like to report a crime against game design please

“Don’t tap the white tile” has 10 million downloads. 10 million people who have played as player pianos that can’t recover from mistakes even if they want to. I wonder what Kurt Vonnegut would think about that. I wonder if Kurt ever played videogames when he was alive.

I doubt it.

I doubt that many of my favourite authors would enjoy games, even half-life would probably be an alienating piece of shit to them the snobby high minded genius fools. Thankfully, most of them are dead already. If they played “Don’t touch the white tile” before they had died they probably would wish they were dead or, would commit suicide that little bit earlier. Jon Ronson, if you’re reading this. Stay away from free android videogames, for now at least.