Crazy Taxi

I remember playing Crazy Taxi in the arcades of my hometown of Blackpool. It was great, beating the clock was a challenge and I was separated from my ill-deserved pocket money and thus prevented from buying anything I could use to hit people. The game had a physical wheel and gearstick too so there was an element of tactility and real driving skill involved. True fact: during my driving test, I tried to drive the wrong way down a one way street and the examiner had to take the wheel off me. Driving on roads isn’t fun anyway.

I can swipe to change lane but I can’t swipe away my tears after having my childhood memories shat all over.

Crazy Taxi for android is the same brand as the arcade game but a fundamentally different experience which has been crudely jammed into a format to which it doesn’t belong.

Direct free roaming control of your taxi has been dropped in favour of swiping left or right to change lanes or occasionally participate in a ludicrous scripted handbrake turn. Admittedly, phones are shit at emulating interactions that don’t involve swiping or tapping but that’s too bad. There’s probably no better way of doing it but I don’t award points for good intentions. The driving is shit.  You also don’t get to fart around as you please, instead you get linear missions. the number of which you can play at any time is now limited by ” fuel ” which can be bought for actual money and dignity.

There are some rather fun tank missions where the goal is to smash into as many cars as you can. The clever clogs developers realised they could flip around their awful controls and encourage you to plow into as many cars as possible . Irritatingly, they also realised that this mode was a lot more fun and made sure to monetise it. Well, they tease you with the odd freebie but if you want to play the fun part of the game more than once every 5 hours, you can unlock more  by buying some gems.  Fucking Gems. They couldn’t even be bothered to fucking contextualise it for fuck’s sake. What a load of shit.

Also, the arcade game had a feverish pace. You feared the clock, you swore at customers and hissed at traffic. The android game is a sorry cash-in which tries to tickle money out of your teats the same way every other free piece of dross does.

I’d only watch that video if it was the developers being eaten alive by vultures.

I’d be less harsh if the game had a price and wasn’t a butchered version of a game I loved and didn’t sit at the back of the bus smoking gem cigarettes, throwing push notifications at peoples heads and laughing. Sadly, it’s a game that makes me want to vomit into the developers eyeballs.

Sonic jump fever

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: 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.

Kim Kardassian: Hollywood

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.

Hay day

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.

Forest mania

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.