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.

Auction Wars

The antiques roadshow is a television program which involves people selling priceless heirlooms which they’ve inherited from their dead relatives. Usually an expert will evaluate these trinkets, describing the item’s history in exquisite detail.

Storage wars and shows like it, involve American pawn shop owners bidding on storage containers which storage companies inherit from their dead customers.  Contestants get a few minutes to glance over the container, trying to estimate its value. The amusing twist is that people don’t know what they’ll get and often find that they’ve just spent $600 on a collection of soiled leather pants and 12 boxes of decomposing onions.

Auction Wars is the videogame version of the latter! Actually I suppose Bargain Hunt would be a more fitting comparison but I don’t think there’s anything close to an American version of David Dickinson.

Y’all know the star spangled banner right?

The joy of shows like Bargain Hunt and Storage wars is barking at the contestants for idiotically pissing away significant sums of money for insignificant things. Auction Wars focuses on this feeling of superiority and challenges you to appraise some abandoned shit in a box and then outbid a series of AI competitors for pretend profit.

There are two modes but I ignored multiplayer because I’m allergic to all forms of human contact. The singleplayer mode forces players to compete against three AI opponents. You’re given five seconds to poke at the tat in a storage unit to see a few dollar value estimations. You then engage in a frenetic bidding war for ownership of the contents. I found it relatively easy at first, ignoring units which were obviously filled with human entrails and bidding like crazy for containers filled with golden chests.

Cameron only has himself to blame. Cameron spent $400 on a broken radiator.

After I unlocked the second series of lockers, the difficulty ramped up considerably. I started to ignore  four out of five boxes just to avoid spending half of my money on units full of compost and hair. The AI also got significantly more devious. If a unit had something of obvious value the AI would go into a bidding frenzy, denying anybody a profit. They’re proper petty little bastards!

After about 20 minutes it becomes the most boring thing on earth but you continue to play, entranced. You ignore how boring the game actually is. You’re not a spectator anymore, you’re a competitor and you’ll be fucked before you let that fuckface Darrell fuck another unit away from you with his fat little head staring gormlessly into the distance as though he’s in a dream where four thousand cheeseburgers float through a wall toward him, begging to be devoured.

I had to stop playing, it’s kind of addictive but you get burned by the shithead AI too much. It also simulates the TV series with such accuracy that it also brings with it the associated “what am I doing with my life?” depression. I’d much prefer a game version of the Antiques Roadshow, you’d have to select an item of intrigue given to you by a deceased aunt, an expert would give you a nice soothing explanation of its history and worth. You could even select something at random from your own house like maybe… a television. Lovely.

 

Boxing game 3D

As I’ve mentioned in other articles, I know more about nostrils than I  do about sports. I’ve therefore been dreading this article. What a wonderful surprise I had when I launched the game. It’s not really a macho boxing game at all, its a failed university project with 2 animated characters and some rushed 3D assets lazily plopped into a game. In fairness, that sounds better than the games I cobbled together at university.

Boxing 3D’s one and only level is set on a beach or err, a desert. It’s hard to tell as the camera doesn’t move but there’s no sea in shot so let’s roll with desert. The boxing ring literally consists of four posts and a few bits of string. The pugilists comically slide across the sand trying to dish out as many slaps as possible until one falls asleep. I found that the best technique is to spam the upper left punch button, it never fails. I could be a pro boxer no bother. Seems to me like real boxers are wasting their time trying to vary their punch direction and movements. Protip boxing readers: Stick with one move, they’ll never see that twentieth punch coming.

If you kick sand into my eyes again Gary, I’m going to put you in the fucking ground!

Colossal failings aside, you can’t help but wonder why these two guys are boxing in the desert. Do they live in those huts? Is there water in those barrels? Is this an official UFC game as advertised on the title screen? Are they fighting over the barrels? What’s in those barrels?

I enjoyed how bad this game was. It makes very little sense, it’s got bad controls, bad graphics and it blasts adverts at me. I just don’t think a lot of effort was put in and it’s refreshing in that sense. There’s no marketing department involved and if there is, it’s hilariously dropped the barrel.

Those guys both seem kind of annoyed at that outcome but you can’t argue with those numbers.

10/10 Played, Laughed, Uninstalled.

Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s leftovers

Tiny And Big  is a game which allows me to satiate my desire to use an incredibly powerful laser to dissect buildings and anything else which has wronged me.

The game focuses on the tale of Tiny, whose inherited underpants have been stolen by his nemesis Big for reasons known only to Big’s presumably warped mind. The first area in the game is a crater in which you’re given licence to learn how to properly carve stuff up and move rubble around to your advantage. You do so using a grappling hook and a portable rocket but the best bit is faffing around with the ultra powerful laser. You’ll quickly find that your cutting technique matches that of a toddler using his shoelaces to cut through play-doh and once the first level is done, the difficulty sharply increases. You’ll be forced to abandon your clumsy chopping in order to butcher the landscape with architectural finesse.

This needs to happen to every government building ever made.

It’s a game by Black Pants studios  and on top of its fantastic fart-around physics and its pleasing comic book stylings it has an utterly smashing soundtrack. However, if you doddle around for as long as I did without collecting new song collectibles, those rather splendid tracks can start to get your dander right up.

The game is littered with collectibles and secret areas to reach, provided you have the skill to reach them. Manipulating the world can be a tough skill to master. Obtaining an out of reach item will depend entirely on your ability to slice and arrange your environment just so but it’s remarkably rewarding. Like spending 4 hours carving up a pumpkin only to find a wallet inside which you lost in 2003 and the cash is still there.

It’s only 7 british dollars (pounds) on Steam and can also be bought DRM free from a variety of sources on the dev’s website. Grapple shot it into your library or I’ll steal your grandfather’s underpants for my own purposes.