YouTube has this thing now called YouTube Playables (great name as usual, guys; it's not a children's snack pack), that are basically in-app "Flash games"-style things that are just enough game to keep you watching ads.
The ones of these that aren't direct ripoffs of owned IP (very specifically Zuma) are barebones exercises in that bog-standard FTP addictive mobile gaming loop we all know and hate but also LOVE, minus the in-app purchases (for the time being). Like, shallow systems that are fun for exactly 30 minutes, then get stupidly hard so you'll pay to win, though you can't do that yet, so...kind of pointless.
...I still spent FOUR HOURS playing these, because they tapped into my primitive lizard brain's desire to try and master an utterly meaningless task and then feel undooly smug about it.
I didn't get any ads, because I'm a stooge that pays real money to Google every month for this, because once you go adless, you CANNOT go back. Which kind of negates the whole point of these, as addictive time-wasters that keep you glued to the platform and its commercials? But I already pay for YouTube and STILL got caught in these, so I suppose everything is going according to YouTube's plan either way, and I need meaningful human relationships.
But THAT isn't going to happen any time soon! So let me waste another evening on these by reviewing some crap garbage games for idiots that no one cares about, on Tumblr dot com!
1. Totemia: Cursed Marbles
It's Zuma. That's it. With a couple minor tweaks that make it harder and more annoying.
Just license Zuma, YouTube. I think you can afford the, what, $25 that would cost atm?
2. Sword Play
An on-rails sword slashing game (you don't control the movement, just the slashing), and you kill plastic doll guys before they kill you.
At some point they get projectiles that move really fast, that you can only destroy via specific directional QTEs that don't register properly half the time, because this is all relative finger smearing across the screen.
It was fun before that. The guys fall apart specific to how you slash them. That's something.
3. Dessert DIY
This one sucks. You're just picking from very limited options, then doing specific motions to trigger animations that create desserts that don't even look much like the promo art. People request different things, but early game all they ask for is "whatever you want to make" and "do one out of poop with bugs on it to make someone I hate throw up."
And then there's an animation of someone accepting what is obviously poop with bugs on it from their sworn enemy, they eat it anyway, then vomit.
The only fun part about this is the shameless inclusion of NPCs that look like celebrities, specifically Billie Eilish, Kanye West, and Donald Trump.
If you want to make a poop ice cream cone with bugs on it and feed it to Trump until he vomits all over his desk, this is the game for you. Otherwise, this is meh even for one of these meh games.
4. Bowmasters
Dueling Angry Birds, but you have no control of the camera and it focuses on you so you have to trial-and-error the degree of angle and throwing force to figure out how to hit and kill your opponent before they hit and kill you.
There are many colorful pop culture-inspired combatants to unlock, with a huge variety of projectiles of different weights, sizes, and behaviors. This is the most "very nearly a real, good game" one of these.
...Except that the level progression forces you to do Bonus Rounds, and one of those is "knock fruit off the head of an opponent without hitting them, and you have to do this like 5 times in a row, and we move you further away from them another 30 yards every round, and you have to use a wildly different unique projectile every round, and you get 3 chances, and that includes if you miss entirely."
It is basically impossible to do this, because your ever-changing location makes calculating arcs and force, with the ever-changing projectiles, impossible, in this limited amount of attempts. It turns into grinding it out until RNG randomly makes you win.
Which is a shame, because otherwise, this is fun. But you WILL get stuck on a stupid fruit round and stop playing this.
5. Mob Control
You have a cannon that launches blue guys. The NPC opponent does red. You both are trying to bumrush the other's base, taking advantage of buttons and switches and bonus gates that speed you up or slow you down and multiply your number of guys. Guys annihilate each-other when they run into each-other, so you need to overwhelm Red before they overwhelm you.
It's fun until it gets so fast that it becomes a chore to manage where precisely to launch guys specifically to annihilate other guys.
6. Merge Master
This goddamn game. This was 3.5 hours of my 4 hour playtime.
You have a grid board, with you at the bottom and an opponent at the top. You both have an army of warriors and dinosaurs, and a team HP bar. You click go, the warriors fire projectiles and the dinosaurs melee the nearest enemy, and last man standing wins.
Before each round, you can arrange the placement of your army, and use money you won from the last rounds to buy more warriors and dinosaurs. But the kicker is, you can combine like warriors and dinosaurs to make more powerful units, which you keep at the end of every round. They don't gain XP or anything, but as you make more money, you can buy more 1st-level units (that's all you can buy), and gradually combine them and then combine the combinations, and on and on and on, making incredibly powerful new units. And you need a mix of low-level and high-level units to have enough melee dinosaurs and projectile-throwers to overwhelm high-level enemy units, or draw fire away from your own, against the ever-changing enemy army each round.
It's a process of slowly adding more units and combining them to make stronger and stronger units, and as many of them as you can get, accounting for the limited board space. Also the price of units rises exponentially each round, so you may have 1 trillion gold, but at this point a new 1st-level dinosaur costs 245 billion.
I couldn't stop with this. It just got me. I wanted to see new exciting high-level warriors and dinosaurs, and see how fast I could take the other army down. There's more than zero strategy at work here, and battles can vary substantially from round to round, depending on what mix of units the enemy brings to the board.
It's still a rudimentary Flash-esque game, and very much akin to those shitty mobile boss rush games that raid our shadow legends. But it's not PTW yet, and the graphics are a charming and distorted replica of early 2000s 3D games, like Age of Mythology or GTA 3. It felt like something, for awhile.
It isn't, and I wasted valuable battery charge on this stupid shit. But I was having fun. And sometimes, that's enough.
...And posting about it here. It's something to talk about that isn't the world eating itself.
currently playing infinity nikki for the first time (as well as my first time playing any gacha game) and i am. so perplexed by this girl.
she is nonconsensually ripped from her home and sucked into some other universe. the annoying rat is taken with her and they end up in some dark souls esque world. she now has the powers of levitation (?!) and shooting objects from her hand (?!) that can only harm bad guys and completely miss everything else in the environment. are these powers conscious of who it can hit or does nikki just have really good aim?
after she meets some lady who has been chained to the ceiling for who knows how many years, a "heart" of some sort is forced into nikki's chest which gives her weird pains (no shit) from time to time when she witnesses emotional or "whimsical" displays.
anyway, im traversing this new land, in shock that this poor girl opened a simple wardrobe and is now in what appears to be some alternate universe where clothes have magic powers. if that were me, i'd be freaking out and wondering where the hell i am, what planet im on, and if im dreaming
nikki, though?
nikki is having the time of her life
i mean, shes casually introducing herself to dada and giovanni like shes just some girl from the next town over; no! youre not supposed to be here!! youre essentially an alien and youre fooling everybody!!
this girl is catwalking miraland like stuff like this happens to her ALL. THE. TIME.
A review for the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy supplement Eureka: The XXX-Files. You can leave a 5-star review by going to the top-right of the store page. Just note that this is one of the rating systems where anything below a 5-star counts as negative.
Alaris Indie Game Review – Shape Your Own Magical Romance
Enter a magical world of mystery, magic, and Fae, in Alaris, a supernatural fantasy amare visual novel developed by Crescence Studio....
Lately, I haven't been doing so well with my mental health. I have many physical problems with my back, muscles, liver, eyes, etc. This week has especially taken a toll on me due to a procedure I need to determine a problem with my optic nerves swelling randomly. Let me tell you, reader, I feel like a plague child at times. I call myself that quite often. Some think I'm joking, but I'm not, really. It all feels too real, the pain, and being told one thing and now being told I was right for being suspicious. Honestly, I didn't expect to finish another game so soon, but I just had to with this adorable game called Kabuto Park. I thought I would take a moment to talk about it and how it's helped me with my mental health. I hope ya'll don't mind me getting personal.
Two developers made this game. Their goal was to make a game where you went to a camp and caught bugs. You meet a lot of faces and even get to battle your way up as a champion. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's very much like the Pokémon games. Not many people know that the creator of the Pokémon franchise got his inspiration from bugs and catching them as he grew up. I loved the idea of having actual bugs fight rather than your typical caterpies and beedrills. It was very refreshing. Some of the beetles I had caught, I didn't even know were a thing. Not to mention that the designs of these cuties are very adorable! I would love a plush of the Hercules Beetle. Who knows, maybe in the future, they'll make a MakeShift petition! I'd vouch for it, for sure.
I didn't have anything that I didn't like in this game. It was very relaxing and chill compared to other games like Stardew Valley or Slime Rancher. I like to just take a break from pixel art and 3D art styles, so the 2D simplistic art style was refreshing for me. There isn't a lot of animation in this game, either. I find this not lazy but rather unique for the vibes it's going for. It feels like you're looking through an old postcard collection when looking at the still images. I like postcards, so of course I adored this decision. It also wasn't very busy or overwhelming for me to get from task to task. Very straightforward and easy to understand. There is also a terrarium you receive from your friend named Hana, which lets you look at all the bugs you put under FAVORITES. It's nice to watch the little guys just have fun crawling around. I also found it very relaxing, especially for deep breathing exercises.
One fact that I didn't expect to do while playing this game through was to get all of its achievments! Honestly, while there may not be as many as other games, I think having small goals can help give the player another goal to have rather than a million. It felt so nice to just get some achievements for chilling out and battling, or catching bugs. They even have shiny bugs in this game with a different color palette. Sometimes, they may be bigger and stronger, too.
Overall, I had a relaxing time with my buggy companions! I hope the developers think of adding some kind of multiplayer mode. I think that would be fun! I'm gonna give this cutie patootie game a 9/10. You should play it if you're having a bad day or if you just need something positive to focus on. It helped me a lot through this rough week I've had, so I hope it at least brings others joy, too.
(By the way, I would love there to be a MakeShift plush of the bugs from this game. I'm just saying!)
