Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Once it finally downloaded completely, I played this for a bit. It's cute and looks like it will be fun, but I didn't get really far into it. It's really linear but pretends not to be (like dialogue options that aren't really options, like "looks good!" and "that sounds fine" as your two options). But hey, that eagle guy on the right was pretty excited that I walked across the sidewalk and brought him an apple, so that's cool.

Super Stickman Golf 2

I actually borrowed Birk's phone for this one. We had gotten into bed, I remembered I needed to play a game, and thought, "Oh, I have a few friends who are enjoying Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp; I should download that and play it for a while." Well, it downloaded quickly but then there was immediately a data update I had to download, and my connection wasn't doing so hot, and I got frustrated with it. Birk offered me his phone, and I found Super Stickman Golf 2. I actually did pretty well, see?

Flow Free

I think I used to have this on my phone... if not, I at least remember seeing ads for it on Facebook or something. It's a pretty simple premise: connect the two same-colored dots with a line that doesn't overlap with any of the other lines.

Snake Vs Block

I saw an ad for this on Instagram and it looked like fun.

It's kind of like Centipede (you direct where the line of little yellow dots in the middle goes side-to-side while the screen automatically scrolls) but you want to build up dots (by picking up the individual little yellow dots with the numbers over them) so that when you inevitably hit a numbered block, you lose that number of dots but as long as you still have at least one dot in your line, you can keep going.

It sounds really simple but it scrolls really fast so it takes some practice.

Cuphead

So for sticking with me through two weeks of the same game (sort of) the prize is... I played Cuphead!

The first thing I was told about Cuphead when it came out was that it's all hand-drawn animation and in like a 1930s style. The second thing I heard about it was that it is REALLY difficult. Both of these things are true.

It's easy for me to get frustrated with a difficult game and say screw it, I'm going to go do something else. But I stuck with Cuphead longer in one sitting than I expected to. Yes, it's difficult, and yes, it's pretty frustrating, but it's also really fun.

Virus Buster

This is a game hidden inside of Brain Age 2 for the Nintendo DS that would be a total knockoff of Dr. Mario if it wasn't made by the same company.

You can only play Virus Buster once you've done your Daily Training for the day (but you only have to do one exercise to unlock it for the day). You're told before it starts that it isn't training, but it's for relaxation.

The music is the same as one of the modes in Dr. Mario for NES, but like a soothing, lullaby-style remix of it. It's nice. And a little weird.

You can only rotate the pills in one direction, by tapping on them, but - at least in Easy mode - they fall really slowly so it's not really an issue.

Also, if you have "remainder" pill pieces after you get four in a row that disappear, they also fall slowly and you can actually grab those and move them around if you want to, which I think is pretty cool.

I am pleased to announce that I'm just as good at this game as I am at regular Dr. Mario.

Piano Tiles 2

(Not great photos, but it's impossible to take a screenshot while playing this game.)

It's kind of like Guitar Hero, but it's piano. It's not nearly sensitive enough (or maybe my phone isn't, but I don't have that problem with other apps), it has no relevance between notes and key location, and the rhythm is off by a bit. It's also pretty annoying that one missed note ends the round.

Scribblenauts (DS)

I always thought this was a clever idea for a game, but I never play it for long. I don't know why... it just doesn't grab me.

For the unfamiliar: you work your way through stages, solving problems by writing the names of objects that will help in the scene. For example, in the top right photo, I was told to help the birthday boy break the pinata, so I wrote "bat" and handed him the baseball bat and he swung at the pinata... problem solved! Some aren't so easy.

Side note: I was amazed to turn on the DS and see that its battery was fully charged... I haven't used it in ages. Props to Nintendo for that one!

Championship Bowling (NES)

You know how games from your childhood remind you of... well, your childhood? I've owned this game since I was very little and got my NES in the first place, but the only time I really spent any time playing it was with my (now ex-) stepsister, Christina, when I was in 7th/8th/9th grade, so this game reminds me of her.

The way the characters are dressed, the look of the alley, the music... it's all incredibly late '80s / early '90s and it's so great. I played as the only female character (there are only four to choose from) does this crazy, knees-together, feet out to the sides celebratory jump when she gets a strike, which is really funny.

I did okay, for not having played in a long time. I bowled a 108, which is probably about what I'd bowl in real life right now (my average hovered around that for the last couple years that I was in a bowling league; I'd like to think I'd still do about that well now... and real bowling is on my games list, so perhaps we'll find out at some point!).

Mahjong Safari

This game, from Pogo, is less mahjong and more... mahjong-like matching game with a twist. But it was fun enough for me to play five or six levels before realizing it was pretty late and I should go to bed.

All the tiles have animals (except two pairs of Pogo logos, two pairs of stars, and two pairs that are each a half of an animal; when you match those to make the full animal, they show up in those blank spots on the left and when you get them all, there's a site-wide points bonus).

The trick is, you don't just match the pairs (there aren't layers, like in most mahjong solitaire games, so that would be too easy)... you have to be able to connect the pairs across blank space with a line that doesn't have to make more than two turns. For example, in the photo below, the line makes two turns.

Baikoh

I know I've mentioned before that I prefer games to be escapism, not necessarily a challenge... so this one stressed me out a little. But it was still fun.

The letter tiles fall from the top at random, and you tap on them to spell words and make the used letters disappear. The letters you use don't have to be touching or in any kind of order or anything. If you make words that don't exist, though, you get a layer of letters (one on every column) after your third non-word guess.

There are also some traps, which is the really annoying part. I mostly ran across the ice trap. You get a random letter that is icy, and if it sits there too long, it freezes adjacent letters, too. You have to use a frozen letter multiple times before it thaws and disappears, and if you use up letters underneath a letter that has frozen to the one next to it, it won't fall down (because it's attached to the one next to it). Annoying.

It's a really nice looking game though. I wish the letter blocks weren't all different colors (maybe three shades would work best: consonants, vowels, and tricky letters like Q/X/Z) because it makes it harder to tell which ones you've selected.

Battleship (Game Boy)

Another oldie but goodie: Battleship... for the Game Boy.

I love the sound effects, I love the items (the feeling when you use the 2x2 radar and it finds something, and the little scanner bar goes wonky and the little sound goes blip instead of myeeenh, so awesome), and I just like having someone to play Battleship with.

One thing I think was fairly progressive for a game this old is the password... every time you beat a level, it gives you a password that you can save, and on subsequent plays, you can enter the password at the beginning and skip ahead to a higher level. Pretty cool.

I won two rounds before I got tired (I was simultaneously staying up late to watch football).

Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself)

I think this one has been sitting at the back of my mind since I played Robot Unicorn Attack, because they were advertised on Adult Swim around the same time.

In this one, you have five minutes in an office setting to do enough damage to yourself to die. There are little things like staplers and scissors, bigger things like the microwave and copy machines, and you can talk to coworkers and use dialogue options to get them to do harm to you, too.

The controls were annoyingly bad when I played this time; I don't know if the blame lies with my laptop, the Wi-Fi connection, or the game, but it was pretty frustrating. I only managed to get 71% of the way to dead. (If you lose, you have to attend a staff meeting at the end.)

I Love Hue

Another decent find from the Google Play store.

In this one, you get blocks of color that vary slightly in hue (in order) and then some get removed and scrambled up, and you have to put them back where they belong.

Given my background in design, I'm very familiar with my specific shortcomings in recognizing color differences. My weakness is purple/blues, and my strength is yellow/greens. I'm halfway decent at pinks/oranges. (This game confirmed that, too.)

Tetris 2 (NES)

My favorite game ever, of any kind, is Dr. Mario. I think the vast amount of time I have dedicated to that game has made me mildly worse at this one.

Instead of how normal Tetris works, where you want to build solid horizontal lines of blocks at the bottom to make them disappear, in this one, you get blocks (yellow, blue, and red) with black circles in the middle to begin with (randomly arranged) and you get Tetris blocks made of different colored blocks (also yellow, blue, and red) to drop on them. You want to match three blocks in the same color in a row to make them disappear. The goal is to make all the original blocks with the black circles in them disappear to move on to the next level.

Dr. Mario has made me worse at this one because of the very slight differences. Both games use the same mechanic, goal, and three colors (and both have good music!), but Dr. Mario has pills of two "blocks" each while Tetris 2 has shapes of four blocks each, and Dr. Mario calls for four in a row to make them disappear and Tetris 2 calls for three in a row.

Kerbal Space Program

I was waiting for Birk to be available to help me with this one, because it looks entertaining, but only if you know what you're doing. After failing utterly at Beseige, I knew this game would not be fun if I attempted it on my own.

Hey look, I made a rocket! I sent Jebediah to space and back down, and had him evac once he hit the ground so he could walk around for no reason. That was pretty cool but then I found out they could go to the Moon... I mean, the Mun.

So (with a lot of help from Birk) I built a new rocket with a lunar lander, sent Jebediah, Bill, and Bob into space, learned (again, with a LOT of help from Birk) how the navigation works, then... well, Birk joked that I could evac a crew member before they hit the Mun, and how tragic that would be. So I did it, because I'm a terrible person.

I had taken a shining to Bob (he was my scientist, after all, and I was very insistent that there be science elements on my rockets) and Jebediah was my pilot so I felt like maybe he was necessary to the process of landing, so Bill jumped out of the pod a few hundred thousand meters above the surface of the Mun. He was never recovered.

But there's Jebediah and Bob on the Mun, getting ready to do the highly complex science experiment of "observe the mystery goo." (Turns out, it's less dense on the Mun. Who knew?)

The World's Easy-est Game

Note to self: Don't get drunk before playing a game for the day. You'll wind up finding a cop-out like this one.

It's from Addicting Games, it lives up to its name, and it's kind of like I Don't Even Know, or a very forgiving version of The Idiot Test.

98 Cards

To be totally honest - and I don't think I'm alone here - I usually don't really enjoy games that I'm not very good at. I don't like having to work at a game, for the most part.

I'm not particularly good at this game... but I like it.

You get eight cards at the bottom. You put the cards into the four piles up at the top. In the piles with the up arrow, you have to put down a card that is a higher number than the previous one. In the piles with the down arrow, you have to put down a card that is a lower number than the previous one. The exception is, in the up arrow piles you can put down a card that is exactly 10 less than the previous one, and in the down arrow piles you can put down a card that is exactly 10 more than the previous one. Every time you've put down two cards, you're dealt two more. You want to put down as many cards as you can.

It's more difficult than it sounds, but it's fun to try it out. I'm leaving this one on my phone for a while.

Donkey Kong (Game Boy)

This was one of the first Game Boy games I owned. I probably got it at the same time as my Game Boy. I don't remember; it has just always been in my collection, as far as I can tell.

And I do not like it. At all.

It is frustrating, the sound effects are annoying, and maybe I've just been a little hipstery my whole life and didn't like it because EVERYONE likes Donkey Kong, I don't know.

My mom would play my Game Boy from time to time, and I know she liked Tetris (possibly more than me, which is saying something) and I think I recall her liking Donkey Kong, too. It certainly explains why I didn't just get rid of it 25 years ago.

Polyforge

So there's a shape, and it's spinning, and there's also a little white arrow (see on the right, up there?) and it is spinning counter to the shape. When you tap on the screen, the arrow stabs itself at the shape and highlights the side that it touches. You have to do that until every side is highlighted, and you can't hit the same side twice.

Sounds easy, but the spinning is pretty fast.

It's not bad, but I uninstalled it.