Super Mario Run (E, Smartphone)



For years we've been avoiding smart phones and sticking to flip phones, but that changed this month. My father was having issues ordering his medications from the VA and he needed to connect his account to a new phone, but that required a facial scan our flip phones couldn't handle. So it was finally time to give in and get a sixty dollar Samsung smart phone, and that meant it was time for me to poke into the cursed world of mobile gaming. I was going to relegate these to the "Stuff I Didn't Do Quickies About" during the Year in Review but I had fuck all else going on this month and you know what, if I've done quickies for World of Warcraft, I can hammer out some thoughts for these. So let's start with the most insubstantial, Super Mario Run.

Did you ever want to play a Mario game, but have Mario be an absolute bastard to control? No? Well, here's Super Mario Run anyway. Imagine the most mindless Mario levels you could come up with in Mario Maker, but because you can't control Mario's horizontal movement it's hard to stomp enemies and easy to overshoot jumps. But what am I on about, you're not here to play a Mario game, you're here to grind out the Toad Rally and earn decorations for the Mushroom Kingdom.

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Pokemon Friends (E, Smartphone)



When I called Super Mario Run the most insubstantial game I played this month, let me say Pokemon Friends isn't far behind. I knew going in this was for little kids (in fact, it's a reskin of a kiddy edutainment app Wonderfy made back in 2013), but hey, sometimes I like to unwind by fucking around in Big Thinkers, Math Workshop, Treasure Mountain, or some other edutainment game. But holy crap, if this is what edutainment games are like for you kids these days I weep for you.

In Pokemon Friends, you're given three puzzles at random from a pool determined by which DLC packs you own, and these puzzles can be anything from mazes to shape visualization to matching games, and they all have multiple rounds you need to complete. After you complete the three puzzles you get a random ball of yarn, which you then throw into a machine to get a random doll. I don't know why it doesn't just give you the doll, maybe it's because if you've already received a certain doll and want more of it, you can throw in two balls of yarn to get it, four for the legendary dolls.

You can then give the dolls away to the local townsfolk, who are some of the neediest motherfuckers on the planet. Some only occur once, but others will keep popping up to ask you for more dolls. One of the repeat customers is two brothers asking for two different dolls, and for a while they didn't care what two dolls I gave them so I gave them dolls of similar size and rarity. But then they wanted two different medium-sized Normal dolls, and the only two medium-sized Normal dolls I could make were Wooloo and Terapagos, which is like that one Christmas where my half-sister gave my brother Donkey Kong Country 2 and me a deck of cards. They weren't even, like, Lion King-themed or anything, just a plain deck of cards.

I was originally planning to buy the $35 complete back, because I'm a fucking moron, I guess, but I was just a little short on funds after tax. So I wound up buying just the $10 basic pack, the one that let me make Skitty, who popped out the next time I put in some Plain Yarn. And you know what, that was enough. The last of the cat dolls I got was Sprigatito, but I still tried to complete my catalogue. The only available plushie I'm currently missing is Rayquaza, but I don't care anymore.

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Pokemon Cafe Remix (E, Smartphone)



Somehow an icon-matching game was the most substantial thing I played this month. It's a fine little puzzle game, based around matching Pokemon icons under various circumstances to clear food-based icons. Sometimes you need to make a chain next to a food icon three times, sometimes you need the make a chain three times in a row, sometimes you have to guide the items to a basket, sometimes the food multiplies, and the various Pokemon you recruit can help out either by instantly clearing certain icons or having a Cafe Skill that works with the current puzzle layout. Although I frequently felt like I was fighting with the physics engine more than the puzzles themselves. I can't tell you how many times I was trying to line up a horn or Cafe Skill, and just as I released the powerup to activate it the icons surrounding "popped" and misaligned everything. And I couldn't help but groan whenever the game suggested Slurpuff for a level, it gets stuck on fucking everything.

But of course this is a free to play mobile game which means there are options to give it money and yeah, I bought a couple of the monthly Premium Passes and a few $3 Mighty Menus. The game gave me some entertainment (I was shocked to look at my Google Play stats and saw I spent almost 70 hours on it in August) so fine, I'll toss a few bucks its way. Shit, I almost dropped $35 on that stupid plushie game. There is gacha mechanic with the Pelipper deliveries, where you can send Pelipper out once a day to potentially recruit a rare Pokemon, or spend money to try as much as you want. You can also win tickets for free spins from bingo cards and events, one of which gave me the summer maiden Froslass. The Pokemon I really wanted was Sprigatito and my original self-decided endgame goal was to amass enough Golden Acorns to buy fourteen spins on the 11x deliveries, and if the game still didn't give it to me I could just buy it with the delivery points. But then I got Sprigatito from one of the Litwick 11x ticket, so now my goal is to get Sprigatito in a chef outfit.

I also find it mildly amusing that back in RBY, Mew was this enigma whose Pokedex entry said it was so rare most people considered it a myth, but thirty years later I can have one serving lattes in my cafe.

And here's a half horrifying, half strange story. For the last week of August I came down with what I would describe as the worst gas cramps I've ever had in my life. Gas X and laxatives didn't do shit (I mean, the latter did to shit but you know what I mean), and while the pain got slightly better as the days went on, it was still a miserable week until it just... stopped. It seems to have actually been a kidney stone. Hooray! But while I was trying to sleep through the agony, I kept dreaming of this game being played in my insides. Like, I don't know how to explain it, other than this game was taking place in my gut instead of a Pokemon cafe.

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