OMGJeremy

Time We Will Never Get Back: A Look at the Internet Games That Are Wasting Our Lives

with generous amounts of help from Melissa!

The Internet is pretty great for the most part.  It can be massively entertaining, you meet up with distant people you’d never have met any other way… Unless the world really is putty in the hands of Fate and if there were no Internet right now, we really would somehow run into all of these people in strange, strange ways.. But I mean I am on my second sentence of an article and I probably shouldn’t ALREADY be getting distracted from the topic at hand.  Wait!  I haven’t even introduced the topic!  I was starting with a slightly-relevant hook to trick you into reading what I am going to be discussing with myself!  Browser-based Internet Games.

Yeah we've played it. No it isn't fun in any way. Oh you know.. probably like 50 hours, all told. We'll probably go back to it.

What I was trying to say is that the Internet is entertaining, but eventually one day you find yourself being the only person on, so you have no delicious conversation to distract you from whatever it is you’re really supposed to be doing.  You have sickened of reading news and humor sites (I assume that’s what you guys do, I am trying to reach out and relate with you here).  You aren’t in the mood for pornography because sometimes that happens even though you don’t like to admit it.  I refuse to let assumptions make an ass of me in this article!  So what you do is turn to some trivial game to pass the time until time zones in other parts of the world become agreeable and you can talk to people again.  Hey, by the way did you notice that I didn’t even pay service to the idea that maybe you would eat, bathe, sleep, or work on outside projects?  Haha.  I mean, I like to consider myself as sort of ridiculous, but I don’t really want to be downright absurd.

This is what has happened to me.  The turning to games.  You may have noticed past articles and mentionings of “Amanda plays Farmville” and “Pet Society isn’t so bad, even though it really actually is” and “HORSELAAAANNNDDDDDD!”  So this is by no means a current development in my/our existences.  I think actually this bug has gotten most of the internet’s population.  Some people fall to it as though it was a gambling problem, pouring in real life money for “coins” or whatever the word is in that game’s world for game money.  God, game money is so important.  These games are heavily stacked in favor of people who actually give them money for some reason.  It’s awful.  It’s the worst.  Needless to say, I am a proud person.  I will forever be the equivalent of a Dumb Game Hobo, living on the game’s streets, doing my best with what I have.  Carving out a paltry living on the scrubby side of a mountain trying to plant a small vegetable crop.. just enough to get by.  That’s all I need.  The joy in these games is obviously playing at all!  Even though they are all deeply flawed and cause us all needless torment and vexation.

To conclude this ridiculously long introduction to a throwaway article, let me say: I will review the current small list of games that my friends and I have been consumed by on google+.  It is up to date.  It is up to the MINUTE up to date, really.  Yes, I am writing this article because I am out of time and moves on all of my games right now.

Zombie Mothafuckin’ Lane

Zombie Lane got us early on.  And by “us” I mean “me and my friend, Melissa.”  In the young days of G+, we noticed a game section and scowled.  ”What!” we cried.  ”Google+ is just going to be as dumb as Facebook I guess!  Games?  Booo!”  (I, at least, had stopped playing games on Facebook like two years ago because I was annoyed by how they required you to continually flood your friends’ newsfeeds with embarrassing things.  I think they have since fixed that, but the damage had been done for me.  So most of the games on google+ are also on Facebook, okay?  I just don’t use them there.  GOT IT??)  Then we immediately clicked and perused the small selection of games.  Many were sort of lame, or dull, or just like, you know, “bubble blast” and other things that are fun and only take a moment and are okay to do in between messaging people and such.  But then we saw Zombie Lane, and man, it was pretty cute!  Look at it!

Welcome to my home away from home! I am being pummeled by zombies as "Spouse Man" looks on.

So you like are sucked in by the general cutieness of these zombies.  And I don’t even LIKE zombies that much!  But these guys are okay.  They shamble their best.  You are a person of gender and you have to do these set tasks in order to protect yourself from this zombie horde.  You invite your friends who lose interest after a few days, but it’s okay, you can still “visit” them and earn rewards.  So you don’t really give a shit.

Zombie Lane is fun because you collect items to build other items. Sure, that sounds like other games, but what might you need in a zombie apocalypse? And what would you even have around? Duct taping a gasoline can to a water gun, tying a bowling ball to the end of a rope, and putting nails in a bat sound just likely enough to work. You even get to watch yourself swing the bowling ball and fire the flamethrower at the unsuspecting zombies of varying careers.  This gives you a psychological satisfaction that causes you to feel justified in crafting bizarre weapons instead of keeping the house clean, or fulfilling occupational obligations!

The game isn’t all that, though. Turns out being a bored, aimless, homebody is too much for Digital Chocolate, the makers of Zombie Lane. You see, at least thrice we’ve reached so far in the game that we ran out of missions entirely. Whenever they list an impending update, you’ll have to wait about three times as long as they promise. Is it worth it? Well, for a zombie circus and a weird alien crash site I would have waited even longer! (A whole minute, even.)

Get supersoaked with FIERY DEATH, horrid zombie clown!

It all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  A perfect waste of time, watching the goopy destruction of villainous monsters.  Saving the day in this game world frozen in time forever.  Finishing impossible tasks such as “kill a million billion zombies” and “plant/harvest a zillion arbitrarily listed crops” and “help your friends as many times as you can until your brains fall out of your face and you burst into flame,” you are happy as a mule on the moon (the moon is made of hay in that scenario).  You may stress in a way that only a game this pointless will make you stress, but it is good stuff.  BUT THEN.  The flaws appear.  Hey, we can’t send gifts to each other!  Wow, we have tasks that can only be helped by friends but when they try, the game doesn’t count it!!  WOW THIS IS FUN!!!

But does it stop us from playing until one day they (might) fix it?  No.  We just bitch and then wait impatiently until the moves build back up or we can harvest our cabbage.

Backyard Monsters

Switching gears, we finish up our last click on Zombie Lane.  Our last curse word directed at the developers of it still warm on our dry, cracked lips (we forget to stay hydrated), we then move to Backyard Monsters – an unexpected delight.

G+ has slowly been releasing more and more games.  I had been playing some others which, now that I have stopped, I can’t remember why I bothered enduring them, but I can only play about three at a time, I guess, and I start to just naturally forget the ones that don’t keep my interest as well.  Anyway, Melissa was all, “omg have you played Backyard Monsters?  Get it!!” And because I have very little will of my own, and Melissa has never steered me wrong when it comes to choosing how to eat up precious minutes of my rapidly depleting store left in my lifetime, I immediately got in on that Backyard Monsters action.  And boy do I not regret that decision!!

Home Sweet Home Away from Home.

Twigs, putty, goo, pebbles, shiny… it took us a little while to get used to this game. The whole tutorial in fact! But after that, it is second nature to build our little goo monsters into a battle we know full well they will not win. We pump our little resource factories away, saving up to upgrade our weapons and hatcheries. It’s a little monster paradise. And then your immunity timer runs out for the first time, and you are attacked so fully that you think you will never recover.

This is Melissa's monster yard. She needed help. I helped her.

Having friends in this game is a huge advantage. They can knock full minutes off of your two day upgrades and sending you valuable resources that will soon be stolen from you. No, that is too cynical, but here’s the deal. If you are a lady on the internet, well you know how it goes right? Turns out that being a lady playing an internet game is also a good way to draw painful attention on yourself. None of our penis-laden friends have been quite so slaughtered and have quickly climbed our friend ladder to the front.  By the way, interestingly, this is the only game where our other, less-sad friends are STILL playing!  Probably because they are boys and are therefore expressing their inner warriors and meanwhile Melissa and I are getting pillaged almost every day. BUT WE ARE STILL PLAYING THIS SUCKER.  We must like the attention!

Where's all this aggression stemming from, Trey? Why do you keep attacking me? Ransacking my poor Town Hall. I didn't do anything to you! And I never will as long as you have such insane defense towers every three spaces in your yard. ;(

And here we find the only actual flaw to Backyard Monsters.  Which isn’t really a flaw, because it isn’t the result of bad code writing or whatever.  They never overreach themselves.  It is just that other players are better than we are and it makes us frown and huff and puff and whine a little and start private threads on google+ that include only your friends who play this game so we can list all of the people who keep attacking us repeatedly so that they can, in turn, attack those guys.  So they can, in turn, try to attack those guys and instead get whipped by their defenses because they seriously must be spending real money because my god who can have THAT many laser cannons??  Ugh.

Gardens of Time

Or “That Time Garden Game,” as we often call it.  This game has quite possibly the stupidest plot in all of video game history. You are some sort of time agent and you visit places trying to recover anachronistic items hidden among the cluttered rooms and landscapes. The game starts with some sort of uninteresting and hard-to-follow argument among other time agents, one of which I guess has recruited you into the time cabal.  However, ignoring the inexplicably complicated story in Gardens of Time makes way for all the good stuff: time wasting. You are given a series of scenes in which you find a list of items, starting with 6 per scene and (very) slowly increasing. It’s fun! And you can even pretend it’s worthwhile, since it almost feels like you’re accomplishing something. Never mind about that watch or that $20 bill you lost in your real apartment, find the rubber ducky, tribal mask, and cigar in this picture of a filthy London apartment!  A filthy London apartment THAT NEVER BECOMES CLEANER.  EVER.

OUT, DAMN SPOT!

That’s right.  This game is basically a picture-find that never changes except that it does have SO many anachronistic items in there that sometimes you get different items to find.  Eventually, you just memorize the whole image and click in the right spots without even looking up at it except for the briefest of moments.  This allows you to compete with your friends’ time scores and feel a strange sense of accomplishment (maybe it is a type of brain exercise?) and try not to feel worried that you are replacing other precious memories with an image of the layout of a market street in ancient China, or a scene set next to the Nile in [undisclosed time period] Egypt.  We can assume that Egypt is always very ancient though because what else has Egypt done ever?

The best part, besides the distracting from thinking about how our lives are going, is that you get to decorate your own Victorian Style Garden.  HAHA DID I REALLY JUST WRITE THAT??  God, it is the best part though.  You decorate it with artifacts you find, and it gives you “reputation” which allows you to open more scenes and more chapters and learn more boring plot twists amongst these asshole characters you will never care about because they are all annoying.  The garden mentioned in the title is useless. I mean, really.  They could have just dispensed with the plot entirely and just given us picture-finds and we still would have played all day and all night and talked about it for hours out of each day while we wait for our energy to come back.  But I guess this is where the *absolute* best part of the game comes in. When you visit your friends you can hide a little present among their cluttered garden. It’s actually really hard to find! You also get to play extra find-em-ups when you visit your friends. They’re on a 60-second timer and give you a lot more items to find, which is nice, but it quickly makes you realize that you need more than 60 seconds. It takes you about 60 seconds to realize, I guess.  You become discouraged for a moment and then remember that maybe you have enough energy to clean that damn London Apartment again.

My home away from home sweet home away from home.

Flaws?  Of course there are flaws.  We haven’t even started listing the flaws.  First of all, I am pretty sure it doesn’t really let you help your friends, or allow them to help you, even though everywhere you look it is like, “ask for your friends’ help in doing this stupid task like UPGRADE BIG BEN what does that even MEAN??”  With the amount of energy you receive in the game, you can only play about 6 times per sitting before you run out. If your friends were able to send you gifts, it might be easier to get more energy, but alas, it doesn’t work. You can send and send until your Backyard Monsters upgrades are done and your Zombie Lane energy is back, but it won’t do a thing. Neither will sending your friends their wishlist items. Or, if it does let you help, and you are getting helped, we haven’t really discovered where the help or gifts are deposited…  Maybe eventually the plot will reveal that the supposed possible-villainous character has been stealing our presents and we will get them all at the end of the game when we will not even need them?  Somehow I doubt it.

What a cruel, cruel tease.

Meanwhile, the garbage in our own homes has long since toppled from the top of Mt Trashcan and Mt Filthsuvius continually threatens to erupt, and all of our hopes and dreams are forgotten and replaced by details of the Time-Romance being played out by poorly written characters in this game.  Sometimes I think that if I had taken up a heroin addiction, I would at least have a reason to leave the house.  However, I know what is going on here.  I am having that moment of lucidity that comes with not having clicked mindlessly at a teensy graphic looping on my screen for almost an hour.  …. Almost an hour!?  Oh man, I bet our energies have replenished!!  See you doggies LATER!