Ball X Pit

Ball X Pit is Breakout X Vampire Survivors. There are a lot of things it does that I like, and it executes well on a most of it’s mechanics. Despite all that, I’m not sure that I want to recommend it, because I don’t really feel like I’m having fun with it. More on that later.

The Basics

Ball X Pit is easiest to describe in terms of just listing off all the places it’s cribbing features from. We’ve got the standard roguelike formula of incremental runs, complete with a 3-pick-1 system. The items in question are a set of brick breaker balls with special powers, and some side items. Balls can poison enemies, shock them in an AoE, split into more balls. These get bounced off enemies to deal damage, enemies drop EXP when the die, and the pressure is killing enemies before they meander their way to the bottom of the screen, at which point they punch you in the face.

Where Ball X Pit innovates is its fusion system, letting you take two balls, and combine them. Grab an Earthquake Ball, fuse it with Ghost, and suddenly you have a ball that pierces enemies while hitting them all with a massive AOE. There are also evolutions, combining specific balls to fuse into new, stronger balls, but these are a bit less novel, as both Vampire Survivors and Holocure had similar systems.

At the end of a run, you’ll be kicked back to the hub screen, a small city builder with a twist that’s actually quite novel. Instead of being your standard Farmville setup, you harvest resources by playing more brick breaker, launching your inhabitants into the village, bouncing off buildings to finish their construction, and across wheat fields to harvest them. These resources can be used to construct new buildings, and generally engage in meta-progression.

Then you’ll jump back into a run, perhaps with a new set of characters, better equipped for the given challenge. Rinse, repeat. Clear a level with enough different characters, and you’ll unlock another level.

It’s probably worth spending at least a bit of time talking about characters. At the start of a run, you’ll pick a character (later, you’ll unlock the ability to bring a second to set up interesting synergies!) to bring into the run. They bring a starting ball, some stats, and some sort of twist modifier. These are interesting, running the gauntlet from “shooting faster, but less accurately” to the one I’m using during while I’m doing this writeup, that auto-plays the game completely on their on own.

That character brings me to my main problems with the game: It’s really compelling, but around hour 5, I found that I wasn’t really having much anymore. I’m mostly ripping off a friend here when I say this, but the game feels kinda like looking at TikTok, there’s a point where you’re just a bit zoned out, but still present enough to keep going. After you stop though, you start finding yourself wondering what you just did for the last several hours.

It’s a shame because all the little things in Ball X Pit are pretty great. I love the low-poly aesthetic, the sound and music are good, and if you don’t like them, they’re easy enough to turn off, because some things I’ve played over the last few weeks, the game has a proper options menu.

It just keeps going

I had a different friend ask why I’d play 20+ hours of this if I’m not having fun, and I think I have two answers. The first is that early on, as the game is unfolding, showing off new systems, new characters, and new ideas, there’s this hope that it’s going to turn into something more then it currently is. I kept hoping that I’d unlock some subsystem that would crack the whole thing open. It’s also during the first few hours that you’re constantly unlocking things, finding new balls, new evolution and fusions with them, and just generally being entertained.

But this whole process slows down later on. Progression tapers off. There are no more twists, and the enemies, while having variety, don’t really require you to play any different. The game turns into a chore.

The second reason I played that much was to make sure that before I did this writeup, I’d really given the game a chance. Seen all it had to offer. And I feel fairly confident of that at this point.

I haven’t even beaten the last boss myself. Instead, I plugged in that character I mentioned above who plays on their own, and just let them do it. I bet there’s some sort of secret if I beat the final level with all 21 characters, maybe a bonus level, or secret 21st character, but at this point I’m just so bored, and frankly, don’t really want to.

Ball X Pit is $15. It’s not the worst $15 I’ve spent this week, but it’s not the best either. It’s an absorbing experience with clever ideas, but ultimately a slightly empty one.

Funspot NH – A Quick Review

For my mildly belated birthday, one of my friends put together a trip down to Funspot several months ago. If you haven’t heard of Funspot, it’s the “worlds largest arcade” according to Guinness World Records.

It’s an interesting place, both for the entertainments inside, and a secondary “vibe”. One of the first things you might see driving up is the electronic outdoor sign switch over from an image of Funspot’s mascot Topsnuf to the yet unanswered question “Who is John Galt?”

After arrival, if you need to relieve yourself and use the first floor bathroom, after exiting you may find yourself looking up at a large picture of Ronald Reagan extolling the virtues of video games for their values in training future pilots for the Air Force.

It’s an interesting tone.

I’m here to talk about the games though.

The Games

Funspot has several hundred cabinets, dozens of pinball machines, and just a general smörgåsbord of other types of arcades. I absolutely can’t review all of them, and I’m not going to try. Instead, I’m just going to section them off, and give my opinions on the various parts of Funspot.

Pinball

There are two general areas for Pinball, a set of old machines, and a set of standard more modern ones. Despite having a lot more machines, I think I generally enjoyed Capital Pinball‘s more.

A big part of this is because when the machine breaks, at Capital Pinball, I’d flip turn it off and on, and at Fun Spot, I’d have to find some exhausted looking employee to fix it, which might not necessarily happen. Two quick shoutouts on machines, first to Gottleib – World Series, the first Pinball machine where I managed to never even score a single point, and Joker Poker, a machine one of my friends quite liked.

Mini-Golf

There’s a self-serve indoor mini-golf area at $5 a person. It’s not the most inspired mini-golf I’ve ever played, with most of the holes being fairly basic straight shots or maybe only two bounces. There are no real gimmicks or super clever designs, but it’s perfectly serviceable, good for maybe one play through total.

Arcade Machines

There’s a lot of old arcade machines. I actually don’t have too much to say on these, as I probably spent the least amount of time on them. Old arcade games are fascinating to me from a technical and design perspective, but as gameplay experiences, I tend to find them a bit underwhelming. Also, a few of the ones I did try to play just kind of ate my money and didn’t start.

That said, my friends had a great time with Tetris and Smash TV.

Air Hockey

Air hockey probably the best token to fun ratio. There are three giant sheet metal air hockey tables, two of which mostly work. There are a few spots on the table where the air doesn’t come out, but overall, it’s Air Hockey. You smash the puck, try not to injure anyone, and just generally have a good time.

Skeeball

There’s a row of Skeeball machines, most in reasonably good shape. They’re an excellent place to watch an 8 year old just absolutely wing a chunk of plastic at the wall, an environmental storytelling explanation of the “Management reserves the right to limit players” sign. They’re a terrible place to earn tickets though, with a max of 10 for a perfect score. Overall, it’s Skeeball. You either know if you like it, or you spend a single token to find out.

Daytona

Okay, so this part was actually kinda cool. There were a bunch of Daytona machines, and they were all hooked up together. We had one bit 7 player game, and that was fun. Also, I got run off the road.

Ticket Counting Machines

Sometimes they count your tickets correctly! Sometimes they don’t. A lot of the time they break, and some kid in a high-vis vest has to come over, crack em open, and unstick the machinery. They still look super cool.

Prize Wall

I mean, it’s an arcade prizewall. It’s not great. I’ll be real here, I had slightly higher expectations from the “World’s Largest Arcade” bit, but like… not much higher. Maybe expectations is the wrong word, and I meant “hopes”. I had higher hopes for the Prizewall.

Like, you could have some Magic cards? Or maybe gold bullion. Instead, this is your general prize wall. There’s some candy, there’s T-Shirts, and there’s a few other things. But I think we turned like 40,000 tickets in 10 cups of candy and T-Shirt.

Overall Thoughts

Frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed by FunSpot. While the number of machines is incredible, the cost to play and ease at which things break was disappointing. I enjoyed getting to hang out with my friends (you were all awesome!) but I’d probably choose to bring folks up to Capital Pinball instead for my next birthday.

If I’m being honest, part of this is also the weird super-right wing vibe the place has. Maybe if it was a different time, I would feel differently.

Q-UP Demo

Okay. We’re back. I may have lost it a little talking about Unfair Flips earlier in the week, but now it’s time to talk about Q-Up, another game about flipping coins.

I really liked the Q-Up Demo. I actually played until I couldn’t anymore, because the demo stopped me. I thought it was great.

You may notice a slight tonal shift here between Unfair Flips and Q-Up, despite the fact that they’re both pseudo-incremental games about coin flips. This is because Q-Up is doing everything that Unfair Flips wasn’t.

I’ve mentioned before that I somewhat dislike idle/incremental games because if I’m not careful, they eat my time like a blackhole. I also don’t necessarily have any fun with them. To quote myself:

I resent idle games because for whatever reason, they work on me. I am entirely capable of looking at them, understanding how the mechanics work, and what they are going to make me do, why they are exploitive, and then I play them anyway.

Unfortunately for me, Q-Up has it’s hooks in me already, which means escape options are limited. Perhaps this writeup will be one of them.

There’s a lot of different layers to Q-Up, and I don’t think I’m even going to identify all of them, let alone write about them. The game is framed as a competitive e-Sport, with all the trappings of such, including ranks, stats, an in-game shop, skins, and a fake TOS that has to be agreed to on launching the game.

The team bit isn’t a joke by the way. You can in fact play the coin flip with your friends, and make synergistic builds. It’s incredible.

The E-Sport in question of course, is just a coin flip. But what a coin flip it is! Complete with matchmaking, exciting animations, and being put on either the Q or Up side. (Fun note: while playing with a friend, he audibly groaned when we got into a game, and were Up side, as he “prefers being Q side”. In a game that’s a literal coin flip.)

Of course, the faux esport/live service game feels like it’s just the tip of the iceberg in a sense. There’s also an in-game mail client where as you play, you end up somewhat accidentally agreeing to “work” for the fictional company making the game in question. I don’t think I can spoil too much from the demo, but even what I saw there seemed to get really weird quite fast, with a weird sci-fi narrative around corporate sabotage.

Oh, and I haven’t even talked about the gameplay! Because yes, there is gameplay. It’s not just a coin-flipper. Instead, fairly early on, you unlock a node based skill grid, different for each of the available characters. This grid is a set of triggers and chaining activation, and by moving nodes around, you can build sets of synergies to make it so that even when you lose, you still win!

I’d say something about my build, but I actually just realized looking at it that it’s a tad bit awful.

Look, it makes more sense if you play the demo, maybe just do that.

Oh, and there are items! To be honest, they’re probably the most standard part of the game, being constructed in such a way that you can build item sets and collections in order to grant yourself additional bonuses. What’s less standard is the incredible weird item shop upgrades, which at one point gave me gems instead of costing them?

Ah yes, the ability to roll for a 5-Star character with a zero percent chance of getting them. And the customer of the year is a whale. It’s all so perfect.

Q-Up, like Unfair Flips, is a game about coin flips. But unlike Unfair Flips, it’s not really about flipping coins. Instead, it seems to be a weird satire on live service games at every level, from the design, the development, and the weird nature of E-Sports.

And it absolutely nails the tone. Probably my favorite part so far was this message, with that absolutely perfect “Exec typing things into ChatGPT to summarize them” energy.

It’s just an incredibly fun and weird experience. I only stopped because I hit the level cap on the available characters.

In short: the Q-Up Demo is great, I hope the full game is just as weird, and has even more twists. I’m going to go see if I can get a code to cover it before it comes out, but I highly doubt that will work, in which case I’ll just have to buy it when it does release.

Landlord Quest

I’ve described a few games on this blog as “love letters to X.” The Plucky Squire, for its joy in the physicality of art. Holocure to all of Hololive. It’s a fairly common idiom I haven’t thought much about until I played Landlord Quest: the first game that I think might be best described as a hate letter.

I don’t mean Landlord Quest is bad. I just mean that if you took a love letter, and kept the passion, but inverted the feelings, this is what you would get. If love letters are sent with roses and chocolate, hate letters are probably sent with a mailbomb.

Landlord Quest is a short adventure game. And when I say short, I mean short. I feel fairly confident I saw the entirety of the game in about 42 minutes, and that was three separate playthroughs. I’ve never actually played an adventure game before, so it may have taken me longer than people who are actually familiar with the genre.

Because it’s so short, I don’t really have much to say on it that isn’t a spoiler for the experience. The art is good. I didn’t have to look up anything, which I’ve been told is some sort of gold standard for adventure games, but there’s also one a single room, and a finite number of things to “Look at.”

This is it. This is the experience.

I guess the one interesting thing I could talk about is that despite the game loathing the Doug character, from his bro-glasses and faux-cybertruck, I’m not sure I do.

There’s a few incredibly brief moments of him ruminating on his relationship with his father. They’re short, and I think the intent is mostly to show that Doug is a useless nepo baby. I’m sure they work if you’re the sort of person who had parents that cared about you and your interests. I imagine if I was that sort of person, I’d be able to look at Doug and laugh, visualizing a chain of shit heads stretching back years eternal.

Unfortunately for the designer, I haven’t spoken to my father in close to 10 years, so the attempt to paint him a shit brat who coasts on his father’s coattails fell flat. Instead, it made me a bit sad for him. Someone cared about him once.

Anyway, I think the credits for Landlord Quest do a better job of speaking to the game’s purpose than I could.

Landlord Quest is a short, and either horrifying or cathartic experience based on how you feel about landlords. It’s six bucks on Steam. It’s very well made for what it is, and it made me feel something.

I’m just not sure how I feel about those feelings yet.

Unfair Flips

Unfair Flips is the first game to really aggravate me in quite a while. As as result, this write-up features a lot more profanity than I would usually include. But my ability to form coherent thoughts without resorting to the f-bomb has been so reduced that I can’t express how frustrated I am any other way.

I was really trying to write a fair article about Unfair Flips, a incremental game by HEATHER FLOWERS. I really was.

I played the whole damn thing, even if I set up an autoclicker about an hour in. (Gods bless you, creators of AutoHotKey.) Then someone called me an idiot for being disappointed for buying a game where nothing happens, and having nothing happen, and I just sorta lost it.

Either that or the can of Bang Energy I just chugged is kicking in. Could be both!

Point is, fuck reasonable critique. Everyone now gets 1000 words about the worst game I’ve played this year.

Maybe I’m just out of the god damn loop here, but I feel like the child in the story of the emperor that has no clothes. When I google Unfair Flips, I see endless praise. People are posting articles about how interesting it is. It’s rated very positive on Steam, with 276 reviews.

This is despite the game saying nothing, doing nothing, making no points. That might come across as the raving of a madman, so let me elaborate and clear up any uncertainty about if I’m lost my mind.

There are, loosely put, two genres I could put Unfair Flips into. These are either as a rage game, or an idle/incremental game. I’m going to compare it to incremental games for the purpose of discussion, but notably, Unfair Flips doesn’t actually let you idle unless you set up a macro to play it.

As an incremental game, Unfair Flips is boring. The cost of upgrades is such that the “correct” choice at any point is to buy the cheapest upgrade available, instead of making any decisions or selecting strategic options.

An image of the game Unfair Flips, with the games four upgrades displayed, near the start of a game.
These are the only upgrades available.

This doesn’t immediately doom a game, but as a game, it’s less interesting than EVERY other entry in the genre I’ve played. This includes IdleOn, Journey to Incrementalia, Universal Paperclips, and probably others.

It also fails in the other place it could redeem itself: making any statement about probability, chance, determination, and such. This is more the space of rage games, like the narrator in Getting Over It. There is nothing to say after all. Unlike Deep Dip, it doesn’t challenge the player to be a master of mechanics. It makes no statement, requires no skill.

So why did I play it? Well, because I saw people posting about it. Because I saw people going “My new game is out, please play it.” And I like taking chances on weird things, on strange shit.

I don’t extend this generosity to everything in my life. If I go to a bake sale, and someone is selling burnt scones, I don’t fucking pony up to shove a clearly torched pastry into my mouth. There’s nothing to learn there.

But bad games often have redeeming ideas! Mechanics, settings, perceptions! Weird ass art can give us a unique perspective on the state of what others see, it can inspire us to view the world in a different lens, it can be part of a process of improvement.

But this isn’t that. There is nothing here. There is no statement, no idea, no perception, even a wrong or bad one. It is empty.

The emperor is wearing no clothes, and people are lining up to compliment his fashion sense.

Hell, while we’re here, it’s also not well made. It has no settings, and you can only mute or unmute audio. I had to set custom unity flags to get the god damn thing to launch in a way I could play it, something I associate with developers who are either newer (or have not considered that computers other then their own exist).

Normally this is something I give the benefit of the doubt here, but the lack of anything redeeming—any single thing—just makes it feel like the folks who made Unfair Flips just didn’t give a shit.

The only reasonable thing I can think of to explain Unfair Flips is that this was created as part of an experience in end to end development. Something to learn the process of taking a concept, building it, publishing it to Steam, and marketing it. In which case, it almost makes sense.

It’s not about the finished product, it’s about the process.

If that’s true, then yes, it has a reason to exist: it’s part of the journey of its creators as artists, a process as purpose.

Still doesn’t explain why everyone is acting like this is good! Like it was an enjoyable experience! Like other people should experience it!

It’s not, it isn’t, and no one should play this game, unless you want to lose 2 dollars, two hours, and be irrationally angry for no reason.

Failure is part of creation. But that doesn’t make it praiseworthy.

Also, the dev has several other games up on Steam, both of which look interesting, so I can’t really believe it’s about process either.

If you gave this game a positive review because you honest to god like it, sure. Fine. I don’t understand it, but that’s the nature of art.

But if you’re doing it ironically, as part of a bit, as part of some sort of performative thing, go fuck yourself.