Author’s Note:Between various things, this week has been long and not entirely productive. As such, this writeup for Peggle is somewhat phoned in. With that said, Peggle and the two games I mentioned yesterday are worth playing, but this writeup is somewhat content light.
I have a hard time writing a “review” of Peggle for the same reason I’d have a hard time writing a review of a jar of Peanut Butter. There’s a lot similarities between the two, mostly the fact that if you place either of them in front of me, leave, and then return several hours you will discover that I have consumed the entire thing, and upon asking for my opinion, I will respond with “It was pretty good,” and “Do you have any more?”
The point is, like peanut butter, I like Peggle, and I enjoy it, but I can’t quite tell you why. That won’t stop me from trying.
Some brief history: Peggle was published by PopCap games, back before they acquired by EA. I mention this not because “Ah, yes, the good old days” but more to give a sense of time, since that was back in 2007 when you could do exciting things like eat in restaurants. And also because the maximum resolution supported is not high.
This image of the menu is maybe 80% to scale.
So, if you expect things like “adjustable resolution” and “performance sliders” you may be about to have a bad time. Otherwise, let’s continue.
You might notice that this review has two games in the title, Peggle Deluxe, and Peggle Nights. And you might wonder why I feel confident in reviewing two games at once, and the answer is simple: Peggle Nights is effectively just an addon pack for Peggle Deluxe. Peggle Nights has new levels to play, and one new character. And that’s it.
The game has a variety of modes, including Adventure, which has you play through a series of levels as a character, duels, where you take turns with another player or a computer trying to get a high score, various challenges, and just a freeplay mode.
Outside of the challenge mode, though, the various levels play somewhat similarly. You click to launch balls, and they bounce around hitting pegs.
Green pegs give you a boost based on the character you’re playing, blue pegs give points, and the goal is to get rid of all the orange pegs. If you score above a certain amount of points, you get an extra ball, and if you get the ball to land in the pot at the bottom, you also get an extra ball.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’m just gonna post this GIF and call it a day, since that has to be worth at least several thousand more pictures.
Peggle is simple, enjoyable, and it’s incredibly compelling to going for a high score in a level, or to just try to beat it for the first time in adventure mode. It’s the same sort of pleasure as things like pinball, where it feels like a combination of skill and also just being at the mercy of the board, and as such you just keep playing.
Peggle is something like 15 years old at this point, but you can still find it on Steam and various EA stores if you’re interested, and I am out of effort to continue writing about it, so I’m just gonna end this post here.
Two free things, ones a demo, and ones just a short game to check out.
Today we’re gonna be talking about two very different games, with… actually pretty much nothing in common. Maybe the amount of time it takes you to play through them? They are respectively, Peglin and Crow Story. Oh, also, they’re both free.
Crow Story is a very short 3D platformer. Playing through the entire game will take you less than an hour. You control a tiny little crow, and you try to make it to the end of each level. There is a story, but it’s told without dialogue, and it’s kind of “Blink and you’ll miss it.”
There’s not very much to Crow Story, but the game doesn’t ask much for your time, and as such it’s a perfectly reasonable way to spend an hour, just hopping around, and swearing when you screw up and get thrown off a ledge.
It’s a small, simple project, but it’s a complete project, and I think that’s worth praising. You can play it here.
Peglin is a roguelite game that uses Peggles breakout/pachinko style mechanics for dealing damage. You venture from area to area, collect items, and just try to survive. Right now it’s just a demo on Steam, but it could turn out to be something fairly interesting.
While I’m not sure how I feel about the trend of “What if we took X and bolted on Roguelike Mechanics?”, I like it a hell of a lot more than “What if we took X, made it a freemium mobile game, and added a lottery ticket system?”
Remember, just because you think monetization models have hit rock bottom doesn’t mean that the business people agree.
This isn’t a full article in any sense, but I’m annoyed, and so I write. This is going to be a brief list of specific games with business models that I hate and/or think are incredibly stupid. In order to be on this list the game had to be at least somewhat released, and do something uniquely and impressively shitty. Blind boxes, overpriced microtransactions, and “Surprise Mechanics” are all very well and good, but the games in this article all looked at those mechanics and went, “We can do worse!”
Axie Infinity
Ah yes. Axie Infinity, otherwise known “Pokemon But On The Blockchain And Worse.” It costs something like $150 (Oops, like $30 now, cuz Crypto) per Axie, and you need 3 just to play, which makes Axie Infinity cost about $90 $450. And fuck the blockchain.
Okay, so before the big Crypto crash recently, these things were a lot more expensive.
Princess and Conquest
Princess and Conquest is a Pornographic Action RPG with Political Simulation elements. I have a writeup on it. While you can just buy the game for like $12, that doesn’t actually get you all the stuff in the game. If you want all the characters, you have to be subscribed to the creator’s Patreon at the $20 a month tier so that when the limited character distributions are done, you can send over you save files to be modified. Also, a good half their updates are also behind a paywall?
Here’s a better idea: I already paid you $12. How about instead you just fucking add the content to the game?
Star Citizen
The true master of NFTs before NFTs existed, Star Citizen has been in development for just about 10 years now! Chris Roberts promised a space MMO with 110 explorable solar systems, hundreds of ships and players, and fidelity unlike anything ever seen. With over $500,000,000 raised over that time period, they’ve delivered a buggy tech demo built in Cryengine with one solar system that doesn’t support more than 30 players in a server. That hasn’t stopped them from selling ships for hundreds of dollars, not all of which are actually in the game, and having a pledge reward tier list that goes up to the $25,000 mark.
None of these actually include the “game package.” You have to buy that separately. I’m also not sure all of these are actually in the game.
Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duel
Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links had a model for digital TCGs that I actually rather liked. While the prices per nonexistent cards were fairly high, there was a box system where each “Box” of cards had a specific set of cards in it, and after you pulled a given card, it was removed from the box until you chose to reset it. This meant that if you were really after a specific card, you were guaranteed to get it if chose to buy out the whole box. Then, after getting that card, you could reset the box and start again if you so wished. It still cost too much god damn money, but I actually bought a fair amount of boosters for this game when they went on sale, and it was better than most digital TCGs that guarantee you a great big fat fucking nothing.
So it was almost impressive to me how badly Master Duel, a different video game for the exact same card game, choose to do their model.
Instead of having individual boxes that are released in small sets, every single box pulls from the same set of over 6000 or so cards, with higher rates for the “Featured” cards for that box. In addition, if you pull a card of the two highest rarities that correspond to a secret pack, you unlock the ability to buy cards from that secret pack.
But only for 24 hours. And again, only half the cards you get from those secret packs are actually the featured cards, so you might not get shit. I have other problems with Master Duel, like the fact that the general power level for Yu-Gi-Oh makes the speed of MTG’s Vintage format look like a casual draft cube. But the fact that someone looked at limited time gacha draws, and TCGs and went “How can I combine these and make it worse?” earns Konami a big “Fuck You Motherfucker” and Master Duel the 4th slot on this list.
I’m going to be honest. I chose to play through HuniePop purely to flex on a friend who thought that the game was “Too hard” and that “Most people couldn’t beat the first level.” For reference, this friend has beaten all three Dark Souls games, so my first impression was that they just really, really sucked at puzzle games.
Having now actually finished the game, I have to admit it was not as easy as I was expecting. But I still beat it, so suck it Kyle. Anyway, HuniePop!
HuniePop is sort of combination of dating simulator and match 3 puzzle game. I have some issues with the game’s implementation of both of these mechanics. But credit where it’s due, it did make me realize that I was about to forget a girlfriend’s birthday for the second year in a row. More on that in a moment.
Anyway, after a brief tutorial and introduction to the game’s mechanics by a sex fairy, you’re given a magic phone that that will let you locate girls you encounter and also show you information about how much they like you.
Hmmm… when you put it that way, it’s kinda creepy. Like, it’ll show you if they’re asleep, but you can’t go visit them or talk to them if they’re not already in a somewhat public place? I dunno. Anyway, that brings us to the first of the two main gameplay loops.
While HuniePop advertises itself as a match 3 game, there’s also a large portion of it that functions as a sort of memory game. Here’s how it works. After the tutorial, you’ll start off the first day, and you’ll go around talking to girls. There are four time blocks in a day, and the game progresses to the next time block when you choose to go talk to a different girl. These blocks are Morning, Noon, Evening and Night, and with some small difference for Evening and Night, they all function pretty much the same.
While you’re interacting with one of the girls, there are five actions you can take. You can buy her food, which increases the food meter, you can offer her a drink, which she generally won’t actually take you up on unless it’s already much later in the day, you can give her a present, or you can just chat with her. Food, alcohol, and gifts all cost Munie, one of the game’s two currencies, that you get by successfully completing dates (Editor’s note: just like in real life). Chatting with a girl gives you a small amount of Hunie, the game’s other currency, but lowers her food meter. Chatting is actually a fairly large portion of the gameplay loop, and she’ll either tell you something about herself, such as birthday, favorite season, etc., or she’ll ask you to remember something she’s told you previously. Getting these questions correct rewards you with extra Hunie, which is used to upgrade your stats, and increase the value of various tokens in the match 3 portion of the game.
It’s worth noting that none of these things actually make her like you any more.
In order to get her to like you more, you have to go on a successful date, and this is the match 3 part of HuniePop.
This is where HuniePop has some differences in genre from most other match 3 games. There are 5 different types of symbols, which each have a different mechanical effect:
Talent/Flirtation/Romance/Sexuality – These are the four symbols that build your affection meter. You need to fill this meter before you run out of turns to successfully complete the date. They’re the circular symbols in the image above. Each girl has a like, and a dislike. Matching the symbols they like will net you more affection, matching the symbols they dislike generally net you less. The other two types will just give a base amount.
Passion – The heart shaped symbols. Matching passion symbols boosts your passion level. Higher passion level gives you a multiple on the amount of affection earned from the four symbols mentioned above.
Sentiment – Sentiment tokens are the small teardrop cyan tokens. They give you energy in order to use your “Date Gifts” which are activated abilities. Abilities can range from permanently increasing the spawn rate of certain tokens for the rest of the date, to removing all tokens of one type from the board, to just replacing all tokens of one type with another.
The Bells I Can’t Remember The Name Of – They’re the bell shaped ones. You match these to get an extra turn.
Broken Hearts – If you match broken hearts, you will lose a large portion of your affection meter. You don’t want to do this.
I think this single gif is responsible for 90% of the bandwidth usage on this site…
While these mechanics are interesting, I have two big problems with them. The first one is how Broken Hearts feel to play with. Because you’ll try to avoid matching them, you’ll find yourself often with a very clogged board state, and it can be easy to have new tokens fall into the board, and set off broken heart chains. It’s frustrating, and it takes away some of the fun I’ve always had with match 3 games: trying to set up ridiculously long combos.
My second problem is a design decision that was made regarding how matches work. If you make a match that includes a set of 3 orbs going up, and 3 orbs over, in a sort of a L shape, with one shared orb in the corner, the game does not count this as a match of 5 orbs. In fact, it won’t count two of the orbs at all. It will just remove the highest match of three and remove the other two. It makes it much harder to set up certain combos. I just don’t understand why they made this choice.
So why do I think that this is a design decision? Well, if you successfully date a girl enough to get her to want to come home and fuck you, there’s a secondary mini-game version of the match 3 puzzle where you have unlimited moves and in that part of the game the L pattern does count as a full match.
Speaking of which, I think it’s time to briefly cover the “Adult Content” that’s present in HuniePop. There is… surprisingly little of it honestly. It’s there, but outside of some bare breasts, and six or so images, nothing ever reaches past the level of “Hot Babe Calendar.” It’s suggestive, but except for the aforementioned, not really explicit.
Overall, HuniePop is decent. It’s not amazing in any sense, but I did find myself continuing to play it, and trying to to beat it. The difficultly curve is a bit weird, with some unusual spikes, and there were a few challenging points. It’s better than I was expecting, and if it wasn’t for the pattern mechanics and Broken Hearts, I think I would have had a fair amount of fun with it.
HuniePop is available on Steam, and also GoG (You’ll need to be logged on Steam to see it though, because ADULT CONTENT). If you want to hit on anime girls and see breasts while also playing a weirdly difficult match 3, this might be the game for you. If you’ve got no interest in the game’s erotic theming, though, you’d likely be better off with another puzzle game. (I would personally suggested Beglitched!)
Don’t buy into the hype without reading this first.
I wasn’t quite sure what to title this article. I’m still not sure even as I write it. In any case, the general purpose of this article is mostly to warn anyone who, like myself, has found themselves curious about buying into MetaZoo.
So for starters, let’s quickly define what MetaZoo is. This is a bit difficult, because MetaZoo wants to be a lot of things, but its core is a TCG (Trading Card Game), named, unsurprisingly, Metazoo. It’s this TCG and the elements around it that currently make me nervous about wanting to get involved or buy anything MetaZoo related.
If nothing else, there’s a single massive factor that has turned me off of MetaZoo so far: the several times I’ve actually sat down and tried to play the game, I didn’t actually have very much fun. And I consider that a really bad sign, because I really like card games and trading card games. I’ve played a ridiculous amount of Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh, both in paper and in those games’ digital equivalents. And even when I’ve gotten stomped, even when things have gone wrong, I’ve still had fun. MetaZoo hasn’t been fun.
(A brief aside: MetaZoo, generally speaking, plays like a combo of Pokémon and Magic, using parts of Pokémon’s attack based combat, and Magic’s resource system and life points.)
This is the root of my skepticism of the game. From there, my skepticism grows when I start to look at everything else around the game’s ecosystem. Right now MetaZoo feels like it cares more about making as much money as feasibly possible than trying to grow and become a fun game.
There are a lot of examples of this, and so I’m just going to go through them in no particular order.
The MetaZoo NFT
There’s an official MetaZoo NFT. Because of course there is. Here’s the link to the OpenSea page. And here’s the link to the page the token was sold on. The long and short of it seems to be, “There’s a plan in the future to use these to give exclusive access to discounts and presales on future products!” For reference, each of these tokens cost a minimum of 0.3 ETH to mint, and CoinBase has Eth listed at about $4,500 for the date this was going on. But if you bought during the presale, “During the minting process, certain errors occurred! These error tokens include a damaged Jersey Devil Purple token, a double stamped Mothman Gold token, and other eccentricities that are significantly rarer than their properly minted counterparts. These error tokens will only be circulated during the presale event.” So, lets be clear: A MINIMUM of $1500 for the potential future ability to… purchase a blind box T-Shirt at presale. And maybe other undetermined benefits!
What incredible fucking value. They sold 2300-ish of these things.
Blind Box… Everything
You know those blind box T-shirts that the token above got you presale access to? Yeah, so, those are $50 a box. Each box contains… 1 T-shirt and a Promo card. I could almost understand getting a specific T-shirt and random Promo, but why would I buy a random T-shirt I don’t even want? And a single promo card? They also had blind box pins and promo cards available at one point. Oh, and “1 out of every 40 boxes contains a Super Rare T-shirt and promo card featuring the Nightcrawler and all 6 iconic MetaZoo characters!” You may be starting to see a pattern here: limited exclusivity everything, with lots of hidden and random promos, at ridiculous prices… but if you don’t buy now, they might sell out!
Playing Card Kickstarter
So, with the world in the absolute shitter, and supply lines being what they are, if you actually want to play MetaZoo, it’s a bit difficult. The first MetaZoo Kickstarter raised about $18,000 to do the print run of the cards. So the MetaZoo team recently ran a second fundraising campaign to… print playing cards.
It has raised, at time of writing… $1,520,596. Let’s be clear: this isn’t for copies of the actual TCG cards, it’s for decks of normal playing cards with art from the MetaZoo game/franchise on them. Of course, these decks also come with special blind box boosters, and if you pledge at the $1150 tier, you’ll get a special promo, one of only 250!
You can’t though, because all those slots are already taken.
The point I’m trying to make here is that this company and community currently seems more interested in capitalizing on fear of missing out, impulsive collectors, and maintaining hype in the secondary market than their actual card game.
The Actual Game
Okay, so that’s enough about MetaZoo for now. Let’s talk about Magic: The Gathering for a moment, and some of the worst designed Magic cards ever printed. Specifically, the set of cards known as the Power Nine. These 9 cards are banned in virtually every format, and the only format that they can be played in, Vintage, only allows you to use a single copy of ONE of them in your deck. They are obscenely powerful with no downside, and have massive format warping potential. It’s actively admitted that it was a “Mistake” to print cards at this power level by the game’s designers.
Because of this, these cards have never been reprinted, exist in fairly small amounts, and are also some of the most expensive magic cards ever. For reference, at time of writing, the “Cheapest” Black Lotus on eBay is about $15,000. (Interestingly, a brief look at some older price guides show how much the cost has gone up. One price guide from 2002 has it at $300 at the time.)
In short, the Power Nine are incredibly valuable, while being toxic to the game of Magic if ever used in play. They are the poster child of “Cards you do not print” while designing a Magic-like card game. Of those 9 cards, 6 are mana rocks. These are the Moxes, and Black Lotus.
So why am I harping on about poorly designed early Magic cards in a article about MetaZoo?
This is why.
I mentioned up above that MetaZoo in many ways plays like a combination of Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering. And one of the things it takes from Magic is Magic’s resource system. You can play one “Aura” card per turn, you “fatigue” it to generate resources, and you “unfatigue” it at the start of your turn, just like Magic’s lands.
MetaZoo has a cycle of zero-cost cards for each element that look like this.
There’s one of these for each “Color” that can be played in MetaZoo, but they all function the same. A zero cost card that taps for 2 Aura.
Now, if you’re looking at this, and going “Wait a minute, that’s more or less just a cycle of strictly better Moxes,” then you’re thinking the same thing that I was when I when first saw them.
And this is another major reason I’m skeptical of the intentions of the MetaZoo team. Magic is close to 30 years old, and in those 30 years, the Power Nine have not been reprinted. While you could argue this is because of collectors, or fears of sullying the market, I’d argue that the core reason is different: the Power Nine ruin the game.
So if you’re making a brand new card game, why would you create more powerful versions of some of the worst designed TCG cards ever made? I can think of two reasons. Reason one is because you’ve never played another collectible card game before.
Reason two is because as you release your brand new card game, you want to immediately invoke FOMO by referencing the most infamous and expensive cards from the world’s most popular TCG.
From what I’ve written in the rest of the article, you can likely see which one I think is more likely. (Although neither are confidence inspiring)
This the vibe that seems to permeate MetaZoo for me. Underneath the wonderful artwork and 90’s video game box art vibe there’s a persistent drumbeat of “Fear of Missing Out,” “It only goes up,” and “Buy now! Limited edition!” This doesn’t feel the work of a team trying to create the most fun game that they can. It feels like someone trying to create a new version of the Beanie Baby craze, or Pokemon that they can cash in on.
And it’s why I’m currently very hesitant of engaging any further with the game or brand. If you’re looking at MetaZoo and going “Huh, that seems neat, I wonder if I can get some boosters,” I urge you to reconsider.
