#might as well say ‘i’m not racist BUUUT’

[lulusoblue]

April didn’t get the white redhead appearance until the 87 cartoon, where they were out to market a bunch of toys to kids and long story short they thought whitewashing would be better for business.

Flashforward to today, where people are still gettig hung up and sensitive over white characters being changed to other races as if the whiteness was crucial to the character. It’s not.

Mirage April was black, and now 2018 is black. The only thing it should affect about these incarnations is the black girls in the show’s audience tuning in and finding a strong fictional girl/woman of the same race as them to look up to and be inspired by. Lord knows us white girls already have plenty of those in media.

[ivanaskye]

So, for reasons that had a lot to do with being unceremoniously kicked out of where I was living on mostly-false pretenses that were mostly thinly-veiled ableism… I had a pretty notable depressive bout lately.  And to make matters worse, because I didn’t have a stable place to live, I couldn’t play KH3 yet.

So I turned to mobile games.

Thus, as follows, here is a SUPER DEFINITIVE IVANASKYE RANKING of mobile games that are good (or less good) for entertainment when you’re depressed and hiding from bigots in an airbnb.

1) ALTO’S ODYSSEY.  This absolutely takes the cake for an actually freaking good mobile game that can be replayed essentially indefinitely.  It’s like a skateboarding game, but in the desert, for some reason, where also lemurs live and like to chase you.

It’s good.

It’s very, very pretty, with a variety of desert backgrounds, day and night.  Although you might hit a rock if you look at the scenery too long.  There’s an actual skill level involved in this game (unless you’re playing zen mode, which it conveniently has), and when you die, well, that’s a decent enough time to put the game down if that’s what you’re going for.

This is an actually-paid game that I got on sale, and was super worth the one entire dollar it cost on that sale, but it would also be worth the full five dollars.  The good thing about paid games, of course, is that they don’t try to sell you things.

2) GODUS.  I’m… not sure this is a good game per se, but it basically consists of exactly what would happen if someone went up to my id, asked what it wanted in a mobile game, and then made exactly that.

Anyway, you play a god, trying to wrangle your (very stupid) followers into constructing buildings, generating worship for you, and even (gasp!) learning how to farm.  Also you can go on boat voyages that are basically mini games where you have to lead your followers to specific points and not get them killed.  (I don’t like these mini-games that much, but hey, two types of game in one game is good.)

Unfortunately, it is also a free game which is trying really, really hard to get you to spend actual money on upgrades.  For that reason, your people’s growth also kind of stops being exponential at a point—yeah, they’ll still build new things and expand, but the game really wants you to spend money.  Sigh.

CW for some racist and sexist stuff (because, of course).  For instance, your followers are at first grouped into two categories—blue color-coded “builders” and pink color-coded “breeders”.  Yes, really.  On the other hand, later you get individually named farmers and miners who often have female names, so??? I don’t even know.

3) MONUMENT VALLEY and MONUMENT VALLEY 2.  These have… such a great concept.  It’s puzzle-solving that involves decidedly non-euclidean geometry (amusingly called “sacred geometry” in the game itself), much as if you’re wandering around an Escher painting.

But… and there’s a big but here… there really aren’t that many levels, all things considered.  And given that it’s a puzzle game, it’s not really that replayable—once you’ve figured out the puzzle, you’ve figured out the puzzle.  And it’s paid, so all in all, you’re spending 4 or 5 dollars on… only a few hours of entertainment.

Also, it’s trying really hard to have a deep and/or emotionally resonant story, but I think it doesn’t do very well at that.  The most emotional moment for me in the game was when this adorable cute totem guy looks like he might be dead (he isn’t)… buuut, according to interviewers with the developers, they were shocked that so many people had such an emotional reaction to an adorable tower of blocks with a single blinking eye?  Have they even met people?

Anyway what I’m saying here is that the things that are supposed to be emotionally resonant aren’t, and the things that aren’t supposed to be are.

And the second game, as I posted about before, has a surprise sub-theme of child abandoment?

Anyway, play for the puzzles and the totem, not the story… but maybe only when it’s on sale, because it really doesn’t have quite enough content for the price.

4) BONZA.  This is a… pretty run-of-the-mill mobile word game, this time in crossword form.  It’s not, like, great, but it’s not terrible either.  (I know, what a rousing endorsement).

One of the best things about this particular game is that you can pick it up for a quick puzzle while trying to avoid using your brains and eyes for 1) actually working or 2) looking at social media and getting really angry at people.  And then you can set it down.  And if you can’t set it down, that might be because you need a hint for the puzzle… which requires watching an ad… which you don’t actually want to do, so you’ll probably be setting your phone down while the ad plays!  Win-win!  I think.

5) THE TRAIL.  Boy, I really liked this game at first, even though it’s definitely got at least 5000 weird colonialism and also racism vibes.  But you can play as a brown-skinned person, so I Guess It’s Okay.  Anyway judging phone games for wokeness probably isn’t ideal, especially if you’re not giving money to them anyway.

Anyway, about the gameplay—it starts out as this thing where you walk along a trail, collecting random items with telepathy, Like You Do, in some cases giving them to a very disappointed-looking bird, also Like You Do, while your guide cheerfully informs you that “you might even have shoes someday!”

My issue is mostly that once you hit a town, the gameplay kind of changes—you can still wander trails and collect items, but a lot of your goals suddenly become town-related, and somehow this made it feel less fun to me.  Ymmv.

6) POLYSPHERE.  This… is an interesting concept… that sure tries really hard to get you to buy things.  Basically, you look at a bunch of weird shard-looking bits of color from different angles, until they become a picture.  Which is a cool visual-spacial challenge, but also as far as I can tell, spinning the shards fast enough can also cause them to flip, which is required to complete certain puzzles, and makes it feel more random than it should be.

I also found that this game didn’t bring a lot of joy—just a slight endorphin rush every time I finished a puzzle, but sort-of annoyance otherwise, and chasing that rush.  The bad kind of addictive.  Not recommended.

Bonus) GOROGOA.  I’m not ranking this alongside the rest of them because I played it a couple months ago, before this Depression Mobile Game Binge, so therefore it’s kind of in a different category.

This, like Monument Valley, is a puzzle game that only has so much content in it before you’ve solve everything, and costs like four whole dollars or something, so might not be worth it—

—But, it’s like, really cool.  You solve puzzles by basically manipulating frames of images around, so that one thing frames another, and… actually, it is kind of hard to explain.  But it’s really gorgeous, and legitimately challenging, and I’ve never seen anything like it.  I highly recommend it, even if it is shorter than I’d have wanted it to be.