Did you know?

In 1993, Italian game company MarcSoft released a cult classic game called "Inferno Summit" for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The game is known for having a lofty development time of 6 years. As a result, the sprites have this extremely polished feel that other games on the system wouldn't be able to replicate due to strict hardware limitations.

Games I've Seen in my Dreams

So I don't really have any reoccurring dreams necessarily, but lately I've noticed that I have a couple reoccurring events within different dreams. One of those is that I will often find myself in front of a bunch of bootleg game cartridges with custom labels (usually implied to contain romhacks or homebrew stuff), and then I get really excited to buy all of them and take them home to see what is on them (this would probably be my actual reaction in real life). I usually then wake up disappointed that it wasn't real. This has been a thing in my dreams for years now. The earliest time I remember it happening was in either late middle school or early highschool. I thought it would be fun to try and recreate some of the ones I've seen and give a brief description of them. The first cartridge I included above is from the first time I remember dreaming of this kind of thing, and all the other ones are from very recent dreams. I might do this again sometime if the dreams keep happening and I keep remembering them. Maybe I'll even put some effort into photoshopping them next time lol.

From the game "ルームメイトがホットなのに、おならをやめてくれません。" (Rūmumeito ga hotto na noni, onara o yamete kuremasen.) Help! my roommate is hot but wont stop farting. A game that only exists inside my head

watching through the latest SuperEyepatchWolf video and now I'm dying to find more fake video games or just fake media in general. If anyone can point me in the direction of some good shit please do!

Ikea has boxes of fake video games in their showroom.

Is it just me or are mobile games just getting worse?

I don't necessarily mean that the stories and gameplay itself is inherently worse, but over the last decade or two I've noticed certain trends.

First up, it used to be a game would prompt you for a MICRO transaction in order to, f.ex., stop getting shown ads. It used to be a one time payment of anything from one to maybe ten dollars (rounding up the stupid 99 cent bullshit). Nowadays comparable games will sell you tickets, skip-its, to skip a certain number of ads, or charge you a monthly subscription fee, and even then these may not rid you of All ads, just some of them, the ones that are otherwise unskippable.

On the subject of ads. False advertising has always been a bit of an issue with mobile games, but I feel like it's grown steadily worse. Every other ad I'm shown is for games I have previously played and thus I can say with 100% certainty that the ads do not represent the gameplay.

I'm also seeing basically the same ad, over and over, which is apparently for 4-5 different games, despite those games being listed as different types of games. A bubble shooter, hidden object, match 3, other puzzle games all showing the same ad, solving the same exact puzzles in each, none of which are the kind of puzzle game that revolves around the puzzle shown.

This used to be the "pull the pin" sort of ad, but now it's these interlocking circles you're (apparently) supposed to detach from one another.

Same puzzles, several different games, all of it fake.

And again, on the subject of ads. There have always been shitty, poorly made, cheap looking puzzle games that were never really "games" but ad farms, where what they were farming were ad watches. Your phone, you, being tricked into essentially being soil in which they grown their profits. The companies that make these make tons of them, the first 20-30 minutes of gameplay is mostly ad free, and then it ramps up, attempting to trick you into sticking it out, trying to make use of your sunk cost fallacy to maximize their ad revenue.

And that's not the only mass produced game out there. There are companies that re-use the same assets, same images, same level designs, same gameplay, same code essentially, only released in increments and with a slight environmental design variety to imply this is a new game being actively created as you play it despite being the exact same game as the last one, two, five, made by the same group of people. The company may even use multiple names to pretend to be new so that you can't just check what else they've made and find the same game over and over.

And then there's the prices.

They've really gotten well out of hand.

For approximately 15 usd a month I can subscribe to a massive online role playing PC game with active player support, a vast variety of activities, and so on. For the same amount of money I can maybe buy a medium pack of resources in one mobile game that won't last more than an hour of gameplay, won't give any lasting benefits, won't do anything really.

Multiplayer mobile games are very often war games where the winner is inevitably whoever can spend the most money on it every month, and those are in no way affordable to most people. They also mostly advertise themselves as games of exploration or of building when in reality the gameplay requires you to amass the largest army possible and invest several hours and hundreds of dollars to prevent your base from being raided frequently enough to make any exploration or building functionally impossible.

The micro-transactions have gone macro.

In short, it feels like mobile games these days are sold to you with false advertising, absolutely stuffed full of ads, and so unreasonably expensive you're better off putting the equivalent money in a jar for a couple of weeks and buying a whole ass PC setup instead.

Being that it's not a heavily regulated market, can this not be used as an example of how capitalism breeds neither innovation nor excellence?

(Yes, exceptions exist, but finding them in the very, very, very, very, heavily saturated with trash, marketplaces, with their absolutely garbage user interface is it's own pile of excrement.)

This my new favorite youtube channel/twitter. They document fake games, and people can submit their set pieces and mockups to them.

The whole point of the account is that the games are not playable and, for the most part, the creator never had any intention of making it a real game, anyway.

The best way I can describe it is that it's equivalent to fascination with liminal spaces.

If you would like me to make more of this feel free to tell me.

[ Fake Mobile Game Ads ]

Robot Boyfriend problems Inspired by Velsmells' INCREDIBLY good crackship D.Va / Rammatra pairing. Truly an inspiration to robotfuckers the world over

INSANE TITLE???

Look at what I got for white elephant this year 😊😊😊

AITA for burning stabbing my boss in the neck and burning his bistro to the ground after finding out he killed my ex gf and turned her into a dish

hey shout out of recognition and validation to all the queer people who didn’t exhibit many queer behaviors or have queer many experiences when they were young!! shout out to trans women and trans men who didn’t feel bad about or uncomfortable with their AGAB when they were younger and didn’t gravitate toward the “opposite side of things”. shout out to nonbinary and genderfluid ppl who felt content with their AGAB all of their childhood or even teen and adults years. shout out to lesbians who didn’t have any crushes on girls growing up and liked traditionally feminine things and shout out to gay men who didn’t have any crushes on boys growing up and liked traditionally masculine things. shout out to bi and pan and omni people who only had hetero attractions growing up. shout out to aros and aces who thought they experienced crushes or attraction or whatever while growing up and didn’t feel excluded by being surrounded by allo people. shout out to literally any queer people who didn’t “show the signs” growing up because that can make you feel invalidated or worried that you’re faking it and you shouldn’t feel worried about that! When we say that everyone’s journey and experience is different, that includes you!! Happy pride month <3

Let’s play a fun game called am I masquerading as an autistic person and acting how I think someone with autism would act or am I simply learning to unmask