Day 125 - Roblox Retrospective
Immersive Sim, Mobile Trash, Horror ·
Sam’s Take:
In 2016, we reviewed 365 Flash games, one every day for a year. Of those Flash games, I would say over 250 of them came from Newgrounds.com.
In 2024, we started this new series. Early on we discussed where we would take our games from, and while this series has less restrictions, most have come from Itch.io.
The differences between Itch and Newgrounds have been staggering. I know we’ve bashed some sub-par free games on Itch.io, but the bar has been set so much higher. If you need an example of what I mean, give my review of Pig a quick read, it was early on before I had adjusted to the quality difference and it broke my brain.
The consistent better organized game jams, the ability to use different engines (I think Newgrounds also allows other engines, but most were Flash and had to be playable in browser), the general encouraging vibes of the comments… there’s just something different going on. Newgrounds had this edgelord nihilism to many of its games, and sure we found Baby Shooter on itch, but we’re talking averages here. If we made a top 10 list of the best free games we’ve played for both projects, I think 9 would be from this one, and we’re not even halfway done.
For a while I wondered if it was just the passage of time that did this. Younger culture leans more positive than it did back in the early 2000s when newgrounds peaked, and the access to game engines and tutorials has increased significantly. Maybe kids now are just better at making games, I thought.
Then we had Roblox week.
There are many days where I don’t want to write a review, but I don’t think I’ve had a harder time pulling through than I did yesterday. Not because The Interview was that bad, but because it was another Roblox game. Another janky mmo with no instructions, where clicking on any object has a 50% chance to trigger a microtransaction pop-up. Almost every game we played is a copy of another, better game on a different platform. Scrolling through the front page yesterday, I saw three copies of the same minecart-long-jump game. It’s fucking depressing.
I don’t know what causes every game designer to attempt to milk money through their games. I don’t know if it’s something Roblox encourages, but you would think those games don’t float to the top. You’d think the games that caught the mobile-scam virus would get downvoted, but nope, (OMG) Scary Mouse or whatever the fuck it was called had a 93% positive rating when we played. I wish I had time in one day to dig up some conspiracy. I could get into the process of making a Roblox game and tell you how they encourage this, how they weight their algorithm to the games that encourage the most micro-transactions, and how they market these Casino games specifically to children. Unfortunately, I don’t have time in a daily review to look into their algorithm or marketing. I can only tell you what I got as a user. What I got were terrible games that begged me for my money.
If we decided to do Roblox for this project instead of mainly Itch, we would not have made it 50 reviews in. If you play Roblox, that’s fine, but you deserve better, and there’s better out there for free. Check out the Itch front page, there’s always cool looking shit on there. Go find a game you like and own with custom game modes, Garry’s Mod, Minecraft, Warcraft 3 if you’re older than dirt, any game where you can create a custom lobby will have a game with the same freeform vibe, but on a better engine and without the popups.
Newgrounds games are terrible, but we played them for a year. We can handle bad games. I can not handle feeling a commodity like this though, I don’t know how y’all do it. Roblox is where creativity goes to die, and I pray that this era of “make real money doing what you love on your own time” gig-economy bullshit is just a depressing fad.
I hate Roblox, and so should you.
Recommend: NO
Replay Percentage Chance: 70% (I’m sure Skeeter will pick a Roblox game to annoy me on day 256 or something)
Time Played: Played: A week I guess
SAM NOTE:
Skeeter’s Take:
I went into this week knowing very little about Roblox, and I was hoping to discover more about it as the week went on. My preconceived notion of Roblox was largely a “virtual daycare for children”. Normally, I would expect my notions (especially those preconceived) to change over time as we played more games and I familiarized myself with Roblox. I am shocked to say that my current impression has largely stayed the same as my initial impressions: Roblox is essentially a giant virtual daycare. I now know this daycare has a ton of flashy toys, each with their own clique. Much like my real life daycare experience, those cliques also happen to ask you for money every time you hang out with them, and then will make fun of you for being poor and not having cool clothes when you don’t give them any.
If I could defend Roblox for a second, I would like to say that if this came out when I was a child, and all my friends were into Roblox as well, this game might have ruled. Unfortunately, I’m in my 30s and have no friends, so Roblox just kind of sucks. Almost every game is a rip-off of a more popular game and it often uses IPs from popular movies/games/shows.
Like this Inside Out 2/Among Us rip-off:
While this image does an excellent job of summarizing the Roblox experience, it is missing something…
There we go!
Combine those two images and that’s Roblox.
So, we’ve got bad rip-off games using popular children’s IPs that are filled to the brim with microtransactions and cosmetic pitfalls and every single one has that patented “mobile phone game” aesthetic that Roblox just seems to nail. It doesn’t help that most of these games have “tycoon” or “RP” in the title. Again, I’m a man who is in his 30s. The absolute last thing I want to do after a long day of work is to come home, grab a beer from the fridge, launch up Inside Out 2 RP and roleplay Anxiety with a bunch of children:
Not only that, but there is a disproportionate amount of games that are popular games, just remade in Roblox.
For example:
Again, if I was a kid with no console/PC and couldn’t afford the $5 to buy the real Chained Together, this would probably be the coolest shit to me. I’m just trying to put myself in 10-year-old me’s shoes. If someone told me I could play a Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker knock-off on my Gameboy Color and instead of Link you play as Ash Ketchum. And on top of all of that, I could also play with my friends (and we didn’t even have to be in the same room sharing the same screen)…all for free? Yeah, I’d probably be losing my shit. The idea of being able to hang out with your friends, and essentially explore and play any game you can think of sounds awesome to a 10 year old me.
But I’m an adult with expendable income now. I could go out right now, buy a brand new PS5 and launch up the newest Call of Duty if I wanted to. I don’t want to do that, but I could and I guarantee it would beat the hell out of playing whatever this is:
What I’m trying to say is: I see the value of Roblox. I can see why this game is so popular with the chillins. It’s a free-to-play social media application where you can play games with your friends. It runs on damn near anything that can run Doom and offers a ton of customization options for player avatars. The content seems largely user driven, so it really does seem like Roblox can change and adapt over time fairly easily.
While I see the value, I still hate Roblox. This game or platform, or whatever you want to call it was not made for me. It does not interest me. It offers no value to my life and I actually might be worse off now that I am familiar with it. I cannot envision a scenario where I would ever go to Roblox to play a game, and that triples if it’s a game that I can pay money for and not have to play a shitty knock off version on Roblox. I think the one exception to that being something like “Dress to Impress” where I don’t really know where I would find a similar experience to that other than in Roblox. But if it’s a Prop Hunt knock-off or an RP game, I’d just go play Prop Hunt or GTA RP. To me, it feels like Roblox only exists to steal the customers that fall through the cracks for other games - I’m picturing a flour-sifter where the sifter is the gaming market and the large chunks of clumpy flour are the people with money who can afford the real games. All the fine powdery flour that falls through are the children who get $5 allowances and can’t afford a real gaming system yet. And there’s Roblox, mouth agape underneath the sifter, greedily gobbling up anything that falls through.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 100% I’m going to pick a random Roblox game on day 256 or something
Time Played: A week of my life I can’t get back. Sure, we didn’t play Roblox for a whole week, but it hung over my days like some sort of polygon mind virus. I would randomly think of Roblox throughout the days and nights only to have to sit down at my PC and actually play Roblox. This week was like playing sleep paralysis. Therefore, I’m counting it as a week. If you have any complaints about this please contact me at iamsamcain@gmail.com and write me something extra nasty - I always respond!
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