Day 24 - Pig Goat Banana Cricket: Game Lad Blitz
Pig Game, Has Treant Protector In It, Immersive Sim ·
Skeeter’s Take:
I know I’m supposed to talk about and review this game. I know I’m supposed to explain that it’s essentially a free-to-play in-browser copy of the Warioware games where you play quick little mini-games in succession and each time you fail the objective you lose a life - 3 lives and it’s game over. But today I was playing a different game. Today, I had to find a game with 3 things in it. trees, pigs, and bananas. I won’t go into the details as to why (though Sam can feel free if he chooses), but essentially I jokingly said I would try to find a game with all three of those things included.
Don’t let your jokes be dreams:
Tree!
Pig!
Banana?
Recommend: Naw, even though I did kind of have fun. I could see 7th grade me booting this up in the Computer Science lab and getting in trouble.
Replay Percentage Chance: % chance we need to find a tree, pig, and banana again
Time Played: 7 minutes
Sam’s Take:
First, the review no one cares about: As Ward said, this is a Wario-Ware like title. It has decent art, its music and sound effects have a similar palette and generally it seems like talented people worked on this game. It’s a Nickelodeon branded game, so I’d assume this was on a Nick website at some time, so we can assume this had at least some sort of actual budget.
Unfortunately this game has a fatal flaw. In WarioWare, you only have 5 seconds or so to figure out each minigame, but the title of each game doubles as the instructions, and the controls are so simple that you can succeed at almost every minigame with good intuition. Blitz has multiple minigames where without playing multiple times, there’s basically no way to understand what you’re supposed to do. A lesser example is the mini game DODGE THE LASER:
Concept is simple, but the lasers the dog shoots have a warm up time with no indication of how long it takes. If you jump right when you see the laser, you will jump during warm up then get shot on landing. Easy to dodge on a second run, but the joy of losing in WarioWare is knowing you got caught up in the speed and stress and made a mistake. It works as a release of tension. This led to me saying “oh… I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do.
The much worse example is EAT THE DIRT. Two piles of dirt appear. You click on them to eat them. Sometimes when you click on one, you vomit and lose, other times you eat the dirt successfully and win. I have played this three times and still have NO IDEA how you win this game. I’ve done it, but I don’t know why or how. I don’t think I need to explain how this completely destroys a minigame collection like this. With no time for real instructions, each game needs to be identifiable immediately. I’d argue this is the most important aspect for any WarioWare wannabe, and this game fails too often for me to recommend playing.
NOW FOR WHAT Y’ALL REALLY CARE ABOUT:
Skeeter needed to pick a banana game because I’m seeing the band Melt Banana tonight and he’d thought it’d be funny.
He also decided that he wanted to take me up on my request to find more games that fit the stupid categories I made for this website: “Pig Game” and “Has Treant Protector In It”. I did not ask him to do all three. Don’t blame me for this.
Also the “Immersive Sim” category is where I put games where I couldn’t think of a third tag, because I think that’s funny. It’s a joke for me. I will never talk about or explain this again. Hope you read our Pig Goat Banana Cricket: Game Lad Blitz review on day 24 to understand that joke.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: No
Time Played: 6 Minutes
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