Mobile Gaming is Weird

A couple of posts ago I said that I got an iPhone 5s and wasn't really all that taken with it.  Well since I had to sign up for a Japanese App Store account, I decided to do some delving into what the Japanese mobile gaming market had to offer.  Thanks to a recommendation from my wife's sister, I ended up playing something called 育てて掃除機 (Or Raising Vacuum Cleaner) and now it's time to take a moment to talk about one of the strangest games I've ever played.

The premise is simple, you have a vacuum cleaner, and when it sucks up rubbish a small meter fills up.  When the meter gets to full the vacuum cleaner changes shape, starting out with a small cat resting on top and then over time taking on much more strange forms.

There is also a mini game that involves taking your cat machine for a walk.  This means you go down a motorway at high speed collecting coins and avoiding cars.  With those coins you can purchase balls of rubbish so that you can speed up the process of cat cleaner evolution.

Usually, when you think about mobile games you assume they are designed to be played at a bus stop or something.  Something you use to kill 10 minutes or so by playing a pointless shitty puzzle game or whatever.  This game however doesn't even qualify as that since all that you are required to do is open the app, touch the screen once, and then you are done for like 10 minutes while the rubbish respawns.

It's a truly strange game that's worth playing at least once if you can read Japanese.  If you can't read Japanese then it's just fucking weird and there wouldn't really be much point.  But I found myself strangely addicted to this fucking thing, opening the app whenever I could do clean my room and watch my cat cleaner evolve into something truly strange.

育てて掃除機, despite being one of the most basic things I've ever seen, is way more engrossing than half the shit on the app store in both regions, so give it a go if you can.