Phone Game Ads are Disgusting

 

So I have these two apps in my phone called Torima and Arucoin and the idea behind these apps is that you gain points by walking around and then you can exchange points for amazon gift cards and crap like that.  It sounds stupid but having it chug away passively in my pocket while I commute to work or just generally go about my day has proven pretty useful.  For example when my PS3 controller bit the dust I was able to get a new one on Amazon free of charge using the gift credit I had accumulated.  Also, I've had Astral Chain on the Switch sat in my backlog for a fair while now and that's also a game I got for free via going to work every day.

Within these apps you can watch ads to get bonus points.  My routine usually is that at the end of my day I'll fire up a movie or an episode of some drama on Netflix (it's Peaky Blinders at time of writing) and I'll cycle the ads while I watch for those extra points.  Usually I'm not paying attention but sometimes these ads catch my eye and I just cannot believe how completely evil some of these companies are to try and get you to play their game.

They come in three types.  The first type is pretty harmless and it's just an advert for the game but usually accompanied by some over exaggeration of what the game play actually involves.  These usually take the form of some color matching game that will having you rescuing a character from Saw-esque peril but the actual game is just the color matching with none of the peril.  Fine, whatever, a little deceptive sure but if you get excited for Bejewled clones and you downloaded the app after seeing that type of game, at least you are getting that type of game.

The second is probably the least common but I do see it on occasion although usually on Instagram adverts rather than via Torima but they do occur in both places and that's adverts for games that steal footage from "real" games.  The worst example I caught of this was an ad for some phone strategy game that was based around Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

An example of a real one made by Koei

If you've ever played one of those games like Sangokushi or Nobunaga's Ambition it was essentially the same thing as that but heavily watered down to accomodate for being played on a phone and for the kind of player that plays a lot of phone games.  The advert for the game though used footage, without permission I assume, from one of the later Dynasty Warriors games.  Advertising intense battles with thousands of troops and then the game itself is just menus with PNGs of anime generals.  A deceptive way to pull you in and probably waste your time.

But the absolute worst are the types of game ads that tell you that you can earn money when you absolutely cannot.  The game in the banner of this post, Evertale, is the absolute worst offender of this.  Evertale sort of also falls into the second category where it advertises a sort of creepypasta version of Pokemon which is just completely divorced from what the game is actually like

But I think that strategy of marketing has stopped working because in recent weeks the game advertises that it gives away 10s of 1000s of yen every week to it's players.  I have not downloaded Evertale since it looks like trash but I can GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE you that they aren't paying anybody, I would be surprised if the option is even in any of the menus.  I did a quick google to see if you could earn money via the game and it nothing about it came up, just one YouTube video calling it "the biggest scam nobody is talking about"

But Evertale isn't the only offender here, there are a TON of these ads that advertise shitty tetris clones, color sorting games or Solitare that tell you that you can earn money by playing.  The adverts usually all go the same way where there will be a person trying to buy something at a resturant or store and when they go to pay they don't have enough money.  Upon this realization they will pull out their phone, play one round of Tetris or some shit and then have 100 bucks in their PayPay account.  I will have to admit that one day my curiosity did in fact get the better of me because while I didn't think I'd be getting 100 bucks, some extra change to play Tetris on the train would have been nice.  However upon even just glancing at the menus the options for earning points or payouts aren't even a thing, so of course it was a quick deletion.

For me, someone who's doing pretty well in life looking for extra beer money for doing stupid bullshit, it's whatever.  Glance at it, realize its fake and move on, nothing lost but a few minutes on my commute.  But there are plenty of people who don't have it like me, who are desperate to put anything in their bank accounts to get by who you COULD potentially decieve and convince to download and waste hours on and that just doesn't sit right with me at all.  Even if there were miniscule payments it wouldn't bother me so much but the fact that these people advertise games with cash money only for the features to be completely absent is disgusting and evil.  It boggles my fucking mind that these companies that host these ads for mobile applications don't have some kind of rules on just flat out lying to customers.

Phone ads being awful is something that's pretty well documented online, with this post I'm essentially stating the obvious.  However I feel that the scammier, more deceptive side and it's potentially damaging effects on people who are desperate for any kind of supplemental income are glossed over in favor of "lmao funny gangster game meme ad".  False Advertising is a thing you get sued for, so how these phone game companies aren't being obliterated is beyond me. 

Phone's are pretty powerful nowadays, you could do some potentially pretty good things with them for gaming but while the market is flooded with shit like this they will always be looked down upon as a platform full of low quality titles for brain-dead twats.

Attack on Moe

It's times like this I start to question my own tastes in games. 

So a few days ago I was drunk in a bar and at one point in the evening I took to looking at one of my social media applications.  An advert popped up for a game called "Attack on Moe" which depicted a dude fighting giant anime girls that lost their clothes when you beat them in combat.

So OF COURSE I fucking downloaded it

What I found was a fan service clicking game similar to that of cookie clicker but instead of cookies its monsters and anime girls.  The game is very simple, you tap the thing until it dies and you do this until you get a boss.  Then you have to tap the boss until it dies but you're on a time limit for that and if you kill it then you progress to the next stage.  Every 5 stages you get to fight a "Moetan" which is a big anime girl which when defeated, goes into a "Moepedia" (seeing a theme here?) and then you can sort of rub them down for bonuses and images of them slowly losing more and more items of clothing.

As you do all this you earn money which you can use to buy upgrades for you guy as well as hero characters that will support you and farm you more money while you're offline.  There's also a "PVP" feature where you and a friend see who can mash this fastest and you earn points which earn you various rewards as you do this every handful of hours.  There's also premium currency which you can buy/earn by playing which allows you to buy items that increase stats or unlock more anime girls for you to fight in later stages.

There's not much to say about it other than it's just a fucking clicking game.  It's the kind of thing you fiddle with for about 30 seconds to a minute at a time when you're taking a shit or REALLY bored on a train or something.  I'd say it's worth checking out because if I'm going to waste my time monotonously tapping things the experience is so much better with some anime titties to go with it.

The iPhone 5S is a piece of shit but....

A couple of days ago I got an iPhone 5S.  Luckily I'm not paying to use it and I didn't pay to get it thanks to a family plan type thingy provided by the phone company, so at least that's something.

I fucking hate this thing, I hate it so damn much.  I thought the idea behind the iPhone was that it was easy and simple to use and that anyone could do anything on it.  The latter is true, you don't need any kind of technical knowledge to work the thing, but in no way is the iPhone easy and simple.

When I first got the damn thing the shit I had to go through to set it up took WAY longer than it ever should have done.  We now live in an age where it's not enough to set up mail and phone number and just go with it, I have to do all sorts of other stupid bullshit along with it.

One example of this was signing up for fucking Line.  Apparently, everyone on the planet uses Line and if I don't do it then I'm going to lose contact with the world despite having a fucking phone number AND mail address.  So I downloaded Line, which took way longer than it fucking should have done because I had to make an account with the Japanese app store which was a complete pain, but even after I had the app it wasn't just a case of adding friends and chatting...of course not. 

I had to go through this long, stupid process where it sent mails to my number that I had to verify and then it sent MORE mails to my email so that I could verify it again and even once that was done I found the process of adding someone to your line account an arduous and ambiguous process that took way longer than it ever should have done.

So I hate the fucking thing, not for just the above reasons but the list is pretty long so I'll leave it at my application fury for now, but as you can probably tell from the post title it's not all bad.

Mobile gaming for the most part is a complete piece of shit, but recently I've been introduced to a few applications that are actually good games.  Puzzle & Dragons is one example of a mobile game that actually had enough quality to it to get ported to proper systems like the 3DS.  Most mobile games are money grubbing, worthless snore fests but every now and then I come across something worth playing and doesn't require you to pay money to be good at it.

In short, fuck the iPhone but at least the app store has a few good titles to keep me entertained on the train platforms.

Now That's Some Bullshit #7: Three Phone Network

The Three phone network is a piece of shit and I'm about to tell you why!

Seriously, fuck this company right in the ear, I have never seen a big company like this conduct business this poorly, it's fucking atrocious!

So the story is, that after moving to Japan, I kept my English phone going for a few months just in case of emergency, so that I could contact people if something went terribly wrong.  Now, everything is well and truly sorted and I have so many other methods of communication that I don't need the extra phone now, so I thought I'd cancel the contract in order to stop monthly payments leaving my bank account.

Never in a million fucking years did I think that this process of making them stop my phone contract would be this fucking hard.  First I rang up their cancellation team, I had to go through all their verification stuff and then I got to talk to someone.  This guy said that it would be cheaper to cancel the contract in March of next year and that I should do it then.  So I hung up, and did some mental arithmetic and realised that I was straight up being lied to.

So I rung them again, had to do all the same verification shit again, and got through to another guy.  This guy said he was doing the whole process of cancelling the account and then tells me to hold then line, and after 4 or 5 minutes of holding, the prick just hangs up me!

Ever so slightly miffed off at this, I ring AGAIN, do the verification AGAIN, and get through to some other prick, who tells me that "he's trying to sort it out" and makes me hold the line for 50 fucking goddamn minutes.  It's a good job I was calling through Skype because if I had done this whole thing from my phone, it would have cost me a fortune in international calls!

Now extremely pissed off, I call again and midway through the call on skype, I get a call on my English phone from a guy at 3.  He tells me he'll cancel the contract, but not before asking me all sort of bullshit questions that were none of his business such as "why are you cancelling" and "are you coming back to the UK" etc.  On top of all this, he was constantly trying to convince me not to cancel the damn thing and stay with Three, at which point I flew into a bit of a rage and told him that once he cancels my account, I'm boycotting his damn company.

Yeah, it may have been pointless to say it but I was mad, I wasn't thinking properly.   But what he then started to do, was tell me that "because I'm not happy with the solution I will have to wait 48 hours for a call from the head office"  This made me even more angry and the next 20 minutes of this international call on my fucking phone was spent just trying to make him do his goddamn job.

EVENTUALLY it got done, but that was the biggest ball ache I've ever had to deal with in my life.  So you know what, DON'T USE THREE! EVER!  They will fuck you over and laugh at you while they do it!  It may sound stupid and unrealistic but I would love nothing more than to see this shitty company burn to the ground, bunch of ass holes!

what a load of bullshit....