Oh, right, so I have this iPad with all this stuff on it, and I need to clean it off so I can put different (and most likely incredibly stupid) stuff on it.  I hate to delete a game without playing it, though, and I hate to play a game without blogging about it (that is not at all true), so, well, you see where this is going.

Here is part one of the breakdown.

King Cashing:  Stripped-down RPG where the combat mechanics consist entirely of slot machine.  The trappings are very satisfying — there are random loot drops and interesting decisions to be made about what weapons and bonuses you want on your reels, and completing a speedrun or earning a unique weapon from a harder boss fight actually feels like an achievement — but I can only recommend it to people who enjoy luck-based gaming.  Personally, I loved the shit out of it, but I’m the kind of person who wishes they televised pachinko.

Keep or scrap:  Got 46 out of 50 achievements, then deleted for my own sanity.

Groove Coaster:  Fun, challenging rhythm game with, God help me, I am about to use some phrase like “funky fresh retrofuture aesthetic,” and awesome music, which is what really makes or breaks a rhythm game.

Keep or scrap:  Keep, at least until I have mastered the levels and obtained all the songs to play in my car.

Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP:  This game is beautiful and amazing and everyone should play it.  I spent more time with no idea what I was supposed to be doing than I generally have patience for, but the environments are so gorgeous and the sound is so perfect that I didn’t mind very much.  Also, the writing is hilarious.

Keep or scrap:  Beat the game, bought it on Steam (primarily for the soundtrack), still can’t bring myself to delete it.

Puzzle Quest 2:  RPG with Bejeweled for combat.  I had trouble wrapping my brain around a game of Bejeweled where you and your opponent take turns, therefore if you line up some sweet juicy four-way action, it is your opponent who gets to reap the benefits, which for a four-piece include going again, so that they can further beat your ass into the ground.  My barbarian had a theoretically sweet skill that turned glyphs red, which in practice turned glyphs red in a way that got me murdered by rats.  I feel like there might be a better way to do an RPG with Bejeweled for combat.  Also, the writing is super phoned-in fantasy template stuff.  Art is nice though.

Keep or scrap:  Sayonara, Puzzle Quest 2.  My love to Zetsubou Sensei.

Star Walk:  This turns out not to be a game, but an app that shows the constellations and gives you information about planets and things.

Keep or scrap:  You know, this is one of the larger apps on my iPad, and I will probably never use it, but somehow I really enjoy having something that gives percentages along with the moon phases.  I have always been slightly nervous around analog clocks, and I never realized I was longing for a digital moon.

Lightopus:  One of those games — is this an actual genre? — where you are an aquatic creature or a paramecium or both, and you are swimming around collecting the right bits and avoiding the wrong bits.  A swimmer?  A Spitz?  The instructions for it, in addition to being incomprehensible in a tl;dr way, use Comic Sans.  Fortunately, there’s a tutorial, which makes me wonder why they bothered foisting the instructions on new players and scaring them out of their wits.

Keep or scrap:  I may let this one live for a bit, but I’m not sure I’ll get a lot of play out of it.  Not super into Spitzes.  (That term is so not going to catch on.)

Corpse Craft:  Strange Edward Gorey-style tower defense/puzzler where matching tiles collapse-style earns you resources that can be used to reanimate armies of prostitutes (et al) to battle your fellow necromancy students, who have gone all Lord of the Flies since the headmaster was murdered.  (Granted, they didn’t have far to go to reach Lord of the Flies.)  I am terrible at collapse games, but I found this compelling.

Keep or scrap:  Keep, preferably in a jar of formaldehyde.  (Do they make informaldehyde?)

Stay tuned for part two!  I mean, don’t actually put any effort into staying tuned; I’d feel terrible.  Just try not to delete this blog from your RSS feed where you have undoubtedly put it to placate Riff, who gets kinda foamy at the mouth about RSS feeds.

Slaughter them all! ...I mean, sixteen of them.

I have to find out what the fuck that purple thing is!

Obviously this list is gonna be game-intensive, because, well, that’s what I’m into. So let’s start out with the non-game stuff first.

System Utilities

The first thing you’re gonna want is a memory manager. The iPad does not seem to do a very good job of recycling used memory, and will gradually become sluggish and crash-prone, especially if you’re playing resource-intensive games; this is why, in the App Store, you will see game devs pleading with people to reboot their iPads before playing a new game, instead of leaving negative feedback when the game crashed on boot due to lack of any available RAM. Instead of rebooting all the time, though, it’s much simpler to get a memory manager app that will refresh the system memory for you. The one I’ve been using doesn’t seem to be on the App Store any more, so I went looking for a replacement to recommend to you. What I found was that there’s a ton of system profiling apps out there, but very very few that will actually refresh your memory. The only decent-looking one I’d found by the time I got tired of looking was System Status by Techet. It may or may not be the best out there, but it does what you need, and will also give you a lot of statistics (including what appears to be a full system processes log!) about your iPad hardware and software, in a nice, clean-looking interface.

Another thing you may want is Private Media Folders. It allows you to organize photographs, media, and other documents into custom galleries, password-locked and defended from prying eyes. Ostensibly, this is for the benefit of important businessmen who have a lot of important business secrets on their important business iPads. In the real world, this is so your mother doesn’t accidentally find your pornography when she’s visiting.

Reference Materials

If you’re like me and do words for a living, you will probably want a dictionary. There’s several out there; I used Dictionary.com‘s one for a while, but on the whole I think I prefer the Merriam-Webster. It loads faster, and the interface is a bit cleaner. Or you could pay $25 for the American Heritage app, ha ha ha.

No matter who you’re like, you will also need a Wikipedia reader. I like Wikipanion, which is nice and clean, and lets you queue and download articles for reading offline. There’s also one called Discover, which formats the articles in a fancy magazine style — it’s prettier, but the formatting gets in the way when all you want is an infodump. Also, it formats out the hyperlinks, so you can’t bounce from one article to the next, which strikes me as unforgivable in a Wikipedia app. Also also, I keep getting confused by the fact that it has the same name as a popular science magazine I used to subscribe to.

You will also need the IMDb App. I am just going to assume that you already know what IMDb is, and therefore, why you need this.

Word Tools

If you’re going to be doing any extensive writing on your iPad (and yes, it’s quite possible; you’ll get used to the touchscreen keyboard after a while. If you’re going to be doing a lot of typing, though, get yourself a decent bluetooth keyboard, because your fingers will hurt like hell from the impact after a couple hours) and want to be able to fancy up your formatting, add graphics, and so on, like you would in Word or whatever word-processing software you’re used to, you will probably want Apple’s Pages app. For the rest of us, who are fine with formatting-free .rtf files, get yourself a copy of Goodreader. It’s what I wrote those HOG reviews on over Christmas.

Even if you don’t intend to be doing any writing, you should have a copy of Goodreader, because it is also an incredibly powerful .pdf (and .doc, and .xls, and videos, and…) reader that allows highlighting, underlining, hand-drawn annotations, file support with iCloud, Dropbox, and Google Docs, and a ton of other features. I use it mainly for reading .pdfs of old RPG rulebooks and boardgame errata — the Dropbox interface means you don’t have to store them on your iPad itself, which lets you keep a pretty sweet library without eating all your space.

Drrrrrrrrr… it turns out that writing about recommended non-game apps is so unexciting that this paragraph is being written nineteen days later. I don’t even really remember what I was intending to write about next, but I did have ‘UPad’ typed in, so it was probably that.

UPad is a freeform notepad sort of thing; you pick what kind of paper you want — blank, lined, yellow legal pad, graph paper, etc. — and you can write and doodle on it with your finger, although a stylus is greatly preferable. (The one I use is by Griffin, and it’s pretty good. Nice rubber tip, not the bullshit foam tip that a lot of iPad styluseses use. And the bevel on the back of the iPad means the stylus clips really nicely into my iPad wallet-cover-thing, which is ultra-convenient.) It has a nice magnification widget, so your writing comes out a normal size even though writing with a stylus (or, god forbid, your finger) means you’re writing in giant inch-high letters like a seven-year-old. And, you know, all the various stuff you expect from a freehand notepad app. I like to do a lot of diagrams and flowcharts and things when I’m planning out my various projects, and I tried a lot of different notepad apps before finally landing on this one, so I feel pretty good about recommending it to you.

Christ, what else? Music apps? All right, fine.

Music Apps

So if you know about Pandora you’ve probably downloaded the app already. Otherwise, okay, Pandora is a thing that you tell it what music you like, and it uses some kind of crazy elaborate matching algorithm — by which I mean magic — to play you more music you will also like. It is excellent for when your music collection is getting a little ho-hum and you need some new tunes, but haven’t been keeping up on what’s new in your preferred genres. Pandora knows what you want to hear, or at least it will learn, since you can tell it when it guesses wrong, and it takes that into account. Seriously, it’s magic.

Another thing I like is the Buddha Machine, which is an iPad implementation of an actual electronic object you might have heard of if you read Boing Boing. It is basically an ambient tone generator — not white noise, like a rain machine, but weird little soothing droning musical loops, of which you can play up to six simultaneously. It’s good for the sort of things ambient music is good for. Which is, uh… well, if you’re having trouble getting to sleep, I guess? Or if you’re trying to drown out auditory distractions at work. Or if you’re having trouble getting to sleep at work.

What else, what else… already did reference materials. I think the only other non-game thing I need to mention is Comic Zeal.

Comic Books

Comic Zeal is a comic book e-reader, and it is a fantastic one. In fact, it’s just recently been updated with a slick new interface and organization… thing. Method. By which to organize your comics. You just load your comics (in any of the popular formats) into your iPad via iTunes, and you’re ready to go, with all kinds of reading and filing options. I’m not even going to bother going into detail about all the features, because if you’re inclined to read comics on your iPad at all (and the iPad is friggin great for reading comics on), this is the app you need to get. So you’ll find out soon enough.

At this point I’m thinking I should break up the article here, and do the actual games recommendations in a separate post. Sorry if that’s a giant cliffhanger for you, since you were probably tapping your foot impatiently, waiting for me to get to the games bit. I’ll do it in a couple of days or so, don’t worry.

Also Jenni will probably be back when she’s done with the IF thing she’s writing for a thing. Unless Minecraft 1.2 comes out before then, in which case you will never see either of us ever again.

20.4 POOP COMMA POOP IS EVERYWHERE
50.8 INITIALIZING REALIZATION THAT THESE THINGS ATTACK BY OPENING THEIR SKIN AND THAT IS GROSS
120.1 HELLS YES ROBO-BABY I CLAIM YOU AS MY CHILD AND TOGETHER WE WILL SMITE ALL ORGANIC LIFE
183.5 LASER TEARS + URINE TEARS = YELLOW LASER BEAMS
247.8 DEPTHS 2 SHOP CONTENTS:  GREED; MONSTER DROPPED: STEAM SALE
247.9 ADDING EXAMPLE TO DICTIONARY DEFINITION ENTRY:  “FUCK YOU”
300.3 REQUEST FOR SELF-TERMINATION ON GROUNDS THAT HUMAN PLAYER WILL NOT STOP MIN-MAXING WITH THE D6
480.6 HUMAN PLAYER ONCE AGAIN DIED IMMEDIATELY UPON REACHING SHEOL
480.7 MOCKING LAUGH SEQUENCE INITIATED
480.8 OW

(Note: I was holding onto this until Jenni posted something, so as to not monopolize what is, technically, her blog. But she appears to have gotten over-distracted by her hobby of coloring in Victorian* wallpaper samples, so I thought maybe if I went ahead and posted this it would shame her into writing something. Shame! Shaaame!)

I’m writing this in the Baltimore airport, waiting for a flight home for which I have managed to arrive two and a half hours early, and possibly more if the plane is further delayed. An excellent opportunity to review some more hidden object games, wouldn’t you say? Or perhaps to slash my wrists?

Crap, they took my wrist-slashing blade at security. Hidden object games it is!

You are legally obligated to hum the Indiana Jones theme while looking at this.

The next one up is Hidden Expedition: Amazon**, developed by Pick Up and Play, iPadified by Monster Costume, and published by Big Fish. This is one of the ones that I’ve played before and remember as being pretty good — in fact, I usually keep it on my iPad whenever space is not at a premium (like when I’m not hoarding every single episode of Adventure Time), though I haven’t actually played it in a while.

So, here’s the mechanical rundown: objects are pretty random, and some are cleverly hidden instead of just scattered. You have limited hints, but can be shown a silhouette of what an object looks like for free, and can get more hints by finding beetles in each scene — every scene has five, and every five gets you another hint. (Pretend I made a lame and obscure joke about Stuart Sutcliffe or Pete Best here.) Objects are occasionally hidden inside locked containers (or dirty fishtanks, or whatever), but objects hidden this way are listed in blue, so you at least know what to hold off on looking for until you’ve collected some inventory items to unlock things with.

Have you seen the Professor's nuts?

Graphics are pretty decent — objects look appropriately present in the scene, if that makes any sense. I mean, they fit the scene art — they blend in, instead of looking like weird hovering magazine cutouts. They could be somewhat higher resolution, but you can zoom in reasonably far, and things are still identifiable, if a shade blurry.

Each chapter has a few different scenes to search, probably culminating in a small puzzle involving trinkets you’ve picked up along the way. At the end of the chapter, you’re given a score based on your time and how many hints you have left, and a paragraph of text talking about whatever your quest in the Amazon actually is, searching for some lost professor or something. Lost professors and archaeologists, as a plot device, are right up there with ghosts and fairies in the canon of Hidden Object Game plots. I hypothesize the existence of a bear or some other feral predator that has discovered an evolutionary niche, wherein it feeds exclusively on archaeologists that have come looking for the previously-eaten archaeologists. The cycle would never end, because as more archaeologists go missing, the mystery becomes all the sweeter.

“Aw mom, it’s not archaeologist for dinner again, is it?”
“No dear, I’ve got something special for tonight: an intrepid female investigative reporter!”
“Hooray!”

There are no cutscenes, and blessedly, no voice acting; there is only the barest sketch of a story holding these hidden object scenes together. (Some scenes have a page of the professor’s diary for you to find, which gives a little more story. Honestly, this professor sounds like kind of an idiot, and I’m surprised he managed to keep from being eaten by a bear long enough to earn his PhD.)

Mr. Grumpy doesn't give a shit about your tenure.

I’m running out of things to say here. When you tap a beetle, it scurries toward the hint marker in the corner; if you’re quick, you can tap it again as it’s on the run to splat it. I only just now discovered this! I don’t think it actually does anything, though.

Maybe I should come up with a system of simple icons, representing different standard hidden object game mechanics — sensible/nonsensical objects, hidden or merely scattered, inventory items, containers, minigames. Voice acting. Maybe a big fat cock-and-balls for Towers of Hanoi, and a slightly smaller one for Bejeweled. Then these reviews could just have a list of icons at the top, and a paragraph of anything of interest that occurred to me while playing, and my recommendation. Then I could churn these out much faster and get back to playing Skyrim.

I just bought an eight-dollar “Value Meal” from the airport McDonalds. It’s amazing how many lies they can pack into just two little words. Also, other than at McDonalds I have never encountered food that can make you feel stuffed, while simultaneously feeling like you haven’t eaten anything at all.*** Hopefully this doesn’t turn out to have been a terrible idea to have before a five-hour flight.

Now I’m on a plane. I can’t complain. Well, at least now that the baby behind me has shut up. I guess my tactic of angrily clacking my teeth together three inches away from its face and yelling “SHUT UP BABY!” over and over finally worked. Okay, I didn’t really do that, but I did invent a new sort of baby suitcase, lined with egg-carton foam and noise-cancelling speakers, with a little lcd screen for educational programming and so the baby doesn’t realize it’s locked in a tiny box. Babies are pretty stupid, so I think that would probably work. They’re small too, so you could probably fit an EduTaining Baby Suitcaze (patent pending) under the seat like a regular carry-on.

What was this article about again? Hidden Expeditions: Amazon? Yeah. Well, it’s a good hidden objects game. It’s about three years old, which is before this genre of game really exploded, so it’s interesting to note that quality gameplay for these things was established early on, and has only gone downhill since — likely due to everyone shitting up the pool with cheap me-toos and poorly thought-out Great New Features. Anyway, I rate it six out of seven scuttling beetles and a steak nailed to a brick wall, and I plan to keep it on the iPad.

In case you wondering if there's a crazy dude with a monkey: Yes.

* Or possibly Edwardian? I feel like the distinction between the two is probably something I should have been taught in Design school. I guess they reserved that for the Interior Design kids.

** Actually the next one was Ancient Spirits: Columbus’ Legacy, but the review wasn’t particularly funny or interesting and I couldn’t think of any good ways to punch it up, so I’m skipping it. It was a mediocre game.

*** I feel like this is a popular joke to make about McDonalds, but have you eaten any McDonalds lately? It is literally true.

I’ve got some time to kill, so I might as well kill it stone dead with another hidden object game. Let’s see what’s up next on the… I still haven’t found out what I’m supposed to call it instead of ‘desktop’. Padtop. Apptop. App Parade. Apparade. Well, whatever.

The next one is by Freeze Tag Games, published by — get this — Square Enix! Of all people. Shouldn’t you be doing something more important with your time, Square Enix? Like ruining the Final Fantasy franchise? Ha! Ha! I am a video-gamer and that is a video-games joke.

Anyway, this thing I’m about to play is called Victorian Mysteries: The Moonstone.

I’ll take a screenshot of the menu screen and paste it around here somewhere. I am going to assume the prim young lady in the foreground is the main character. She’s on the icon too, and the little rococo curlicues are arranged such that it looks like she’s smoking a cigarette. I became slightly less interested in this game when I realized that isn’t the case, but oh well. It was probably too good to be true, a noir mystery set in Victorian England with a hardboiled female detective.

Mr. Darcy’s aftershave couldn’t mask the smell of death. He tugged nervously at his lace cravat as though he could already feel the hangman’s noose, and I very nearly smiled at his discomfort.

“N-now see here, Violetta,” he stammered, his face pale as the belly of a dead fish. “What is this nonsense you’re spouting?  What on earth would cause you to accuse me of the murder of Reverend Chalmers? My alibi is air-tight!”

“Sure, Darcy,” I sneered, “like a zeppelin made of cheesecloth!”

“But Dahlia will confirm –”

“Dahlia would confirm that you’re the King of Siam, if that were your instruction! She wouldn’t dare cross you, not since you found out that the father of her child is… an Irishman!”

I wonder what’s going on in this scene. The young man in the vest looks positively shocked.

“By all that’s holy, I believe Elizabeth has just had an independant thought! It is fortunate she is locked within that glass isolation chamber, else she might infect the other ladies!”

“Well, that’s what you get for permitting her to learn to read,” says the man in the green coat behind him. “Tut!”

Okay, well, let’s get started. We have a cutscene of oldschool British soldiers killing East Indian guys (presumably for the crime of being brown and wearing turbans)… and using a bayonet to pry a big gem out of a Buddha statue. I’m pretty sure you get seven years bad luck for that, but the next screen says “50 years later”, so I guess it doesn’t matter much.

… Oh dammit, there’s voice acting.

"Detective? But I'm not... oh dear!"

I guess the titular Moonstone has been stolen from this mansion and I have to figure out which of the suspects stole it? If I’m this little detective with the curled-up moustache and bowler hat, I’m cool with that. He is an amusing gentleman. Sort of a cross between Poirot and Stupid Watson. “Holmes! Jam! For my little gray cells!” Actually I think this guy is really just an insurance assessor, or a zoning board officer. Doesn’t he just have the look of some minor city official who wandered onto the scene, was mistaken for the detective, and is gamely going along with the whole thing because he’s too embarrassed to contradict anyone?

I will start with questioning Raj Gupta, the travelling performer, since as a Victorian Gentleman, I assume I am a gigantic racist. …Well shit, I guess I won’t after all, the game demands that I start out with Rachel Verander, the girl from the icon. Fine, whatever. Hmph.

We’ve got a pretty decent hidden object scene here — six or eight objects in the list, with more popping in to replace the found ones until you find everything. The objects are mainly sensible to the room, but there are a few exceptions — a skull mixed into the pattern of the wallpaper, a pear in the bedspread. More ladybugs scattered about than I would expect in a young Victorian lady’s bedroom. A broom concealed along the ceiling-moulding. It’s a good setup actually. And nothing has been hidden inside a cabinet or anything bullshit like that.

I can’t find the rabbit. :[

Where's the bunny?

Goddamnit I still can’t find the rabbit! I refuse to use the hints!

Aha, found it — a little silhouette, in plain sight next to some books. Totally fair, and I don’t know how I missed it for so long. That is a pretty typical occurance in this sort of game. Actually, it’s possible that you could use that as an indication of well-arranged objects: totally fair placement, but you miss it anyway.

There's the bunny.

I find a letter, naturally torn into jigsaw pieces, but the fragments are apparently too fragile to handle without some kind of tool. I guess the paper was woven out of spiderwebs and wistful dreams. I have also found a hex wrench, which is apparently not the corrrect tool for torn-up letter reassembly.

Have you ever torn up a piece of paper? You generally get squares, more-or-less, right? How is it that torn-up letters in adventure games always have such crazy random jagged edges? I asked Jenni how this was possible, and she said they probably had a steam-powered scissors robot.

Oh son of a bitch, now I have to play Bejeweled. There is also a Memory minigame, made more difficult by the fact that, if the second card you pick doesn’t match the first, you don’t even get to see it. Awesome. Victorian Mysteries: the Moonstone, I will let this slide because you’ve been doing pretty well so far, but if I see Towers of Hanoi there is gonna be fuckin’ hell to pay.

Well, I finished Rachel’s rooms. Found some bits of evidence, but nothing that points directly to her being the thief. Was “treated” to a little cutscene of Rachel claiming not to know anything about the theft. The cartoony cutscene art is frankly not very good, and nor is the voice-acting (hardly a surprise there).

I think I’ve pretty much seen the game at this point, unless there’s an unexpected twist. Presumably, after I’ve done all 36 scenes (4 each for 9 suspects), I’ll be asked to pick who I think the culprit is, based on accumulated evidence, and be told if I guessed right. Alternately (and more probably), the little chartered accountant playing detective will just announce who it was without any prompting from me. Hopefully that isn’t the case, but I’m not willing to play the whole thing to find out. I have too many of these games to get through.

As these games go, though, I’d say this is a pretty good one! Worth keeping, and maybe even eventually finishing. The cutscene art and acting is poor and the music is a bit repetitive, and the minigame puzzles are pretty lame, though not outright offensive. On the other hand, the overall plot and concept are suitable, and the most important part, the actual hidden object mechanics, are pretty good.

I rate it a gentleman in a top hat, with his monocle still on, but his eyebrows raised in an expression of surprise. “I say! Capital!” he says, rather pleased.

Don’t let your buddies see you hunting for earrings and butterflies in a Victorian lady’s bedroom though, guys.

p.s. Oh shit! Godfrey’s fingerprints are all over this laudanum bottle! You’re nicked, mate! As soon as I’ve found some grapes, a ship, a pair of pliers, three winecorks…

* This was written over Christmas, remember. The fact that I’m editing and posting it after New Year’s might result in some puzzling temporal anomalies. This will continue to be true for the next few of these.

I am a drifting shadow, a hush in the night. I creep up behind the unsuspecting bandit, the tools of my trade held at the ready, moonlight glinting on the razor edges.

My daggers are hand-crafted from stolen metals, hand-enchanted with the souls of the unfortunates who have fallen victim to my attentions. The one in my left hand is named Capades, and its ancient Nordish magic will chill a man’s body to the bones, making him sluggish and slow to react. The one in my right hand glows purple in the dim light; its name is Soulfucker. It fucks souls.

Just before I plunge the daggers into the bandit’s neck, he spontaneously turns around. Dammit! This almost never happens, I swear.

“Whuh?” he grunts, then draws his sword. “You’ll be much easier to rob when –”

“When I’m dead, yeah, yeah. Hang on a minute,” I reply.

The bandit waits patiently as I take off the backstabbing gloves gifted to me by my mentor in the Dark Brotherhood, and put on the ones I earned during my initiation rites as a Nightingale. Then I remove my sapphire-studded sneaking necklace, and replace it with one enchanted with protective armor-enhancing spells. Finally I sheathe my daggers, and draw two of the three magical longswords I carry around with me (the third is just for dragons)*.

“Okay, I’m ready,” I say.

“You’ll be much easier to rob when you’re dead!” he yells, as he charges at me. He gets in several good hits, removing quite a large amount of my health. Surprised, I look at his nametag again — oh, he’s a bandit marauder. Okay, that makes sense. Those guys are pretty tough.

“Hang on, hang on,” I say. “Time out.”

The bandit once again waits patiently as I start pulling food out of my backpack. I eat three grilled leeks, some baked potatoes, two whole wheels of cheese, an apple pie I found inside an ancient dwarven ruin, two broiled goat legs (and, accidentally, one raw one), five or six grilled salmon filets, a bowl of vegetable soup, and four raw cabbages (because, what the hell, they were just taking up space anyway). I top it off with a small healing potion I made out of poisonous toadstools and butterfly wings. Ahh, that’s better.

“Right, finished,” I say. “Time in.”

“You’ll be much easier to rob when you’re dead!” he yells again. I take a deep breath and shout “HOO-AH!” in response. He flies backwards and over the edge of the cliff.

Shit! It’s going to take forever to climb down there and find his corpse.

…Aw, screw it, he probably only had fur armor anyway.

* In the time since this was written, I have acquired a fourth longsword, which is for undead.

The first Hidden Object Game I’m going to review is… well, I guess I should pick one.

I’ll just start with the first one on my iPad desktop (desktop? The iPad doesn’t use the old desktop metaphor; do we still call it that?), which is Gardens of Time.

…Okay, except it turns out Gardens of Time will not play at all without an active internet connection. Hahaha, what? Hang on, I’ll look it up in the App Store on my phone and see what the hell.

Nope, can’t do that either, because the iPhone version of the App Store doesn’t know iPad apps even exist. So I guess I can go ahead and delete Gardens of Time from my iPad immediately! Man, that is an unexpectedly easy start to this project. If only the rest of it goes so well.*

Let’s try this again. The first game up for review (now) is Lost in the City, created by Elephant Games, and published (as is nearly every Hidden Object game in the known universe) by Big Fish Games.

It starts out with some mellow, kind of jazzy music over a blank white screen, which… doesn’t go away. Um. Okay, one sec, I’ll just clear the system memory and so on… Ah, there we go.

Man, just as an aside here, I want to say: Hey Big Fish Games? You are kind of pissing me off with the amount of advertising you are packing in everywhere. Everyone that plays these games already knows your name, and if they don’t they will as soon as they open the App Store. You don’t need to start the app with a “CLICK HERE TO PLAY OUR OTHER GAMES (or maybe click here to play the one you already bought)” splash-screen. And, having done that, you don’t need to spoil the game’s (very nice actually) menu screen with your ugly blue advertising banner across the top, especially considering the fact that I’ve already paid you too much money for the game I’m already playing. If I was Elephant Games, I would be pretty pissed about this; they’ve obviously put some design time into making a very nice-looking menu screen. Hmm, let’s see if I remember how to take a screenshot on an iPad.

Felix doesn't give a crap about your graphic design.

Anyway, that aside, clicking Play gives me a choice between ‘Light Mode’ (no timer) and ‘Classic Mode’ (timed). I will choose Timed, in order to feel slightly less ashamed about playing a hidden object game.

It starts with a bit of text talking about me (the main character is apparently male, which is an oddity in these games) meeting a nice girl named April and then apparently getting Mickey Finned. There’s some silhouetted photos, it’s all very noirish, and most importantly, no voice-over. Full marks so far!

Now the actual game begins. I appear to be in a dungeony basement room. It looks like I’m being asked to find realistic objects (flashlight, keys, medicine, diary), which is meh but okay fine. I have a timer set to ten minutes, and have been told that a hint costs one minute and three bad taps costs me an undefined penalty. I don’t know if the ten minutes is for this room or the whole game, but it’s probably the room, or at least the first set of rooms. You know, it’s been a long time since one of these games gave me a real penalty for random tapping, and I am honestly glad to see it. It’s not like I’m here for thrills (I usually use these games to help me get to sleep at night), but every little bit helps.

I find all the stuff in just over one minute and move on to the next room. The graphics could use some tightening up — the item images appear to be of differing resolutions, so when you zoom in, some things get blurrier than others. Also, the objects are quite small, and there aren’t very many of them. There was a whole lot of empty space in that room. The new room turns out to be similar in that regard.

This game has some of the ‘items in containers’ problem I ranted about in my intro post: some batteries I needed were in a box, unlocked with a key I found inside a statue I smashed with a hammer. To be fair, it could have been handled much worse: The locked box was evident, there was a red X on the statue, and when I got the hammer, “get hammer” changed to “use hammer” in my to-do list. Still, what this indicates to me is that this game is infected with point-and-click adventure puzzles, which is an affliction many hidden object games are acquiring. They are almost always lock-and-key problems, forcing you to get some (or all) of the items in a specific order. Since you have to get every item in your list to leave the scene anyway, this rarely adds anything other than annoyance, depending on how obtuse the list of tasks is.

You could say that this annoyance is on me, since this game obviously wants to be an adventure game, not just a hidden object game. If I want a straight-up hidden object game, I should maybe look elsewhere? Fine, but I like adventure games too, and it’s quite obvious that this isn’t a very good adventure game either. Be a good adventure game, or be a good hidden objects game; there’s no honor in being a shitty amalgam of both.

I’ll keep playing it, though. No need to give you a room-by-room, but we’ll see if anything else happens that seems worth commenting on.

Can you find the five identical candy bars?**

Yeah, not really. I got through a couple-three more rooms before getting too bored to continue. Lost in the City fails as a hidden object game — the items are small and uninteresting (and frequently identical carbon-copies of each other), sitting in plain sight in largely empty rooms. It also fails as an adventure game — the puzzles and riddles are so trivial you can’t really call them puzzles or riddles, and the things you’re doing aren’t interesting in the least. The mood is decent — mainly due to a nice, if repetitive, soundtrack — and the overall plot looks like it might possibly shape up to being intriguing, but at this early stage the game isn’t interesting enough to keep playing and see if it gets any better. Anyway, I feel pretty confident in assuming the plot will never be amazing enough to make it worth playing through this game to see it.

“Riff, you bastard!” you shout, “if you only play the first four or five rooms, you aren’t giving the game a fair shake! You should play games to completion!” No, look, let me give you a Game Design Protip: if your game is not strong all the way through (and why isn’t it?), you do not put the weak bit up front. If the beginning of the game is not worth playing, nobody will bother slogging through it to get to the awesome bits you’ve left ’til the end. I, like most gamers, have too many games to play to be wasting my time on a crap one, much less playing a crap one to completion in the hope that it will get better at the end. That is a gamble that no sane man would take.

Let’s call Lost in the City your first example (I’m sure there will be more) of what is probably the biggest and most common mistake made by hidden object games: it wants to be both a hidden object game and a point-and-click adventure, and fails to succeed at either. If there are any Hidden Object game designers reading this (and in an infinite universe, there must be an infinite number of them), take Lost in the City as an object lesson: two weak games do not add up to one strong game.

I will award it 3 out of 12 randomly scattered keys, plus a bonus third for the nice-looking menu and pleasant music, but minus a half for some grammatical errors in the text. No, I should be stricter about that, there’s completely no excuse for it. (Game developers! Proofread your shit! I am not goddamn kidding!) So minus a full key, taking it back to 3 out of 12. Eleven? Call it 3 out of 11-ish. And now I can delete it from my iPad.

Not recommended, though if I recall correctly there’s a free demo you can get if you’d like to see what I’m griping about.

I feel awkward, because this isn’t a very funny or entertaining review, but then it’s a very drab and colorless game. Maybe you could imagine me doing a funny little dance? Doop doop doo, shoopty doop doo-wop! Is that better? I’ll try to be peppier in the next one.

* As it turns out, the reason for this is that Gardens of Time is an iPad conversion of a Facebook game, in which you find hidden objects to earn coins to buy furniture for your personal garden, which the total strangers you’ve added as Facebook friends (because they are also playing the same stupid game) can visit and give you more coins, oh and also you can pay real money for gold bars, which I am going to guess you need to buy any of the good shit. I am not sorry I missed out on playing this.

** I just want you to know that no objects have been removed from this scene — the room actually starts out that empty. Also, I played through the first part of the game again to get this screenshot — that’s how much I love my readers.

It’s true, I confess it: I play a lot of find-the-hidden-object games. They are generally pretty dumb, and almost universally targeted at middle-aged housewives, but I keep downloading them, and so help me Jegus, I play them. There’s no point in hiding the fact in order to keep up an appearance of manliness, since it’s already common knowledge that another one of my hobbies is cross-stitch. So, oh well.

Maybe someone will start an ultra-macho series of hidden object games. Find the Hidden Howitzer. Tap fifteen hand grenades while being distracted by animated photographs of fiery explosions. And then there’s a minigame where you spot the differences between two nearly-identical photographs of John Wayne shooting a commie, or a Native American, or a Native American commie. Get on that, Big Fish Games. Fill that niche in the market.

Anyway, let me give you the run-down on how these games work, for those of you that have never played one. You are given a picture of some scenic location, like a Roman ruin or somebody’s study or an abandoned garage. The scene is filled with pictures of assorted random objects, scattered about haphazardly like a flea market managed by a hurricane that lives under my desk. You’re given a list of a dozen or so particular objects, and are expected to scan the picture and tap or click on those objects as you find them. It’s rather like “Where’s Waldo”, if Waldo were a typewriter, a stop sign, three apples, a pair of scissors, and an antelope. Once you’ve found all the objects, you get to move on to the next scene, probably after a cutscene involving either ghosts or fairies or, god help you, both. You might get a score based on how quickly you found the objects; even without score, it is oddly satisfying. I do not really expect you to believe me when I say that.

Can you find: a fox, a Wooper, an Applepig, and my wallet? Seriously, I can't find my wallet.

You also might not believe me when I say there’s actually a lot of nuance and difference in mechanics between these games, which makes some of them decidedly better or worse than others, irrespective of the presence or absence of fairies. What makes a good hidden objects game (yeah yeah I hear you snickering at the very idea) good?

The most important thing is that the objects be hidden interestingly, but fairly. Many games take a more realistic approach to the scenes, where the objects scattered in the room are all things you might reasonably find in that location, of an appropriate relative size to each other, and are properly affected by gravity and so on — in other words, you’re looking at a realistic photograph of, say, a very messy kitchen. On the other end of the spectrum are games where you might see friggin’ anything in that kitchen — a giraffe, say, except it’s a rather small giraffe hanging upside-down from the ceiling next to a row of similarly-colored sausages, so that the verticality of its neck causes it to blend in somewhat. I tend to find the latter style of game much more interesting to play.

(Ideally, this is where I would paste in a couple screenshots for watermelon comparison, so you can see the sort of thing I’m talking about. Maybe that will actually happen! Probably not. You’ll see it in the individual game reviews though. …Maybe.)

In terms of fairness, you want all of the objects you’re expected to find to be actually findable. This is a statement that sounds quite similar to “you want that cookie you are about to eat to be made out of chocolate and not ceramic”, but man, you would be surprised at what the designers of these games are getting up to in the name of making things more ‘interesting’. Objects partially hidden behind other objects, but still identifiable by the visible portion: fine. Objects entirely hidden behind or within objects that move or open when you tap them, which you won’t because they aren’t in your list of objects to tap on and many games penalize you for too many wrong taps? Not so fine. Some of these games try to eat their cake while still having it by making the container objects sparkle, so you know to tap on them, but the sparkles inevitably have too long a pause between them, and are easily missable if you’re focused on the wrong part of the screen, so you end up sitting, frustrated, searching for objects that don’t exist and waiting for the goddamn sparkle to appear again to show you where to click. Assholes. And yes, there is a giant HINTS button in the corner of the screen which the game probably expects you to push three times in every location, but I don’t use the goddamn hints because jesus christ I’m a man playing a hidden objects game, and refusing to use hints is the only means I have left to prove that I have a penis capable of bringing a woman to orgasm.

Besides, you know, actually doing that.

Some other things that can potentially ruin a hidden objects game, off the top of my head:
• Cartoon/comic book art instead of photographs — the unrealistic color and shading makes identifying things awkward, I find, though your mileage may vary. And of course, graphical quality in general is important.
• Terrible plot — really, no plot at all is necessary, but a good framing device to hang these random locations and object-spotting challenges on can make things more interesting. A stupid plot, filled with insipid and unskippable dialogue (and fairies), is much worse than no plot at all. And man oh man, nothing will make me turn off a game faster than shitty voice-acting. (There is no such thing as good voice-acting in these games, but there are degrees of terrible.)
• Poor minigames — some games break up the object-hunting with an occasional puzzle. This is all well and good if they’re halfway interesting puzzles, but it’s far more likely that you will be asked to play Bejeweled or, fuck you right in the ear, Towers of Hanoi. Look, hidden-object game designers, if I want to play Bejeweled? I will play Bejeweled. I have a hunk of electronics and LED lights that I soldered together and wrote my own code to play Bejeweled on — I will play it on that, so I will at least have the satisfaction of pretending I did something cool with my time.

This thing kills a 9-volt in like five minutes. That's how you know it was made by a real man.

And Towers of Hanoi? Yeah, right in the goddamn ear is what I think of Towers of Fucking Hanoi.

I have forgotten where I was going with this whole article. I hate Towers of Hanoi so much.

Oh right, I remember now. Okay, see, I’m writing this over Christmas vacation. There is not much to do here in Nowhere, Maryland where the extended family lives, so I’ve filled my iPad with a bunch (nine) of hidden object games that I haven’t played but that looked like they might be decent, plus five more that I have played before and remember as being pretty good ones. My plan is to play them all, with an eye to what they do right and wrong, and write some reviews. Will they be entertaining reviews? Ha ha! Maybe!

P.s. I hid a watermelon in this article, can you find it?

Sure, I am prone to reference my thick-cut man-loaf and my pendulous testiculords, but deep down, and this is true, I am the girliest of girls. I like to go out for yogurt with my girlfriends (the friends-who-are-girls kind, not the relationship kind, although I’m sure they would make out with me given reasonable pretext, like helping each other get yogurt seeds out of our teeth).  I like to talk about boys and menstruate on shoes and laugh alone at salad while struggling to drink water.  This is why, when the app store asked me if I wanted to be a model and go shopping and date boys for free, I was all “hells yes, sign me up for that mofo. I will date all the boys. No two boys will not be ripped in half by my large but still amiable turkeynecked sex log*.” Thus, with a small degree of genuine excitement, I downloaded Top Girl.

Top Girl, of course, is a British television programme where several witty hosts test-drive… no it isn’t.

Top Girl is a game for devices (my droid at least, I dunno about your fancy iPhone) in which you have been condemned to the hell of working as an aspiring model whose apartment consists only of a closet and whose boyfriend, whom she met in a club literally two minutes ago, keeps following her around saying things like “You complete me” and “You make me feel complete” and “Wow, I have deep feelings for you.” I am not making any of these up. “Wow, I have deep feelings for you.” That is really a real thing that he actually says. “Wow, I have deep feelings for you.” This game is bullshit you guys.

Oh, it starts off well enough, with you choosing your skin tone, hair style, and color. The hair colors are all pretty dull (I get sad when the most garish is a tasteful auburn) but oh my God the styles. There are tons of them and they are adorable. (I went with the pretty emo puff and if you judge me for that I will EAT YOUR FACE.)

Then, after a quick reassurance that you look fabulous, it asks you to choose your clothes from your tiny wardrobe of two entire outfits. (I own way more clothes than this and I am not a model. I have met English muffins that own more clothes than this. Just sayin’.) Every piece of clothing in the game has a numerical value corresponding to work hotness, club hotness, or, in some cases, both. You need work hotness to get better-paying jobs so you can buy more clothes so you can make more money so you can buy more clothes, and you need club hotness to snag a boyfriend, more on those bitches later.

Actually, no, let us discuss those bitches now.  After completing my first assignments, to buy some new work clothes and wear them to a grueling thankless demeaning job as a piece of hot emo-haired meat, I received a quest to hit the club and snag a boyfriend.  Never one to turn down a quest, I club-hotted up sufficiently and inquired after men at the local discotheque.  The game presented me with three, and I chose the one with the most ridiculous outfit.  His name was William, a pop-up screen informed me, he was a hip-hop dancer, he would refill my energy 10% faster, and did I want to buy him a drink?  Fuck yes I wanted to buy him a drink.  (Well, actually, I wanted him to buy me a drink, because I firmly believe that if ladies are going to be objectified we should at least get free beverage.  Besides, come on, I was like 28 club hot!  That’s gotta be enough for a Miller Lite if nothing else.)  I bought him a free glass of wine (okay, I can’t complain too much) and both of us appeared on a dancefloor with our bodies facing each other and our heads facing the camera, probably because no one had drawn us with sideways heads.  Little hearts came out of him, and a pop-up told me we were dating.  What?  Whoa there, cowboy!

The game told me I could kiss him, if I wanted, to keep his morale up.  Great, I thought, I’m dating a Tamagotchi.  I pressed the kiss button anyway, and the game congratulated me on my relationship reaching the next level and gave me a dollar.  Then it grayed out the kiss button for the next two hours.  I did still get to chat with him, though.

Yeah.

The next quest I was given, and this made me laugh so hard, was to keep my boyfriend for three hours.  Tall order indeed!

I could switch gears here and go off on how much I dislike the real-time energy drip mechanic the game, like your Echo Bazaars and your whatever elses, uses to limit progression, but frankly I am too busy fantasizing about throwing missiles at this game so that no one’s impressionable daughter ever comes across it and thinks her purpose in life is to shop and be hot while some interchangeable dude pays soulless lip service to the concepts of deep love and emotional connection.  I say this as someone who was actually looking forward to a fun, sexy, absolutely shallow supermodel game with no redeeming social value whatsoever.

I hated this game and I hope it gets hit by a truck.  Merry Christmas!

* I clearly have never seen a penis. Or a turkey’s neck, for that matter.