Weekly Worst Game: Cherry Cupcake Cake Cooking

Pillarboxing's a good sign, right?

Cherry Cupcake Cake Cooking is an Android port of a flash game by Girl Games Plaza, a site apparently dedicated to keeping women in the kitchen by making cooking simulations and dress-up games their only form of entertainment. And by "port," I mean a direct copy and paste of the code without even adjusting for the change in screen resolution.

As a rule, simulations exist to give players a chance to experience things they never would otherwise, such as running a game company in Game Dev Story, or leading a meaningful and productive life in The Sims. It follows that GGP made this redundantly-named simulation for those poor souls incapable of actually making cupcakes for themselves. These people likely have fragile, pin-sized fingers that couldn’t lift a bowl without snapping in two, which would explain why the game's buttons border on microscopic sizes.

The first major challenge involves getting past the title screen, which boasts buttons unflinchingly resistant to the idea working. At first, frantically tapping at the millimeter-high "play" button accomplished nothing but making the attractive woman sitting across from me slowly make her way to the other end of the room.  

The idea writing the game off as broken like all three reviews in the Android market tempted me.  But I make a point of going the extra mile in my search for all things awful and scorn-worthy, and after the finger-tapping equivalent of a drum solo to the beat of the eleven-note title song, the screen realized that I might actually want to play, and faded out at about three frames per second to reveal the game in proper.

Pretty sure this doesn't mean "Spaz out."

The main crux of the game involves getting ingredients out of the cupboard or fridge according to what a little box in the corner tells you to, then dragging them around until you reach the exact point where the game decides that, yes, you do in fact want to put the bowl down on the counter rather than flail it about the kitchen like a madman.  There’s also points where you have to do something involving following an animated arrow, though I found that randomly scribbling a finger back and forth over top of it works better than following whatever the arrow is trying to tell you.

Then there’s the oven.

Yeah, good luck with this one.

After I fumbled the oven open and flailed the mix around enough to get it inside, I realized I had no idea what to do next. The little instruction box still showed a picture of the oven, but my elite tapping skills didn’t manage to register any reaction.

Never one to let a complete lack of functionality keep me from playing a horrible game, I loaded up the online flash version and tried to figure out what I needed to do.  It turned out that I was supposed to hit the oven’s “on” button, which was about half the size of a grain of rice on my phone’s screen.

After tapping a faithful recreation of the drum solo from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on a button with a label so small I mistook it for an attempt to make the button shiny, the oven’s finally turned on. After the timer counted down, the batter miraculously teleported itself back the the refrigerator, teaching impressionable young players that while it’s important to take everything out of the fridge first, you never have to put anything away.

After a few similar phases of ingredient-flailing, squigglefests, and conspiciously-absent clean-up, the game decided that even it was tired of this crap, and refused to let me move on to the next step.  I tried the game again three times, and once again on the online version, but it always stopped working before I could behold my digital cupcakes in all their baked glory.

Since this meant I could stop playing, it brightened my mood considerably.

But to my horror, when I hit the home screen button, the game’s music continued playing through the phone’s speaker, serving as a haunting reminder my dreadful experiences in its digital kitchen.  I needed to restart the game and exit through the menu to keep the ear-grating tune from infecting my phone until the end of time.

It could be argued that this game was meant to be played on a tablet, where the buttons could conceivably be finger-sized.  But that would imply that the game was “meant to be played,” rather than “mean to be deleted from every device in existence while a team of train professionals hunt down the developers in a quest to administer their own brand of justice.”

But, on the off-chance that this game sounds like the kind of way you want to waste your afternoon, here's the link in all its QR glory:

Cordy Wants your Money

This is Cordy, the robotic platform hero who’s so cute that accidentally ingesting him might cause diabetes to shut down your kidneys. But wouldn’t it make him cuter if he, say, wore all white and had a cowboy hat?

You agree? Then fork over five bucks.

The thing about games is, they need to make money.  If they didn’t, more of them wouldn't exist than a person could reasonably play in a lifetime, forcing us to spend our free time actually doing something productive.  But sometimes a game feels like a nothing more than a platform for the developer to stand over your shoulder and ask you to pony up some cash.

And yet, not as expensive as a mocha.

Sometimes, this it has the same effect as Starbucks employees continually eying the people who employees just to leeching off their free Wi-Fi. It creates an atmosphere of disapproval that can only be overcome by actually buying something.

Insert credit card to continue 

Anyone who has written more than two words about video games recently has complained about micropayments, but those aren't the problem. Cordy’s extra levels are worth paying for, and the payment system for games like Pocket Legends works as a great substitute for an MMO’s traditional monthly fee. The issue comes when a game wants money for something utterly inane, or if it comes with an arbitrary stamina/energy system that exists for no other reason than  to squeeze cash out of unsuspecting wallets.

One recent example is the slot-machine-based Robotek HD" which feels the need to remind players in its very description that beating it without paying anything is, in fact, possible.  But good luck with that.

The game itself is fun enough.  It has enough subtle strategy where every victory makes you feel like a strategic mastermind whose brilliant machinations overcame enemy forces.  It also has enough chance involved to make you feel like any loss is just bad luck, so you want to fight again out of spite. It’s like slot machines are addicting or something.

If I pay the game enough money, I can
get to the point where I don't have to
pay the game money anymore!

And so players press on, custom-upgrading their robot armies into carefully-honed machines of death. Then they lose enough rounds to run out of energy, and have to pay to keep playing. The game holds their progress for ransom.

To be fair, it’s a cheap ransom, and paying for energy once does unlock a mode where you can earn energy without paying again. But that mode requires so much effort for so little reward that forking out another buck or to may seem worth it, because screw that computer and its dumb luck.

Brand new ways to give us money 

Despite its shady payment system, Robotek has a clever twist on gameplay, sleek graphics, quirky humor, and an overall polish that speaks of developers who take pride in their cash grabs. This compares well to games like Battle Fury, which seems cobbled together by a few giddy businessmen in an afternoon after someone realized that people actually pay for these kinds of things.

It's called a "money machine." You
put money in, and we take your money.

The end result takes the form of a shoddy tactical rpg. It’s plot forgets that it exists, its fights take place on a single obstacle-free battleground, low-cost unit sometimes have better stats than higher-cost counterparts, a grand total of four spells exist in the entire game, and upgrading a leveled-up unit is less cost-efficient than selling it and buying a new one.

All of this comes packaged around an insidious payment system.  the best units cost money. Leveling up a character without playing costs money. “Upgrading” a unit before it levels up costs money.  Using a unit more than five times in 10 minutes costs money. And, in case you don’t want to take the time to actually play with these units that you’ve paid to buy, upgrade and keep using, the game’s auto function will use up your well-spent money while you type up articles criticizing its use.

Exploiting the sucker-per-minute birth ratio

People have shelled out hard-earned cash for dumb things as soon as something existed to pay with. But now, in this exciting digital age, we have the chance to buy into these scams from any location using one of several convenient payment options.

In the end, though, this trend takes away from the entire reason people play games to begin with: to have fun.  The games that take part in this stop looking like ways to make the dull hours of a day more enjoyable.  Instead, they begin to look like ways to be exploited from the comfort of your own home.

However, these things are always subjective.  If paying for in-game stamina or a fancy virtual costume seems worthwhile, I’m not going to criticize. I would, however, like to offer you the chance to dress this article in a top hat and  monocle.  This customized document is available now at the low, low price of $2.99/€1.99/£1.75!