A few days ago, I injured my thumb by slamming it into a refrigerator door in a fistfight defending my honor. A few minutes after that, I reached for my phone to compose a no-doubt hilarious and insightful tweet about the situation. However, I found that with my new injury, it was a rather difficult task. Nonetheless, I persevered, adding a little ‘ow’ to punctuate each letter I typed, only to look over and see my friend Amy laughing at me.
“Did you read my tweet?” I asked. “Preeeetty funny, right?”
“What? No, nobody likes your Twitter account and you post too many pictures of your dog. I was laughing at the way you were typing. Ow! Ow! Ow!” She giggled.
“You were laughing at my pain?”
“I guess. It was funny!”
“You know, there’s a word for that.”
“Oh yeah, ‘schadenfreude’.”
“No. ‘Asshole’.”
But of course, Amy was right. Pain IS funny to you soulless people. So I decided to embrace my injury and write a review of the top 5 free games in the App Store, focusing especially on how each one made me, an actual live human being with thoughts and emotions, feel upset and sad.
Enjoy, bastards.
Game: Trivia Crack
Overall pain level:
Rating: One slowly healing thumb up!
Hey, maybe writing this article won’t be so bad after all! I expected this to hurt a lot, especially if I had to hurry to answer questions, but when I first started playing, it was actually pretty zen. All you have to do is answer questions in different categories and try to earn little trophies by getting them right. It’s fun, easy to play with just an index finger, and most importantly, provides an outlet for all of the useless knowledge about the Harry Potter series I’ve accumulated over the years.
Please.
Of course, all of these good feelings occurred when I was playing with random opponents. When I started games with my actual friends, all bets were off, and it was a different finger that started feeling sore after that…
Game: Zigzag
Overall pain level:
Rating: No thumbs, just a tight and menacing fist headed directly at your face
No, no, I was wrong. I hate writing this article and I want to die.
In Zigzag, all you have to do is keep this little ball rolling on a zigzag platform without letting it fall off. You change direction by tapping it. It’s simple, but also probably pulled directly from the asshole of Satan himself.
This, my friends, is the Boulevard of Broken Dreams that Green Day once prophesied.
The worst thing about Zigzag is that so far as thumb pain goes, it wasn’t even that bad. Sure, the tapping hurt after a while, but worse than the soreness was the constant feeling in the back of my mind that every little jab of pain was for nothing, that this whole article and in fact humor itself are futile, that I and everyone I know will die someday, and that eventually the earth will explode and everything that humanity has ever known or cared about will be sent hurtling into the void of space.
That’s what happens when you try to keep a virtual marble on a virtual plane while collecting virtual diamonds for thirty minutes straight.
Game: Crossy Road
Overall pain level:
Rating: Two incredibly mangled thumbs doing their best to point up
I’ll be honest. Crossy Road caused me just as much physical pain as Zigzag. Probably more, actually, seeing as I played them one right after the other without a break because I hate myself. However, Crossy Road made me want the pain. Just like 50 Shades of Grey, except with adorable cubed animals instead of an abusive millionaire stalker with great hair!
Crossy Road is safe, sane, AND consensual.
The premise is this: you are a chicken. You must cross the road. You tap to move forward and try to avoid obstacles like cars, trains, and a giant swooping eagle that will snatch you away. It’s adorable, hilarious, and totally worth the stabbing pain that’s started to move up into my forearm!
…Maybe I should take a break.
Game: AA
Overall pain level:
Rating: Two thumbs so numb they can’t move lying sadly on a table, pointed in a general, southward direction
Oh, AA. What an adventure we’ve had. Dear readers, I was worried that after playing this game, I would not be able to finish this article. Why? Well, because it very nearly made me launch my phone at the nearest wall. The premise is simple, but maddening, like an unexplained ringing in your ears or Perez Hilton’s personality. All you have to do is press the screen to shoot some motherfucking number darts on a motherfucking rotating wheel of death without any of the motherfucking number darts touching each other.
Sorry. I’m still a little raw.
Just the sight of this image made my blood pressure skyrocket.
AA manages to check off every pain trigger on the injured thumb list. You play by tapping with your thumb, sometimes in quick succession and always with intense, focused aggression. There are no breaks. You can’t give your little injured buddy a time-out because if your index finger’s reflexes are just a millisecond slower, you’re screwed. There’s no free escape from the levels you just can’t beat, the motions are so repetitive you can feel your muscles getting sore, and staring at the spinning wheel spokes for hours at a time is, suffice to say, dizzying as fuck.
That being said, I’m highly addicted to it, and I’m going to go take a little break to try to beat Level 37 now.
Game: Candy Crush
Overall pain level:
Rating: One befuddled, bandaged thumb scratching vaguely at my forehead.
I don’t understand this game. Maybe I’m delirious from the pain meds I took midway through the writing process. Is that cheating? Did I lose my journalistic integrity? I don’t care. Someone bring me a donut.
The rules are, you have to switch around some candy and some soda and put the same colors together to win, and if you do it well enough, the screen will reward you with candy puns in sparkly fonts. Sodalicious was my favorite.
Classic.
However, there were also special candies, like striped ones that caused giant sugar explosions, and also completely inexplicable magic fish, I think…?
Did I hallucinate this entire game? I’m not sure. All I know is I’m doped out enough to not feel the pain anymore, and I’m craving some candy, so we’re going to leave it at that.
Don’t do drugs, kids. And next time you injure your thumb, maybe use it as an excuse to put your phone down for a week. After all, you’ve seen what iOS games can do to people…
FREEMIUM ISN’T FREE, MOTHERFUCKERS.
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