FREE App Reviews: Meme Fighter, Space Basketball, Sky Swing
If you are one of the millions of people worldwide with a smart phone or other magical computing device, you already know that you have millions of games and apps available to you 24 hours a day. You’ve probably downloaded some sort of electronic farting simulator, zombie hair salon, or game that only ends when you die, and you probably only got it because it was free.
Every day, dozens of apps go on sale in the Apple store, many of them reduced in price to ZERO $$$, and because after about two hours you got tired of that animal flinging game that was the first thing you saw, you need something else to distract you from your responsibilities and your increasingly distant wife.
In this instance, you are faced with a question: “Which one of these six billion things is the least awful and will keep me from killing myself for one more night?” Well, friend, I’m here to help, with the following
FREE APP REVIEWS!
Act Classy: Solving first-world problems since 2012.
All of the following games were downloaded and played on the iPhone 4S and were free when I got them. Current prices not guaranteed.
Meme Fighter
Original Price: $0.99
App Store Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Sample App Store Review: “Nobody Buy this.” — All the names are taken too
This game lawsuit waiting to happen has you assuming the role of a meme that my research tells me is a reference to a picture of basketball player Yao Ming smiling. Yao Ming Face and all the memes he is fighting are characters derived from Rage Guy, which is a popular meme stemming from-NO…f*#% it. This meme crap is a rabbit hole unlike any I’ve ever seen.
Rage Guy spawned Forever Alone Guy who begat Yao Ming Face which derived Shaq with a Bucket on His Head…there are entire websites devoted to tracking the detailed history of this stuff, and in a few years this is going to be all they study in college courses on the Internet. But in the end, it pretty much all comes back to a 4Chan user who decided to draw a stick man pooping. Here’s the title screen from Meme Fighters:
I’m not sure what Naruto has to do with it, but I’m sure there’s a well thought-out reason for his inclusion. The game-play is simple: you tap on the screen repeatedly to make Yao Ming Face move to the left and push the other meme off the screen. If you fail to do so, you go back to the Start Menu. Oh, no. Sorry, the Star Menu.
You must selec the star butto to begi the gam.
Now, as much as anime fans may desperately want to see Yao Ming Gohan fight Troll Face Naruto (and read the related slash fiction), be advised: only play this game if you like having things you want denied you in the most confusing of ways. Here is a screen cap of an actual fight in Meme Fighters:
For the record, we here at Act Classy in no way consider basketball player Yao Ming to be a terrorist.
There is no indication in the game itself why Yao Ming would want to shove a weeping child with Eric Stoltz syndrome into the void space behind it; in fact there is virtually no back story at all. This, along with no option for cloud saves, means I can’t recommend this game at all.
Final Verdict: Don’t buy!
Space Basketball
Original Price: $2.99
App Store Rating: ★★★★★
Sample App Store Review: “It’s got that fun old school vibe, cool game.” — skp714
Space Basketball takes all of the thrill and excitement of quickly moving your forefinger diagonally across a screen and puts it on top of a nauseating scrolling grid and the Afro-Synth Bass demo button on your little sister’s Casio. Because, you know, SPAAAAAAACE!
The red thing is your Space-Ball, the yellow thing is your Space-Basket, and that feeling in the back of your throat is your Space-Lunch.
This is what Space Basketball looks like…and this is all Space Basketball looks like. Well, OK, to be fair, it also sometimes looks like this:
Ballin’.
The transition from the real live game to screenshot fails to capture just how much the constantly scrolling back-ground makes you want to vomit. Though, to the developer’s credit, that is exactly how I feel when I’m forced to watch actual basketball. So, as desperate as I am to play basketball in a complete vacuum, I can’t give this one my support.
Final Verdict: Don’t buy! Unless you swallowed something toxic and need an expectorant. And even then you’d probably be better off calling an ambulance.
Sky Swing
Original Price: $0.99
App Store Rating: NA
Sample App Store Review: NA
Sky Swing boldly explores what may be the the last unasked question of our time: Can an elephant survive swinging through the sky on a rope? And as we play, we are forced to project who we are onto this nameless elephant. And, in many ways, the elephant is all of us.
Who among us doesn’t struggle to navigate the tempestuous storm that is life? Was it not Descartes who said, “Yea, the world upon which we stride is like a path of lightning’d bolts, and we but an elephant in the midst of a pendulum swinging, swinging, moving forward in increments towards an uncertain future for which we are awarded points for reasons unknown”? No? I’m pretty sure I saw that on Facebook. I think you might be wrong.
Ah, but adherence to philosophical principles can only take a game so far, so how does Sky Swing fare by more conventional metrics? Actually, surprisingly well! While I certainly can’t recommend paying any money for it, the actual mechanics of the game are not entirely terrible. You touch the top of the screen to connect a rope to the…top of the screen, and you swing, tap again to disconnect, throw another, repeat. The only real problem is that it’s a f*#^ing elephant.
WHERE DOES THE ROPE COME FROM?!?!?!
If this same game was branded with Spider-Man and had cleaned-up controls it would be an infinitely better product, or at least it would make some sort of sense. As it is, the fact that it’s an elephant swinging on a rope that comes from…somewhere and attaches to clouds or something is good for a WTF chuckle, but not much else. That and no game center support is a staggering oversight by the developers.
Final Verdict: Meh, if it’s still free, it might occupy your attention during a trip to the bathroom.
Well, that’s all we’ve got for today, kids. If there’s a particular app you’d like us to review or just bring to everyone’s attention, please post it in the comments below!
About the Author
Fred Betzner Fred Betzner spends his days silently staring out of windows in his castle, Le Château de Kangourou, and cursing his ill fate in severely broken French. He is considering changing his name to Molly.
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