Did you know that Linkedin also has games? They are so much more depressing than anything you could possibly imagine.
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some of you will never know what itās like to ride a moped around while royalty free ragtime piano plays in the background and honestly i feel sad for you
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@onnuhhhh plz defend your linkedin games
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maybe linkedin games are actually brilliant satire
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Wow i played this too for like a full day and then I guess forced myself to stop. It had exited my brain completely until this post.
Itās got the addictive power of idle games I am so weak to, but you also get to move a guy. A lethal combination
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Next monthly game club?
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i cannot believe this defamatory post about the greatest daily games out there. queens is on par with sudoku, cross climb is significantly better than the NYT connections and genuinely comes close to mini crosswords. zip is sensory baby cocomelon number go up in the classic grid based line making puzzle game 13 year olds download when they first get a smartphone. pinpoint is stupid. tango is decent but kinda baby trash.
linkedin queens is my favorite daily game.
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Lol I love thisā¦ this game is actually so pleasing to me. The music is perfect. Everything about it feels soā¦ rambunctious!!
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Rambunctious is the perfect word. I also love that your reward for digging a hole is getting to dig another hole.
Iām pretty sure I used to have this shirt. I will reply to this post if I ever find it in attic years later (it was most likely donated if I did actually have it)
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Not that I especially value the idea of fun, but these activities (I refuse to dignify them with the word āgameā) appear so bereft of it as to draw attention. A bland, lifeless presentation of tasks scientifically designed to maximize your value as a worker (āPrep your mind for the workdayā, in the parlance); further immiseration in the machinations of late capitalism through the very mechanism that once functioned, at least hypothetically, as its release valve. At long last, the gamification revolution has reached fruition!
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linkedin is obviously detestable but these games are well made. I donāt really lean into any daily game āmaking you smarterā but these are a nice brain warm up for me everyday to get me awake. also fun comparing times with friends.
from a game design perspective, I also like the way that they let you demonstrate your unique choices and ability.
compare the classic wordle clipboard daily stats
Wordle 1,417 6/6*
with the similarly clinical connections
Connections
Puzzle #695
next to, my favorite, queens
Queens #371 | 0:41 and flawless
First 
s: 
lnkd.in/queens.
i like the flawless bonus you can get each day, and I love that all the linkedin games have a unique emoji and include a shortened link that best lets friends challenge you. also knowing which first colors someone got is almost a clue but most days have at least two ways to start the solve.
while I donāt like tango as much, its clipboard stats are sublime
Tango #211 | 1:03 and flawless
First 5 placements:
that said, I think all daily games are only really āgood for your brainā so long as you are poking the confines of the systems and learning the mechanics. once you have sorta āmasteredā a daily game conceptually idk if it really has much more left for you.
obviously microsoft and linkedin can suck me off from behind but, these games are genuinely leagues above most of their peers
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There are 16 holes total and I am mentally ill
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Putting this in my dating profile.
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Be careful, there is such a thing as being too desirableā¦
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Damnā¦ not blaming you of course but itās hard for me to articulate just how mentally ill this kind of shit makes me. I literally woke up this morning in the middle of when Iād usually wake up with a headache (nothing serious really, and I got back to sleep, so could be worse) and one of my first thoughts was of fucking Farm Land and needing to know what was going to be revealed by unlocking more of those goddamned tiles of the goddamned Farm Land farmland in Farm Land.
I half engage with this kind of crap half out of a captive, compulsive drive, because the kinds of dopamine production and reception hijacking gameplay structures they have just really, really work on me (especially when I am made even more vulnerable to seeking out some kind of stimulation of the āIām Being Productiveā part of my brain while funemployed), and half as a sort of contemptuous hate play, where I can calmly recognize all of the ways it is basically contemporary MKUltra and how I feel it is working but also how I can simply use willpower to stop playing once Iāve had my fill in that regard. Not to be vulgar, but, itās not entirely unlike (cw sexuality, erotic material, not gonna get too personal here but maybe a bit if you know what I mean) the feeling of a total sudden voiding of interest in looking at pornography upon the conclusion of a session of masturbation. Just likeā¦ a brain chemical mix-up is achieved for Reasons and then suddenly what was previously entrancing to you mere seconds ago is suddenly of no interest whatsoever and one can remove oneself from it without any further thought.
I was able to flip the switch and completely discard Dig Deep without too much trouble, once Iād realized it was truly out of progression tricks and ways to better manage its resources, and so it would just be pointless waiting in order to fully āfinishā the game and managing it too closely would simply not increase efficiency all that much, the desire to see more of it through evaporated. No more āsecrets,ā such as they were even when there were some, no more tricks, no more space to manage things and increase efficiency. It was really remarkably shallow (ā¦pun not intended), even for these kinds of games, in the sense that even unlocking new holes to dig is of dubious gameplay benefit overall. It really quickly runs out of the kinds of layering of multiple linear upgrades that can usually stand in for true exponential kinds of upgrades, into ones that are just too small and unsatisfying to matter, if not outright objectively unbalanced. Not exactly a rare occurrence when the plan to increase the amount of content in the game was surely literally just copy pasting what came before, repeating the same linear pattern of numerical increases, palette swapping, shoving in a few other surely content pack included 3D assets, and deciding on an arbitrary cutoff point (like, why 16 holes, and not 15?) to end things. Some weird inconsistencies (weirdly different total numbers of Hole Orbs needed to build the Monuments in particular) ended up having no greater meaning and the enormous increase in costs of resources (especially hiring and upgrading your NPC miners) scaled horribly. It was a puzzle to solve but the only real fulcrum of the puzzle was just how to figure out efficient approaches to everything, which is something I do like even with such an unworthy subject, to overcome my growing sense of impatience with how long things took and how annoying it was to micromanage things to no real benefit. The puzzle of the prison of the mindā¦
Farm Land sunk its claws in deeper in some ways, due to the compulsion to reveal more tiles to unearth the progression stuff being so random. It really gave little indication of what anything would do, and frustratingly it was the mystery that really I think drove the sense of compulsion. It was always like, ok, the balance between the cost of things and my rate of income feels off at the moment, so, I must be getting close to revealing something that will correct my rate of income and get that feeling of forward progression back again. Like, what was around the corner? Even if what was around the corner was still just different kinds of dopamine production/reception manipulating, Skinner box trash.
However I am pleased to report that Farm Land also reached the point where I decided its contempt for me became greater than its psychological manipulation tactics, and it was kind of a combined overall effect from more minor but extremely annoying qualities it possessed:
- Annoying how sowing seeds and watering could be done in an area about 1 tile area away from the player equally in all directions, so you could just walk along the 9x9 grid of a field and sow and water all crops, but then how harvesting was slower, your movement was slower and it was very easy to miss harvesting particular tiles by going too slow or trying to harvest more than two tiles at once.
- The cost of revealing tiles, at least for me, was quickly outpaced by my capacity to generate income. So, 5 minutes of income being able to reveal a handful of new tiles of the game area went from having to grind out a particular field of the highest value crop several times just to reveal one new tile.
- upgrading NPC workers and the barns they transport crops to, also becoming so much more expensive, seemingly without really much means to get enough income to make it feel like anything less of a slog.
- the cost of new tiles did not seem to correspond to how useful theyād be. Nothing quite like grinding out the most expensive current tile to reveal out of the I think understandable logic that it was expensive because it was going to be good, only to find that it was just a bridge to connect to an area that already has a route to get to it that is not even that much less convenient. Or finally finding the third barn of NPC workers to automate working certain fields only to find that hiring them and upgrading them is exorbitantly expensive, even though theyāre still just as slow and the crops theyāre growing arenāt even that valuable.
- Everything seemed to just arbitrarily increase in price, linearly and crushingly. I donāt know what it was scaled on but it was like, price = some base price times total progress, regardless of whether or not you have unlocked income generating things or not. Just saying but the smart way to entrap people in a Skinner box with this kind of thing was to ensure that income trails behind the average price of anything available to purchase, not just flat increases to progress as if all progress equally benefits income.
- Overall just very poor relationship between how much effort something is to unlock or reveal (maybe we could see it as distance or time from the default beginning game state) and how valuable it is. One of the last crops I found the fields for sold for a pitiful amount, like half the value of the last crop I unlocked. What is even the point of having all these different crops if they donāt even logically increase in sale value?
- Also very deliberately obtuse about the sale value of anything was. It was like, instead of showing the sale prices of individual crops, things seemed to sell in bundles of 3 or 4 and nothing was consistent with each otherā¦ I think. So instead of saying a Wheat sells for 8 and a Watermelon sells for 5 or whatever it says 4 Wheat sells for 32 and 3 Watermelon sells for 15. Like, I think thatās what it was trying to communicate. Also you can only either sell everything in your inventory at once or all of a strange collection of 3 distinct kinds of things all at once, so it becomes so difficult to get a sense of what is actually the most efficient to grow and sell. At any rate it just seemed to want to act very coy about how much anything sold for, which I think helps prey on the compulsive nature of the disorganized mind (me). If what has the highest sell price sloughs off of my mind 'cause I donāt want to sit and do actual calculations Iām more willing to just keep playing because figuring out what is most efficient felt less efficient than just doing anything.
- Nothing encapsulates just how much Farm Land actually hates you than how it pauses any time you are not actively focused on the window. You mean I canāt just go to a different tab to wait while my NPCs grow crops for me?? Who is this game for??
- Oh right itās for ad sales. It offers to let you watch an ad, which will make all fields near you have their crops grow instantly and be ready to be harvested. I wouldnāt have spent more than a few minutes in this game if I actually had to watch ads, blessedly my ad blocker caught them. But it also happens on a timer, so, if youāre near fields that already have crops grown it does nothing, and if youāre near fields with shitty low value crops it does next to nothing. If you just grew a few fields of high value crops and are about to harvest it, it also does nothing. Also you canāt even look away from the screen while letting your NPCs harvest crops because that prompt to watch an ad pauses the game I think, and it doesnāt exit on a timer or anything. All in all, it is a game that really demands your full attention but offers you really nothing in return.
- The very royalty free sounding acoustic guitar jam sesh as played by the mean but well liked youth pastor was not as funny as a lightly recomposed loop of The Entertainer.
Anyway I just want anyone to know that if you get sucked into these kinds of games, I think that it is normal, it is just that people with evil intentions figured out how to hijack the psychological processes that give people a sense of satisfaction, and/or feelings of productivity or urgency or relief or suspense, and itās not your fault. I feel like I do need to expose myself to them sometimes and kind of figure out how that is all working to be reminded of how obviously deliberate and against your best interests it all is. There are games that tap into similar psychological/neurological quirks of the human mind that are actually fun, like Factorio and some of the better designed increment games. I can only recommend that you seek out and play those rather than any shit like this.
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Mega Man is the Weezer of video games
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megaman zero series is the Island In The Sun of video games (one of the only good ones)
megaman battle network is a song by weezer that is unlike anything else theyve done, idk enough about weezer to make a comparison
same for legends
the real question is which megaman is Across The Sea?
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The first Weezer album is the original few Megaman games. They didnāt really know what they were doing yet and tried lots of weird stuff, but ended up nailing it somehow.
Battle Network is Hashpipe. They didnāt make another song that sounds like that one again, but that song/series fucks. And I saw both of these on TV.
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Mega Man 7
My argument relies on both Mega Man and Weezer are popular prescribed nerd stuff that started alright and somewhat fun, has put out a couple really great stuff (Mega Man Legends, Blue Album) and has been after that wildly inconistent with some real trash and some real alright if a little corny stuff
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