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This one was, fortunately, not a problem. It’s a strategy RPG, I haven’t played it in years, and I remember it stopping me from progressing pretty early on because I either needed to pay for characters or materials, or I had to wait a LONG time for them. I like the concept, but this to me was the epitome of how badly some mobile games can make a grab for your wallet.
So long, Star Trek Timelines. I’m sorry to say, you will not be missed.
Okay, I’ve been deleting games for a week. Let’s celebrate by deleting one that’s gonna hurt… a little bit, at least.
I started playing Star Trek Lower Decks Mobile pretty recently; within the last few weeks, really. And as much as I enjoy the cartoon graphics, the wacky scenarios that unfold in the story chapters, and the irreverent Star Trek-ness of it all, its ultimate undoing is that it’s a resource management game.
Yeah… those.
Resource management games are designed to keep you in front of them for as long as possible. You want to automate a task? Earn just a little more money (or in the case of this game, merit points) so you can afford it! Wanna upgrade a specific character so you can unlock the automation in the first place? Earn more money! And so on.
What hurts most is that I’m starting to watch Lower Decks, and I do enjoy the overall atmosphere of this game as it relates to the show. But I’ve dabbled in enough resource management games to know that I’ll only get more annoyed the further I go into this one. It’s almost an inevitability for these kinds of games with me.
So, even though I know I’ll miss this one, I’m going to dispense with it now, as I know otherwise I’ll spend way too much time waiting on front of my phone to get just one more achievement, unlock one more capability, obtain one more character.
Yep. Beam me outta this one. Take care, Lower Decks Mobile. You were fun at first, but your nature betrays you’ll be bad for me.
Okay, this was an easy one.
Let me be clear: Figgerits the word game itself is fine. You solve words based on phrases and the number of letters in them. Each letter is assigned a number that, if correct, will spell it a phrase that consists of those numbers. It’s actually a decent word puzzle game.
But, my god. The ads.
They’re all over the place. Pop-up ads on sections of the puzzle. Commercial ads between each puzzle. And they just. Never. Stop. 🛑
This app would actually be a decent, and harder to delete, if it would just dial it down. But hey–capitalism gonna capitalism, right.
Good game, terrible app. Goodbye, Figgerits.
I’ve only really played Fallout 3, which I enjoyed immensely, but otherwise I have little experience with this franchise. It was, however, enough to get me interested in this mobile resource management game. While its animation and gameplay was pleasant enough, it’s still probably been years since I actually logged into this game.
Like Last Fortress: Underground, you’re in charge of a facility that has survived a large scale cataclysm. You create facilities with resources, direct people to undertake necessary tasks, and level up facilities to unlock more abilities. Unlike Last Fortress: Underground, I have some fairly positive memories tied up with this game.
While I wouldn’t call this a difficult deletion, I feel like this has been one of the more benign games thus far in terms. It’s associated with a franchise I enjoy, and it never felt like it was grabbing for my wallet too much. It did, of course demand my time if I wanted to keep things running smoothly.
Resource management games tend to be like that by design, though. So, I very well can’t fault this game just for being what it’s supposed to be.
Goodbye, Fallout Shelter. You were decent. Maybe someday I’ll return, but if not, know I’ll remember you fondly.
Okay, wow. This one was easy.
Like, ridiculously so.
This flimsy excuse for a mobile game deals with the premise that you’re managing a ragtag group of zombie apocalypse survivors who happen upon an abandoned fortress that happens to contain everything they need to survive. You’ll need to put some work in to survive, of course, but as you discover new areas and level things and people up, the base becomes easier to manage.
I must have downloaded this years ago, and I remember playing it, but apparently my account got zapped after a period of inactivity, so it started me all over again. Which is fine. It was going to get purged regardless, and while the gameplay concept is simple enough, I had simply lost interest.
Aside from that, the game had some bugs, wasn’t easy to navigate (at times infuriatingly so), and the premise was eye-rollingly cookie cutter. This was an easy one to get rid of, and not even take a backwards glance at.
I’d recently added Star Trek Fleet Command back to my phone because I’ve been watching season 3 of Star Trek Picard, and it’s really been fueling a desire to immerse myself in More Things Trek. When I started the game, I realized that I must have played it years ago, because I’d already made it past the tutorials and had a ship and some characters.
It… wasn’t an ideal situation.
The things you need to do, the resources you have to monitor, the number of events and tasks you need to keep track of, all make for a confusing game that really was too busy to enjoy. Since the game was already assuming I knew what I was doing, I just didn’t have the interest to keep with it and try to build my fleet and officers. Throw in the gacha/proto-gambling mechanics that come with these kinds of mobile games, and it was a quick decision to purge it.
So… almost as soon as I’ve downloaded it, I’m giving it the boot.
This was an easy decision to make. I find it impossible to believe there aren’t many, many more, better Star Trek games out there that can slake your thirst for a voyage to the Final Frontier.
You might say I’m cheating with this particular purge, as Topps Marvel Collect technically isn’t a mobile game; it’s more of a digital card collecting app. And, in that sense, you’d be right.
But I’m looking at apps that:
And Topps Marvel Collect certainly fits that description.
This was a fun app, and I spent a lot of time on it chasing Spider-Man cards for my collection. However, I haven’t been on it for a few months, and had no real trouble deleting it, along with the subreddit for the game and the Instagram follow I had for it.
So goodbye, Topps Marvel Collect. You were an amusing distraction for a long time, but no more!
The first casualty of my slow purge of f2p/p2w mobile games has occurred, and it’s Marvel SNAP.
I’ve uninstalled the game, and removed myself from a Facebook group about the game. As far as I can tell, I didn’t belong to any other social media for the game: no Instagram, no subreddits, nothing like that. It’s gone, and any mentions of it through my normal passive means should be gone–if I missed something, I’ll immediately erase upon discovery.
Marvel SNAP wasn’t a really hard habit to break for me. It’s a good game for what it is, but I’m only so interested in card games, and this was a fairly new game, so I didn’t really get that invested. I know there are some games I’ll have a much harder time deleting, but this wasn’t one of them.
So, the first baby step is complete. I’ll do another one in the next day or so.
A few years ago, I took any and all mobile games off my phone in an attempt to free myself of their addictive hold on my time, attention, and money. I don’t think I went more than a couple months before I downloaded a couple of favorites and was back at it again, playing and swiping as I derided myself for my lack of willpower.
This time, I think I’m ready to make it stick. Here’s why:
I think this will be a good move for me, as I try to increase my productivity and become a better librarian, content creator, and overall person. I’d love to hear people’s perspectives on this, including any similar struggles you’ve dealt with, how you broke them, and what you think of what I’m proposing for myself here.
Best of luck to everyone as we all try to become the best versions of ourselves.
Angel, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as so many other good shows throughout television history, still occasionally suffered from the odd episode that was clearly filler and failed to really connect with fans. “The House Always Wins,” the third episode of season 4, was one such installment, but it has one particular plot device that still speaks to me today, which I feel somewhat redeems what is generally regarded as an uneven, bland episode.
The Spin-and-Win, a gambling wheel rigged by the episode’s villain, the casino owner Lee DeMarco, is only accessible by guests chosen by the casino. DeMarco uses Lorne’s ability to read people’s auras and see their futures, and with this information, chooses the ones with the most profitable destinies. They are given a special gambling chip to play the Spin-and-Win, with a million-dollar prize as the lure. When his mark takes the chip, it is imprinted with that person’s future destiny, and when they inevitably lose, they are left virtually mindless, their destiny taken away along with their ambition, and they spend the rest of their lives in a dull haze, listlessly spinning away quarters in the casino’s slot machine.
Most fans feel this is a pretty heavy handed attempt to equate gambling with throwing away one’s future, and while that’s not a completely off-kilter supposition, it’s one I never really connected with gambling in spite of the context. The Spin-and-Win, along with its devious ‘destiny chip’ component, may have existed in a casino, and been in the purview of gamblers and those who loved games of chance, but to me the symbolism went a lot deeper. The trap that the Spin-and-Win represented could take any form, and entrap just about anyone, as long as they obsessed enough about it.
Yesterday I wrote about creation vs. consumption, and how Stephen King’s It both represented that struggle and how it’s helped inspire me to throw off (at least for now) the trappings of consumption so I can create. The image of this thing, the Spin-and-Win, from this episode of Angel, was another of the primary motivators that came to my mind’s eye as I came to this realization. The Spin-and-Win, in my estimation, could be anything to anyone, much like It could take on the form of anything that its victims feared. It wasn’t just about gambling, although I suppose my vice of gaming could easily be argued to have many parallels to that pastime.
For me, the Spin-and-Win represents video games. For someone who loves food too much, the Spin-and-Win represents food. For others, it could be sex, alcohol, television, movies, music. More broadly, the Spin-and-Win represent excess, the overindulgence of an otherwise harmless vice that creeps into your life and steals from you. Time, energy, devotion to otherwise creative or self-improving pursuits. It’s an easy retreat into something that’s comforting, but otherwise and ultimately, pointless.
I admit, “The House Always Wins” is not a great episode of Angel, though I still enjoyed it just fine. But the idea of someone throwing away their destiny because they see an easy (but rigged and unattainable) win in front of them is a powerful one that has stuck with me through the years. It’s always been there, in the back of my thoughts, and I’ve at times wondered why that particular form of that vice stuck when there have certainly been others that may have been more apt.
Now I know why, and I’m sending up that image to pull free of my own tendency to put of creating–writing–with something easy to consume–in this case, video games.
It may not be the prettiest or most eloquent way to break free, but so far it seems to be working out well for me.
Spidey Librarian 