Video Gamers Podcast - Video Games Quick Take - Mobile Trio

Episode Date: October 14, 2023

From video games hosts Josh, Paul, and Ryan we're bringing you even more video games content each week.  Video Games Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. And the Quick Take episodes were initially only available to Patreon and Apple supporters, although there was a little bit of demand that people were requesting to hear them as they got a little bit older. So we started releasing these to the public for everybody to enjoy. These episodes are pretty short. They are generally about 10 to 12 minutes long, and they are recorded by just one of us at a time. Usually it's us wanting to talk about something that just didn't really fit the format of the main show.

So it always gave us an opportunity to maybe record just a few minutes about something that we've always wanted to talk about. Just keep in mind that as you listen to this episode, if you hear any announcements or upcoming dates, plans, anything like that, just take that with a grain of salt because you're listening to this quite a bit delayed. All right, I think that covers everything here. We hope that you'll enjoy this episode. Let's do it. Hey, what's going on, everybody?

Paul here with another Quick Take episode for you all. Before we hop in, thank you so much for your support, whether it's on Patreon or Apple. We really do appreciate it. You guys are the ones that help fund the show and keep it running. We literally could not do the show without you. So thank you so much from the bottom of all of our hearts. We really appreciate the support. All right. So what I wanted to talk to you guys about here today is a trio of mobile games. So I know before I have said that every once in a while I want to release these quick takes covering mobile games since we never talk about mobile games on the show,

unless it's just to quickly do a drive-by on Josh and make fun of him for not playing mobile games. But the first one that I'm going to talk about is actually a really old mobile game. It's one of the very first ones that I can remember playing. This one actually goes all the way back to 2011. And so for some of you that are a little bit younger, this is a game that was popular for a while, and then it fizzled out. And if you've never heard of it, it's absolutely worth picking up. It is a puzzle game by the name Bag It. B-A-G space I-T. And the entire mechanic of this game is kind of a little bit like Tetris, but within the context of bagging groceries, which is, you know, not exactly the most action-sounding theme of a mobile game, but just stick with it here. So the way that this game works is you've

got like a giant grocery bag that kind of has like, it's got the cover cut off so you can see into the bag. And at the top of the screen, you've got groceries coming by on a conveyor belt. And what you do is you have to click and drag the groceries into your grocery bag, but you have to be careful about what things go next to one another and how you stack it, because all of these different things will the heaviest stuff down first, you know, your gallons of milk, your giant watermelons, you know, these are the things that are heavy, you got to put them on the bottom, and then you can start stacking stuff on top of that. And so your goal is to fit as much food as you can filling the bag without anything causing damage. And so the game gives you like a little bit of a warning if you try to put a bottle of orange juice on top of a bag of chips. It'll give you a little bit of a quick countdown,

like three, two, one, and then the bag of chips actually gets smashed, and then you lose a whole bunch of points. And it starts off, of course, very easy. They only hand you a couple of types of food. But before you know it, you're having to like bag everything with only using two bags or only using three bags. And you might actually like strategically crush certain things to try to fit everything in in one less bag. And you also get all kinds of crazy bonus points as you start to learn different combinations of food being next to each other. So I redownloaded Bag It and started playing it today. And when I put three bags of tortilla chips that all touched each other, I got a bonus that said three amigos. Or if you put milk next

to orange juice, you get a bonus because it's like they have a crush on each other in the game. I don't know. It's kind of goofy. But as you play it, you learn all of these things. And so it's really neat that you get to have like a strategic version of Tetris that's not time based. You just get to play at your own pace, click and drag this stuff into bags. Even little kids can get a real kick out of it. I remember my son James, I mean, he was born in 2009, so he was only like two or three when this game came out. And even he would just click and drag eggs and purposely make them drop and crack. And he would just, you know, laugh in the back seat while playing on my phone. So even kids seemed to really enjoy Bag It. The only bummer

is that Bag It is no longer on the Google Play Store, and so I actually had to download it through the Amazon App Store, which of course I never use, and it even gave me a warning that it was for an older version of Android. So if you're on Apple, I think you can still download it really easily. If you're on Android, it's a little bit tougher. You might have to find it somewhere else, but Bag It is a really fun one if you have never played it. All right, second mobile game that I was going to talk about is, I think it's pronounced Shprody. I have no idea what this word means or why it's spelled this way, but it is S-H-P, like Paul, R-O-T-Y, Shprody. And this is another puzzle game. You guys know I love

me some mobile puzzle games. But the whole idea of this one is, actually, this one has a little bit of Tetris DNA in it as well. I think I'm discovering some things about myself recording these quick takes. Apparently, Tetris was really influential on me. So this is a puzzle game where there are a whole bunch of empty tiles, and your goal is to fill all of the tiles with these Tetric-like pieces, and they all have to fit and be in the right orientation for you to fill every single tile on the level, and then you complete it. Now, the way that this works is the tiles are mostly blank, but they do give you a couple of squares that are filled in. And inside that square, it shows you a picture of what that one tile can become. So for example, it might just be like a

straight line of three pixels. And so that means I can click and start in that box, and I can click and drag it to fill two more pixels next to it in one direction. And I can always just do a single click, and that shape will re-collapse back into the first pixel. And so basically, the puzzle itself will give you these single pixels that are filled out all over the screen, and you just start clicking and drawing, and then, you know, bringing things back, redrawing it another way, trying to fill in the corners, and then kind of work your way inward. And it's a very cleverly made puzzle game. You can download it completely for free, and the free version comes with 100 levels. And I know that because

I played all 100, and then it gave me a pop-up and said, hey, the free version stops at this point, but if you're willing to buy the pro version, it's $1.99, and then you get something like 100,000 levels or something preposterous like that. So that is one that is well worth checking out. You can certainly play the free version i did not mention but bag it is also free but you can pay a dollar and then you get some additional modes that unlock so some of the extra modes actually rely on you like crushing as much food as possible and things like that so it gives you a chance you a chance to load up four milks in a row and drop a giant watermelon and watch all four explode and get points for that. So both of those

are games you can check out for free. And then the last one here is a little bit more of a niche game. Many of you out there, you might have zero interest in this at all, but this is where we get a little bit of that blend of video games and movies, which of course you guys know I love. So this is actually a browser-based game, and it is Box Office GA.ME. So it's like Box Office Game with a.ME at the end. And one of the movie podcasts that I love listening to is called Blank Check, and one of the things that they do in the episode after they cover a movie, it's sort of like a deep dive episode on a movie, and then they always talk about that weekend at the box office. You know, what movie was number one? What was number two? You know, was this movie the number one movie in

America at the time? How much did it gross worldwide? And they would always talk about those things. And it turned into where they would start guessing, you know, where do you think this was? Do you think it was the number one movie? How much do you think it made? And it ended up starting to kind of snowball to where someone actually thought, you know what, that's actually a game anybody could play. And so someone designed a program to basically just pull the box office data. And every single day, the game refreshes. You can only play it once a day, but it only takes a couple minutes. And I actually end up doing it almost every night around midnight before I go to bed, because the new day has refreshed. And it'll just pick a random week of a random year. They tend to pick from the 90s on, but every once in a while you might get a weekend back in the

80s, which is going to be a lot tougher because the movies are just so much further back. But they'll tell you whatever, July 2nd, you know, whatever. And what it does is it gives you a list of five movies, and they tell you how much it made that weekend and who the production company is. So if I see something like 1999 Warner Brothers, it's number one, and it's been number one for four weeks, then right off the bat, I might just guess something like The Matrix. Because I know that that's a Warner Brothers movie. I know it came out in 99. So if you want, you can just start guessing right off the bat. Or what you can do is you can start clicking to get hints. And so it'll give you the tagline of the movie. It'll tell you an actor from

the movie. It'll tell you another actor. It'll tell you the genre. And so as you get more hints, obviously it gets easier, but then you get fewer points. And so you get like a nice big bonus if you're able to guess all five movies. And so I actually have several friends who are playing box office game. And every day we'll, well, not every single day, but every once in a while, we'll text each other and start talking about that day, how many points we got, how we did. Even today, I noticed that there was an error where the movie would give you the top three actors, but it was actually missing the main actor from the movie. So I kind of gave all my buddies a heads up. So if you're not into movies and you don't

follow movies, that's obviously not going to be one for you, but I still think it's really fun to play, and it's one that's just totally free, and you don't even have to do it on mobile. You can do it at your desktop if you want. It's just simply a browser game. All right, well, that's it that we'll talk about here today for mobile games. Hopefully at least one of those will strike your interest. I will say that Bag It, I think, is for everybody, any age. Everybody should check that one out, even if you do have to go out of your way to get the Amazon App Store. So thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. Thank you for your support. Thank you for listening to the episodes and for subscribing, leaving reviews, all of that stuff helps the show. But honestly, it's the financial

support that matters the most. And so we really do appreciate that you guys have chosen to help support the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. It really means a lot to us and we are very appreciative. So thank you and just stay tuned for that next episode. And we'll see you guys then. Happy gaming.