THE REALARCADE GRAB-BAG: ROUND 2

THIS IS IT THIS IS THE GAME I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR!!!!!!!!!! This thing has haunted me for YEARS. This was the one remaining RealArcade game that I definitely remembered playing but just could not find any trace of, no matter how hard I racked my brain trying to pull its title out of whatever deep crevice it might've been tucked away in. THIS is what I was trying to find when I came across the last round's Boy Genius-lookin' whatsit. I knew it existed!!! I wasn't insane!!! About this specific thing!!!

As it turns out, this game was published by EA of all companies, which makes it all the weirder that MobyGames does not make ANY mention of its existence. Despite that, it inexplicably DOES have a stub of a dedicated Wikipedia article, somehow? This thing really is an anomaly. You can still buy it from Big Fish Games's website, if you really want.

It's a pretty simple business simulator: the archetypical Fairy Godmother has hired you to help her drum up sales running her potion shop, because that's where the actual money lies in this whimsical fairy-tale world and the whole "granting wishes" thing is really more of a side gig. At the start of every day you look at the daily forecast for curses and ailments, and then allocate your funds accordingly towards ingredients for the appropriate potions, marketing, and hired help, while setting your prices to account for demand. The days themselves are fully-automated, and consist of watching variously blighted peasants wander around a little top-down view of a village to hopefully come into your shop. At the end of the day you see how your profits and reputation fared, and then you rinse and repeat.

The game's simplicity means it shines primarily how charmingly it is written, and it carries the package fairly well. There's a joke in basically every bit of flavor text here, and they are all generally Pretty Funny at a baseline level. It's the sort of thing that feels all the more like outstanding quality when you are used to these games being written in a no-proofreading-we-die-like-men sort of way that makes you question whether the devs were actually fluent in English. (See: round 1's Supercow.) But that comparison feels a bit reductive, because being funny consistently is a much higher standard to meet than "would this pass a fourth-grade English assignment". Granted, correct formatting and comedy are two very different skills. I'll acknowledge that one does not need to be a prerequisite for the other. ...But it usually helps.

I start out in Tutorialville, where I am tasked with crafting love potions to cure an epidemic of broken hearts, and eventually expand my business to include "uninflammable" potions for treating this quaint little ailment known as being actively on fire. At one point I receive a pop-up that notifies me I have been approached by a contractor: the Three Little Pigs. They, predictably, are here to complain about the Big Bad Wolf blowing down their houses, so I send out for him and the next day he comes to me with his side of the story, explaining that they subcontracted him to build those houses his goddamn self and then they didn't even PAY him for it. The nerve!!! I take his side immediately because I hold steadfast that you gotta pay your laborers, man. I got no patience for that. He sees to it that I'm compensated for my help and my good morals.

From here I move onto the next village, which consists entirely of people who live in shoes, where I meet my first competitor: the Magic Dragons, who are currently operating on an extremely 60s hippie sort of vibe instead of being properly intimidating. Now it's not just a matter of Selling Potions Good, but Selling Potions Better Than The Other Guy. My list of ingredients and all my upgrades have gone back down to square 1 since this is a new store, and currently the only thing I can do is use fish heads to make head-shrinking potions for these peasants with very big heads. Still, day 1 goes as fine as it can with an already-established shop to compete with. And then I begin day 2 and find there is a very large green man standing directly outside of my shop. Who is he? I certainly didn't put him there. He keeps grabbing my potential customers and shaking them vigorously.

Ah. They have hired the Persuasion Troll.

I hire my own troll the next day, but he's pricey to keep around and doesn't really seem worth the investment, so away he goes a few days later. I don't need a troll when I got deals like this. I get a new contractor encounter: this time Miss Muffet's curds and whey business is being encroached upon by this big scary biker gang led by a guy calling himself Spider, who also owns property on that land and is just trying to run a business himself. I suggest to them that they work together, and she could have his boys help her work the machinery. They report back a few days later with great success and a business that has become a confusing amalgam of curds and auto repair. While this goes on, I find that people's heads are on fire before I've completed the research necessary to unlock the uninflammable potion, so I have to wait through a couple more days of unsatisfied customers before I can treat them. Once I've done that, managing potion resources becomes the main challenge here, but before I can make any further developments my time is up. It was good to be back while it lasted. I'm satisfied in my vindication.

With the one remaining game that I'd been unable to find out of the way, there's not really much else to do now but start looking at the weird stuff I've never touched before. This is where the fun really begins, and there's no better place to start than the game whose title I saw in this list and thought "what in god's name is Boorp's Balls." I have never heard of this thing in my life. For some reason it is the only game I have downloaded so far that actually correctly shows in the RealArcade client that you have to use to extract these things.

This game drops you into a psychedelic title screen after some nice-looking key art of the game's two main characters as it boots up, and from there we can get started from a menu that lets us choose which set of levels we want to play in convenient, player-friendly chapter format. There's five with ten levels each, and you have to beat them in order to unlock access to the next one; pretty self-explanatory. The first provides us with the critical context we need for Boorp's Balls, set to the singular song that exists in this game: there is a little green thing named Boorp and he is just trying to have a nice day, but his dastardly cousin Meck (whose name is only mentioned in the readme) has decided to terrorize him by psychically dropping colorful balls on his head from the sky. Everyone's had to deal with this sort of thing, right? The classic Cousin's Evil Balls Trick. This apparently happens frequently enough to Boorp that he is already armed with the knowledge of exactly what to do in this situation, which is of course to balance your own colorful balls on your head and launch them into the falling ones to match the colors. Obviously.

Each level set comes with its own whimsical background art, but everything else is visually the same: A big pair of forcefield panels, one of which we are standing on, and in the center a big dubious machine with a fun sort of dieselpunk aesthetic where Meck emerges on a hovering platform to taunt us from at the start of every stage. The gauge on the machine drains to indicate level progress, and I guess his psychic Ball Generating Energy? It's the same colors as him so probably. The game's intro seemed to indicate this was some sort of arcane force he was tapping into and he looks like a weird little devil, but we don't care about that anymore. This is Boorp's Balls. An evil machine does it now. As for Boorp and Meck themselves, they're actually really nicely animated? A lot more personality than I was expecting.

Gameplay-wise, this is sort of a more intensive timed puzzle game that just happens to be disguised as a basic match-the-colors bubble shooter. Balls are arranged in lines that are falling down above your character, and you have to make the lines all one color to clear them, with your shots swapping your ball with the one you just hit. Each color has its own subtle "weight" that affects its falling speed and the angle of the line, which you have to manage as you figure out how to replace all of the balls within a given line, as heavier ones will actively push lighter ones down faster. Absolutely nothing is randomized; as you get deeper into the game, you will start running into situations where you have to plan ahead with your colors or you might render the stage unwinnable. It gets surprisingly tense, actually. There's stages in here that demand you to be paying serious attention because if you do not do the correct thing very fast you WILL lose. I respect that. I respect you, Boorp. And there's even no lives, so no rude progress loss!

Rather glaringly, half the screen is always barren because this is clearly designed for competitive multiplayer and there's no dedicated single-player version of the game board. Unfortunately, because this is a PC game from 2001, this is local-only. Meaning you and a friend both play on the same keyboard, like animals. But I have too much dignity for this, no convenient friend in my home to do it with, and not nearly enough time left of my one hour to explore this mode anyway, so I will simply have to remain in the dark about a theoretical Second Boorp that may or may not exist. My first action upon booting the game up was, in fact, to rebind the ball switch key from its default location of right Ctrl to the left one because that is a deranged control setup when you are one person.

I do still have some ambiguous amount of time left on my trial, and it's tricking me into feeling like I somehow do have the full version for this one. This is largely because I accidentally buttoned onto the "quit" option after losing on level 39 which meant I would have to redo that entire set again, which I definitely do not have time for and would destroy this beautiful illusion of unlimited Boorp, so I simply elected to call it there. (The fourth set, for the record, is called "Balls' Palace", which has fascinating geopolitical implications about the role of Balls in this world.) By choosing to quit of my own accord before the game closes me out of itself forever, it will be like Boorp's Balls can always be with me. Boorp's Balls will be eternally frozen in a snapshot of its final living moments if I simply never let it die. That's really healthy and normal, I think.

Here's another game I vaguely sort of remember playing! I never had trouble finding it, though, because whenever I looked into these games it was just kind of sitting on top of the "most recently updated" pile in one way or another, be it on the very humble wiki or the actual game upload list. I'm not sure if my memories of it are as spotty as they are because I only had the demo, because it's kinda not much to write home about either way. You kinda don't miss anything by only playing the one hour. Honestly, I had my fill of this one before it even booted me out.

Shroomz: Quest For Puppy, as the logo you can only see by leaving the attract screen running for a minute attests is this game's full title, opens with an explanation of the game's premise delivered entirely in limerick: there is a little girl named Bashful, and one day she and her puppy (creatively named Puppy) fall down a well. Puppy plummets all the way down to the bottom, so instead of trying to climb her way out, Bashful spelunks further into the comically deep hole to rescue him. Escaping is something we can worry about later. In her way is an endless glut of mushrooms bigger than herself, and also living stone blocks that are just literal Super Mario Brothers Thwomps From Super Mario Brothers, but luckily she went out on this walk wearing her iconic pair of boxing gloves so she can shatter these with little effort. Do you get it!!! Her name is a pun!!! About Bashing!!! Do You Understand The Joke,

Bashful's goal, as you might expect by now, is to clear away the groups of colorful something-or-others in her path by clicking on them. The variation on this theme is the gravity situation, wherein you can get crushed if there's nothing to catch a block threatening to fall on you, and the fact that you have a stamina meter this time, represented by the gauge on the right. Bashful is reliant on Ambiguous Purple Elixirs to keep her energy up and is remarkably lucky that there conveniently happens to be so many down in this well, because when the meter runs out she is instantly flattened by some unseen force from beyond the veil like in that one Junji Ito story. (They didn't bother to make a second death animation.) On the other hand, if she overfills the gauge and it reaches the sharp-toothed angry face at the top, she becomes imbued with a glowing aura that allows her to explode stone with a single punch.

Do you remember Snowmuncher, back when the Flash games worked on Neopets? This is just Snowmuncher.

I was never any good at Snowmuncher.

There are four difficulty levels of this, each longer than the last; these are all accessible from the start, so I just kind of swapped between mostly the easy and normal levels when I got bored of one or the other and did not ever actually beat either of them. They're all manually-designed stages that I assume have objective "best" paths and correct solutions to reaching out-of-the-way items, but the controls are... not conducive to consistency. My options are either to control Bashful with the arrow keys and bash mushrooms with the mouse, which is about as comfortable as it sounds, or just fully direct all of her movement and actions with the mouse, which is what I ended up doing. The result is imprecise, to say the least. Bashful is very prone to following my cursor a smidge too far and stepping into the smush zone, to say nothing of the times things just fall from offscreen too fast to predict because they don't despawn if you outpace them. But Bashful pops back up all the same, with a helium-voiced "Let's go!" that does not remotely match the relatively more realistic gasp she lets out when she gets into a tight spot.

The only song in this game is a fairly uninspired rendition of In The Hall of the Mountain King, the royalty-free classical piece that's great on its own but has long since become a plague on the realm of mediocre video game trailers, and it also had about a one in three chance of glitching and just leaving you playing a round of the game in silence. Just you and the mushrooms and your thoughts. If nothing else, being able to hear an isolated version of the WHAM sound effect that plays when you punch a metal wall is unreasonably funny, because its sound design is so jarringly visceral compared to the kind of twee nature of the rest of the game; it fits the frantic feel of the animation when you just hold the mouse button down instead of tapping. The crudeness of the low-budget 3D model really just makes that sense feel all the more genuine, like a child's depiction of a reality they're not fully equipped to express. You're fighting for your life like a goddamn animal down here.

Bashful does kind of have the proportions of some sort of monkey. I think those bared teeth in the lives icon might be a threat display instead of a nice smile, given the corresponding icon on the Scary Meter that lets her explode rocks. I don't know what she is, but I'm a little afraid? I think I'm just gonna keep my distance.