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Games You Don't Want, Vol. 1

(and assorted nuts)

Well, hi!
It will be great fun for me to pick on titles in the Securus games and apps catalogue, sharing the pain of how dense this store system happens to be.

Sadly, I cannot share screenshots, as that feature is disabled, but suffice it to say Little of Value Was Lost.

Let's begin!

RPG Dice Pro, by GPI Development

This app is intended to be a dice roller for people who play tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and similar.

Given that inmates may not have physical dice because the Department of Corrections feel it would enable gambling, you would expect that having a dice rolling app that costs $1.99 would also be forbidden: they are digital dice, easier to put away, and so on.
But hey, we got an app!

... if you wish to call something that runs this badly an app. Trying to tap on any interface component results in a two second delay with jerky graphics. This roller swallows enough memory to kill other apps running in the background.

We used it the other night to play a tabletop role playing game, and it took so long to scroll between the dice types, to add or subtract dice for rolling, to add modifiers that it made us long for real dice just to roll combat rolls.

I hadn't played anything tabletop in... decades (shush), and still remember the ease of picking up a d20.

PlanarCraft 2D

For those of you who are familiar with a game called Terraria, or a game called Starbound, you can perhaps imagine what a mutant hybrid that has the worst parts of what each game offers could be.

Now, make it five times worse and $5.98.

With slow, clunky controls, broken combat, frequent crashes, and bugs that are game breaking, this begins to describe PlanarCraft 2D.

How broken can this game get?

  • I was able to make the game crash to launcher by making and wearing leather armor. Repeatedly.
  • If you make any sticks out of any wood other than oak, then make one ladder, you will never be able to place another ladder in that world, even if you throw away all of the ladders and sticks you have made. If you break a ladder that's already placed, you're screwed, too: you can't replace that.
  • I was being attacked by a bear that was on land, screens away, while standing on a block of ice on an empty screen. Bears have to touch you to hurt you, usually.

These were game breaking enough that I stopped playing. After all, when any action can basically render your game unplayable, trapping you in a loop of starting fresh on a daily basis, you don't want to bother.

C.A.T.S. (Crash Arena Turbo Stars)

Well, hi, ZeptoLab!

I preface this with a knock aimed at Securus, not so much ZeptoLab. The game has a very strange bug where the Dozer chassis is involved if you try upgrading it. I figure that it is likely long ago patched in the free world edition, but Securus likely keeps a modified APK that runs on our old version of AOSP on hand.

CATS is fun, but for the $5.98 we pay, incredibly short. It's shortened even further once you have the Dragon chassis on knobs and the Dragon head, making virtually every fight a cheese fest. Even the final one with Mr. Macavity becomes a two second UFO flight into I Winland, making it short, sweet, and with only five prestiges, finished in a couple of hours.

As inmates, we do not get internet access, so fighting the creations that free worlders make isn't an option. It hurts, then, to pay $5.98 for a game whose replayability has been lobotomized by Securus.

What would be great?

Oh, that's easy. Here is my list:

  • If we had a more modern build of AOSP on the tablets to keep us in better API range of the free world, that would be a fine start.
  • If game pricing were less abusive -- $6 for a game the free world gets for free is a bit much. $3 is easier to swallow.
  • A better library of games in general, which might need gaming houses to target our platform specifically, and say "Here. Use this build to entertain and/or educate behind the wires. You may charge $x. We get $y."

A better library?

Yes. I keep suggesting this, not simply because I miss the ease of getting things in the free world, but because I lament that we have people who deserve to have opportunities to learn, but are steadfastly passed by in an anachronistic system.

A person I talk to is just a few years away from completing 3 decades behind the wires, to which he can finally go home. He said in conversation, he's positively scared, because the world out there is nothing like what he left behind. He isn't sure how to do any of the things I left behind less than two years ago, and it's still changing rapidly.

Imagine by searching for a minute:

  • Look for photos of a 1993 Honda Accord, interior and exterior.
  • Now look for photos of a 2023 Honda Accord, interior and exterior.

In that 30 year gap, you go from "car" to "spaceship", with LEDs and touchscreens and highly advanced impact mitigations. You can still largely drive it the same way, but now there's warning lights in the mirrors for lane departure, optional features that will fight lane drift when you don't signal, cameras that show you the back end of your car when you reverse, or the lane next to you when you signal to change lanes...

And the man is going to go out into that, blind to all of the technical advances.

It makes me ache inside for him.

It would be a mercy to have a budgeting app, so that folks can learn how to run a budget, to have access to grocery circulars as teaching tools, so folks can see modern pricing...

People here need the apps and tools of today to be citizens of tomorrow.

I bet that you on the outside can push for that, both in your local communities, and in reforms for prisons.

Let's build together. :)