I am trying out YouTube Premium’s games, but I can’t find them. I assumed I would boot up the app and there would be a big red button saying GAMES … but no. I have to sign up to PREMIUM. Then find the YOUR PREMIUM BENEFITS section. Then find EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES and select TRY EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES. Then find the TRY GAMES ON YOUTUBE part therein and tap on TRY IT OUT. There is an EXPLORE tab and a SEARCH tab just to make things as intuitive as dadaist poetry. I go through more menus than an entire series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. It was quicker to load up and play Lords of Midnight on the ZX Spectrum.
When I find it, the GAMING section contains not games but a fetid hellscape of people alternately mumbling or shouting over video game playing. These must be those Content Creators. They’re all torturous. I am sure they play these videos to those inmates at Guantánamo Bay who they can’t break with Metallica songs. How many prisoners must have finally cracked while watching I DID THIS IN ZELDA AND MY NOSE FELL OFF FOR LOLZ by CoolRizz23.
The games in YouTube are actually in a section called Playables. This reminds me of Lunchables where tiny versions of food fight a losing battle against mountains of separating plastic so kids can make pizzas out of crackers and processed lumps of regret.
Anyway, I start with 8 Ball Billiards because it’s first on the list and I wonder what YouTube can possibly do to improve a game that has had a billion versions on every machine since the abacus. The answer is nothing – unless you count a computer AI that is impossible to lose to on level two yet impossible to beat on level four.
Brain Out was an interesting lateral thinking game but the screen was covered by a message telling me that I couldn’t connect to the cloud so gaming progress could not be saved. Nothing seemed to fix this. Galaxy Attack: Alien Shooter manages the trifecta of screen lag, stutter and crashes whenever multiple enemies are on screen. Crazy Caves was like an old Nintendo Game & Watch affair where a goldminer fires pickaxes skyward to smash plummeting rocks. It’s almost unplayably bad. I can’t write about Super Score because it is so bad it defies language.
Scooter Xtreme requires you to hold your thumb on the screen to move a scooter. This drains your phone battery and makes the screen so hot your thumb melts, typical of the brainlessness of this product. I wondered whether these games are so thoughtless they were designed by AI, but only humans can be this maliciously stupid.
The games that are programmed well enough to work are all rip-offs of successful trends and titles. Collect Em All is a shape and colour match thing. Merge Heroes and Merge Pirates are variations on road tower defence things, Jewel Planet is Bejeweled. Hurdle is Wordle but you solve five of them. FarmLand is the shrivelled twin of Harvest Moon that they keep in a basement cupboard while Words of Wonder makes me wonder how they keep copying those games where you slide your finger around four letters to add words to a crossword thing. Who wants them? Who needs them? I refuse to play Basketball FRVR for spelling reasons.
It is not all terrible.
Slice It All! is a fun game where you rotate a knife down a course, slicing things and avoiding traps – though there really is no need for an exclamation mark in the title of anything other than a musical. And the sound disappears at one point. Draw Climber has you racing a block along a track by drawing legs on it, which you can redraw to get past different obstacles. I have no idea how accurate the physics are, but I do know that a penis drawing makes a surprisingly good wheel. State.io is a faster, simpler version of Risk using only dots. Stack Bounce has you happily bouncing a ball through coloured parts of a wall.
But playing these are like picking your nose: they provide a moment of tactile happiness but deep down you know you shouldn’t be doing it. There is nothing that makes me want to play these over offerings on Apple Arcade, and that’s what they must do to make even a casual gamer switch. Maybe they would appeal to a gamer so casual they don’t bother to get dressed or have a shower, and just lie there in pyjamas covered in beans from last night’s dinner.
Angry Birds Showdown is the only quality licensed game here. It came out in 2009. So did Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I don’t need to experience that again, either.
YouTube appears to have ordered barely functioning developers to make supermarket own brand versions of games we got bored playing a decade or more ago. They’re like knockoff toys from foreign market stalls, a Robert Downeyesque plastic face in a suit, branded Iron Guy.
I asked my kids to try them to see if it was just me. They played for 10 minutes before they were taken into care. I played 29 of the games. No one will ever make it through all 48. It would be crueller than Squid Game. A biological imperative would take over and you’d ram a pencil up your nose into your brain.
This tawdry affair is curated either by an idiot who knows nothing about games, or thinks consumers are idiots who deserve nothing but to be ripped off. YouTube has killed language and irony by making Playables unplayable.
