Robot Unicorn Attack

There are some games which elicit a strong reaction when you first see them. Sometimes the reaction is 'whoa, that looks awesome', or 'hee, that's so cute!'. Sometimes, it is 'oh my God, I can't believe how dumb that is'.

The first time my husband showed me Burnout Revenge, I thought (and most likely said out loud), "this has got to be the most pointless game ever." You drive around crashing into other cars, trying to make as many things blow up as you can. WTF. No story, no goal, no skill, just a total waste of time. "Srsly", I said, "what are you, like 12?"

Then, I sat down and played it. And got totally addicted to it, and thought it was the MOST AWESOME GAME EVER. I mean, you drive around crashing into other cars, trying to make as many things blow up as you can! I played it for weeks. That's pretty much when I learned that there are some games which make no sense to the casual observer, but are helluva fun for whoever is actually playing them. When you're explaining the game to someone who hasn't played it, and they're shaking their head at you, all you can say is "but it's so much fun!".

Which brings me embarrassingly to my latest game-of-the-moment: Robot Unicorn Attack. It's a free, online flash game from Adult Swim which has racked up 29 million plays and 107, 000 Facebook likes to date. It's one of those neverending run-jump-and-dodge games, which I normally hate because I have a) no patience, b) no coordination, and c) no timing. But wait, you play a unicorn! A robot unicorn!

There is something comforting about the purple-candy-coloured, rainbow-strewn universe through which your unicorn prances, jumping from platform to platform and dashing through stars. Especially when Erasure plays on repeat in the background encouraging you to live in harmony, harmony oh love. You get bonus points when you dash through fairies and stars. If you fall, run into walls or fail to dash through a star, you lose a life, your robot unicorn's head falls off, and it cries unicorn tears. Your points accumulate over three lives, after which you will feel compelled to start again.

As they say, persistence is futile.

There are so many reasons this game makes me giggle. Sure, it's campy, mindless, and unexpectedly fun. It also could be the fact that I had Erasure on my playlist long before I played the game, and I'm still getting over the sheer genius of pairing them with robot unicorns.  It could be the sheer awesomeness of robot unicorns, period. It could be the fact that the all-time high score recorded on the AS website is over 201 million (how the frak...??), which means that someone, somewhere has played this game continuously for at least a couple of hours (or is a big smelly cheat. My sucky all-time high is about 55,000).

 Okay. Enough reading about the game, go chase your dreams! But not before you get in the mood...