Monopoly Go! is a recently released mobile game available on iOS and Android, but before you dive in, think twice. This game seems to be primarily designed as a money-making scheme, relentlessly pushing in-app purchases and utilizing slot machine mechanics to enhance its addictive nature.

Monopoly GO! a review

While it carries the Monopoly name and features a familiar game board, that’s where the resemblance ends. In Monopoly Go!, the traditional gameplay mechanics are completely altered. Instead of paying for properties, you actually earn money when you land on them. Additionally, certain actions, such as shutting down your friends’ properties or engaging in bank heists, can be executed when you land on train stations.

The game introduces time-limited themes lasting around two days, offering rewards and requiring you to collect tokens when you reach specific spots on the board. Furthermore, there’s a 24-hour friendly competition where players compete against each other to accumulate the most tokens from train stations.

Beyond its surface, Monopoly Go! is riddled with dark patterns, embodying all the sins of free-to-play games and more.

1- Energy, or dice in the case of Monopoly Go, serves as a limiting factor in gameplay. You can only play with the number of dice you have, and while you might earn more through reward or other gimmicks, once you run out, you’re left with two options: pay for more or pester your friends to join.

2- Lost aversion is at play, as friends and strangers alike can wreck your game board and pilfer your hard-earned money. Repairing the board incurs costs, and if you’re not vigilant, they can snatch away all your funds (it happened to me with a staggering 24 million). When you run out of money, the game, you guess it, entices you to purchase Monopoly money with real cash.

3- Some daily rewards are hidden or hard to reach. Accessing them involves navigating through four pages of purchase temptations. The game even moved the reward from the first page to the last, leading people like myself to mindlessly click, inadvertently ending up on the google play page, where a purchase confirmation awaits.

4- Upon loading the game, you’re bombarded with approximately 4-5 pop-ups soliciting money. Themes of the day, limited-time offers, one-time deals, board reports, and at the end yet another reminder of the theme of the day—it’s an endless barrage.

5- The game employs time-based boards event, such as an event where landing on taxes earns you money or death instead of losing funds. However, to recover those gains, you must land on free parking. Which is annoying when you keep landing everywhere else but the free parking.

6- Stickers, a seemingly pointless feature, took me a while to comprehend. Finally, after assembling a set, I received a handful of dice. Yet, they remain bothersome since opening a single pack take an eternity because of the animation—a precursor to the next point.

7- Monopoly Go! inundates you with meaningless rewards, accompanied by drawn-out animations. Each action, whether it’s a shutdown or a bank heist, prompts an animation featuring the Monopoly guy donning a hard hat and riding a train. Even if the reward is a measly 10 dice, each item receives its own animation, carefully designed to elicit that dopamine rush and keep you hooked.

If you’ve managed to endure my rambling, let me confess that I wasted a staggering 17 hours on this game this week, according to my phone’s records. The dopamine rushes, the fear of not having enough shields to protect my board until the next game—all of it compels you to keep playing. That 400-dice reward when you believed you were finished? You tell yourself, ‘Guess I must play all these dice now.’. Fortunately, I didn’t spend a dime on this game.

My final verdict, considering the heavy emphasis on microtransactions and the departure from the classic Monopoly experience, it might be best to approach Monopoly Go! with caution.

In part 1, we managed to build your first organism, now let dial that to 11 and engineer the whole planet ecosystem.

Getting habitability

Since the requirement for habitability is just for terrestrial plant support, we can start by focusing on that instead of building both aquatic and terrestrial biosphere. Let’s assume you have enough species slot from you environmental building, the amount of species you need depends on how much support they will give. You can probably go around six microbial species for this for the moon/mars if you follow this guide. Keep in mind that it depends from planet to planet (or moons) since the moon need between 3- 10 and Mars 6-20 and since it’s support that needed not number of species, you might just have 2 species of on the moon and be fine (if they give 3-4.5 support each). Note since the skyfarm get rid of the biosphere requirement, you may use easy route if your goal is just habitability.

Get those microbes everywhere

Our colonist will need plant and those plant will need microbial support. Good thing that in our previous entry we built a microorganism from scratch. Now we can do the same thing until we have enough support for our plant and some extra if you want those microbe that give credit. There are two main way to increase support. The first is by selecting a phylum that give support so either actinobacteria or fungus. Both give a base bonus of +50% to support. However species of the fungus phylum are less tolerant to arid environment (-15% tolerance low water). The second way if my selecting a gene attribute that boost support, for microorganism this mean either the Large gene (+50% support) and the Nitrogen Fixing. You can combine both ways them together and even stack attribute gene to give super organism that can give up to 10 of support. Since you cannot have organism with the exact same sequence you can mix large gene and nitrogen fixing to get more variety and still have a lot of support. Here, some example of the gene sequence you can build with high support that we repeat for each phylum.

Legend : L = large gene attribute NF = nitrogen fixing XX = low atmosphere tolerance, YY = low water tolerance (for fungus), AN = any

Actinobacteria = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN (and if your feeling it L-NF-NF, NF-NF-XX)
Fungus = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-NF, LNFXX, L-NF-YY, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN (and if you’re feeling it L-NF-NF, NF-NF-XX)
Lichen = Same as actinobacteria, you might be able to pull off a L-NF-NF or NF-NF-XX because of the +10% tolerance bonus lichens has.
Protozoa = Same as actinobacteria

I don’t really like the using NF twice in a gene, but if you’re comfortable with it just go for it.
Honestly my first batch look like this:
Protozoa/actinobacteria/Lichen = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN
Fungus: L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-NF-YY, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN
Total support: around 50+

You can even get 64 of support with one microorganism

With this you will be getting multiple high support microorganism quickly, invest money in them to give them better odds of surviving.

Now you can unpause the game if you want to see if they survive and let them grow a bit.
Once your microbes are thriving let get some plant to get our habitability requirement.

If you have Lagrange Academy or a few culture points you’re willing to spare, you can go in the culture screen and add a few points to increase biomass.
This will increase the birthrate of all you species.

Going Green

Now that we have a microbial ecosystem, let have some plant take advantage of it.
We’ll focus on terrestrial plant since they are the ones we need for habitability, but the principle work the same way for aquatic plant.

Tree require more support, but give more support. However, the extra o2 can be a pain to manage.
Shrub have a +50% birthrate and require less support (-25% required) Moss +15% low temps resistance -15% low water tolerance are not super useful if you have the Soletta satellite since your temperature is usually just right.
Grass +2 pop grow&+1000c/min can be cost effective if you reinvest that 1000c/m in their health or just let them make money for you.
Usually I got with a mixture of tree and scrub maybe a few grass to start, if you’re feeling frisky about the extra o2 pumping in your atmosphere, you could always go for a mixture of scrub and grass initially.

Adding genes to your plant

Stacking large gene is not has good has with Microbes because now they will increase the support required too.

If you really want gene that give support, look at the fruit bearing gene first. Similar to large gene but it give an extra +2 to population.
You can mix them together to have four species that have +150% support.

Other interesting gene

Cash crop: +2000c/m -30 low water tolerance, this gene is a nice addition for plants, except maybe for moss since they already have -15% low water tolerance.

If you stack 3 fruit bearing genes together (or a mix of fruit bearing and large gene) you’ll get about +150 support (+200% for tree) but +150% support required. Which is about 14 support required per species (20 for tree) and 3.4 (4 for tree) support given.
Not sure my math is right, but that what I’ve observed creating my plants. You can add some cash to increase their health and remove it once they get over 100%.

Since you can mix the Large (L) gene with the fruit bearing gene (FB) you can get 4 combination with +150%.
L-L-L, L-L-FB, L-FB-FB, FB-FB-FB

WIth 4 plant type you get up to 16 species with high support, but beware of the support they need from your microbes however.

Side note: In order to give the maximum of support a species need to be health at 100% or more.

Create a few gene to get to your 10 or 20 of support for habitability and you are now habitable.
That mean you need about 3 species on the moon, 5-6 on mars to be habitable if you create high support plant like I’ve explain here.

Road to Paradise

Paradise is actually simple to acheive. You just need to be within 5% of all the goals and have enough support from your plant to be way right.
 

If at the beginning of the game you chose the biosphere option instead of biomass this guide is for you. If not, go start a new game with it and we’ll be waiting for you.

If it’s your first time with the biosphere or you got burn buy it, this guide will help you get your head around the basic.

Note if you just want your planet to be habitable might not need to border with biosphere if the skyfarm is built. 

Step 1:
First even if you have the biosphere you need to make your planet at least habitable for plants and microorganism. So get your temperature & atmosphere right, sprinkle some o2 and water and you’re good to go. Be sure your four metric are stable before starting playing around your biosphere. You could always try to create an organism that has better resistance to your planet problems, by giving it gene with higher tolerance to these problems or making them extremophile. However it’s easier to wait and create them in a stable environment.

Step 2:
Note: this step can actually start while you’re still in step 1.

While your adjusting your planet, research some biomass aquatic & terrestrial building (Like Reef institute & Zoological Society) and build some. If you only want to get to victory you can only build terrestrial building since it’s the one counted in the victory screen.

Step 3:

Once the planet metric are stables and you have enough biosphere infrastructure to support at least nine species you can start playing around biosphere menu.

How support work

What is support? In nature, each organism lives with support of other, carnivore need herbivore for food, the herbivore need plant to eat, plant need microorganism to enrich the soil with nutrient. This cycle of life is represented through support in the game. In the circle in blue on the left, its represent the amount of support your microorganism give. The green circle in the middle is the amount of support your plant give and the red circle on the right is the amount of support your animal give.
When you create an organism, this organism will receive (“consume” if you will) support from the previous group and offer support depending on the type of organism and the gene selected. Microorganism don’t require support so you can ignore the +50% support required modifier when creating them. Be sure to have enough support offered in one group before making organism from the next group. The base number of support each organisms give is 1 before modifier (seem to be 2 for microbe)
Note that to achieve victory you only need a bit less that 20 of terrestrial plant support (on mars, 10 for the moon), so if you’re in a hurry you can only focus on getting these 20 of plant support.

Creating your first organism

Once you selected what group your organism is going to be, you can now select the phylum gene of your organism. Let’s pick Lichen for this example since it’s our first organism and lichen offer better base environment that the others with its +10% bonus to all tolerances.

Now that we chosen our phylum we can now pick three gene that will determine the base attribute of our organism. This is probably the best part of the biosphere, creating your organism. Do you want it to survive at all cost or allow it to generate a lot of support for higher up the food chain. Or maybe you want it to proliferate like crazy and give out O2 at the same time. Or actually make your planet some extra credit. You can all do that, for now let’s build a simple organism that we want to survive on Mars with our current temperature, pressure, o2 level and water level.

Since they can ignore support required, the Large Gene is very interesting since its give an extra 50% supports and no drawback. You can even pick it three times if you want since attribute gene can stack, but let’s pick it once for this example. Another interesting gene unique for microorganism is the Nitrogen fixing gene. Its give 50% supports, but reduce resistance to low pressure by 30%. We could counterbalance that drawback by giving it the resistance to low pressure gene (+30% tolerance low pressure -30% tolerance high pressure). Since our pressure is high and stable and lichen already get a +10% to all tolerances, we will add another gene instead like one that increase the birthrate so our lichen can proliferate. The High metabolism gene is probably our best bet since it provides a boost of 100% birthrate and its drawback is that it need 50% support, but since our lichen doesn’t need support we can ignore it. Other viable options are either the Nocturnal gene (+100% birthrate -30% low temperature tolerance) or the Invasive gene (+100% birth rate -2000 credit/m). Infectious is another option, but it reduces your population grow and Airborne would be nice, but it has a -30 % tolerance to low pressure and since we already got -30% from Nitrogen fixing we don’t want them to stack together.
Now name your organism and you’re good to go. Now that you know have built your first organism you can start playing around and build a whole ecosystem.

Other tips that can help your biosphere creation and that your species survives.

• Invest money on each species to increase their health and help them survives.
• You can play around the biosphere menu and create your species while the game is paused.
• The culture modifier that usually help the biomass will help all your species birthrate instead.

Stay tuned for part 2: building a whole ecosystem and optimizing your biosphere to make your planet habitable.

TerraGenesis is not the new console from SEGA, it’s a space sim where you terraform planets in order to build human colonies. The game uses actual NASA data (in case of the planets of the solar system only) in order to make the game more immersive and real.

The game is free to play, you can either buy individual planet or buy all the planet of each system in bulk. If you don’t want to pay a dime you can unlock other planet when you successfully colonize one. You start with the choice of colonizing either the moon or Mars. Successfully colonizing them will unlock the other inner planet Mercury (the Moon) and Venus (Mars)

Once you chose your planet to colonize your need to setup a small colony and start mining to get some cash, which will help you pay for research, add module to your colony and build satellite.

The module part is where you build module to slowly terraform your planet. You’re on Mars and need to start having an atmosphere, you need to build a thermal dust plant to increase pressure, you’re on Venus and want it to go down build a bunch of hydrogen processor to drop that pressure to earth level.

Once you start modifying your planet don’t forget to check it once in an awhile or you end up like me and going waterworld on Venus (Kevin Costner would not be happy)

This is where I was a bit annoyed, I went to sleep while I was terraforming Mars and ended up putting to much o2 in it because I left it a +100 for the night. Same thing happen on Venus, but with the temperature. I’ve built the Soletta, a satellite that helps you adjust the temperature on your planet surface, but when it was built I had so much water build up in the atmosphere that it’s flooded the planet. Also, known has “the great flood” in the Venusian Holy Text.

So after that, I went all Tamagochi on my Venus, checking every time making sure everything was rising carefully, turning them down or up as needed. It’s like a feeding a little monster instead it’s a planet and it needs to be feed differently depending how it’s going.

I have some nitpicking on that flood thing, it’s weird that your colony can support the initial Venus atmosphere, but add a little water on the ground and everything falls apart. We (NASA) have (like today) base underwater so building cities underwater is probably feasible with current technology, but with our current tech we cannot build anything on Venus surface. So why the hell the whole colony get destroyed when the 1m of water above sea level when the damn dome can support about 90x earth pressure and a temperature that f**king melt lead.

Other than that TerraGenesis is a great game, I’ve managed to terraform the moon, Mars and Venus (twice), but the Tamagochi nature of the game got me and annoyed a bit my wife too. Constantly checking if your little planet is doing fine get tiring at the end. Another thing I didn’t like it’s how mining work. However, you can make it less annoying by building satellite that detects the concentration of each mineral on the ground. On the Android version there seem to have some bugs. Some of them seem to have been fixed since I last played, the game is still slow when you start having many late stage world to handle.

Give it a try and let me know if you like it.

You’ve probably heard of that show that was pretty popular on Netflix. You know the one that a mix of horror movie with a zest of 80’s nostalgia.
Yeah that one 😀

The game has recently had an update when the season 2 came out and it’s pretty solid. First no ads, no micro transaction, no stamina that force you to comeback later.
The game play is a mix of Zelda most notably The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, old point and click adventures and a SNES/80’s style. Because the game is only playable on touch screen devices, game mechanics have been heavily simplified: everything from character movement, to combat, to inspecting and activating items can be achieved by tapping the screen. The game uses a 16-bit art style and is played in an overhead view. There are two game modes: Normal and Classic. In Classic mode, players are returned to the beginning of dungeons upon death, and enemies respawn even after dungeons have been completed.

You start has Hopper and you wander around hawking freeing the other kids, each time you save or found a character they’ll usually join you and each character have a special ability that will help you progress and unlock new dungeons. Most of the characters from the series are there, you get to play Hopper, who’s the only one that cans go in the underworld, Lucas, who throws rock with is slingshot, Nancy with a baseball bat that breaks things, Mike and is bike,  Will, who can crawl in pipe,  Dustin, he distracts enemies with pudding, El and her psychic blast and Max (from season 2) who throw coins.

If you grew up in the 80s, you’ll love this game, but what’s even more amazing is the fact anyone who likes video games, new or old, will like playing this game.
This game is fun and engrossing. It’s smooth and the controls are perfect.
There a lot of old school throwback, in the setting, the gameplay, the graphics and the sound!  It really does take you back to old school NES/SNES games but without compromising the play or graphics.

You couldn’t expect more from a paid game, let alone this free game.