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Running a sweet farm employing coloured blobs: The f**king deranged mobile games you can't escape online ads for

TOO tight to upgrade to an ad-free version of a site or an app? Looks like you’ll have to learn to live with horrible adverts for dodgy mobile games. Like these…

Royal Match 

Duolingo users will never buy Super, but thanks to unwanted ads know every hidden level of puzzle game Royal Match that no one ever reaches. The jolly King Robert character is unobtrusive – until you’re forced to watch him burned to death or brutally drowned. Apparently that’s what you deserve for refusing to download a charmless rip-off of Candy Crush Saga. And not immersing yourself in the gripping storyline about renovating his castle. For f**k’s sake. 

Hero Wars

These scammy ads get shoved down your throat constantly, but seem to forget they have a game to promote. Instead they’re an apparently unending series of animations about fantasy cartoon sex dominatrixes flirting with centaurs, women in lingerie growing stag horns, and sometimes being demons or horny trees. In-game you click a few dialogue boxes to fight things, very misleading after its softcore porn promotional tools, which surely cost way too much for an extremely bogus app everyone must have instantly uninstalled. 

Sweet Farm

With little Blobbies that the player can hire for help, this ad is clearly aimed at kids able to rinse their parents’ Apple Pay without them knowing. It’s also a genuine Kafkaesque nightmare. Candy blobs act like proles restoring the factory of a domineering sugar baron that may eventually spin them into taffy or something. Obviously the player won’t ever find that out when the game involves walking through jelly and clicking the screen a bit.

Emporea: Realms of War & Magic

Some war strategy games do their historical research, resulting in a satisfying experience for  history nerds and fans of the BBC show Time Commanders, which recreated historical battles with 2005 graphics. Who knew Hannibal’s elephants were so pixellated? Emporea takes a different tack, plastering its ads with shitty AI-generated orcs and trolls, like the ones from old Games Workshop signs, to flog this boring build-a-city game. Spelling ‘orc’ incorrectly in the trailer is not a good sign either.

Refantasia: Charm & Conquer

Games have successfully combined different genres such as shooter and puzzle-solving for decades. This one more ambitiously combines ‘invade a country’ with ‘win a lovely wife’. The resultant mess is laden with massive anime boobs, weird ‘sexy’ cosplay babes and ripoff Pokemon creatures. Ideal for players, presumably aspiring warlords, who want to churn through a dull power-up game for hints of hentai without just clicking on a porn site. Genghis Khan was well-known for his prudishness.

Gossip Harbour

Farmville had an innocence about it when it was a lame Facebook phenomenon for your aunt. Now similar town-based games rely on shock guilt trips featuring family members getting fired, starving, being made homeless, or developing hypothermia because they live in a broken wooden shack in the Arctic. Naturally, these calamities don’t feature in the actual gameplay of Gossip Harbor, which is another crap tile-matching puzzle game. So if you do download it you’ve suffered the double trauma of hearing about countless shattered lives, plus actually owning the game.

Six minefield questions your new girlfriend will ask about your ex and how to answer

IS there a new girlfriend in your life? Make sure you’re prepared to field these questions about your ex she’ll be interrogating you with.

Was she prettier than me? 

In reality, yes, by a country mile, to the extent that new girlfriend feels like downgrading from an iPhone 16 Pro Max to a secondhand Blackberry. Probably don’t share that metaphor with her. Instead flatter her with something like: ‘How could anyone be prettier than you?’ It’s hard not to bask in a compliment, although brutally honest new girlfriends will now have you down as a bit of a massive sickening creep.

How long were you together? 

The answer is nearly three years, but don’t be so bloody stupid as to tell the truth. She’ll correctly guess your ex was the love of your life and you’d be running back at the click of her fingers. However, saying ‘a couple of months’ will get you marked down as a shag-happy cavalier who only wants to get in her knickers. The correct middle-ground answer is ‘about a year’. But for f**k’s sake remove any historical evidence to the contrary on your social media accounts. She’ll check. 

Who dumped who? 

Well that’s reopened a wound. Thanks for that, sweetness. New girl must never know old girl chucked you out with the rubbish as soon as a better offer came along. Telling her it was a mutual decision is less humiliating and might even make you sound mature and grown-up. The slight drawback is that these days everyone realises ‘mutual decision’ is a face-saving, cliched lie. Maybe it happened like that. Maybe OJ didn’t kill Nicole Simpson.

Did you love her? 

You were, and still are, utterly besotted with her, but keep that under wraps. Nothing will kill your new squeeze’s sex drive quicker than suspecting you’re imagining your ex while you’re humping. Something non-committal like ‘It wasn’t really that kind of relationship’ or ‘We were more friends than anything’ ought to put her off the scent. So long as she can make out the words amongst the choked sobs.

What was she like in bed? 

Like an electric eel on steroids, but new girlfriend doesn’t need to know that, unless you want to get dumped on the spot. Adopt the air of an upstanding Jane Austen gentleman and assert that talking about such matters is disrespectful. If your girlfriend has any sense she’ll realise this will preclude you sharing her failings in bed at some point in the future, although you’ve already discussed her lack of blowjob enthusiasm with your mates in the pub, adding a few comic touches yourself. To current girlfriend you’ll sound like the bigger man which, ironically, is the polar opposite of how your ex describes you in bed to her friends.

Do you still speak to her? 

Even if you did it would be idiotic to admit it. And admitting your ex would rather take a long bath in formic acid than endure another split-second of your company will just make you look like the pathetic failure at love you are. ‘No, we’ve never kept in touch,’ is perfectly plausible and should be sufficient to fend off new girlfriend’s mind probes. She doesn’t need to know about the restraining order.

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