Fruit Rings (Cornflakes/Cereals) Review

 

Today we are taking a look at a very different topic. I usually review videogames on this channel and I am considering reviewing some select movies and shows as well. Today however I would like to attempt a food review. As a kid I liked to try out all kinds of different Cornflakes/Cereals. When I saw a cool Box image in the supermarket, than I had to try out. As an adult I still occasionally eat some cornflakes and thought it would be fun to review a couple of them, since they are certainly not all of the same quality.

You would be forgiven for thinking this would be a review of the popular Kelloggs 'Froot Loops'. As a kid I used to eat them sometime and they were one of my brothers favourite cereals. Instead, we are today talking about the Knock-Off version of Froot Loops, called 'Fruit Rings'.

Froot Loops are the multicoloured ring-like cereals by the famous Kellogs company, which were first introduced in 1963 and have since than been represented by its famous blue toucan mascot ('Toucan Sam'). The German version of Fruit Rings by the 'Ja' company clearly copied the cereals, just that they are being represented by a blue sheep, thats sits on top of pink swan. I said the German version of Fruit Rings, since there seem to be different Knock-Off versions of Froot Loops in a variety of countries, which also feature different mascots.

There is for example 'Krogers' Fruit Rings, which are being represented by a chameleon, or 'Alca Foods' Fruits Rings with a lion. 'Kwality' got a red parrot, while 'Baumann Food' features a colorful parrot instead. And lets not forget the basketball playing Wolf on 'Tarladalal' Fruit Rings, which stands in strong contrast to 'Best Yets' cartoon ape. Many people also fail to mention, that 'Temmys' Fruit Rings have both a crocodile and a bear as representatives of their food.  

And than there are the Froot Loops Knockoffs with slightly changed names, like 'Fruity Rings' from 'Hofer', who choose an owl to be the face of their cereals. You shouldn't confuse this with Fruity Rings by 'Enrich', who also took the monkey approach. 'Fruit Hoops' by 'Crownfield' and their elephant also certainly deserve a mention.

I only tasted the Ja version of Fruit Rings and therefore my impressions are solely based on this version of the product. Without Milk the Fruit Rings taste nearly flavourless, which is a big downgrade in comparison to the original Kellogs Froot Loops. If you soak them into Milk, like you should do with cereals, than they taste a little bit better. Nonetheless, there is huge discrepancy in comparison to Froot Loops. While Froot Loops are tasty and nice, Fruit Rings are barely acceptable. Their flavour is just so impactless. It's not actively unpleasant to eat them, but it lacks the satisfaction of proper cornflakes. I have eaten a couple of worse Cereals, but was nonetheless really let down by Fruit Rings.  

Since the price of Fruit Rings is nearly identical to that of Froot Loops, I can only discourage people from buying the Knockoff. The small saving isn't worth the big loss in quality. I guess you simply can't trust a blue sheep riding a pink swan!

 

4/10

Gum Ball Run (PC) Review

 

Gum Ball Run is a Speedrun Platformer Game. In the Single Player campaign the focus is clearly on speedrunning and earning medals, while the multiplayer is focused on competitive online races.

Players take control of a running gumball, who has to compete in races/ complete the levels as fast as possible. Movement and platforming feel for the most part pretty responsive and good in this game. You can however sometimes get stuck in the environments in situations, where you shouldn’t be. These moments however were infrequent enough, that they didn’t impact the gameplay too much.

The single player missions are usually pretty short, but I did enjoy playing them. Some of them were quite challenging to complete with a gold medal and I only managed to get 28/30, but I mostly had a good time doing it and enjoyed finding the best route for each of the levels. The difficulty however was all over the place. Sometimes you got a really tough level out of nowhere and two levels later you got a total pushover level. The levels could have definitely been a bit better balanced.

The Multiplayer races, were nearly all played on totally different tracks and according to the developer, were the main focus of the game. I do think it is pretty cool, that the dev didn’t use the same levels twice and instead really designed them to either fit a singleplayer speedrun or a multiplayer race layout. Even though gameplay was mostly the same, you could also use something like the superjump ability in multiplayer, which was pretty much never viable in any of the singleplayer stages.

There are some aspects of Gum Ball Run, that I need to criticize, but I also want to praise the game for delivering frequent content updates and quick fixes. I once had a problem with a popup message ingame regarding my internet connection and reported it in the steam forums. The very next day the developer had already provided a patch with a fix for the issue. That’s what I call customer service. The content updates usually release at least once a month and add both, new multiplayer races and themes, as well as additional single player stages. This is generally a really good pace of updates.

While the quantity and the quality of the new levels is good, I do have to criticize some of the updates to the monetization of the game. I do understand that this game is being developed by a single person and since the game is being distributed for free, it needs to make money somehow. There are a lot of skins in Gum Ball Run and I think it is perfectly fine to monetize them. Some other monetization methods however rubbed me the wrong way. The dev  for example added a chat function to the multiplayer, but you had to buy it for 50 cents. Admittedly that wasn’t a lot of money, but you should just not monetize stuff like this. The chat is thankfully free nowadays. Instead the singleplayer has been heavily monetized retrospectively. I had played through 30 levels of this game, but one of the last updates simply locked me out of 25 stages I had previously beat. If the game had launched this way, than I would have probably been okay with it. Having to pay now to gather access to something I previously had unlocked just seems a bit wrong to me. Perhaps the dev should have just locked every additional level after the first 30 behind a paywall, if he wants to change his business strategy months into the game's lifecycle.

The singleplayer has therefore become a lot less viable to most players and while the multiplayer is still getting regular free updates, the player numbers have collapsed. A drop in the player count is expected with most games, but Gum Ball Run now has fallen to peak daily player numbers of 15 or less. This could lead to neither single- nor multiplayer really being accessible anymore, which will just further shrink the small playerbase and ultimately lead to less revenue too.

 

Result:

Gum Ball Run is a fun speedrun platformer/racing game. The game is however not without its issues. I did enjoy both the singleplayer speedrun levels, which invite you to repeat them over and over again, in the pursuit of the best times, as well as the competitive online races. Small issues and the unattractive monetization changes however let the game down. I was thinking about giving the game a 7/10, but because of the Paywall and shrinking playerpool will ultimately reduce it to 6.5/10. Interested players should start the game in the next months, since it might become abandoned till next year.

 

6.5/10

Big City Stories (PS4) Review

 

The Playstation 4 exclusive game 'Big City Stories' often gets described as a mix of GTA and Sim City. This comparison isn't totally inaccurate, but probably makes the game sound cooler than it actually is.

The players take the role of a newly elected mayor, who has to manage his city, by constructing buildings, upgrading them and completing missions for the local citizens. The big difference to other city building simulators is that the game is to a large degree being played in the third person perspective as the mayor.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, neither gameplay aspect is strong enough to convince players to stick with the game. The GTA inspired gameplay is in the best case a cheap knockoff. The missions are pretty repetitive and neither exciting nor very engaging. You must simply collect stuff, drive around and upgrade buildings. This form of gameplay gets boring after a few hours at most. There are also some minor framerate issues. Nothing too big, but also not really justified by the underwhelming visuals. Additionally there were some AI, Physics and visual Glitches. Again nothing game-breaking, but these do eventually add up as well.

At least the dialogues and quest texts are a bit funny. The police for example orders you to build a donut shop and you can negotiate with a bunch of Zombies, who took over the local mall.

The City Builder aspect is probably the stronger part of the game, but even that one can’t compete with dedicated City Building Simulations like Sim City, Cities Skylines or the Anno games.

A cool idea is the option to visit the cities of other players or a common Hub area in the form of a train station. Unfortunately there isn’t really anything to do there. You can simply chat with other players or show them your emotes/skins in the train station, which isn’t overly exciting and I didn’t experience any other meaningful interaction elements, when visiting other cities. A lot of potential was wasted in that regard.

Big City Stories also has two other major flaws. For one, it has a very restrictive region lock, which prevents players with Non North-American Playstation Accounts from playing this game. It is common for some games to not release in all playstation store regions, but usually you can still play all of them regardless of your account region, once you downloaded them. Big City Stories on the other hand excludes you from playing it on a different account for no reason at all. I don't want to call it racism, but it is needlessly restrictive and discriminatory.

The other really big flaw are the P2W aspects in this game. Big City Stories isn’t really P2W since you are not directly competing with other players, unless you are simply comparing your city to theirs. Nonetheless, it is extremely frustrating that you will run out of labour very quickly, which is needed to construct buildings or buy improvements for them. Your available labour points will reset after a day, but you can also simply buy as much labour as you want from the cash shop. Furthermore there are some buildings, which happen to be very useful, which can only be bought with real life money. This stinks!

Another weird aspect of Big City Stories is its obscure shutdown announcement. The game was scheduled to shut down on the 1^st of April 2023. In May however the game is still being playable, which leaves a couple of possible explanations. Either the shutdown got indefinitely postponed due to new found success of the game, the devs simply forgot about the game and its servers, or the shutdown date of the first of April was some kind of Aprils Fools joke to have some free marketing for the game. In this case I could just say: What a sick joke! In any case the developers should stop ghosting the players and make some kind of official statement in regard to the servers and the future of the game.

 

Result:

Big City Stories has a cool concept as a third person city building game with GTA inspired gameplay elements. Sadly the game is less fun than it sounds. The on-foot/driving as well as the city building gameplay are too shallow and, in combination with strong Paying Incentives and plenty of Glitches, leave too much to be desired. Before the novelty wears off and the flaws off the game become too apparent, players might nonetheless find some enjoyment or amusement in Big City Stories.

 

5/10