Those Games turns crappy mobile game ads into actually good puzzles

Enlarge / Can you master the ornate physics and inscrutable game theory necessary to overcome this challenge? (credit: D3Publisher)

You’ve seen them. If you’ve tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.

“Many failed before! Think you can do better?” one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can’t do elementary math, so it sends a “10” fighter to its death against a “13” creature, ignoring the “8” it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.

They’re infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you’d discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they’re some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games, for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?