ZOMGoodness: Zootopia Crime Files

Don't really have Zootopia Watch anymore, now that the film's, actually watchable. Still need some feature to monitor Zooty products and merchandise, though. I'm feeling just so, ZO-M-Goodness, then, about this new, Zootopia Crime Files, app...

Just realized that that'd be a good name for a blog in itself: ZOMGoodness. Z, with the double meaning of the misspelling of OMG as zomg (when the finger hits the z key instead of shift accidentally, frequently recreated ironically,) slash, z as in Zootopia; that, combined with Clawhauser's "O-M-Goodness!," just... Good name, what am I talking about. It's a great name. Maybe I'll do that, actually. It's just soo good. Maybe not just as a blog either but a full-blown website itself...

Alright, looking at it, doing not only a quick Googling but also a quick Yahooing and even a quick Binging... There are a small handful of ZOMGoodnesses out there, a twitter a tumblr a blogspot a couple livejournals, but nothing Zootopia related... the most recently anything's been updated in here is 2013, so, yeah, I'd say not.

Let's see... blogspot hosting custom basic domains, $12/ year; wordpress domains... a lot of shiny options, premium hosting being $8.25/ month... a *tad* pricier, but I've always rather admired the flexibility provided by Wordpress's service package... and besides, the domain as a blogspot was already snatched up (and immediately abandoned) exactly one decade (and 24 days) ago, and the way blogger's hosting domain services work is, you apparently need to register your domain as a .blogspot first, before customizing from there?

So, $99 a year... billing only at the end of the year, and, to be fair, it is waaay less than I spend on the Adobe CC suite, even at student pricing... hm...

I could really do this...

What ZCF is is a hidden-object app where you investigate crime scenes (just like, vandalism and property damage and stuff, nothing so dramatic geez) and gather clues to solve cases- finding the hidden objects quickly enough allows you to rake in points toward stars, which you can spend on things relevant to continuing the investigation, such as questioning suspects and examining clues.

It's... it's tougher than it sounds. Finding hidden objects is not my superpower, apparently.

On the scale of actually fun vs merely addicting (are they really mutually exclusive there's gotta be a better way to rank apps I really don't have the means to know where to begin in checking any other solutions to this problem) it's... it's playing as dang Nick and Judy, partner police officers to the municipality of Zootopia, as they team up to solve cases in what're like probably canonical adventures I guess, sometime after the movie to be sure but its relationship to Stinky Cheese Caper I'm really not deep enough in the game to be able to gauge... It's, just, a blast.

As far as addicting goes though of course, the game does offer you incentives to space out your gameplay (and thus come back again and again, form a habit of it, and (the app thus being a part of your life, so it doesn't feel as weird) make sweet sweet in-app purchases, which make the appmakers tons of money, is I guess the psychology behind why apps tend to have features built in to prohibit bingeing.) The forensics lab in the game (where you take your evidence needing to be forensic'd) is of course staffed by a sloth, so you may have to wait anywhere from a couple of minutes to a small handful of hours in order to get your results back... unless you want to spend the in-game currency (bucks, as in the film) to, somehow, lubricate the gears of progress. Examining the scenes themselves you can get backup (hints highlighting items in the scene) in the form of ZPD officers- Chief Bogo offers 5 hints but can only be used again after a refractory period of 8 hours, and others down the line with dwindling in-betweens but also dwindling number of hints offered, until you get to Clawhauser, who's always available but not very useful (only offering one hint.) The end of obsolescence doesn't appear to be lubricatible, but is definitely something that can drag you back over and over again.

How does this game and these mechanics compare with other hidden-object apps? I wouldn't know, of course, because I spend my time doing productive things all day, dangit~!

What I do have as a frame of reference is Marvel Puzzle Quest. That game, that game is addicting.

Blake "Workaholic" Anderson on Coco:



Marvel Puzzle Quest has kind of been losing some of its lustre for me (I still return to it over and over, just not as exclusively)- the first couple of weeks of storyline play I was scoring quite high against fellow players, usually ending up in the top ten of events- now I'm struggling to crack 400. It probably has to deal with event times, more players playing events which don't start and end at disheavenly hours of the morning, but...

That's really one of the compelling aspects of that, the Marvel Avengers Alliance universe, that keeps you coming back for more- the challenges and events and rewards you can receive from doing well (read: spending a lot of time) on those. Or just making in-app purchases, you know, that's pretty cool too... you whale.

Zootopia Crime Files does have room for in-app purchases, of course- get yo'se'f some bucks! The "Actually Free" feature means that Amazon foots the bill! You don't really actually need the bucks, of course... they're not like Hero Points in MPQ, which are essential but deucedly difficult to get in any significant quantity any other way.

Any downsides to the game?

I saw the reviews before downloading, read them while doing so- 4 stars even average.on Amazon... 4.5 is good enough you can ignore the disgruntled critics; 4 is no cause for concern, but it is most certainly cause for curiosity. The major problem of the app seems to be... load times. Load times, even with all that level grinding you have to do if you want to collect all the stars to advance the case. It's probably something that's going to be patched some point in the future, but for now, it's true, this is a screen you're going to be seeing a lot of:

Pictured: a frequent sight

Not that that's a bad thing. I mean, look at that screen. Myself I think the load screen passes too quickly; it's a glorious bit of art and of graphic design, and I just want to keep on staring at it... The silhouette, the lighting effects, the colors and values... the lines, I mean, just look at the lines... The way the line of Nick's necktie sweeps down from his face, echoed by the tail but countered by the competing lines of his arm and leg to create a sense of dynamism... Deliberate usage of tangents to flatten the image to create a crisp graphic feel against the masterful handling of the three-dimensionality of the forms- while also creating really interesting negative shapes...

The silhouette of the above image, with tangents circled in red so that you can appreciate what the heck I'm talking about.

But if you really feel that the loading screen is idling away your time (which is, better spent idling away your time actually playing apps?), you know, you could always multitask. Just, I don't know, put on a podcast in the background. That's what I do.

As I've said, I've had, a lot of time to listen to podcasts, lately. Also getting in listening to scriptures too of course. Stuff like that.

Edgar Grunewald of Artifexian has been listening to Wheel of Time lately, and that's what this guy from the Biomat is doing as well, some guy who talked to me when I was in the middle of the Bands of Mourning (the train fight sequence specifically!) who said he'd read the first Mistborn series and was listening to the Eye of the World. Darn it maybe I should too. I've already listened to some John Le Carré, which books of course aren't nearly as long (seriously I think if you put all the George Smileys together they'd equal, maybe, one half of a Robert Jordan book) but see it is possible, listening to an audiobook instead of a podcast, and two other people in the world are right now specifically listening to the Eye of the World. So. I'll be sure to put it on my to-do?

After, of course, looking into this whole, ZOMG stuff further...