Fuck those jerks over at Filthy Burger. Seriously, fuck ’em. They think they can get more customers than me with fancy signs? Well… well, they might be right.
Grab Them By The Eyes is a new free game from Terry Cavanagh, best known for mega-hard games like Super Hexagonand VVVVVV, but also the mastermind behind all sorts of quirky freeware.
This one is about running a burger stand, but not in the way you might think. The food? A pittance, an afterthought. No, the real meat of the game is signage — purchasing signs, snatching away the best sign components from your rivals, putting together the most eye-catching signs to attract customers. You can also, if you so choose, write whatever you want on them. For instance:
Grab Them By The Eyes is deceptively difficult. My first couple times through, Filthy Burger nearly doubled my meager crowd despite my sign that literally read, “FILTHY BURGER IS LITERALLY FILTHY.” At first, I thought the key was to buy up extra sign slots (you can have multiple parts to your sign, you see) as early and often as possible, no matter the cost. However, when the final score was tallied up, I still found myself buried under nearly the same landslide as the time before.
That’s because there’s a surprising amount of strategy to sign part/effect purchasing in Grab Them By The Eyes. Each day there are new items and you have fresh cash to spend, but you can’t just grab the flashiest-looking booth swag and call it a day. You go back-and-forth making purchases — one for you, one for your rivals, and so on — and each buy drops the prices of all other items. So yeah, that rainbow effect might draw a lot of customers, but grabbing it at $US40 might give the burger fuckers at Fuck Burger a grab bag of only slightly inferior items on the cheap. You must spend wisely — methodically, even.
On my third try I finally won, which is good because I pretty much refused to do anything else until the smug arseholes at Filthy Fuck On A Damp Motel Floor That Reeks Of Sweat And Desperation Burger were driven before me, flavoring their cheap confections with their tears. The only thing that makes me happier is the idea that other people might obliterate them in their own games, so get to it. You can play Grab Them By The Eyes here.
To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.
Comments
5 responses to “And Now For An Addictive Game About Selling Hamburgers”
Addictive indeed. I got reemed on account that a new frame was for sale everytime they got to buy first and they got it. When it came my turn first, there was never a new frame. 🙁
Yeah, I just got screwed over when it put the extra frame in the $10 slot TWICE for Filthy Burger.
Strangely, I was still winning up until the last day…
Oh my god, I just did a game where I managed to get all the extra frames.
On the last day, Filthy Burger’s sign was just flashing colours/borders (they opted not to display messages for some reason), and they still managed to get more customers than me. I call shenanigans.
I want Jay to sneak back in the middle of the night and burn down Filthy Burger’s stand.
WOO TERRY