Before reading further, check your coat pocket. Did you find a smartphone? If the answer is yes, proceed. If the answer is no, please consider what exactly it is you’re doing with your life, read this, and immediately go to your nearest SK Telecom and get one. Under no circumstance sign a contract with KT and after you’re done you may begin living life anew (disclaimer: author has a Samsung Galaxy SII 3G with KT; loves the SII and hates KT). No thanks necessary, In Between Soju is always looking out.
Now, please take out your smartphone. Go into your applications. Do you have KakaoTalk installed? If yes, proceed. If no, please stop reading, go outside, and make some friends.
Now that we’re all on the same page, did you know that outside of Kakao’s messenger service Kakao supports a number of smartphone games, all linked to your Kakao account? There’s dozens and dozens of games that are free to download, with no annoying popups and requests to buy the full version.
While the content of the games themselves vary, the nature of each game is these the same. These are social media games. All games connect with your Kakao account, so if you have friends playing the same game you will be able to see and find them in-game. Each game has a leaderboard on the home page where your score and the scores of your friends are displayed. This leaderboard resets itself weekly, so it’s alright if one of your friends posts a punishingly unreachable score. Everyone goes back to zero each week. When you yourself earn a super high score, each game has a feature that lets you brag via Kakao message to any friend who is playing the same game.
Each game only lets you play a certain number of times, presumably so people will put down their phones for a second. You get a finite number of “tokens” to play each game that are displayed as hearts, coins, or other things. If you run out, you have to wait a few minutes until you’re given a new token. Never fear, however: you can gift and be gifted tokens from other players, so if you need your fix now, there’s likely a friend out there who will help enable your addiction.
All of these games are very simplistic, with usually a ten-second learning curve or less. Most of them are screen mashing/tapping/sliding games. Even if you’re not big into smartphone games, these games, due to their social aspect, can be very addictive. The leaderboard is always there to illustrate where you fall skillwise amongst your friends, and that is often enough to keep you playing for 10, 20, 30 minute stretches at a time. These games are great for bus and subway rides, or to kill time at your apartment when you’re not watching a TV show or movie that you may or may not legally own.
So without further ado, here are three popular KakaoTalk games Koreans are playing today!
1. 드래곤 플라이트 (Dragon Flight)
Dragon Flight is your traditional top-down scrolling jet shooter arcade game. The gun autofires, so the only thing a player is responsible for doing is sliding the big dragon side to side and killing waves of other dragons. The enemy dragons come in waves of five in a line that takes up the width of the screen, so the player must destroy them in and fly through the gaps in order to survive. When you destroy dragons, they will give you either coins that let you buy upgrades or powerups like double shot or hyperflight (which advances you about 500m automatically while in invincible mode). Your score is calculated by adding the points you get from killing enemies added with how far you flew in meters before dying.
The safest thing to do once you get the mechanics of the game down, is to stay in one spot forever; killing just one dragon but surviving almost forever. The designers of the game realized this and provide a countermeasure: if you stay in one spot, a meteor will come flying down to crush you. Additionally, if you fly around too much and the game can’t decide where to throw a meteor, the game will cease spawning dragons and send a wave of 5 – 10 meteors in all directions to try to kill you.
In Between Soju protip: depending on how strong your gun is, spend the first part of the game trying to kill everything in order to maximize your score and earn as many coins as you can for upgrades. At some point, then rotate into killing just one dragon and flying through the hole in order to maximize your flight score.
2. Anipang
Probably the most popular Kakao game today, Anipang is a tetris-like where players can slide animal characters one space in one of the cardinal directions (no diagonals) in order to make a three of a kind. After that, the animals will explode and a new group will drop down. The idea is to flip as many animals into position as quickly as possible to get a high score. After a set amount of points, the player earns a bird-bomb that the player can trigger at anytime which will wipe out all animals directly above and to the right and left of the bomb. This will also freeze the clock, giving you time to scan the board to find a group you can flip into a set of three. The game rewards you for being fast, so if you rapidly flip combos one after the other, you will earn a combo score. If you are able to clear four animals in a row instead of three, the animals will compress into a hyperbomb that will explode and wipe out a huge number of animals if you’re able to incorporate it into another set.
If all of this animal killing sounds barbaric, you’re in luck. The Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth group has protested this game, suggesting that the came depicts inhumane treatment of animals. We can’t let people kill off cute cartoon animals! Think of the cute cartoon animal babies!!!
In Between Soju protip: Get a Korean friend to play for you under your username. There is no way you will ever be as good as a Korean is at this game. Ever.
3. 홈런왕 (Homerun King)
This is a baseball timing-based smartphone game. The player is a baseball slugger who knocks out homeruns with each swing of the bat. A pitcher pitches the ball to you with a randomized variety of pitches (fastballs, curveballs, sliders, sinkers, changeups are all there), and the players job is to tap the screen at the exact time it crosses the plate to knock it out of the park. You can score a “Bad” “Good” “Great” or “Perfect” for each shot, each earning you more and more points. After a set number of points, the game goes into hyper x2 mode where you can earn double points for a few seconds while the pitcher throws flaming baseballs. Each time you enter hyper mode you earn a flaming ball that will be re-pitched to you in “final mode” at the end of the game. Final mode lets you earn a huge amount of points for a single hit (and replays your swing in slow-mo which is pretty cool). You earn coins after each game with which you can upgrade your player at the store or buy single-use powerups for your next game.
This game is entirely in Korean, but the mechanics are so simple that even if you can’t even introduce yourself in Korean you’ll figure it out. If you have a little Korean under your belt, all the better (hint: “game” in Korean is “가임” pronounced game)
In Between Soju protip: It doesn’t matter where you tap your finger on the screen to swing the bat, so wait for the ball to fly into the circle above home plate, and then tap to get the “perfect” swing.
Can you beat this?? See you in-game!