• guess.reallyi wanna see what u pick

i do everything. badly most of the time.
you might call my art inconsistent i call it having infinite art styles (<-coping with barely having a choice in how things look)


my neocities website
ch-u.neocities.org/
discord
ch.u.

cake
@cake
a pastel-colored sprite of the pokemon Toxtricity
let me tell you about...
pokefarm q!
a virtual pet minireview by @cake

do you like collecting creatures? do you hate installing apps? have you ever found yourself shiny hunting in a pokemon game, even if you've got no plans to use the pokemon competitively or otherwise? well, since the tags for this game are basically empty on cohost, let's talk about pfq ...


what is it? Pokefarm Q is a browser-based, mobile-friendly online game where you collect and raise Pokemon. It hearkens back to the mid- and late-2000s era of browser MMOs and virtual pets (some of which are still hobbling along even now), but is much more accessible and less janky than the rest.

Like some of its other brethren, such as GPX+ and the long-dead Vdex Project (rip), Pokefarm is a pretty simple site at the core: you collect eggs, click eggs, encourage other people to click your eggs, and eventually those eggs hatch into Pokemon. You can show your Pokemon off to other people, or put them on your socmed profiles or forum signatures... you get the drift:

a sprite of an egg, colored like the pokemon Toxel
a sprite of the pokemon Toxel
an egg and its baby

Hatching little dudes is the main draw of the site, and if you're lucky, you might hatch a shiny. "Yeah, I know about shinies," yeah, okay. However, PFQ also includes two even-rarer color variations, for every Pokemon on the site:

a sprite of the pokemon Toxel, in pinkish hues
a sprite of the pokemon Toxel, in minty hues
a sprite of the pokemon Toxel, in navy hues
shiny, albino, and melanistic

On that note: I'm not representative of the relevant community, but I feel like they should change the names for these alternate color variants -- astral and moonlight, or something, that way existing acronyms ("S/A/M," for example) can stay unchanged. Perhaps the term albino has a different connotation in the developers' home country?? I am only using it in this review and in the context of this site because if I didn't then nobody would know what I'm talking about, but it does not feel great to say :'))

Shiny, Albino, and Melanistic variants are rare -- increasingly so, in order -- and "melan hunts" constitute most of site activity... probably. However, that simple gameplay loop is not the only draw the site has!

a sprite of a fanmade pokemon which resembles a bowl of ramen noodles
a sprite of a fanmade mega-evolution of the pokemon Sylveon
a sprite of a fanmade Arcanine design, featuring volanic smoke flames
site-exclusive fakemon, mega evos, and regional variants

other features include: site-exclusive mega evolutions, totem formes, variants, fakemon lines and more, most of which have really well-done pixel art... and a whole slew of auxiliary gameplay avenues, like contests, battling, pokerus-hunting, wonder trade, fishing, delta types, something akin to achievement-hunting (by way of the wishforge), dex-completion, gardening, and more, including the ugliest player avatars known to man! 🥳

the part where i just write down a bunch of words:
pros: wholly f2p with ignorable monetization (mostly); friendly playerbase; gorgeous pixelart; interesting original designs; browser-based/potato-friendly; satisfies the urge to collect little duders; respects your time; all-in-all just a lot to do

cons: please call the pastel pokemon something else; if you want to max out your rare-color-hunting odds you have to buy the monthly subscription; the huge variety of things to do can lead to that sort of endless-scrolling unproductive brain badfeel cortex if you don't set limits for yourself; pokemon trading must be arranged manually on the forums (or some other outlet); easy to get overwhelmed with how much there is to do; the browser-based game's simple graphics might not be flashy enough for people in a post-genshin world; etc...

tl;dr: if you like collecting and clicking and showing off your little .pngs of creatures, and can control your playtime to avoid getting burnt out, it's a very fun option! and if you do sign up, consider dropping "cerberusnoise" in the referral field! but you don't have to! I swear I just wanted to write about this goofy website!! I'm not bonus-fishing!!!!

I may do more of these reviews in the future, since i've spent so many years of my life slinking around on these varying-quality-ass web games... if anyone gets this far, you got any favorite weirdo webgames?


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in reply to @cake's post:

albinism is a real condition humans can have, and the term albino has been used as a pejorative towards people with albinism! It's a little unclear to me how "heavy" of a slur it is (and opinion probably differs even amongst people with albinism), but for example here's a thread on r/albinism where folks talk about whether or not they find it offensive. I think even changing the term on pfq to "albinistic" could work in a pinch, but like I said I'm not an authority on this haha

ah that makes sense. for some reason i assumed it was a slur against people with vitiligo even though i know that albinism exists. and i don't know how i came to that conclusion at all

even if the connotations weren't there, or if it were called albinism, IMO it should still be changed just because it clashes with the very-fictional condition of shininess. especially since that's the only one that's canon. this has probably been subconsciously bugging me since day 1