licenced games can a lot of the time be my favourite kinds of games to check out, they can relaly run the gambit from actual classics like touken ranbu warriors and DNF Duel to, while i hesitate to call any game shovelware as i find the term reductive and unfair, that can be what some of the really uninteresting licenced games can be, i do love licenced games though, i love checking them out weather i've seen the IP before or not just because it can be fun to see these things on their own merits and maybe even find something i vibe with via a medium i'm more familiar with, anime games especially. these three are interesting enough to talk about and even play in the case of at least two of them.

first off is golden balls. golden balls is based on a british game show that i know nothing about, but this game is shockingly interesting, kind of, as interesting as a gamified prisoners dilamma cam be. the game itself is a party game about deception, weather you have or don't have a bomb or cash in your golden ball. it's not a bad idea for a game and when you have more than two people it can probably be super fun! however i only had one other player and it led to one of the most unintentionally player-hostile experiances i've ever had, i loved it! the game is borderline impossible to finish even with two players and solo the game may as well be, the ai can and will always conspire against you to kill you and there isn't really much you can do about it, it almost feels like a yoko taro-esque game design choice of making the player feel as hated and excluded by the game as possible, this combined with the horrifying looking characters (it may be the most ugly game i've ever personally played) , weird stilted voice acting from the host, jasper carrot that feels like he hates you and doesn't want to be there, he even chides and makes fun of you and the overall strange uncanny feeling of the game makes it feel like a dadaist version of a game show video game made by devs who hated both it and the people who might have bought it. it just feels so exclusionary and it gives me a deep pit of anxiety trying to play it as you feel genuinely hated by these random AI characters who just want you gone, it's like half an hour of a few people trying their best to remove you from their lives. it's wild to behold and i'd reccomend anyone to try and actually beat it, it's an experiance for sure.

after this i played race with ryan: road trip. i mostly picked this up as a joke, i won't lie. i honestly had next to no idea who ryan even was and i won't try and make any comments about him or his channel, because i do see that a lot when people make fun of this game and i just think that's unfair, he is just a kid and he had zero input in this game in any of the conceptual phases and making fun of a child, even a wealthy one is just cruel and mean, don't do it. i was mostly curious as it was, at least in the UK, a smyths toystore exclusive game which is kind of weird to me considering games arent even their main thing, i had to have it. it's honestly not that bad either, it's just a standard generic kart racer with a random youtuber licence, it has badly voiced cutscenes, low quality voicelines and the most generic tracks you can possibly imagine, it's got so little personality it might as well not exist, and that's kind of interesting to me, that it's so devoid of passion and creativity that it kind of gains it's own reason for existing and it's worth experiancing just to see the peak of corporate design by comittie anti-art in video game form, i guess it also plays fine too, there's a lot of racers and tracks and it has a little solo campaign that'll last you a few hours but when it's done you won't really think about it much, and i guess that's kind of the point, don't play it but it's interesting to think about, it's also worth noting that the road trip edition of the game ads a few extra dlc characters and tracks but even these are some of the least interesting courses in the game, though the route66 and new york courses are a little neat, they aren't integrated into the solo mode at all and you need to play them from the standard race segment, so you probably won't see them as much.

lastly there is doritos crash course, the most cool game of the lot. this is a free XBLA doritos themed platformer styled after shows like takeshi's castle and wipeout, it's good! great even, enough so that i went out of my way to 100% it and buy the dlc to play through. it feels like such a 360 XBLA relic in so many ways, i'd even argue it's the most XBLA XBLA game, it's the most simple kind of arcade game but in a good way where you can just jump in and have a good time, it has avatar support which is great because avatars are cool and i love those lil frens and the dlc is also only a pound, calling back to a time when dlc's were worth the money you spent, and not the same price of the game. the game itself is just so fun, it's easy, accessable and it has a super good flow to it, a little like rayman legends in that it can be a straight run to the end in a flow state with no real stops if you don't die, it's not as rhythmic as that game but it gives me the same kind of feeling as you dash straght to the end dodging all the obsticles in your way, some levels even have multiple routes which can add a lot to the depth, there's even leaderboards for speedrunners, mirrors edge style, though i could never quite place very high, beat most of my friends though. it helps that it's also super short, you can easily beat it in a single sitting, dlc included and i think that helps a lot, you can just turn your brain off for a night and have a good time, and for the low price of free plus a pound for the dlc if you enjoy it, what do you have to lose, the only real downside the game has is the generic music, which isn't that big of a deal breaker to me, especially since it's an advergame, i don't expect that much there.