Bag It!

Year: 2011
Genre: Puzzle
Website: http://www.hiddenvariable.com/bagit/

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Lee:

• Platform: Android
• Hours logged: 14.0
• Playthroughs: 1
• Rating: 8/10

Shane:

• Platform: Android
• Hours logged: 2.0
• Playthroughs: 0
• Rating: --/10

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Notes and Discussions:

• Lee (5/21/2014): When I started playing Bag It, the game immediately came across as silly and gimmicky, which is similar to how I felt about Bad Hotel. It wasn't a good sign. But it turned out that this game offered a decent amount of challenge and clever scoring, objective, and award mechanisms that kept me coming back for more.
  
  The premise of the game is that you are grabbing items from a conveyor belt at a grocery store check-stand and packing them into a grocery bag. Generally, you will want to put the stronger and heavier items (milk cartons and watermelons) on the bottom of the bag and the lighter and more fragile items (chips and eggs) on the top. But once you place an item in the bag, you can’t take it out, so some rearranging is required to keep items from getting crushed. Each item has a limit to how much weight can be placed on top of it. If that limit is exceeded by a little, a timer will start ticking down on the item, and if you don’t fix the problem before the timer runs out, the item gets crushed. If you exceed an item's weight limit by a lot (the animated character for a lighter item will flip the fuck out as you hold a heavy item such as a watermelon over its head), you get no timer, and the item simply explodes. Bonus points are awarded for combinations of items placed next to each other. For example, “Balanced Breakfast” = Milk + Orange Juice + Cereal + Eggs. Some levels require you to actually crush certain groceries and save others to solve the puzzle. Each level has a scaling objective that can earn you up to three stars, in addition to two medals, which can be achieved by meeting extra criteria (usually item combos or placing every item upright). You must unlock the second medal by earning the first one, but both can be achieved at the same time if you are lucky. Once both medals are obtained, a blue ribbon for the level is awarded.
  
  I enjoyed the fact that I could play a few rounds of this game in one sitting, then put it away. I felt accomplished when I was able to finally solve a puzzle that I had been working on for a while, especially if it gained me more stars and/or a blue ribbon. I liked that for many of the levels, achieving stars and each of the two medals required completely different strategies, but on occasion, if you played the level just right, you could grab all three stars AND get the ribbon in a single round. I felt like a freaking superhero when that happened. Some of the puzzles are rather challenging, but ultimately entirely solvable. There were a few times that I beat the level only a fraction of a second before the weight limit timer ran out on one or more items in my grocery bag. To be honest, those situations were kind of nerve-wracking and made my ass pucker, like when jumping over a bottomless pit in Super Mario Brothers.
  
  I didn't get a lot out of the game modes that kept track of your high score instead of dangling stars and ribbons over your head. I guess I just wanted to finish the game and move on to something else, so I played each one of those levels once and called it good.
  
  I decided that a playthrough could be logged by unlocking and solving every level in the game. I didn't require that all stars and blue ribbons be achieved, but unlocking some of the later levels in the game required obtaining a large percentage of the stars and ribbons anyway. After completing the last level, I ended up having scored a total of 277 out of 291 stars and 155 out of 186 blue ribbons. Not bad! All in all, I would highly recommend this game to anyone looking for a casual brain-tickler to pass some time here or there.

• Shane (6/22/2014):  It is really interesting to me that Lee got as much enjoyment out of this game as he did.  I played it for 2 hours or so and almost got through the first set of puzzles but I ... I guess I wasn't very good at it in the end.  It wasn't interesting to me, or interesting enough to make sure I knew how many milk cartons could be stacked on an egg carton before they crushed something.  I appreciate what was built here, but it was just never all that interesting.
  
  Sorry Lee.  Maybe we can agree on the next one.  :)