The Hobbit: A Drug on Your Mobile Phone

Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth

I don’t think its farfetched to describe this game as more addictive than a cocaine infused blowjob (don’t think that’s possible, but just imagine if it was). We’ve all played those stupid Facebook time-killing games by Kabam and got bored after a few days. Mafia Wars sucked me in hard, only to lose me after about a week. But Hobbits... oh, these little hairy foot bastards latched onto me and sunk their teeth in, infecting me with whatever repulsive virus that makes you check your iPhone every seven-and-a-half minutes. My addiction is bad enough that I started another Hobbit account on my iPad. And got three of my eight brothers into it. And my sister-in-law. And my old roommate. And his new roommate. And started an alliance.

To be honest, it can barely be considered a LotR game. The only “cannon” (nerd term) that this game offers is a few “Hero” characters from the movies that lead your raids on goblin camps and enemy cities. That being said, it’s lack of story relevance doesn’t take away from its amazing and gloriously addicting gluteus maximus-kickingness. You spend an obnoxious amount of time (actual real time) creating a city, each building having a level of 1-9, so you can build a super army force of Middle-Earthlings to beat up on less combative, lower level players that downloaded this game, started it, and immediately forgot they had it. Basically, I’m a bully on a server full of people who care exponentially less about this game than I do. Which is fine, because it makes it that much easier to mug them for their gold like I'm an angrier, jewish Smigel.

Which brings me to the people that care about this game about the same as myself, if not more than I do... To hell with them! There is this eleven year old Elven bag of twats that has attacked me so many times in the last two weeks that he has made it impossible for me to build a very specific (and useful) building because his sucker-punching, sticky handed thievery has rendered me unable to stockpile the necessary funds to do it. I'm sure the developers love him though, because I've actually spent real money now to complete my building and rush him with an army to run him back to Mordor.

And I can’t be the only person who thinks Mt. Doom isn’t a very creative name. I mean, it gets its point across, but that's the best Sauron could come up with while he hid for hundreds of years? I guess he did decide to put all of his power in a piece of jewelry that you keep on the very tip of your body. No one ever accused him of being too creative. Anyways...

At the beginning you chose whether you want to be a dwarf or an elf. Other than the "Hero" characters, nothing really changes. Pick your preference, it doesn't matter. Just know that if you go Elf, you're an idiot.

Since the release of "The Desolation of Smaug", HKoME has released a new aspect of the game. It appears to be as close to a storyline as you can get with this style of game. Basically, instead of only marching your armies on fellow players and goblin camps, you can also march them through "dungeons" which grant you access to further dungeons which grant you access to runes that can be melded together(?) to form items that are "useful to you". I have yet to gain an item from this that's useful to me, but I can say that after playing this for months, the added aspect to the game was a welcomed event.

Give it a whirl, it really is free-to-play. It's less soul destructive than flappy-bird, but trust me. You will be sinking some hard-earned free time into this thing

Enjoy!

Uber: The Perfect App for the Uni-Lingual, Socially Awkward Geek on the Go

I travel to Chicago often enough that this iPhone app (also on Android) has saved my pasty white ass a dozen times. Seriously. My Chicago office is located in that one part of town where the tollway dumps a bunch of occupied cabs on my street, and its impossible to flag down one that’s empty. I have to walk two or three blocks in the wrong direction of my destination to catch a yellow. Normally, this wouldn’t matter, but try doing this with a briefcase, wing-tip shoes, and a 27” iMac under your arm during a slush storm when your train leaves in seven minutes. Ish is tough, dude.

This is where the Uber app comes in. You set up an account, which takes a total of three minutes (including credit card information), and the app uses your GPS location to call a cab to you. You get a picture of your cabby’s face and an approximate time of arrival, and all you have to do is sit in the lobby and watch his GPS location change on your map.

Then, when your off-the-boat Trinidadian cab driver pulls up, you get a text message telling you to come outside, and instead of being forced to converse with a guy who’s speaking a language you couldn’t even begin to guess, you can just jump in the back of the car, blurt a destination loud enough to hear over his National Public Radio blaring through blown speakers, and go back to searching backpages.com for a date to whatever half-cheap restaurant you think you can get away with expensing.

Honestly, if you travel enough that you spend over $50 a week in cab fare, do yourself a favor and give this app a shot. I’ve been using it for a couple months now and swear by it. If it hasn’t come to a city near you yet, email their people and let them know you want it. Do me a favor and send an email on behalf of Milwaukee, too. I would, but I’m just too damn busy writing nonsense like this.


Edit: Less than a week after I posted this, I got an email from Uber informing me that it was officially in Milwaukee. I got a laugh out of that.