Developer: Green Lava Studios S.A.
Publisher: Green Lava Studios S.A.
Release Date: 2-15-16
My Name is Mayo is the type of game that nobody should be writing thousand word essays about. It’s a game that barely even qualifies as a game at all. It’s a total ripoff shovelware title that happens to have a platinum colored shovel. It’s a game that exists for only one reason. It is a very easy way to earn a platinum trophy. So basically you pay a dollar and get a platinum. I’ve done it. Okay so I’ve done it twice. Neither time made me feel too much like a moron either. The sad part is that this notorious pay-to-win game has proven to be one of the most influential on the whole platform. It’s much like how Action 52 is the worst NES game but today stores are flooded with handheld systems crammed with horrible bootleg games much in the same vein. My Name is Mayo inspired whole companies to come into existence just to make cheap games that are easy to platinum. What used to be an occasional occurence is now a cottage industry. There will be dozens of games released every year that cost less than five dollars and take less than an hour to platinum. There are plenty of games that only require you to complete less than half of the actual content to platinum. People are buying these games, playing a fifth of the levels, getting their platinum, and then never playing the game again. And this whole shady business model, which I am definitely guilty of participating in, all started with a humble jar of mayo.
You get the idea!
So what is My Name is Mayo anyway. It’s going to take some intense visualization to understand it. Imagine a mayonnaise jar. Now imagine a hand. Now imagine the hand moving with the control stick and then tapping the jar when you push X. Now imagine tapping the X button 10,000 times. That is My Name is Mayo. Yes it is a game where you tap the X button 10,000 times and then get a platinum trophy. Oh but that’s not all! As you tap away you will unlock achievements. Some of these reveal uncomfortably sexual bits of story. Some of them give you completely random fun facts (a group of crows is called a murder), and some of them will change the appearance of the jar itself. You think it’s embarrassing tapping on a mayo jar for platinum trophy just wait till it’s wearing a whipped-cream bikini. Some of them are admittedly pretty funny, but they seem to keep this in check by having the funny ones take five taps to complete and having the embarrassing ones take 500 taps. You are not getting off that easy. You also can’t cheat your way through with a turbo controller because you have to manually switch out costumes and achievements. If you want that trophy than you are going to have to play it to the bitter end.
So as I said it is a game that nobody should play through but I have played through it twice. I got the platinum trophy for both the PS4 and Vita versions and if there was a PS3 version I would probably play that one too. In fact psnprofiles.com, a popular trophy tracking site, has almost 100,000 platinum achievers for the game. That’s a really large amount for an indie game. It’s one of the more played indie games of the era. Celeste, a true gaming masterpiece, only has about 9,000 owners. It’s more expensive sure, but Mayo’s popularity means that it will be more likely what people think of when they think of indie games. There are great indie designers out there making some of the best games of our generation, but people get a bad impression because of the companies coming into existence in the wake of My Name is Mayo putting out lousy games to make a quick buck. Of course I know that Mayo is meant to be a parody, and the designers are in on the joke, but that doesn’t change the impact on gaming. Sometimes jokes are just so funny that you need to lock them away and never tell anyone about them. You unleashed a smiley faced Pandora’s box onto the world. And I rewarded you by giving you my money. There’s just something about those shiny platinum trophies.
You can probably guess already but this game is going to the bottom. It’s a game that leaves most of its players either mildly amused or completely ashamed. Everyone who has played it always tries to come up with a way of justifying it. That’s not a good look for a game. It’s a game that damages the reputation of other games that don’t even relate to it. It brought a lot of unscrupulous companies into the Playstation store. It’s made me start spouting litany like a bad pop culture Walt Whitman. I think I better stop before writing about this game makes me worse by association. Here’s the bottom line. It’s one of the worst games of all time and doesn’t pretend to be anything else but it’s also only a dollar and has a forty minute challenge free platinum trophy. Why play good games when you can earn fake trophies that practically nobody cares about? I don’t even know if that question is rhetorical anymore.
1. Super Mario Odyssey
2. Galaga
3. Donkey Kong
4. Exodus: Ultima III
5. Pac-Mania
6. Wrecking Crew
7. Super Pac-Man
8. Pac-Man
9. Excitebike
10. Arc the Lad
11. Clu Clu Land
12. Artifact Adventure Gaiden DX
13. Mickey’s Racing Adventure
14. Metro-Cross
15. Ice Climber
16. Gaplus
17. Dragon Spirit
18. Pinball (NES)
19. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)
20. Red Sea Crossing
21. Baraduke
22. Gamma-Attack
23. The Legend of “Valkyrie”
24. Galaxian
25. Evoland
26. Defunct
27. Gyruss (2600)
28. Looney Tunes Racing
29. Squidlit
30. Baseball
31. Birthday Mania
32. Bad Street Brawler
33. My Name is Mayo
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