Show these ads their place

November 27, 2020 2:57 PM

Banners Begone! is a clicker quest to purge banners from your homepage. Unlike others in the genre, there’s not much idling in this game – it’s a clicker to the core at a tight 1-2 hours in length.
posted by adrianhon (14 comments total)

Hehe I played this a little while ago and really liked it. I noticed something odd, though. When I really tried to spin the fan quickly I would get nauseous. I don't know why, but strange.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:11 PM on November 27, 2020

Bookmarklet for real life version of this game to KILL STICKY HEADERS

posted by lalochezia at 3:11 PM on November 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Whose ML systems am I training, here?
posted by mhoye at 3:15 PM on November 27, 2020 [7 favorites]

This is an annoying black box in which frantically clicking does absolutely fuckall except expose unsolvable puzzles. Please tell me I am not understanding something here.
posted by ardgedee at 3:30 PM on November 27, 2020

Please tell me I am not understanding something here.

Probably. Clicking pushes ads back to show what you can unlock; then you can spend dynamite (?) to unlock those things properly.
posted by solarion at 4:05 PM on November 27, 2020

yeah, each ad has a "block" button on it with a cost in dynamites. I think the cheapest one costs like 200 that you can do after clicking the "push ad" button 200 times
posted by aubilenon at 4:28 PM on November 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I appreciate a quick in-and-out clicker like this! Not a ton going on mechanically but it doesn't wear out its welcome either; getting this kind of purposeful balance of thematic strength and sane pacing is a rarity in these. Did an hour and six minutes, probably could have been under an hour if I hadn't multitasked; enjoyed the boss fight.
posted by cortex at 4:59 PM on November 27, 2020

Kind of a pain if you don't have a reliable right click - one of the resources requires you to click left and right mouse buttons quickly in sequence.
posted by Merus at 5:11 PM on November 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

That may be the problem, it isn't registering my right clicks. Oh well, it's more of a twitch game than I can handle right now anyway.
posted by ardgedee at 6:22 PM on November 27, 2020

fwiw I could see the block button and I can (left-)click really fast but I hit a cliff immediately after exposing the first ad. Neither the freelance income nor the dynamite was accruing in a way that allowed anything else to be exposed for long enough to do anything with, and the repetition from having to zoom all over the screen trying to click on things before they got covered again was more annoying than entertaining. I grok that frustration is one of the points of the game, but there didn't seem to be a reward for enduring it.
posted by ardgedee at 6:25 PM on November 27, 2020

The fan makes you dynamite a lot faster than the push add button if you can hit it when it's green (which for me means clicking around when it's at 9:00 and 3:00).
posted by aubilenon at 7:13 PM on November 27, 2020

At the highest fan level your spins recharges before it fully slows down, which lets you build up a passive dynamite income. Of course, to get that you need a lot of money.

Clicking the central ad pusher lets you see what are under the ads, which helps you make informed decisions about what ads are worth permanently blocking and which can wait until the costs are trivial. You should be able to interact with the crypto and especially the freelancing before you permanently block their ads.
posted by Merus at 9:20 PM on November 27, 2020

Something I wish I'd figured out earlier: you can hold down the mouse button when applying keys to get a discount on blocking ads.
posted by aparrish at 9:22 PM on November 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Thank you for that tip--I probably would've lost interest before beating the final boss without it.

An hour and 26 minutes, in and out.
posted by box at 10:41 AM on November 28, 2020