I just got an Android phone, ostensibly to help me study Japanese on the go, but I've been downloading tons of free games as well. The latest freebie game I got is a shameless clone of Galcon named GalaxIR. It's not terrible, per se, but that's because all of its best mechanics are ripped from Galcon. Everything that it has added (including purchasable upgraded ships, bizarre limitations on how many ships can attack at once, overly aggressive AI, and a campaign mode which I will get to in a minute) is horribly unbalanced and awful. There is no sound, and the music sounds like a MIDI from a Sonic fansite on Geocities.

The real crowning achievement of all of this is the campaign. First, to even unlock it, you have to defeat three AIs on the "too hard for you" difficulty setting, which is laughably easy once you discover that the AI will attack your homeworld and leave itself vulnerable to a counterstrike on every other planet. After you've massacred the AI, you can start the campaign to "discover the GalaxIR history."

The campaign consists of 13 episodes, according to the description, but there are actually 15. They are a series of special missions, including "conquer some specific planets," "conquer all the planets," and "conquer some random planets." Each level is preceded by a bit of story that expounds upon the mysteries of GalaxIR.

Some gems from this amazing story mode:

"During 8 millennia, the MaxziimIR family has justly ruled the GalaxIR. But as every culture consistently shows in their histories, nothing is absolute except death."

"It is a drama; ZiggIR has already produced a lot of implants. He can now take the control of 50% of the population."

I think my favorite part of this is that the narrative switches from being an account of your history, to directly addressing you as a subordinate ("...but a flash on our RADAR appeared, sir..."), to complimenting you from the standpoint of a commanding officer ("Thanks to YOU the Emperor is now in power again!"). The specificity of controlling "50% of the population" is also hilarious. There's also a "holy Rising Star" macguffin in the beginning that is completely forgotten by the second mission. There are also references to the Third, Fourth, and Seventh Families, but those are all dropped as well. Sometimes, the scale shifts from describing a galactic conflict, to something like installing security cameras in everyone's house, and visiting your mother.

Apparently this was intended to be "season 1" of a long-running series, too.

All in all, it reads like Star Wars fan fiction written by a Dutch 10 year old with all the copyrighted names replaced with something that ends in IR that was subsequently run through Google Translate.

Oh, and one of the missions abruptly ends when you conquer a certain planet, and just turns the screen entirely yellow for 5 seconds. I thought the game froze, but apparently it's intended to represent an explosion that kills everyone.

So yeah. Recommended for download if you have an Android phone.