I bought The DvD Idle Game as a joke to cheer myself up, and on that premise, I’d say the game is somewhat successful. I still buy DVDs, CDs, and Blu-rays because physical media matters. Whenever a DVD player was left on standby, the DVD media icon would casually bounce around the screen. You’d egg it on to hit a perfect corner as it bounced off the sides. What can I say, times were simpler then. This game takes that nostalgia and turns it into an incremental idle game.
At the start, you’ll have one DVD icon bouncing around the screen, creating currency for each hit off the sides. You’ll then use that currency to add more icons, increase the profit per bounce (or mouse click), and increase the speed travelled. From there, you’ll get a psychedelic hyperactive screensaver, and unlock the next bit of 90s nostalgia… dial up internet! Dial up modems act like score multipliers in this game, and have a recharge. Again, your currency can be used to improve the multiplier, time spent online to use the multiplier, and to reduce the downtime. After that, different screen backgrounds can be unlocked, and prestige points can be earned by burning DVDs. These all come quite thick and fast, meaning that whilst this is an idle game, you are constantly improving and tweaking things to keep you in control and active.
Sadly, The DvD Idle Game is a game of two halves. The second half involves playing songs on a media player to generate a new type of currency, and then that gets converted into DVD data bits, and this grinds the game down to a slow, painful crawl. It takes around 2 hours to reach this point, but it’ll take another 4-6 hours to just watch a progress bar slowly fill up. You can’t speed it up, as after 2 hours, you’ll have maxed out every upgrade, and prestige points no longer help. It genuinely feels like a mistake in the game design that the very last two unlocks in the game take three times longer than the rest of the game combined. I didn’t bother to wait.
Whilst there’s some nostalgic theming, and fun early incremental progress that you can see in real time, the back half of the game really soured my experience. I’d recommend this to a very niche Venn diagram of incremental fans and people of 90s nostalgic culture only. It was less than £2, but there are better idle games that are far more balanced out there.
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