


I did it for the same reason people like to play hard games, reader. “Julia, it sounds like you did not have fun doing this, so why did you do it?” you may ask. If I had lost a few points shy, I certainly would have rage-quit, but with some panic and luck, I was able to reach 1,000 points. The bulbous fruit was falling so fast, giving me no time to think about where I needed to place them successfully.

At one point during Gadgadsgame when my score was nearing the requirement for the avatar, I began sweating and shaking. Through the stress and the grind, I was able to actually get about half of the avatars I was aiming for. I played Typing Terror for hours, but still, the avatar escaped me. I can type very fast, and I can clear the game perfectly while making no mistakes, but luck was not on my side.

Typing Terror was one of these luck-based games, to my frustration. There were several games in which rare items or monsters needed to spawn throughout your playthrough so that you could get the high score necessary to earn the avatar. It wasn’t a matter of just beating a Flash game and then unlocking a secret avatar. Thanks to some Neopets game guides from JellyNeo, I realized that a lot of these games actually required both skill and luck. Extreme Herder (A herding game where you prevent petpets from getting eaten by a hungry wolf).Snowmuncher (A Dig Dug-like game where you eat through snow to reach the bottom).The Buzzer Game (A game where you have to carefully trace over a line with your cursor).Meepit Versus Feepit (A side-scrolling fighting game).Meepits’ Juice Break (A puzzle game where you connect tubes to feed hungry Meepits).Gadgadsgame (A combination of Puyo Puyo and Tetris).Sutek’s Tomb (A match-three, like Bejeweled).After I was done stressing out, I decided to make a list of games that I could feasibly get the avatars in, if I put in the work: But I quickly realized this project was not going to be a one-and-done situation. In early January, I had logged into Neopets, thinking I would get some of the avatars from just playing the games a couple times. And I’m missing dozens of avatars that require you to play a Flash game. It turns out that a lot of these games are still really hard. They were too hard! But I thought, “Surely, as an adult I’ll be able to get the required scores in these games now - no problem.” I was wrong. While it seems like the Neopets team is working on converting these games to HTML5, it’ll be a long time until they’re all converted, if they ever even achieve this goal.Īs a child, I remember struggling to earn even remotely OK scores in these games. Last week, I just focused on the games, which I predicted would stop working after Jan. There are tons of avatars you can earn from features on the site that don’t use Flash, but I can earn those any time.
