In this special episode, I downloaded 10 free iPhone games and am prepared to let you know what I think about each one.
Because it’s very important what I think about these things.
I guess this is less a review of games and more of just a thing where I explain how or whether I enjoyed them. Hell, they’re free. It took maybe 5 minutes to download all of them, so you might as well just see for yourself.
I astonish myself with my ability to talk people out of reading things on this web site.
I also decided, as a departure for me, to play each one for at least one 15-minute break at work because I figure that’s kind of the point of this type of game. I don’t know that they’re meant to be played to the point of immersion. I don’t think the mechanics are set up to make you even want to do that. They seem much better suited to grabbing, playing for three or four minutes while you wait for someone outside a restaurant or wait for a movie to start in the theater. Being someone who is always late and never goes to movies, I decided to try mine out on work breaks instead.
I don’t really want to spend a lot of time on the graphics and sounds and all of that either. That stuff is fine. I mean, it’s pretty much always fine anymore, right? It’s kind of idiotic that people still review games that way. I can remember some pretty stunning games, but I don’t remember any where the graphics were really a hindrance. Or if they were, it seemed intentional. So what’s the point?
Mostly what I want to talk about is: Was it fun?
Game 1: Temple Run
The setup on this one is pretty basic. You’re a guy who just runs down some temple-y type paths. By temple-y I mean that they are made of stone and vines play key roles in the aesthetic. As the player, you swipe left to turn left, right to go right, up to jump over obstacles, and down to slide under them. There’s also a control where you tilt the phone left or right to make the character run down the left or right side of the screen, and this is usually for the sake of collecting…coins? Tokens? Medallions that activate curses? Who the hell knows? It’s my least favorite part. I don’t really give a shit about collecting things. In real life or in games. I suppose if I were to one day be running around and found that golden rings were just appearing in mid-air, I might heft as many as I could to a Cash 4 Gold Zone or whatever those places are. But that’s not so much about collecting gold rings as it is about the instinct to pick up cash that’s just lying around.
The parts that make it more interesting are the setting and the character, who is basically a tiny Indiana Jones type, viewed entirely from behind (which is the best view of Indy anyway, am I right, ladies!?). I wonder if there are a bunch of other renegade archaeologist types from the same era who are pissed that nobody gives them credit for the Indiana Jones look. It’s always Indiana Jones this, Indiana Jones that. Nobody gives a hot damn about Minnesota Smith, who had some equally harrowing if less publicized adventures.
Temple Run is fine. I think what it lacks, without a real beginning, ending, or much variety other than sequencing of the same obstacles in different arrangements, is anything that makes me want to pick it up again. You hit one thing, you die, you start at the beginning. This leads to a gaming frustration that most are familiar with, the feeling that as you play, you put in a couple rounds, hit the sweet spot, and then immediately lose whatever it was that made things work at which point you suck worse than when you first started. Your mojo, your flow, your zone, your eye of the tiger, your highway miles (I made that one up. It’s not working) disappear and you end up struggling.
So I guess the positive thing is that you can put this thing away at any time, really. It’s unlikely to be a distraction when your dinner date shows up or your movie starts or, in my case, when you’re mind starts drifting and you’re mostly thinking about how this guy, this Minnesota Johnson or whatever his name was, should consider the realm of world-class running as a career move.
Game 2: Hoggy
Hoggy is pretty much Kirby but you solve puzzles to eat fruit to make keys to go through doors.
The mechanic is sort of interesting. You move side to side, and then tap the screen to reverse Hoggy’s personal relationship with gravity. So you stick to the floor, then tap and stick to the ceiling. That part’s kind of cool.
The part that is not kind of cool, not even really medium cool, is the part where you tilt the phone side to side to move Hoggy side to side. I hate that shit. For one thing, could you make it any more obvious that I’m goofing off over here? Not only does it look like I’m playing a game, but it looks like I’m playing it the same way I did when I was five, turning the controller, moving it up and down, figuring that the NES was advanced to a level where if I really mashed the shit out of the button, the system would react and Mario would jump just a little higher.
Really, though, my problem with the tilting is the problem I was worried about when jumping into these games. It’s just not a tight control style. Which isn’t terribly important all the time, but I have to say that one of my top frustrations with console gaming comes from death that can be attributed to a control error that wasn’t user-generated. It’s messed up because the game sets out rules, but that’s a way in which the game breaks its own rules. You know, the thing where someone says, “Hey! What the hell!? I was pressing B!”
In golf, real analogue golf, if I hit a hole in one and then some guy in a bandit mask ran out of the bushes, pulled my ball out of the hole and set it a couple inches away, I would still count my hole in one as valid. But in the video game world, if the ball goes in, then materializes a few feet away, there’s not a thing you can do about it. You can’t just pick it up and move on to the next hole, explaining that the machine made an error. You get what you get.
That’s the problem when the controls aren’t tight. If they aren’t tight, I don’t get to perform the actions as I’d like to, but I’m still being punished as though I could.
Hoggy isn’t so bad. The early puzzles don’t require a lot of control. As they got harder, though, I was wishing for something a little more reliable, and that’s only 15 minutes into the game.
Game #3: Trace
Trace has a simple premise. You’re a stick figure in a geometric world where moving shapes kill you. The shapes move in regular patterns, and in order to avoid them or to avoid falling into pits or any number of other issues that plague video game characters, players trace lines on the screen which act as platforms.
It’s a cool concept, sort of like that memorable cartoon where Daffy Duck is being simultaneously harassed and created by an artist whose hand also appears just off the page but within the frame of the cartoon itself.
The game is mostly about timing, I’d say. There’s a puzzle element, a best way to go. But there’s certainly a possibility to plow through the thing in the fashion of a digital swashbuckler, diving in headfirst and seeing where you might head next.
Honestly, though? Kind of boring. After finishing the first world, then seeing that the second world was essentially the same thing, I was pretty well done with the whole thing.
The other problem, which is probably more of a personal issue for me than for others, is that I have no point to the tip of my fingers. They’re more sausage-y than I’d prefer, especially at the tips. What ends up happening all the time is that I draw a line, but it never ends up exactly where I want it to end up. And while drawing the lines, my dumb fat finger is right in the way of what I’m trying to see. Down in front, buddy! Without some sort of skinnier, invisible-er finger, I don’t think this game has much potential to end well for me.
Game #4: Tiny Tower
The danger of downloading free games is not that you’ll waste money. The danger is that you’ll find something that ends up consuming your life.
Enter Tiny Tower.
I’d be tempted to say that this game is perfect for fans of Sim City. But I’m not a fan of Sim City, and I love Tiny Tower, so I’m not sure where that leaves us.
The game has a similar vibe. You build a tower, one floor at a time, and on each floor build a business or apartments.
For me, a big difference is you actually get to see the tiny dudes and the tiny lady dudes who live in your building. They have names. They have faces. Sort of.
With Sim City I always felt like I was working with a city on the brink. Like instead of being the mayor of an idyllic new hamlet, I was thrust into the job of taking the reins in Detroit. Detroit with the occasional monster attack. It was all about infrastructure, which bored the holy hell out of me. I don’t want to build plots, then power lines, then roads. I mean, this is supposed to be a game. How is that a game? It was everything short of pressing A to turn a bolt whenever one was called for.
Tiny Tower is simpler, which is probably why it appeals to me. Also, your tower keeps running while you’re not playing. Being a Sim City player, that made me pretty nervous at first. I pretty much figured that if I left my TT overnight I’d wake up to find it replaced with a skyscraper straight out of the Warriors, complete with a baseball-themed gang of toughs roaming the halls. But mostly they just run out of veggie burgers at the vegan restaurant.
It’s really more like running an ant farm. You set it up, then you make small adjustments here and there. Which is awesome.
What’s not awesome is the level of anxiety this game can cause.
First off, you have to make sure and turn off the notifications unless you would like to be updated in the dead of night, as I was, that the photo studio needed more supplies to do family portraits. On the scale of Tiny Tower emergencies, this probably ranks fairly high. But on the scale of how mad Pete is going to be when the tiny people wake him up, this definitely ranks at fury level.
Secondly, I wish I’d never discovered that each citizen of a Tiny Tower has a listed dream job. If you put someone in their dream job, they do better work and restock things more quickly. So the benefits aren’t super high in terms of tangibles. However, they DID have great potential for emotional devastation.
Why, I wondered, would poor Maria have to work in a vegan restaurant when her real dream was to work in a Mexican restaurant. It was better than Jamie, who dreamed of making movies and worked at the Laundromat. Or was it? Is it better to have something in the realm of your dream, or is it better to divorce yourself from it entirely so that you’re not reminded of how wrong things have gone every time you’re whipping up some kind of tofu something?
And if these tiny people in their tiny tower couldn’t have their dream jobs, what chance do the rest of us have?
So I said, NO, this can’t happen. And I kept working to get them in their dream jobs. Kept building floors. Played well beyond the fifteen minute minimum. Which would be a success except for the fact that it was more out of guilt than anything. Also, none of my bitizens have their dream jobs. Yet.
Game #5: Escape from Nom
Nom is a little like an Angry Birds type of thing, but instead of slingshotting the birds you drop this guy into slime. Or something. Goo? Muck? Gelatinous concoction?
There’s a mechanic that helps with the control precision, which is nice. But after getting about a dozen puzzles in, I started feeling like you could really just finish each level by going with guess and check, and while guess and check was my favorite method of completing school work, this was not school work. Allegedly.
Also, I don’t know how important it is, but I hated the sound effects. They bothered me on an almost physical level.
Game #6 X-Baseball
All you do is hit baseballs. Tap anywhere on the screen to swing.
Oh, I guess that’s not totally true. You can also hit bananas that someone throws from the stands. If you manage to hit a thrown banana bunch you can get one of your three strikes back. Which may or may not be something that happens in legitimate baseball. I’m not really sure on that one. Along those same lines, you get a certain number of points for each hit, but it seems to depend on how good a job you do hitting it. This is something I have absolutely no control over, probably because I have absolutely no idea where the sweet spot is in terms of baseball. One would think that a game this simple would be pretty easy to master. One would think.
This is a decent game if you only want to play something for about thirty seconds and be able to put it away right away. It’s also got a nice retro feel that I dig. And it’s Japanese-y, but in a good way. I don’t know how to explain that other than once you hit a certain level a large purple gorilla comes out in a little car to replace the regular pitcher. Nobody in the stands seems alarmed by this development.
Game #7: ElectroMaster
You are a blue-haired girl who uses electric powers to shock brunettes, as opposed to being a blue-haired girl and using your wildly blue hair to shock brunettes EMOTIONALLY.
The control scheme on this one is a little weird. Tapping the screen aims your electric bolt and sends your character walking in the same direction. So you’re always walking into trouble, really.
After about five or six levels, this thing got so goddamn hard that I hit the wall. It didn’t even take 15 minutes before I ended up super stuck. In fact, it was probably 5 minutes getting as far as I did, 10 minutes of hitting my head against ceiling fan. I used to bang my head against the wall, but I have an iPhone now, so I’m smart enough that I bought a lifeguard chair and sit up on high while the blades gently whack me in the temples. MUCH easier.
I love me a good melee game. Robotron is the best. Smash TV was great. I’m absolutely a sucker for a game that involves controls that couldn’t be simpler and action that’s all about shooting and running around like an idiot who somehow bumbled into a case of guns and uppers. But again, my dumb fat fingers get in the way. When I’m playing I can’t see shit because my stupid finger is in the way. I tried playing polite style, pinky out and touching the screen, but it wasn’t much better. So it’s a little like playing a game, but also mixed with being at a concert and trying to get some idiot’s head out of your line of sight.
Game #8 Pico Games
Well, these are a bunch of short, simple games that are hard as all hell. I’d say more about them, but the next game, Alice in the Secret Castle, comes from them as well, and I’d like to save most of my upsetness for that one.
Game #9 Alice in the Secret Castle
(3min in)
This game is so fucking hard.
First off, you get no directions whatsoever. Which is fine sometimes. But SOMEtimes, like when you push the only available button and then die for no apparent reason, things are frustrating.
It turns out that the mechanic of the game involves holding down the button, which causes Alice to phase through the floor Kitty Pryde style, so when you tap the button instead of holding it you become solid while inside the floor, which means you die for whatever reason.
This was hard won knowledge. And nothing’s more frustrating than pushing the only button over and over and dying over and over for reasons unknown.
I think I spent more time figuring out what in the holy name of holy hell was going on than I did playing the game afterwards.
Some people have said this is a very difficult game and that’s why they like it. They’re tired of the coddling of today’s games. I don’t completely disagree. Games back when used to be really goddamn hard. You had to know each part inside out to really succeed, and even then you probably would end up smashed by a badly-timed spike or that one asshole alien who just never played by the rules.
In this player’s humble opinion, however, those games definitely gave you a sense of accomplishment when you succeeded, but it was only after you went through a whole lot of frustration. They were a lot more destination than journey, let’s say. Today’s games, though easier, I find more pleasurable as I go as opposed to slogging endlessly through a repetitive task until I break through, somewhat by chance.
There is one other thing that I really disliked about this game beyond its throwback difficulty.
Something that comes to the forefront in these games, at least for those of us who suck, is a death or ending sequence. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal because you’re going to die a lot. Angry Birds is a good example of what I’m talking about here. I noticed that when playing that game, after you’ve launched all your birds and not succeeded, there’s a brief period where everyone is just kind of sitting around really soaking up your failure. It’s not a huge deal, but the hundredth time it happens it’s 100 times more upsetting, I think, based on the very little bit of math I’ve done just now with my mind. I don’t want the pause. No lag. I almost want to launch the bird and then be immediately reset to the beginning of the puzzle once the game realizes those pigs ain’t gonna die.
After dying in Alice there’s a brief pause. The screen says Fail. Then you’re kicked back out to the level select screen, as if you might want to go back a stage and die there for a while, maybe for the variety? Then you select the level. Then it tells you how many lives you have left. Then the level begins. Seriously, why? Why go through all this extra nonsense? I’m going to be dying a shitload. Cut me some slack, fellas.
Game #10: Solomon’s Keep
In this mini RPG you’re a wizard who has to fight an evil wizard. Wizards must be like the guns of the fantasy world. Some people argue that wizard control would really reduce the problems of the world, while others argue that they just need to become wizards themselves in order to better understand what wizards do and how they can benefit people. Ultimately it’s an endless cycle where the only solutions are wizards for ALL or wizards for NONE.
You know what I really dislike about fantasy realms? They reuse the same stuff all the time. How come everyone can just use wizards? Shouldn’t people have to make up their own stuff? It’s not like I can write a sci-fi book and just decide that I want to use Terminators. Or Predators. I at least have to disguise them a little, right?
Anyway, Solomon’s Keep is clearly way too involved to play for 15 minutes. I didn’t get anywhere. I fought a few skeletons and that’s about the extent of my adventuring by the time I talked to a bunch of people.
I will say, however, that I’m keeping it on my phone to play some more. And that though you have to talk to a bunch of shitheads before you get to do anything, you can scroll through the dialogue at your own pace by swiping your finger. It’s a pretty great way to control the dialogue speed, I have to say, and nothing’s worse than a game that forces you to read the dialogue as it’s typed on the screen. Stop doing that, games. Seriously. I wouldn’t make people sit and read this shit AS IT WAS BEING TYPED. Although that’s a novel idea, helpfulsnowman via instant message. It’s a bad novel idea, but novel.
Conclusion:
I’ll say this, you can get an awful lot of entertainment out of 15 minutes and trying ten games inside of a week, all for free.
The huge number of games, however, does distract a little from full exploration of each title. I’m sure there’s more to Temple Run than I give it credit. If this was 1989 and I had Alice on the NES, I’d probably play the shit out of it just because I wanted to see every stage.
Flipside, it’s pretty awesome that you can get so many free games almost instantly. One time I was at work and a guy brought a huge stack of books to the desk. He did this every week, and while I was checking them out to him I said, “Man, how do you get so much reading done very week?” He said, “Hell, I’ll probably read a couple pages of most of these and put them down. I MIGHT read one. There’s no award for reading bad books.”
I took that to heart. He’s right. There’s really no reason to read something that you’re not enjoying because there’s more out there to read than a person could ever conquer in a lifetime. So why bother? With games, there was a time when there really weren’t that many options. You’d own half a dozen and maybe rent one for five days. When you rented it, that’s what you had. You might as well play the hell out of it until there’s almost nothing left.
The good side is that you really explored great games, and I do think it encouraged game designers to put some little extras into their games when possible. The bad side is that a lot of us ended up spending a lot of time playing bad, broken games.
I’d encourage anyone to try these games for themselves. Let me know what you think. There’s no harm in it. No real consequence of disliking one of them. You lose some time, and I know that’s a commodity today, so if you’re looking to save some time I would say that I enjoyed Tiny Tower, Solomon’s Keep (potentially), and X Baseball the most. Between the three, you’ve got a sim type game in Tiny Tower, a longform RPG in Solomon’s Keep, and a mindless, quick bit of fun in X Baseball.
I know everyone is talking about the death of consoles. But after this little experiment I haven’t seen anything that’s ready to do the slaying. Seriously. There’s fun to be had, but as far as immersive game experiences, the natural fit of a controller as opposed to a phone is a huge thing, the screen size makes a gigantic difference, and even relatively tight iPhone controls would never cut it on a console.
What we may see is a reduction in casual players on consoles. Maybe consoles will become the exclusive territory of immersive gaming while casual gaming will be done on mobile devices. Maybe that’s why the Wii was a hit, then sort of fell to the wayside. The Wii came out right about the same time that casual mobile gaming hit, so maybe they divided the same audience.
Either way, I guess for me personally, when I want to play a game, I want to play a game. The quality of the gameplay and the fun factor are bigger for me than the convenience of getting the game in my hands.