Casual Ruination: Why SolitaireArcade is no longer a web domain
During what I consider the golden age of casual PC games, you
could get a subscription service from companies like Big Fish or
GameHouse, and get a decent game every month for less than
$10. I was a member of Big Fish for several years (and Game House too, for a shorter while), playing every
card solitaire I could get my hands on, and a fair number of Match-3, Hidden
Object, and other genres of games too.
In 2008, I bought the domain name
SolitaireArcade.com, intending to create a website to cover the wide
range of casual games which were then available, notably the solitaire
campaign game Fairway Solitaire (which has never been surpassed as a
solitaire adventure game), the Chocolatier series, and the original
Plants vs. Zombies. The first article I posted was a
detailed review of Fairway Solitaire; I wanted to write a detailed
walkthrough but could not get permission. PopCap granted me
permission to do one for Plants vs. Zombies, and promised to publicize
it (but never did so before they sold the company). Both of
those are still available here. I wrote a couple of reviews
(the flawed games Top Ten Solitaire and Winemaker Extraordinaire), but
never went any further (I thought about writing an article on The
Economics of Chocolatier, but didn't get beyond some notes and
statistics). Around 2019 I let the domain lapse (it's still
available today). What follows are some of the reasons why.
Smartphones
One of the two largest factors in what I call the ruination of
casual games is the gradual transition from full-sized personal
computers with large screens to smartphones (mainly iPhone and Android)
with screens (with the exception of iPads) ranging from small to
tiny. Even a 1920x1080 screen isn't really big enough
for a complex city-building game like Township or SimCity BuildIt: I
would love to play a native PC version of those with a larger screen
resolution. (And
why can't I make a panoramic
screenshot of a whole island in Zombie Castaways, or my entire town in
Township or SimCity BuildIt?). For a long while I played on
the Android emulator BlueStacks (more on thie below), but this brought
other problems. Recently I bought a Chromebook
which promised compatibility with the Android games on Google Play, but
found that Township was not fully supported on Chromebook (the
outside events cannot be played at all), and Plants vs. Zombies 2 would
not play at all. I eventually bought an Android
TV-box (an X88 Pro 10), a mini-PC which runs native
Android. This
allows the full Township game to be played in full-screen mode, though
at the cost of using the feeble Android operating system, which lacks a
built-in screenshot function (the third-party screenshot apps are very
poor). Township still ran more slowly than I would like, and the
Internet connection would cut out occasionally for a second (despite
being
connected by Ethernet); I am not sure
whether this is the fault of the program, the Android
box, or something else. Sometimes the entire game exits for no
reason
(especially in the exploration events which hog resources even worse
than Zoos),
and a few minutes of progress is lost, which is strange since the
program must be continously connected (why then isn't progress also
saved continously?).
Some games designed for smartphones are fixed in portrait mode, which
means that even on a large PC screen, with the app display stretched to
maximum, half the PC screen will be empty.
Free To Play
The second major ruination factor is Free to Play games, which can be downloaded and played for free. But the
term is mostly a lie, because most such games have add-ons
which cost money, and what you can do in the game is usually very
limited (or at least game progress is much slower) without add-ons.
Free to Play opened the door to greed, and in many cases actually made
gameplay worse: instead of using strategy to achieve game goals, you simply buy the goals.
Many games have at least two main forms of currency: coins, which are
usually plentiful and easy to replenish, and paper currency (I
generically call these greenbucks),
which are harder to obtain. [Strangely, SimCity is backwards in this regard: it is easier to
accumulate greenbucks in SimCity than coins.]. Often there are
are other currencies (SimCity has at least six or seven, notably different currencies for different locales), other
commodities like gems or precious metals, or various tokens which can
be used to buy things.
The first Free To Play game I ever
encountered was Fairway, the sequel to the huge 2007 PC hit Fairway
Solitaire. [I actually managed to finish Fairway without
buying any add-ons, for the first and only time. I am
currently experimenting with the economic game Train Station 2 to see
how far I can proceed without any in-game purchases.]
Plants vs. Zombies 2, which I started playing on BlueStacks in
2015,
has still never been released in a native Windows
version. At least here, many of the in-game purchases are for
permanent powerups which enhance game play (mostly powerful new
plants). In many games, real money is needed to buy in-game
currency, without which it is hard to make much
progress. I started to lose interest in Plants
vs. Zombies 2 when they stopped releasing new worlds and focused on the
competitive arena Battlez (spelling anything with z as a plural is a
red flag for me: it never ends well.)
Many of the things you can buy are (to me) unnecessary and
frivolous decorations and animations, which just clutter up the screen
and slow down the game. And why
would a game give me items I can no longer use (hedge trimmers in
Township, boosts for exhausted resources in Zombie Castaways)?
Most games have some verification mechanism for preventing accidental
greenbuck purchases, but these do not work in all cases: in Township,
for example, clicking on the button to buy more moves in a minigame (a
button that is, confusingly, the same green color as the Try Again button,
which makes it easy to click carelessly) does not ask you to verify
your purchase, as most other Township purchases do. It would make more sense to use green as the default color for purchases,
and make other buttons a different color, so you would get use to
associating green with spending greenbucks. Balloons
occasionally float over your town or the towns of friends, and are
incorrectly described as gifts, but most of them cost 3 greenbucks to
obtain. The same is true of many (though not all) of the treasure
chests found in the exploration minigame.
Comparison Tolerance
This is a term used, in the APL programming language, to refer to a
small value (epsilon) by which two values can differ and be considered
equal. I use it in casual games (almost all of which use
drag and drop) to refer to the margin around an object which allows it
to be selected as a destination without the mouse being placed exactly on the
object). In casual games designed for small smartphone
screens, this tolerance is set high because the player is using a thumb
or finger to select and move tiny objects and it is hard to be
precise. The problem is that when items are packed close
together, it is easy to select the wrong object even when you are
accurately pointing to the correct one (like helicopter orders in
Township, or factory commodities in SimCity). In card solitaires,
however, the tolerance is often set too low: when you are dragging a
card, you should be able to drop it at a destination even if only part
of the card is overlapping the target (provided there is no ambiguity
when a card overlaps two possible targets).
Time Limits
Part of the point of a casual game is that you can play for as long or
as short a time as you wish, playing every day for a stretch, then
leaving the game for weeks and returning exactly as you left
it. Many Free To Play games, however, have time limits for many
scenarios and special events, which makes the game much less casual (you almost have to play at least once a day), and increases
the pressure to buy stuff. Some games seem to
distrust the basic premise of the game and add too many additional
events (notably SimCity Build It, which adds several types of combat to
what should be a straightforward city building game).
Most Free To Play games have a bottleneck: some
commodity, currency, or necessity which is constantly in short supply
(e.g. tools in Township and Zombie Castaways, Simoleons in SimCity
Build It), which grinds the game to a halt, so
you often can't play for an extended period of time; you have to wait
for resources to be replenished. Tasks which require a certain
quiantity of an item to be produced often require just a bit more than
an even multiple of the number which can be produced at a time (for
example, asking for 37 milk when the cows can produce 18 at a time),
which seems childish.
Inventory Control
In addition to the flaws introduced by using drag-and-drop (and
especially mixing with single-click), most games have little inventory
control. Every single action must be carried out
individually, and every completed item must be collected by
clicking. This prevents, for example, setting up a series of
production orders where the product of one order is used for the next
order: if I am making steel from iron and girders from steel, I cannot
put girders into the production queue unless I already have enough
steel. There is no facility for freezing already-produced
items to reserve them for an upcoming order (e.g. a ship or plane),
which makes the tendency for games to ask for the same item in orders
from different sources even worse. Games where a large
order must be filled all at once (e.g. Railstation 2), so that you
cannot fill one bin of a ship, make the problem even worse (and
increase the pressure on warehouse limits).
How Many Ads Must I Watch?
In addition to the print ads which run constantly on the left side of
the BlueStacks screen, there are constant offers in exchange for
watching a 30-second video ad: most of these are for other
games. Most production games give
you extra resources for watching ads, but one game I was playing
suddenly started forced ads, which come up at random and offer no
benefit. This was later dropped, likely due to a negative reaction from players.
Where did all the sequels go?
While the two formal sequels to Chocolatier (Hidden Ingredients and
Decadence by Design) were improvements on the already good original,
none of the
similar games I have played (the closest were Lavender's Botanicals and
Winemaker Extraordinaire) were nearly as good. There
were two more games in the Chocolatier series: The Great Chocolate
Chase (for PC), and Sweet Society (for Facebook): both time management
games, and neither successful. It seems unlikely that we
will see any further games in the Chocolatier universe.
Fairway Solitaire had several remakes and sequels, one called simply
Fairway, and another Fairway Solitaire Blast: all were Free To Play
games, and none were improvements on the original. Plants vs.
Zombies had a number of sequels, but only Plants vs. Zombies 2 is the
same kind of lawn defense game (there is a third-person shooter series
called Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare). Plants
vs. Zombies 3 has appeared in test versions in various locations, but
at the moment is not available. It appears that the trend
is to design endless games (e.g. Zombie Castaways) instead of
fixed-length games.
The Sad State of Solitaire
While there are a number of good card solitaire omnibus packages
(particularly BVS Solitaire and Pretty Good Solitaire, and the online
Politaire), I haven't seen a good solitaire adventure game since the
original Fairway Solitaire. Most campaign solitaires are
just a string of random levels, without any sense of
advancement. They are overly dependent on two main
mechanisms: discarding pairs (variations of Nestor) and discarding in
sequence (Golf); these are usually gummed up with unnecessary
frills. There are dozens of other suitable mechanisms which
have never or rarely been used.
Township has, as one of its rotating minigames, a solitaire/Mah Jongg
game they call Matchy Patch, in which you must discard three tiles of the
same kind at a time, with seven available freecells for temporary
storage (so it is sort of a cross between Nestor and FreeCell).
But you can't discard a trio of tiles directly: you must put all three
in empty cells, where the game will discard them
automatically. [Shenzhen Solitaire, a recent original variation
of the Eight Off family, uses a similar mechanism for discarding
dragons.] The mechanism doesn't work very well: it seems that
almost every level is either trivial (open tableaus with few deep
piles) or almost impossible (many deep piles). Some of the
levels are marred by hidden stacked tiles within what appear to be open
piles. The graphics are uneven (it is difficult to
tell some of the tiles apart, especially when mostly covered, and even
worse with the silly distraction of gold tiles). The tiles
appear to be clumped together rather than dealt randomly: nearly every
level ends with one or two stacks of the same tile. It is
hard to play fast, even though the interface is straight clicking with
no drop and drag: each tile you click on goes straight to a vacant
cell, but tiles are often missed if you click too fast, especially when
the game is autodiscarding.
The Problems with Puzzles
Some of the puzzle games require you to watch an ad
after every single level you win. This is aggravated by the
fact that nearly all of the pure puzzle games start with completely
trivial puzzles, and take a good number of levels before the puzzles
start getting interesting. Many of the color sorting apps miss the whole point of the puzzle:
if you can move any ball from anywhere to any open space, all of the
strategic challenge is lost and it becomes a trivial mechanical exercise.
BlueStacks
Plants vs. Zombies was a huge PC hit for PopCap, but they stabbed
their supporters in the back by announcing that the sequel would be
developed for Android and would not immediately [never, it now seems]
be ported to PC. Not having a smartphone when Plants vs.
Zombies 2 was announced for
Android (and not being willing to play on a tiny screen later when I
did have an Android phone), I tried out a number of Android emulators
for PC. BlueStacks was the only emulator I was able to get to run properly. But BlueStacks was, at least at the time, a slow and
resource-hogging emulator, eating lots of memory and CPU: when I was
running it I could only run one game at a time, and could not
simultaneously have a browser or any other large apps
running. It had frequent upgrades, which never went
smoothly, and bugs in individual games took ages to be
fixed. The free version was inundated with ads,
and eventually I paid a relatively modest
annual fee for ad-free service, but there were still regular ads for
other games and offers for free items (which often didn't work). Some of the ads were offers for in-game items in exchange for trying out a new game: not the worst idea, except that they kept asking you to try a game you've already tried and hated.
Part of the trouble was that there were too many fingers in the pie:
playing Township, for example, involved BlueStacks, Google, Facebook,
and the publisher Playrix at the very least. It's hard to know
where the blame lies when problems arise. Nevertheless,
I played a number of games regularly: the best were
Plants vs. Zombies 2, Township, SimCity BuildIt, and Zombie
Castaways. I spent
many hours (and
many dollars) playing these and other games.
Eventually, after several upgrades, BlueStacks stopped working on my
PC, and my time playing Android games was over until I upgraded to a
Windows 10 mini-PC, which can run BlueStacks. I am playing a
few games there, but recently Plants
vs. Zombies 2 (which I am on my third time through) stopped working
after a new release, and BlueStacks customer service was unable to help me run it again. Because BlueStacks is so
CPU-intensive, it causes my mini-PC to get very hot after a few hours
of play (though I've been assured this is not dangerous).
Recently, Google released a beta version of Google Play for PC, but
this is yet another simulator and does not, for example, run the full
Township. It also has a strange incompatibility with
BlueStacks: BlueStacks will not run in Windows 10 or 11 unless the
Windows Hyper-V feature is turned off, but Google Play for PC will not
run unless it is turned on. So since I am running
BlueStacks, Google Play Beta is out of the picture at the moment, which
doesn't matter much right now, since the selection of games which runs
on Google Play Beta, even on a brand new Windows 11 computer, is
extremely limited. I did eventually get Nox, another
emulator, to run under Windows 11. Windows 11 also
supports a native Android subsystem, but this appears to run only the
very limited number of Android games available on Amazon, not the
enormous selection on Google Play in native Android mode.
Steam
Steam, a platform for PC games, picked up the original Plants vs.
Zombies soon after it was published, and added a set of achievements,
almost all of which were soon incorporated into PopCap's Game of the Year
edition. They have subsequently picked up other games in the series
like Garden Warfare, all of which are different genres of games and
none of which are true sequels. I don't know whether Steam pushed for
a PC release of Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time, but if they did,
they were unsuccessful. Steam has its own issues, most notably that a
game designed for Steam may not run on every Steam installation (I
have run into this problem more than once). It's also a
resource hog, though not as much as BlueStacks. The only Steam
games I
currently have installed are the original card solitaire game Shenzhen
Solitaire (an interesting game implemented badly), and the Sandwich
Sudoku puzzle from Cracking the Cryptic,
and I do not frequently play either. In fact, now I cannot
play
Steam at all on Windows 7 because the login system stopped working, and
there seems no way to transfer progress data to a newer machine.
Facebook
I used to have a Facebook account during the time period when they
started
getting into online social games. My favorite game was
Frontierville, a simple but pleasant farming game. Facebook
eventually abandoned casual games (and their players), except that many
games use Facebook to identify you for saving data and finding friends
for the game. Chocolatier also had a Facebook game
called Sweet Society, which was a time management game rather than an
economic game. Sweet Society didn't last very long, and seemed to
spell the end of the Chocolatier series (it seems unlikely at this
point that Chocolatier 4 will ever be published).
Poor Design
Many games, especially city-building and exploring games,
have a large playing area which must be scrolled across, as it is far
too big to fit on even a large PC screen. Some games (Seaport and
SimCity Build It) make this worse with a large number of obtrusive
menus
surrounding the entire screen. When the screen is scrolled
or refreshed, menus can
often be hit accidentally (or maybe on purpose from the game's design
standpoint, if you click on purchases by mistake).
I have enjoyed very few of the side minigames which are included
in many games (Township and Zombie Castaways in
particular). They range from trivial to nearly impossible,
and are sometimes mandatory to make progress in the game. One of the few I would call excellent is the factory setup shooting game in the Chocolatier series.
The concept of finishing a game seems to be disappearing too: why let a
game end when you can just add more levels and more opportunity to make
money? Zombie Castaways is a particular offender in
this area: I assumed the game would end soon after the player character
turned back from zombie to human, but the game went on with no sign of
ending, and I gave up without finding out if it ever does.
By and large, the games are not designed as realistic simulations, but
some of the recipes for making items in factories are either factually
incorrect (Coffee Cake isn't made from coffee; it's a pastry designed
to be eaten while drinking coffee), or seriously deficient in
logic. The Press factory in Spring Valley: Farming Adventures
requires you to make a bottle or jar for each item like Sugar Syrup,
some of which are components of further items which need another
container, but you can happily churn out dozens of bottles of milk a
day without making bottles (allowing those to be reused would add a
pleasant environmental component). This is particularly irksome
since bottles and jars have to be made from Glass, which is slow to
make and requires a lot of Sand, further overloading the Workshop,
which is also needed to turn out Rope and other items in large
quantities.
A More Detailed Look at Township, SimCity Build It, and others
Township and SimCity Build It [hereafter SimCity for short] are the
best of the
farming/development games I have played, but a number of factors keep
them from being great games. Many of these are related to
being Free To Play games, or being designed for small screens, but they
both have quite a few other flaws as
well. I will go into detail about their drawbacks, using
them as examples because I have played them the most. Most other
FTP/Android games share
many of the same deficiencies.
The first drawback is the slowness of the game. Township
and SimCity use a large amount of computing and internet resources,
partly because they must be connected to the Internet constantly while
playing (is every mouse action sent over the server?), partly
because there is a huge amount of animation going on on every square
inch of the map (more so in Township), and partly because they use an
inefficent drag-and-drop
interface for almost every game action. This makes it
impossible to carry out even the simplest actions quickly and smoothly,
like scrolling the map, sowing fields (Township doesn't help this by
placing the farming fields at an oblique angle), feeding animals, and
setting up and collecting from factories (SimCity's drag and drop is
even worse than Township's, frequently skipping a production spot or
picking up the wrong item because the comparison tolerance
is too high: more on this below). Map scrolling competes
with a second interface in Township which puts you into Edit
Mode if you hold the mouse down on a particular spot (completely
unnecessary since there is a button on the screen to put you into Edit
Mode); frequently, simply scrolling puts you into Edit Mode
accidentally (or into the many side menus in SimCity). In
addition to the excessive background
animation, Township has completely frivolous and pointless animation of
simple
tasks, like feeding animals and filling zoo orders, which wastes time
for no
reason. There are three separate maps; one for your town,
one for the Zoo, and a third for the four islands where you send ships
(plus any towns or Zoos you visit to help friends and co-op members
with orders). These load slowly (especially Zoos).
SimCity is extremely slow when moving to another city.
The general interface for Township leaves a lot to be desired: there
should be
a way to freeze goods being saved for a plane order (the same goods
will often be
requested by helicopter orders). Many of the status
indicators are in the wrong place: a bulletin board summarizing zoo
orders can be found outside the zoo entrance, but is inaccessible from
within the zoo. There used to be a status number indicating
how many open zoo orders there were, but this was removed in an
update, along with the status of your current regatta task, which used
to be on the main screen (now you have to scroll and click on the
regatta dock to see your status). Status of the currently
active Event tasks cannot be seen on the minigame screen (either the
main adventure screen or the Match-2 or Match-3 game); you would have
to leave the adventure and go back to the main screen and click on the
Rewards ticket to see the three current tasks and their status.
The tasks can change midgame; the moment a task is completed, even in
the middle of e.g. a Match-3 game, a new task is assigned.
This should properly be shown instantly to the player rather than
forcing them to fly blind.
Resources
The most fatal flaw in Township is the lack of resources. For one
example, the game requires four different sets of tools (three
different tools in each set) for digging in the mine, expanding barn
space, expanding territory, and building Community
Buildings. In addition, three types of building materials
are needed to build both Community Buildings and Zoo
enclosures. The three trains which come every three
or four hours carry around ten cars in all, way too little to provide
enough of 12 different tools and commodities. The three
extra tools (circular saws, jackhammers, and drills) needed to build
Community Buildings are not brought by train; they must be obtained at
the Tool Exchange by trading building materials (concrete, glass, and
brick) for the needed tools (the only other way to get them is to pay
50 bucks in Township Cash for each tool, ridiculous when a typical
building may need 30 or more of two different tools, plus over 100 of
one kind of building material). The deals at the Tool Exchange
are random and are updated once an hour, and often ask for the same
material you are trying to accumulate. Even when they are asking
for the other two materials, it drastically slows down the accumulation
of those materials for building Zoo enclosures. At the time I am
writing this, I am at level 94, and while I have accumulated every
animal card I need to complete the 50 Zoo families, I have three
enclosures started, but nowhere near completion due to lack of building
materials, and nine enclosures I have not even started to build
yet. It's not only the building resources which are
inadequate: the game
uses at least five different forms of currency: greenbucks (here called Township
cash, earned mostly from special achievements), coins, gems (which are
found in the mines and awarded for sending off planes), ingots (which
must be smelted from nuggets dug from the mine), and clovers (awarded
for filling orders for other players). The lack of
resources even extends to tasks in regattas (competitions where you and
the members of your co-op try to complete more tasks than other
co-ops). A co-op can have as many as 30 members, and there
are at most only 12 tasks available at a time for the whole co-op, and
some of them are bad (taking too long or not being worth enough
points); tasks can be dumped, but this leaves a spot vacant for half an
hour. Even worse is allowing members to reserve a task
while working on another, which cuts the available tasks even further.
In SimCity, the lack of Simoleons (coins used to buy new buildings
and
upgrade existing ones, as well as other purchases) will be felt
constantly throughout the game, unless you spend a lot of actual money
to buy greenbucks (which can be converted into coins at a rather
exhorbitant exchange rate).
Accumulating coins for a large purchase (Airport, Recycling Center,
etc.) takes a very long time when the residents are clamouring
constantly for upgrades to city services (police, fire, health, water,
power, and waste disposal). Visitors arrive frequently to
request products in exchange for coins: some of these are products you
badly need to expand your city or storage, but sometimes the prices they offer
for common items are well above market value (but you have no way of knowing that without taking notes; another design flaw).
Lack of resources is a common flaw in many FTP games; not only are
the
resources inadequate in general, but frequently there are three
resources needed to complete various tasks, and one of the three always
seems in especially short supply (e.g. red building tickets in Train
Station 2). In Spring Valley, factories are a serious
bottleneck, partly because many factories are overloaded with too many
different items (in kind and quantity) to make, partly because they
require resources which have to be dug up with limited energy, and also
because you can only run factories simultaneously if you have enough
power, which is slow to build up. Critical items
(such as hammers) needed for building certain items are in constantly
short supply because they can only be obtained from special bulletin
board orders. Postcards needed to raise friendship levels are
also hard to get because they can only be obtained one at a time from
filling (some) airplane orders. Airplane orders are very similar
to those in Township and SimCity, but much harder because you have no
help from outside friends, coupons, or a marketplace where you can buy
needed items. You have to make everything needed for
the orders, and they are usually not common items.
Minigames
The minigames in Township are generally awful: the Match-3 and
Match-2
games are
among the least enjoyable I have played: random, gimmicky, and overly
dependent on various powerups (both those created in play and extra
powers randomly received as gifts). There are three levels of
difficulty: normal, Hard, and Super Hard, but there is no consistency
in how they are labelled: I have taken dozens of tries to solve many
normal levels, and occasionally solved a Hard or even Super Hard on the
first try with moves to spare. On the other hand, some of the
Super Hard (and even Hard) levels are almost impossible to complete
without spectacular luck (having the strongest powerups occur at
random), using several of the extermal powerups (e.g. wiping out an
entire row or column), or buying extra moves at the end of a game when
you are close to victory. There are very few levels of
medium difficulty: almost all of levels labelled normal are either
ridiculously easy (and often too short to accumulate much for the
campaign tasks) or much too hard, with most of the playing field locked
up at the start, and a very limited number of moves to complete the
level. Explosive powerups are placed at the beginning of a
level when the previous level was won, or when the player selects them
before starting, but these sometimes don't help at all
Often they are placed in a spot which breaks up a large existing color
group, or the level is so constricted at the start that exploding them
has little value, or there may be no other moves available, so you have to
waste them immediately (the game only shuffles tiles when no moves at
all are available, which happens far too often).
One of the nastiest tricks Township plays is to stick you in a nearly
impossible Super Hard level,
needing e.g. blue tiles for one of the three current Event tasks, but
finding there are no blue tiles at all in the level (and there is no
way to skip a level; you must complete it, even if you have to pay 10,
25, or even 45 bucks for extra turns). One on occasion this
happened to me on three consecutive levels. One bizarre flaw is
that
when you run out of moves, a message pops up which covers most of the
screen, asking if you want to buy more moves. But it is hard to
see whether you are close enough to make it worthwhile when the playing
field is almost completely covered! Surely players would be
more apt to spend greenbucks if they could tell how close they were to
finishing.
The mining subgame, which runs continuously, has an
automatic scrolling
feature which has a serious flaw: when there is a long cascading series
of explosions, ore you have uncovered may scroll vertically off the
screen before you can collect it. Giving the player manual
control over scrolling would eliminate this problem and increase skill
by allowing more planning ahead. The mining game is rather
dull,
even if you use the powerup which allows you to see all the hidden ore
and tools. The icon for the pickaxe is inexplicably large and harder to place accurately.
The silliest Township minigame is Pirate Treasure,
which allows you to accumulate prizes (coins, resources, and eventually
greenbucks) by randomly picking cards from a selection of four
cards. One of the four cards is a Black Mark card (actually purple) showing crossed cutlasses; drawing this card loses
all of the accumulated prizes, unless you pay a substantial number of
greenbucks to continue. There is a prize of 500 greenbucks
if you make 30 successful picks in a row: the odds of this without
paying to continue is about 1 in 5600, assuming the game is random.
Friends and Trading
Township has a decent interface for adding friends to the game (they
can be added in-game, and the game itself gives friend
requests). This gives you lots of people you can help (and
ask for help) with orders, and you can also join a co-op which may have
up to 30 people who act as additional friends, and allow you to compete
in regatta competitions. The interface for dealing with
co-op members is far superior to the one for friends: you can request
specific items from your co-op, and fill others' requests without even
leaving your city. You can only help non-co-op friends by
periodically sifting through their requests for help in filling
individual orders for trains, plains, and zoos, which is very
time-consuming.
SimCity's interface is terrible, requiring you to go through Facebook, or
sending
an invitation code to your real-life friends and
acquaintances. There are clubs you can join, but I can't
even see how to invite fellow members as friends. SimCity
also has a terrible mechanism, the Global Trade HQ, for buying and
selling items. You cannot directly sell items (as you can in
Township) or even dump them (as you can in Train Station 2) to make
room in City Storage: you must put them up for sale (up to five at a
time) in one of your six initial slots; this removes them from your
storage
quota, but you have to wait for someone to buy them before getting
coins for them. [You can buy extra permanent trading slots
for 10 greenbucks each.] In order to buy items, you have to
look
through 20 items at a time being advertised for sale (usually clogged
with irrelevant
junk or multiple copies of easy-to-make items): you cannot request a
particular item. If you find something you want to buy, you
have to travel to another player's city (slow again), where you can buy
that item (sometimes sold before you arrive) and anything else they
have
for sale. You can also sometimes get a parting gift, but
you have to scroll around their city (luckily faster than scrolling
your own,
since there are no menus or messages to interfere), looking for a Gift
icon which is the same light blue color as the For Sale icon (why not
use a different color?).
Many games provide (once a day or so) ships, planes, or other
conveyances which can be filled with orders and sent off when
full. Most games handle this well, allowing individual crates to
be filled as orders are completed. Rail Station 2 badly botches
it, however, requiring the entire order (sometimes 400 items or more!) to
sit in the player's storage until the entire order is
complete. It also has a conceptual flaw: manufactured
items take up the same amount as space as the raw materials used to
make them, so you cannot save storage space by manufacturing items, as
you can in most games like Township and SimCity; the only way to gain
space is by shipping items out, or actually throwing away items from
storage (they can't be sold). Making the matter even worse is that items can
only be manufactured in large batches, increasing the pressure on the
storage limit, and there are severe constraints on what trains can be
used to fill particular orders, making it much harder to gain space by
filling multiple orders (there is also a limit on the number of dispatchers, which controls how many trains can be sent
at a time). All in all, Rail Station's production and
storage system is a disaster.
Cloud Storage
I never got a clear answer to where my game data was being stored,
but
I lost all of my data (and all of my progress) at different times for both Plants vs. Zombies 2
and SimCity BuildIt, and had to start over from scratch in both cases
(at least Google Play preserved my upgrade purchases for
PvZ2). If it was being stored on the internet, why did I
have to backup all of my data when upgrading BlueStacks? If
it's stored on my PC, why did I have to be online
continuously? And in either case, why was my data lost?
Anti-Social Social Games
Although a number of games, e.g. Township, Seaport, and SimCity
BuildIt,
are billed as social games (and give some opportunity to interact with
other players in-game), they provide no mechanism to contact people
outside the game (through e-mail, Facebook, Google, or other
means), and actually discourage players from giving out personal
information, even something as trivial as an e-mail address. Some games even limit the number of in-game friends
to a relatively small number of people, to protect profit, as friends
can help achieve goals which would otherwise need resources that must
be bought.
The State of Play Today
Most of the games I am interested in today which run on Windows PCs are
card solitaire packages (such as Pretty Good Solitaire and BVS
Solitaire) and puzzle games (e.g. Everett Kaser's series of logic
puzzles, notably Sherlock and Honeycomb Hotel). The field
of solitaire adventures seems completely dominated by clones of Nestor
(pair matching) and Golf (sequence discarding), most of which consist
merely of a series of different layouts with a loose theme connecting
them. In the field of regular solitaire apps, there are a
flood of alternate versions of popular games: FreeCell alone has over
250 versions on Android, not even counting omnibus packages which
include it. It's not clear to me why anyone would put up a
new version of Klondike or FreeCell on Android or iOS unless it had
some really startling new features. Match-3, Match-2, and
Hidden Object games also rely heavily on the same mechanisms repeated
over and over: I have played a number of these, and it is rare to see
something really original.
Copyright ©2024 by Michael Keller. All rights reserved.
This article was edited most recently on August 10, 2024.