Cell Phones and Gaming

I recently got a new smartphone. I asked for something decent that I could take good pictures with (I did not mention outright to the employee that it was to take pictures of my cats) and I took the first thing he showed me because it was free with a 100 dollar mail in rebate, was clearly leagues ahead of my old phone, and seemed fine from the 5 minutes I fiddled with it.

Turned out it was actually a pretty powerful phone with 2GB of ram. So, naturally, now that I had a powerful electronic device intended to be used to communicate with other people, I started looking for games to play on it to avoid communicating with people.

I've written before about idle games, and how I actually like them, and had previously been looking at some sort of dragon game that cookie clicker was advertising, but it was not available on the web.

obviously I want to play this

It was the first game I downloaded on my new phone. It follows the same general guidelines as cookie clicker - click/tap on the egg/gem for points, buy things that give you auto-points, so you can get points faster and buy better things that give you more points even faster so you can buy better things that give you more points... etc. The only thing is, because it was a cell phone game, it had an obligatory 'pay to win' item you can purchase with real money. Of course it did.

A Dark Room

Sometimes great games come in unassuming, text based, browser windows. A Dark Room, also a game for iOS, is a text based, somewhat role playing, idle game that begins with nothing more than... a dark room.

It was released on browser in 2013, and became available in the app store in 2014. There is also a prequel, which was released after the first game like some kind of Star Wars, but it's not available on the web.

Before I played the game, I had no more knowledge of it than the general idea that I would be creating some kind of small town and it was quite the roller coaster ride. Be aware that everything past this paragraph will reveal parts of the story! The fact that I would be worried about spoiling the plot of a text based idle game should be a pretty good indication that it gets pretty interesting. If you're already intrigued, go ahead and ignore the rest of this post (or, you know, come back later if you'd like to read the words that I typed).

Idle Gaming - When You're Too Lazy to Actually Game

unrealistic number of cookies

Ah, idle games. The very phrase elicits feelings of... staring vacantly at numbers. Endlessly clicking on things to earn resources to build and buy more things to get more resources to build or buy other things that give you more or maybe different resources to use to buy and build... other things and, sometimes, you... don't really know why you're playing.

Currently, the most famous of these games is probably cookie clicker. It's probably also the best example of one of the addictive power of these games. If you've ever been sucked in by an idle game, then you already know what I mean. The thing about most games like these is there really isn't... a point.

The goal feels like it's to accumulate more resources and build all the things to completion, but some games have no end. Some games add incentives to restart your game, putting you spiraling into an infinite loop of cookies or cabbages or what have you. Some of them do end, but to be honest, the end is always disappointing.

Idle games have been around for quite a long time - I remember playing one when I was still in middle school, in the early 2000s, before the term "idle game" was even coined. Now, there are a ton of them, sometimes their addictive powers being used for evil, exploiting the 'idle' aspect of them to riddle the games with microtransactions...

...while some people genuinely make great idle games for entertainment.

World of Clash of Clans - Now on Android!

put your follower tokens into the loot slot machine!

I've noticed a lot of discussion about follower missions being uninteresting. The whole process is reminiscent of a time-gated mobile app game that doesn't actually require you to "play" or interact with the process in any way other than setting it into motion.

While I can see where they are coming from with their opinion, I think that one of the biggest things keeping people from enjoying the aspect of follower missions is that they aren't looking at it from within the game.

What I mean from this is people are looking at follower missions as a drag and drop UI function that spits out gold and loot rather than what it represents.