BIT.TRIP RUNNER

RELIEF! The long, infuriating, eye tiring, carpal tunnel inducing BIT.TRIP RUNNER binge I've been on for the past two days has finally come to a close. I beat that motherfucker. High fives all around!

If you're not familiar with BIT.TRIP RUNNER, it's basically a platformer, but it's a platformer in which you are constantly charging heedlessly toward oncoming death. There's no stopping. It's all about reaction time, jumping, sliding, kicking, and blocking your way through a boxy pixel world full of obstacles. Well...it's about reaction time and learning from mistakes...lots of mistakes. Each level requires you to perform the appropriate action at the appropriate time or you'll bump into an obstacle and be sent back to the beginning of the level. There's no health meter. You touch anything you're not supposed to touch, and you start over.

This repetitiveness results in the user becoming very familiar with each level they're struggling with. I knew exactly which objects were coming up. I knew I had to jump, slide, jump here and slide, jump, block there. Each level you'd be faced with an entirely new configuration of obstacles, and many times, at first glance, they seemed impossible and you'd die immediately, but after failing a few dozen times, you'd be getting through those "impossible" bits unconsciously. Then you'd get to some unfamiliar territory, and start wiping again, slowly adding to your mental map of what you need to do. Repeat this learning process until you cross the level's finish line. Then you can start failing anew in the next level.

Some of the levels are surprisingly easy, and I would be waiting the entire level for the other shoe to drop. In these instances, I'd cross the finish line without issue and be perplexed, feeling a trick was about to be played on me. Other levels are ridiculously long and treacherous and make me want to punch babies and scream at the computer. Sometimes I did. The screaming part...not the baby punching part. Observe Exhibit A...



With this game being so much about timing, it got harder and harder the later it got because I was getting tired. My reaction time slowed, my eyes started getting bleary, and my left hand looked a bit like a claw when I removed it from the keyboard. I'm pretty sure I stopped blinking at times to keep an eye on what was coming up. Blinking...that's when they get ya.

Last night, I went to bed at 2AM, after playing for multiple hours. The second to last level kept tripping me up, but the stubbornness in me wouldn't let me quit even though my logical brain knew my level of accuracy was declining the later I played. I went to bed defeated, and when I awoke this morning, the first thing I did was play this damn game. After a night of sleep, I beat the level that was haunting my dreams in a few tries. Lesson Learned: BIT.TRIP RUNNER is not an "I'm about to go to bed" game. I needed to know when to cut myself off.

Overall, BIT.TRIP RUNNER was quite fun, but it was certainly frustrating and made me yell many obscenities. That type of passionate yelling is usually reserved for football season. Sorry neighbors.

CivCity: Rome

Ah..."CivCity: Rome". I picked you up last October during the Extra Life 24-hour Charity Gaming Marathon. For the first 18 hours of that marathon, I powered through "Batman: Arkham City" from start to finish. After beating that, I was tired, sick of using a controller, and just wanted a game that was kind of running itself while I could also watch TV for a change of pace. Multi-tasking, bitches. These type of building games, like real-time strategy games, have a tendency to make me draw out missions way longer than they should. Build slow, watch em work...it's kind of calming.

Well...usually it's calming.

Apparently, back in October, when the last 6 hours of the marathon ended and I went into my sleep coma, I had left the game in the middle of a high stress campaign that required some skill that I had built up in those 6 hours of play but had since lost in the months that followed. The mission required me to send bushels of wheat to Rome whenever asked...which was frequently. Pushy emperor... If you missed the deadline, Caesar got pissed. I had forgotten everything I once knew in this game since I had successfully ignored its existence for 9+ months. Not knowing stuff made it difficult to plan a proper city. I needed wheat farms and mills and a trade dock and a large boatyard, a shit ton of wood... It was all very stressful, and as the months passed and each wheat deadline approached I watched my little workers scurry around, and I yelled at my screen, "HURRY YOU LOAFS!"

This was the opposite of calming. Because of my mad dash to mass produce wheat, I didn't organize my city very well, and it made it hard to upgrade my housing later because everything was thrown together...like Homer trying to put together a barbecue pit.

I couldn't for the life of me get their houses to upgrade to Large Insulas. The lazy bastards wouldn't go across the street to the bathhouse. More yelling of "IT'S RIGHT FUCKING THERE!" ensued. So many hours wasted trying to relearn the game and reorganize this shit show that I had created. (No more stopping playing a game halfway through. This I vow.) I finally completed this mission and had the chance to move on.

Moving forward, there were oodles of cities to choose from. Some peaceful missions, some military. Too many choices. Hate it. That's the same reason I hate Subway. Do I have to tell you every fucking thing? Can't I just point at the board and say gimme that one?

I have digressed.

This was one of the problems I have with this game. There is clearly a progression from easy to hard that is present in the missions presented, but cruelly they just give you all the options on the map and say "Just pick one, idiot." while I'm sure they quietly laugh amongst themselves at your expense. I looked up all the missions online, and I had apparently been a moron and picked one of the fairly difficult ones previously. If there's a logical progression of difficultly in the missions, make me do them in the right order. Save me from myself. The system they use is terrible because:

1. It makes it possible to play a mission that's way above your skill level, which makes you say bad things about yourself, and could result in rage quitting.
2. Having a shit ton of missions to choose from is kind of overwhelming. I thought this game might go on forever, but thankfully, the internet was helpful in debunking those thoughts.
3. When you complete a mission, that city isn't removed from the map. You can play it over and over. Why the hell would I want to do that? Your game is fun, but it ain't THAT fun.

After the growing pains of my first return mission, I got back on the right progression path and slowly eased into the rest of the game. It was back to being calming again. I built slow and managed my output of goods better. There's a bit of pride that happens when you only have to use one Granary, which fills up and empties out consistently, and everyone gets their rations. I found the exact right balance of food production to people. Awww yiss.

Each new mission, I got better at building up my city and upgrading the houses quicker. I mostly stuck to the Peaceful campaign, not because I'm averse to fighting or some such shit, but because the combat system in the game is really kind of terrible. You build structures to house and train your military, and then when people come a fightin', you take your soldiers out and run them toward the attacking horde. They clang clang clang a little bit, and then it's over. It's not fun. It's not hard. It just...is. Le sigh.

While we're on the complaint train, I just want to say that Civilization Rating is a bitch as a mission objective. I never quite figured out what made it go up, and it's infuriating because it slowly decays, decreasing your Rating over time. I thought building a Wonder (giant showy structures) would bump up my Civilization Rating tremendously. No dice. You gain as much with a Wonder as you do with adding a shrubbery. COME ON! Plus, because it takes a long time to build and they're ginormous, they play this ridiculously long video where it pans around the Wonder to show off the "beautiful" 3D structure. By the time they're done ogling the Wonder, what little Civ Rating I gained has already decayed away. Great...

This was the biggest hurdle in the final mission. I had gotten really good at upgrading housing so that I got to the Palaces stage without too much consternation. I just had to get loads more people and bump up my Civ Rating to 95. Getting more people was easy. Build more structures. Ones that don't create any new materials or products because it'd screw up my delicate warehouse inventory balance. More structures mean more jobs, and more jobs bring all the boys to the yard. Population huge. Check. Onto Civ Rating.

Like I said, I still haven't quite figured this out. It did seem that temples bumped it up 1 point for each temple. This led to much chaos. I just wanted to finish the game, and I was so close, so I just started throwing shit anywhere. More temples, more temples...okay, stop temples. Now, gardens. A shit ton of gardens! Now some purdy statues. AHHHHH! The Civ Rating is going down the longer I wait. Just throw stuff anywhere! Click, click, click, click...clickclickclick! God, this looks awful. My nice organized town looks terrible now. Fuck it, more trees!!

That did the trick, but I felt kind of dirty afterward. It was like a giant statue vomited baby statues all over town.

Despite the issues I mentioned, "CivCity: Rome" is still a good game. Once I started getting the hang of managing my town efficiently, the game became incredibly addictive. Who wouldn't like a game that makes you shout things like "Go take a bath!", "Go to church!", "Shut up! It's fine!", and "There's olive oil in that warehouse, ya fucks!" Once I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I ran heedlessly toward it. I played til 3 in the morning last night; I played during my lunch hour; I played during our 20 minute break at work. I have a nasty habit of not finishing these types of games because they require such a time investment, but I kicked this one's ass, and I'm proud to knock another game off my backlog list.

Tiny Tower

I have yet to talk about any mobile games in this blog, and I never really intended to as I don't really count them among my backlog. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that most mobile games have no win condition. They're designed to be a quick distraction you can use to pass the time while you're on a bus or possibly sitting on the terlet.

However, I feel compelled to describe my experience with "Tiny Tower". There's something about Nimblebit games that suck you in against your will. It happened with "Pocket Planes", it happened with "Tiny Tower". I remember telling people multiple times that it is absolutely no fun but for some reason I keep playing it.

First, let me describe what "Tiny Tower" actually is. It's a management game. You are in charge of a tower in which you will build floor upon floor infinitely toward the sky. That's basically it.

You have a lobby and an empty floor, to start, to put either a residential apartment area, food establishment, retail store, recreation location, service, or creative business. You move people, called Bitizens, into your residences, but they can't just spend all their time holed up at home. These motherfuckers have needs...like Froyo. Build it and they will come.

The Froyo won't function without workers though. That's fine. I have a whole floor of people loafing in the residence I have renamed Shithole Apts. Swish. Each Bitizen you assign to an establishment will unlock a new commodity that is sold there, with three being the maximum number of workers at any one location.

Choose a product to purchase and after waiting an inordinately long amount of time, it will be ready to stock. Lather, rinse, repeat and your shop will be fully stocked with all three available items. But what's this? Eileen Miller hates her job at the Frozen Yogurt stand, as evidenced by her frowny face. I would be a terrible human being to allow her to continue this unfulfilling digital existence. She just won't be happy unless she's working in the recreation industry. It is her dream to work at a bowling alley. Dream big, Eileen.

Well, I'm raking in the frozen yogurt money and can build another story to this tower. I'll build a random recreation business, so I can whisk Eileen away from her personal hell.

What? It's going to take 14 hours to build this?!

Wow...this game is really no fun at all, yet I keep checking to see if my inventory needs to be restocked. I reorder and restock the shelves as necessary as construction of my new floor trudges on. If I leave these bastards to their own devices, we sell out of product, and they all go home. Get back to work you loafs.

That seems to be the key to the addictive quality of these games. It requires constant management. It's not fun, but it requires you to check up on your Bitizens numerous times during the day lest your whole tower ecosystem grind to a halt. Everything takes time to build or restock, and this keeps you coming back. For the impatient out there, you can speed this up though, with TOWER BUX! You can gain these slowly by playing the game or you can buy them immediately with real moneys. It's genius really... Who wants to wait 15 hours to build a Hat Shop? I got shit to do. (Note: I have never spent money on microtransactions, and I don't intend to, but there are apparently people out there that are making this monetization system feasible or it wouldn't exist. Right? Right.)

Anyway, I waited the whole time, used TOWER BUX I accumulated in-game, or used the various VIPs that arrived in my lobby to speed up the process when I chose, without spending actual money and slowly built up a total of 38 floors. I even went home on vacation and kept playing it. All while I was there, I tried to explain to my Mom why this game was terrible and that I wasn't quite sure why I kept playing. The Brainy Gamer wrote an article which echoed my experience of forced unfun. (You can read that here. He's way more eloquent than I and curses much less, if you're into that sort of thing.)

"Tiny Tower" is a hamster wheel. When you get enough money, you can build more floors, which require more workers, which require more residential areas to house them, which requires more floors, and so on and so forth. I was trying to form some sort of exit strategy because I wasn't enjoying myself but couldn't quite tear myself away. The way I usually do away with a game is to beat it. How was I to get that feeling of accomplishment in this sort of game?

My only hope were the missions. There were only...75 of them. *gulp* These missions require you to collect a certain amount items for a particular event and only one could be active at a time. Example: The "A Day at the Beach" mission requires 900 Sandals from a Shoe Store, 13,500 Tournaments from a Volleyball Club, and 1,350 Jumbo Swirls from a Frozen Yogurt. I had all those establishments, so I accepted the mission and started collecting. After finishing it, I found two others that required businesses I already had plus a Pub, which I didn't have. Therefore, I set out to build a Pub.

Upon building the Pub and completing those two missions, I looked at the remaining missions and thought, "What the hell am I doing?" It was like King Théoden coming out of the fog of control created by Gríma Wormtongue.

It no longer held any interest for me. I've been "Tiny Tower" free for three days. "Tiny Tower" is not a game. It is a constant obligation in the guise of a game, and I'm glad to be rid of it.