FEZ

Well...I beat FEZ. I know that because credits were involved. As to what happened, what I accomplished, what the fuck that ending was about, it's hard to say...symbolism is not exactly my forte.

Let's back up for a sec though. I don't even know what FEZ is, you say. For the uninitiated, FEZ can best be described as a puzzle/platformer. The interesting mechanic that it's built around is the ability to rotate the world. Not everything is as it first appears. What looks like a 2D world is actually 3D, and Gomez, after receiving his magic fez hat, is able to rotate the world 90° left or right at will to navigate through the world. Platforming will always be performed in a 2D space, but each 2D face has three other corresponding sides that can be rotated to the foreground. Platforms, ledges, ivy to climb, etc. may not line up in your current configuration, but with a change in perspective, the way can be found.

The immediate surface goal is to find shiny yellow squares scattered around the world. Find 8 of those squares, and they form a cube. Find/construct enough cubes, and you can open certain doors around the world, revealing more of the world. The true goal is exploration and discovery. As you progress, you realize there are secrets, hidden cubes, puzzles that will make you tear your hair out, and even an entire language to decipher.

When you start playing, you're totally confused. You're also lost and can't use the map system for shit, but that's okay! Keep plugging away, and you start to understand how to get around in the world. I told one of my friends, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but I'm doing it better than I was an hour ago."

Whenever you actually figure out one of the puzzles USING YOUR OWN BRAIN, there is tremendous satisfaction in that. In order to have the best gameplay experience possible, I recommend resisting the urge to look to the internet for help. I did that on occasion and felt like a cheating asshole when I did. Three things to keep in mind while playing FEZ:

1. Don't go into this game putting time constraints on yourself. If you think you're not progressing as quickly as your arbitrary self-imposed schedule demands, you're going to get frustrated and look shit up. Try not to look shit up.


2. Know that there are some rooms that you simply cannot do anything in on your first pass. You may do something down the road that makes unlocking the secrets of that room possible. Don't feel like you can't backtrack. You're going to have to backtrack. You're not a failure if you backtrack.


3. You don't have to unlock everything to see the endgame. Finding 32 cubes will allow you to "beat" FEZ, however there is a slightly different ending if you find all 64 cubes and anti-cubes. Whether or not that's worth it depends on how much fun you're having, I suppose.

I was an impatient asshole and did not follow rule #1. I only created the rules after realizing I was being an asshole, so forgive me. The nature of the game is meant to be a little frustrating. The true joy of the game comes from overcoming that frustration with your noggin.

FEZ was one of the games featured in the documentary "Indie Game: The Movie", and Phil Fish, FEZ's creator, said he "wanted to bring it back to the old days of gaming pre-internet when there'd be like these urban legends where if you stand in this one corner and stand still for 5 seconds and then press down, and jump two times, it warps you somewhere." You definitely get that feel. Secrets abound within FEZ. I even heard that there are hidden images, text, and QR codes hidden in the tracks of the soundtrack when viewed in any audio program with a spectrogram.

Phil Fish, you're a clever dude, and I'm glad that after five years, you could share FEZ with the world. It made me feel like a genius at times; it annoyed the shit out of me at times, but all the while, it was an enjoyable world to spend some time in.

Humble Bundle Strikes Again

Just when I think I'm making some headway on this gaming backlog, a Humble Bundle comes out with stuff I actually had on my wishlist...

Welp, add Trine 2, Mark of the Ninja, Eets Muchies, Brutal Legend (although I already had this on PS3), and FEZ to the pile. Put em over there on the floor in that small empty space I was starting to feel good about.

Go over to humblebundle.com if you want to add these games to your collection.

Saints Row IV

It's not often that I pre-order games. The only franchises that garner this kind of pre-order inducing fervor in me are Dragon Age, Fallout, Mass Effect, and Saints Row. I have an enormous backlog of games, and to even bother purchasing something at full price, I have to know I'm going to dive into my new acquisition immediately and not come up for air until I'm done with it. Otherwise, I know I won't get to it until it's like 2 dollars on Steam. Two of my friends were commenting on my Saints Row love, saying, "I like it when [she] fanboys about stuff. It's rare. And very intense." What's not to like? Everybody talks like they're in a Tarantino movie, I can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and I get to blow shit up while listening to classical music.

Saints Row IV starts off five years after the third installment, and you're now the President of the United States. Life is good until a bunch of douchey aliens come, enslave humanity, and explode the Earth a little bit. Zinyak, the head douche of the alien race known as the Zin, and his cronies have captured oodles of humans and have plugged them in to a simulated version of Steelport.

Yes. It's totally The Matrix. In said simulation, each of your homies are reliving and being subjected to their greatest fears over and over. You, as the most awesome one, must break out each of your homies in turn and unite to take down your alien overlords. And since you're pretty much Neo in this little tale, when you're in the simulation, you have super powers including Super Sprint, Super Jump, Freeze Blast, Telekinesis, Super Stomp, etc. It's an incredibly satisfying way to wreak havoc.

Outside of the simulation, you're on a ship. (I'm going to call it the Nebuchadnezzar because duh...Matrix.) While on the ship, the tone switches from Matrix to Mass Effect, as you can talk to and/or romance all your homies on the ship, resulting in many a laugh.

Gameplay itself has not changed a whole lot between games save the addition of super powers, which I mentioned are immensely fun. There's still a boatload of Activity mini-games to play. New ones have been added and existing ones have been tweaked to utilize your new abilities. There are stores to buy stuff, but instead of purchasing the stores, you have to hack into them to use them. Remember, this is a simulation of the world. Hacking. Viruses. All that. And of course, there's a heaping helping of new ridiculous weaponry that's sure to tickle your fancy. A few examples include an Inflato-Ray which inflates your target like a balloon until they explode, an Abduction Gun that places a beam of vertical light where you shoot and all caught within that light are sent skyward, the 'Merica gun, which plays patriotic music while shooting fireworks that catch people on fire, and the ever popular Dubstep Gun that pulses bursts of light to a dubstep beat which elicits cars to hydraulics hop and nearby people to dance until their hearts explode.

Saints Row IV leaves enough things intact to keep it familiar but adds enough new to excite and make it feel fresh. The things I like most about Saints Row in general are the ridiculous, over the top storylines, humorous dialogue, and kick ass voice actors. Female Voice 1 Laura Bailey is pretty much amazing, FYI. She made a simple sentence of "Well...fuck." make me laugh for like 5 minutes. That's fuckin' pro.

The Loyalty quests for each homie are generally the most humorous, ridiculous, and memorable. I don't want to give too much away, so I'm just going to say: Fun Shaundi, Paul, and Double Dragon, bitches.

Speaking of homies, one of the things that bummed me out was that I didn't really need to use them that much out in the regular game world. It's kind of a pain in the ass to use them, in fact. If my main mode of transportation is super jumping/sprinting everywhere, that makes it a smidge difficult for people with cars and regular legs to follow.

The concept of Notoriety kind of goes out the window for similar reasons. I don't fear you alien assholes chasing me with your insignificant vehicles. I'm the Gingerbread Man, motherfuckers. This makes things like Flashpoints a little less exciting. I remember in Saints Row III, rolling up with a carload full of homies, taking out a Flashpoint, and driving away with enemies in hot pursuit, while we're shooting out the windows and hucking grenades behind us. It was magical. Nowadays, I shoot em all in the head before reinforcements arrive and jump jump jump to freedom.

Sometimes I'd use cars just because of the nostalgia of it though. I actually wanted to use my homies, so I started taking out Flashpoints, doing Virus Injections (waves of enemies attacking), and Virus Collection (car stealing) with Super Shaundi in tow just for funsies. The car thieving wasn't any more or less difficult with Shaundi with me, but it was way more fun having her hanging out the window, shooting at my pursuers. Also, when waves of enemies are attacking me, having her around adds a little something extra when she Super Stomps the whole lot of them up into the air or starts hucking cars at people.

One thing that was a little frustrating with driving cars though is that I can't hop into them as easily as I used to. Super Sprint makes life a bit difficult in this regard. I'll run at the car, press 'E' to hop in, but instead of jumping into the car, my sprinting hurls it three city blocks away from me. Whoops. This must be how mutants feel. Someone call Professor X. I need to rein this shit in.

Also, I miss the concept of owning all the things. Even though Notoriety isn't really that serious, I have no place to call my own. I can't run into a Friendly Fire and have my Notoriety slate wiped clean. Plus, I have all this money and nothing to spend it on. Boo-urns.

And since this section has turned into the mild bitching and moaning portion of my word spew, I'll say I also kind of miss the different factions. Variety is the spice of life and all that. Aliens are assholes, and it's all well and good to blow them to hell, but sometimes you just want to find a nice Decker or Morningstar to hit in the teeth.

Those things are all super minor though. My main gripe about the game is how side quests were handled. When you free each of your homies, they'll have you do a series of side quests. However, these really aren't side quests like I was expecting. They're mostly sending you out into the world to specific activities already littered around the city. I like hacking the stores and playing all the mini-games without any prodding, so most of the time, I already did the quest objective before they asked me to. This led to me missing potentially humorous dialogue, which is one of the reasons I love this franchise. Sadness. I would start a mission and go talk to a certain crew member, which is generally the first objective. They told me to go do something that I had already done, so I immediately talk to them again. They'd tell me I was awesome and did a good job, and on occasion they'd reference something they would have said earlier when I was out doing the mission, but since I already did the mission, never left the ship, and never heard the dialogue, I was just confused by the reference. Then that mission would be over, and I would be sad because I obviously missed something. In the future, don't tie mini-games into side quests. It's lazy and makes me sad. Quit making me sad.

If I would have not done any activities until someone told me to do them, I probably would have had a better experience. Then I could just clean up any leftover activities right before the finale. However, this negates the sandboxiness that they're trying to tout. Let mini-games be mini-games and think up other legit side quests.

I don't know if it was because I dicked around longer in Saints Row: The Third or this one actually had less to do, but the game seemed quite a bit shorter and my total playtime corroborates that story. I spent a little over 30 hours in Saints Row IV, while The Third held me for 47 hours.

The last couple paragraphs have gotten kind of bitch and moany. Let's bring it back home. Overall, Saints Row IV is incredibly enjoyable. I have spent the last couple weeks playing it at every opportunity. Hour lunch break, time for Saints Row. 20 minute break during the work day, time for Saints Row. I enjoyed the shit out of this game and will be excited for any future installments. However, taking into account all the bitching I just did, I think Saints Row: The Third is stronger overall. I'm tempted to go back and verify that these perceptions and comparisons are accurate and not just based on the warm and squishy feels in my heart, but I have like a hundred more games to get through... Ain't nobody got time for that.

10 Reasons MMOs Piss Me Off

Sometime when I wasn't looking, I started disliking MMOs. I don't know when it happened, and it came as a bit of a shock when I finally came to this realization. But now I've moved beyond that initial surprise and mild sadness and onto some state of rage about the genre as a whole. This was made clear in a recent conversation about the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online MMO, where my rage was prolific enough to take list form. Now, I want to preface this, saying that I haven't played every MMO that exists, and these are just my perceptions of the ones I have played, so if your favorite MMO defies my words, I hope you two are very happy together. So without further ado, 10 reasons MMOs piss me off:

1: Shitty Story
The main goal of an MMO is to have a huge world with stuff to do littered evenly among the various zones. Quests are merely a means to move you from one place to the other, not because you're needed over there or because it's particularly interesting in that neck of the woods. That place exists, and you haven't visited it yet, so here's some bullshit delivery quest to goad you into heading toward the next town. I guess lots of games might be subject to this when you start thinking about it, but other games generally have a main overarching story that connects the tent pole plot points. Side quests exist, but they are deemed just that...side quests. With an MMO, I feel like I'm just constantly hopping from side quest to side quest. This is largely because of my second gripe...

2: I Can't Win...Ever
It's hard to craft a compelling story that has no climax or ultimate goal. But MMOs can't have an ultimate goal because once you have completed it, you'll get that lovely feeling of accomplishment and feel like you can leave. That just won't do. MMOs, whether subscription based or microtransaction based, rely on the user coming back month after month (or at least forgetting about their active subscription month after month). I have a backlog of 153 games according to "How Long to Beat.com". I'm sorry MMOs. I don't have time for your just play forever bullshit.

3. I'm Not Accomplishing Anything
No, this one isn't about "wasting" time playing games making me less productive in the real world. I'm talking about in-game. Nothing I do creates lasting change in the game world. Everything in an MMO has to be designed to reset so that the next person that comes along can do what you just did. These assholes aren't in any better shape after I completed their quest. Whatever I did will reset within a few moments, and it will be like I had never been there. This brings me to my next two quibbles...

4. The World Is Full of Fucking Liars
All the quest-givers will whisper sweet nothings in your ear, tell you you're somehow special, it's a miracle you arrived when you did, you're the only hope to save them, etc. etc. Horseshit. If I do what you ask, you're going to say I saved the day, but some asshole's going to come up behind me and re-save you. You sit on a throne of lies!

5. Helpless Motherfuckers
Are none of these NPCs self-sufficient? How could every town I come across be full of lazy, helpless motherfuckers that need me to fix their rat problem, or gather some potatoes for their stew, or deliver their mail. Aren't I supposed to be a hero or some shit? The necessity of a boatload of quests in any one hub inevitably creates this glut of mundane quests. Quantity over quality is definitely at work here.

6. This Is Not How I Play RPGs
This is mostly a result of my earlier qualms, but I'm going to call it out specifically. I am soooo slow when clearing enemies from an area in any single-player RPGs. I send out my thief to look for traps, I pull one baddie at a time if possible, and check every single room thoroughly. This method is bizarrely something I enjoy, but it is impossible to play this way in an MMO due to how quickly things respawn. I like to take time to smell the roses...or carcasses, I guess in this situation. Gross. You're gross.

7. Worthless Ass Set Decorations
It saddens me a bit that all these little bits and bobs decorating a house/dungeon/general area are just there to be pretty and don't really function in any capacity. In a standard RPG, I check every chest, drawer, jar, and pile of debris for items. This search for loot leads me to canvasing every inch of a room before moving on. The fact that no storage containers contain anything unless it's a part of a quest results in me blowing through areas without really taking in the scenery. If it's not glowing, it's just background fluff that my brain can afford to ignore. You made me this way!

8. Constant Change
I am a creature of habit. Change scares me, and on some occasions, infuriates me. New content is all well and good, but when they start nerfing my shit, I get a little upset. Constant tinkering with the balance usually goes hand in hand with them resetting my abilities too. That always drives me crazy because I have to spend my first half hour back reading tooltips to respec. Change in the form of giving new players previously hard to attain things earlier is also a source of frustration. Yeah, I'm thinking about when WoW started allowing mounts at Level 20. Sonsofbitches... Also, as player numbers start to fade, there's generally changes to make a grab for a wider, yet possibly dumber, audience. They call it making it "more accessible"; I call it dumbing it down. I don't exactly like things being super easy, and a once enjoyable game can be ruined in this redesign for the masses. Being able to fix bugs post-launch and adding new content is fabulous, but sometimes I miss the days where patching wasn't a thing.

9. Judgey Assholes
This is probably the biggest problem I have with MMOs. I can get over a lot of these things, but this one leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I've had good experiences, at times, but the ratio leans more toward the negative side. Pick-up groups are usually death. From the merely annoying jerks going AFK when you're ready to go, to the unforgivable asshole in the group that insists on aggroing every fucking beastie in creation, wiping your group over and over. Then there's the random bigotry and bile you encounter in chats or the random stranger that feels the need to examine your gear and chastise you for not having the optimum gear that's available for my exact level and class. These online games allow us to connect with one another like never before, but sometimes...I just don't wanna.

10. Déjà vu
The details may differ, but all MMOs feel very much the same to me. They may be in a different setting and have different races and classes, but the core gameplay is very much the same. Big world, lots of little quest hubs, level up, talent tree, kill 10 of this, collect 20 of that... I'm just bored of them. It costs so much money to create one of these behemoths, and you're just fighting over the same customer base of people that like MMOs. It hardly seems worth it.

Even though I bitch and moan about these things, when a new MMO comes out, I'll usually give it a go. I'm not sure whether that makes me an idiot or an optimist. Maybe that's a fine line...

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.