Finding Time With Mobile Games

Just to warn you ahead of time, I will not be making any sweeping declarations or forcing our reader to have an epiphany of Torahic proportions.  It is just an observation.

There are a few games that I play on my phone and of those few, even fewer that I play on a regular basis.  Actually, since both lists are relatively small, let us just do some listing of the games in alphabetical order, because that is how they are organized in my phone.  Yes, I am that way.

• Angry Birds
• Blitz (Bejeweled)
• Bloons TD 5
• Clash of Clans
• Dead Space
• Desert Bus
• God of Blades
• Humble Bundle (Not a game, I know, but it is an application for games)
• Munchkin Counter (See above)
• PvZ2 (Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time)

That is it.  So of the ten listed, two of the applications are not games, so it is really eight.  Of those eight, I play two on a daily basis.  Of the remaining six, I have played, maybe two in the last month.  From those four, I still have them on my phone because I have not beaten them yet.

So as you might be able to tell, I do not spend a lot of time on my phone playing games.  Plants vs. Zombies 2 I will play once a day, usually for no more than five minutes and then it goes back into the vault.  This is because, as somewhat stated in my update from January, the game has become less fun and all I really look forward to are the Piñata parties, which now happen once every 24 hours.  I go through the single stage and if I am able to complete it, great!  If I fail the first time through, I put the game away rather than spend 1000 gold to purchase a replay.  Recently, EA/PopCap updated the game to include a variation on the Vase Breaker mini-game from the original Plants vs. Zombies, but I might go through a single stage then put the game away.  There is maybe 10 minutes tops.

In Clash of Clans, I will go into the game, collect gold and elixir from my mining sources, check to see if I have enough gold/elixir to upgrade any existing buildings, check the time remaining on any buildings which are being upgraded then exit the game.  If I had recently been attacked, I will watch the replay of the raid.  This takes all of, at most, 7-10 minutes.  Do not get me wrong though, I am fairly addicted to this game but I know there will be a point when I stop playing rather than saving up a weeks worth of gold to upgrade a single piece of the wall.

Dead Space, of which I will write an article about in the nearish future, while a fun game, has one major flaw.  The game cannot be manually saved, but instead is auto-saved when you reach a checkpoint, which happens at the end of a "chapter."  Chapters in this game last anywhere from 15-20 minutes.  This is the flaw and where the nugget for this article sprang from.  If I could manually save, as in the main games, I would not feel that I had to find and dedicate 20 minutes to playing a game on my phone.  But why would playing a game on the cellphone versus on the 3DS feel so different if they are both video games played on a 3-3 3/4" screen?

Maybe it is the already short battery life of my cellphone or the fact that it is a cellphone that I do not feel as inclined to play games on it as much as I would with my 3DS.  The primary reason for my phone existing is so that I can make/receive phone calls (when not obstructed by my apartment) and text messages; those who know me can already attest how much I already do not talk on the phone.  Playing games on my phone is only secondary and something that I do when I am out-and-about and I do not have my 3DS on me.  Although feeling publicly chastised for playing games on the 3DS vs. the cellphone is a whole other nest of flesh eating elder horrors that I might cover at a later date.

Maybe it is the fact that a lot of cellphone games are free-to-play and are designed around microtransactions in order to keep the games action flowing.  But, when someone like myself who does not spend real world money to buy gems/gold/energy to continue playing or reduce the week it takes to upgrade a mortar canon, play time is greatly reduced.  Reduced playtime on cellphone games has possibly wired my brain to not want to spend more than a couple of minutes playing games on my cellphone, which is possibly why is has taken me three months to go through the Dead Space mobile game which should have only taken me only four hours.   I am intrigued by the story told in the game and how it will connect to Dead Space 2, but it just seems that the platform is what is holding me back.

Just something to think about (or not, that is cool too) this weekend.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Never Ending Soul Ripping

Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time - Updated (Android OS)

A while back, I'm not 100% sure when, but I want to say late last November (and it easily might have been early December, 2013), Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time updated on my phone.  My phone probably let me know that there was an update for the game and I thought, "Sure, go ahead, that's cool."  I'm not even 100% sure it did that as I recall, I opened my phone and noticed that the icon for the game had changed.  Maybe I just picked "Update All" and didn't pay attention.  Okay, let's assume that's what I did, as that makes the most sense.

so PvZ2 was updated.  And it wasn't just a simple update either.  This update was a complete overhaul of the game and the way it was played.  If you remember from my original look at the game, the world looked, I thought, like something out of Super Mario Bros. 3, which isn't a criticism, just an observation.

As you can see, there are multiple paths within the first world, Ancient Egypt.  You will also notice a few locked doors (you can tell they're doors because they have keyholes) along with Pyramid-Keys next to them.  These could be opened with said Pyramid-Keys which you earned randomly throughout the game, depending on which world you were in.  Ancient Egypt = Pyramid-Key, Old West = Some-Other-Key-I-Never-Got; you get the idea.

Now that the update has taken place, things not only look a bit different, but the fundamentals of how one plays the game have changed.  The gaming world, and we'll stay in Ancient Egypt, looks like this:

You will first off notice that the game is now very linear, not that that is a problem as the first PvZ was linear without a world map.  The world specific keys were turned into gold coins (10,000 I think for each).  A mini-boss level was introduced into each world stage where you have to fight the standard horde of zombies, but now Gargantuars have been thrown in for good measure.  You may have also noticed that a strange blue-orbal key has replaced the world keys.  These keys are supposed to unlock an as-of-yet released world and these keys, supposedly, can only be obtained in the Gargantuar levels, but are only dropped at random.

A minor addition to the game is that it's played a lot faster.  Suns now give 50 points instead of the usual 25.  Zombies enter the level a lot faster and they move faster, but your plants also attack faster, basically, everything is faster. And, if that's not enough fast for you, you also have the option to speed the game up further by pressing a "Fast-forward-type-button" in the upper right portion of the screen that doubles the game speed.  Not a bad idea until you realize that your reaction time is the same as before, but now the zombies are coming at you and twice their normal speed.  It would be like taking Ben and Barbaras experience from Night of the Living Dead and putting them into the Dawn of the Dead remake.  I've clicked it once and said, "Yup, they're faster," and promptly went back to standard (albeit faster than original) speed.

One other major overhaul to the game that I am not at all happy with, are the conditions to how a level is beaten/completed/finished.  In the first iteration of the game, you were given specific conditions in order to earn a Star.  Earning Stars just acted as additional challenges that increased in difficulty for a specific level.  Such conditions would be something like, "Spend No More Than 1500 Sun & Don't Lose Any Lawnmowers."  If you were to fail in any one of the conditions, you were still allowed to finish the level and often continued to earn coins, but no star was earned.  Now, if you fail to meet all of the conditions, the level ends the moment you fail.  Accidentally spend 1525 sun when you could only spend 1500, the level ends immediately.  It's kind of annoying and frustrating, especially with the lawnmowers.  Why bother even having them as an option if losing even one means you lose the level?

I actually feel sad that since this update has taken place, that I've lost a bit of interest in PvZ2.  A lot of the levels feel like they're trying to force the player to use up gold coins to buy power boosts.  There have been levels where I used any one of the boosts at least four times because I knew my defense that I had planted (sort of the whole point of the game) would not hold against what I was going up against.  Nowadays, all I look forward to are the Piñata parties, even though I wish I could turn off the costumes.

Initially, I would have given the game a "Must Play" rating, you know, if we did official ratings here.  Now, I would probably give an "You Could Live Without Playing."  Maybe I'm just becoming cynical in my old age.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Because You Don't Do Like They Think You Should