Simpsons: Tapped Out
By FishieBuddha 0 Comments
This is part of an on-going bet with myself to write one thing about a video game per week.
I’ve been playing the Simpsons iOS game (Tapped Out!) and big surprise, it’s not good. Yet I’ve logged countless hours into it. Why?
I’ve played Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes and burned out on them. Adding floors and tapping stuff wasn’t engrossing. Flying cargo to different cities didn’t have a hold. So I set out to find a dumb game to play on the ipad when watching mindless T.V. The idea that a Simpsons game could be a time eater was alien to me before playing it.
In the Simpsons iOS game, you start out limited resources and few ways to make money. You can set the Simpsons characters to do different tasks that will earn you XP and money, but these tasks take real world time. Earning XP allows you to build different houses, shops, and unlock new characters. It is a free-to-play game though, meaning there is a separate currency in addition to XP and money. The second currency is doughnuts, and you accrue one doughnut per level. There are some structures in the game that can only be unlocked by having hundreds and hundreds of doughnuts. You can also spend doughnuts to shorten tasks or building times. I’ve been playing for some time now and should have 25 (25 levels = 1 per level). There is no easy way to get the second currency except by paying with real world money.
There is a tacit understanding that when you buy a video game, you are paying for a full experience. If some part of that experience is negligent, it’s a ripoff. But when it comes to free-to-play games, you aren’t paying for the game. It’s free. What you end up paying for is the luxury of your time. Sure, spend 100 hours grinding out levels and doughnuts and money or spend $5 and use that time to do something else. When you are supporting a smaller company like Nimblebit, it’s not so gross, you feel okay because most iOS games are around 99¢. But when you’re asked to undergo a sisyphean task, it tends to sour the experience. As adults, we don’t have forever to play games. We have jobs, lives, other hobbies. It makes sense to have a shortcut but when that shortcut is a money grab, it detracts from the overall game. I don’t want to play this game anymore because it will take forever to make any progress but yet I keep checking in ever morning and night because it’s mindless.
It is the celery of video games and while celery once a day isn’t bad, celery for breakfast, lunch, and dinner can kill you. I worry about what games like Angry Birds, Temple Run, Jetpack Joyride, and this say about gaming but that won’t stop me from checking in while my wife's watching Criminal Minds. God, that show is boring.
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