Category: Mobile Games

Yes, I still “play” Tiny Tower. I now have the biggest tower of all my Game Center friends, but I still can’t put the thing down. I have to build it higher!

There is one thing that really bugs me about it though. See the really clean, consistent visual style? Yeah, nice and pixely. Now look at the stars. Crisp, clean, and not at all matching the graphical style of everything else in the game. Geez. Next thing you know the clouds are going to be made out of polygons…

I’ve been slowly picking away at 5th Cell’s Run Roo Run whenever I rememeber that I have games that aren’t Tiny Tower on my iPhone. That and Mega Man X, but that’s a story for another day.

In quite a stark contrast to their previous games (re: Scribblenauts), Run Roo Run is a very simple game. The premise is usual video game fare: you are a mother kangaroo who must travel across Australia in order to save your joey, who has been captured and put in a zoo. Just another (minor) twist on the common hero/princess business.

The gameplay isn’t entirely new either. Stages are a single screen long (at least up to chapter 10), and you just have to tap the srceen to make momma kangaroo bounce over obstacles. In each chapter, a new element is introduced, like springs, bouncy tires, and a double-jump kajigger. For the first few chapters, the game is really easy, and only once you reach chapter 8 will you find yourself not getting gold medals on the first try. The game’s main focus is accuracy, so you have to make sure you’re bouncing at just the right time. Once you complete all 15 levels in a chapter, 6 “extreme” stages are unlocked, and in those you need pixel-perfect accuracy to even complete the stage, nevermid score a gold medal.

Run Roo Run isn’t exactly a deep game. Like I said before, for at least half of the game, every stage fits on a single screen. Most of the stages in that first half take less than 3 seconds to complete, too. Only once you get far enough that moving platforms are introduced will your stage times exceed 5 seconds. The rating you get after each stage is handed out based on your time, too. Getting gold stars on normal stages isn’t too diffficult, but nabbing golds on the extreme levels can be even more difficult than 3-starring levels in Angry Birds.

Speaking of those angry avians, Run Roo Run’s menus have a very… familiar look.

The real high point, and I think one of the main reasons I keep coming back, is the music. Scribblenauts had a fantastic soundtrack. Run Roo Run’s music strikes the exact same sweet spot and adds a didgeridoo in a couple spots. The stages proper don’t have much in the way of tunage, but the menu screens provide all the aural pleasure you could want.

As with iOS game developers, 5th Cell is not above trying to wring a couple more bucks out of you once you’ve bought their game. There are a couple purchasable items: a bus that lets you skip a stage, and a “bullet-time” (it may be called something else, I can’t be arsed to check) powerup that slows time for so long. The cool thing is that the bullet-time persists over multiple stages, so you can use one to cheese your way to gold on several extreme stages. I’m not sure if there are more things to buy, as I lost interest in items as soon as I learned it would cost me real money to use them.

Run Roo Run isn’t a particularly robust game, but it’s fun and is over before it wears out its welcome (quite the opposite of Angry Birds). The extreme stages will have you pulling out your hair in frustration from chapter 1, but the regular levels have just the right difficulty curve. Achievements are included, and it’s only a buck. I recommend it and hope that it sells well, because 5th Cell is a great studio, and I’d love to see more work from them.

So I downloaded Tiny Tower the other day. Now I’m constantly checking my phone to make sure my stores are stocked up. I’ve learned to eat all meals with one hand, whilst managing my tower with the other. I’m even having trouble resisting the urge to play it during work hours. I’m literally afraid that I’m going to start trying to play while I’m driving. This is becoming a problem.

The thing about Tiny Tower though, is that it isn’t really that good of a game. I mean, it’s as addictive as all the other stupid iOS/Facebook micromanagement games, but it’s pretty shallow and needs way more babysitting than all the other one’s I’ve played.

The objective of Tiny Tower is to build a tower. Imagine that! It’s a neat little pixel tower, and the cute little people that move in are referred to as “bitizens.” It hits all the right old-school gaming notes as far as visuals go. The music isn’t quite as prefectly retro; I find the game is best played with volume off.

Building you tower is as simple as clicking the “build a new floor” button. Only it costs coins to do so. Coins are earned in a few ways, but mostly from businesses that you can open in your tower. Each occupies a floor, and each can be staffed by up to 3 bitizens. Bitizens live on apartment floors, and each apartment can occupy up to five bitizens. So you have to build more businesses to make profit, and apartments to keep them staffed.

Businesses are to Tiny Tower as crops are to FarmVille. Each business can sell up to three items (dependent on how many bitizens work there), and each one has an “ordering” time. So like farming games, you have to wait a while before your products will sell and make you money. Then you have to press the “stock” button before the ordered item can be sold. You get so many of each item, so you don’t have to restock every time a thing is bought, but stocks tend to go quickly. The thing that makes this different from farm games is that (at least early on), your products have an ordering time that’s measured in minutes instead of hours. What this means is that with farm games you can plant your crops before work or bed, then forget about them. Tiny Tower is constantly pushing notifications telling you that your stock is in, meaning that if you’re not constantly babysitting it, your profits are going to slow down to nothing.

There really isn’t much else to the game. Random bitizens will sit in the elevator, waiting for you to drive it to whatever floor they desire. This provides a small payment of coins, but the real reason to bother is that you will rarely get a Tower Buck instead. The “bux” are Tiny Tower’s second, rares currency. The one all stupid little Facebook/iPod games have to confuse idiots into spending real money on game money. The bux can be used to speed construction/ordering, improve your elevator/stores, buy coins, and get new costumes for your bitizens. The nice thing here is that Tiny Tower hands out bux much more liberally than most other games like it.

There’s a silly, useless little feature called “Bitbook,” where your bitizens post their thoughts. It’s more like Twitter than Facebook, but I suppose Bitbook sounds better than Bitter. Rollercoaster Tycoon had a similar feature, where you could read what your park guests were thinking, and use that feedback to improve your park. Bitbook comments are just for fun.

The two features I really like about Tiny Tower are that you can dress up your bitizens and rename all the stores and apartments in your tower. Dressing bitizens is mostly cycling through random, adorable outfits. There’s apparently an editor where you can design your own outfits, but I haven’t used it yet. Renaming shops is undispuatably the most fun I’ve had with the game, as I’ve gotten much more satisfaction from coming up with snappy names than I have from driving bitizens up the elevator. Some of my prouder examples include the bike shop called “Cerulean Cycle” (that’s a Pokémon reference, FYI) and the pharmacy named “Mr. Popper’s Pills.”

 I think the only real reason I keep playing Tiny Tower is to create a bigger tower than my Game Center peers. And really, that’s less a competition of skill than a race to see who gets bored last. I could probably say more about Tiny Tower, but I think my summary has all the pertinent information. Now if you’ll excuse me, my sushi shop has run out of tuna rolls. Again.