Tiny Tower is official iPhone 'Game of the Year'
The App Store has been updated with a new "Rewind 2011" feature, which declares Apple's picks for the best content throughout iTunes. The iPhone Game of the Year is Tiny Tower.
The App Store has been updated with a new "Rewind 2011" feature, which declares Apple's picks for the best content throughout iTunes. We could tell you Adele won Artist of the Year, but we'll stay focused on the games.
The iPhone "Game of the Year" is Tiny Tower, a freemium game that lets you build a tower and manage the businesses and citizens that inhabit it.
Runners-up include the similarly-titled (but very different) Tiny Wings, a simple physics-based "racing" game that has you using momentum to fly as far and as fast as you can. Touchgrind BMX rounds out the selections, giving you the ability to virtually ride a 3D bike by swiping your finger.
The iPad has its own winner's list. Dead Space, a mobile spin-off of the console/PC game of the same name, earns the highest honor, thanks to its great graphics and rather ingenious control scheme.
Runners-up include Contre Jour, a puzzle game with a unique high-contrast look, and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, an adventure game from Capybara.
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Tiny Tower is official iPhone 'Game of the Year'.
The App Store has been updated with a new "Rewind 2011" feature, which declares Apple's picks for the best content throughout iTunes. The iPhone Game of the Year is Tiny Tower.-
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The fear, whether it's grounded or not, is that if a certain type of game that you don't like becomes too popular, it could potentially pull the industry towards it and cause developers to stop making the kinds of games you do like.
Which sounds idiotic until you think about what it must have been like to be an adventure game fan once FPS games started becoming popular. Or a side scrolling gaming fan. Or a fan of 2D fighting games.
Of course, all of those have come back now but for a good while there they basically didn't exist. -
Also, there's a case to be made for how the game is "freemium" (man I fucking hate that word) which represents an unnerving trend.
I played the game for a bit and it became very apparent - there's two forms of currency in the game. Coins and dollars. There's things you can do with coins but the things you really need to build your tower with are dollars. Coins are fairly easy to come by in the game - once you have some "stores" in your tower the game basically generates it for you. Dollars, however, are hard to come by. They only occasionally show up (a game character "tips" you, etc.) but the things you really need, like a faster elevator (part of the gameplay is to take people where they need to go and the default elevator is slow) require a lot of dollars. The only way to get a lot of dollars is to either be playing the game all the fucking time to get them, or buy them with actual money (in-App purchase). So basically the game is free but if you want to play it sanely, you need to start spending money.
A lot of iPhone games do the thing where there's an in-game currency you need to buy upgrades and such but usually there's just one currency and if you don't want to spend actual money you can just play the game more and make up for it. But with Tiny Tower, you have to play the game a ton (to get the coins) as well as spend actual money (to get the dollars).
I played the game for a while but I stopped when I realized I was becoming a slave to the game (it uses local notifications to let you know when things happen in the game), and that the concept of getting enough dollars to do anything would be more than I was interested in doing.
If you're someone who thinks DLC is a bad thing that hoses customers, Tiny Tower and freemium games are basically cancer.
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At least we have the year of the linux desktop to look forward to in 2012!
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It's definitely my biggest iPhone timesink after Civ Rev. A lot of fun and very charming but it became too monotonous once you get your tower very high.
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I loved Dead Space on iPad. The tight and intuitive controls and excellent presentation made a mobile game feel like a full-fledged, high-production console/PC game for the first time.
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Yeah, the iphone's screen size is what pushed me toward getting the iPad version.
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Well if this represents how the mobile gaming market is going then I'll be sticking with my consoles thanks. I like games, not investments.
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I lasted for a day. Then it just got annoying and turned into a glorified giga pet.
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So it's nothing like Sim Tower?
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