Comments on: Thoughts: Triple Town.

By: Gap

Gap — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 10:35:20 +0000

There is potential, I think, but the market is flooded with cutesy, manipulative crap, and the low ceiling on prices means that any developer that wants to spend time adding depth to their title is probably better off on a platform where people will spend a reasonable sum of money on a title without being conned into it by a F2P system.

Another limitation is that the market is geared towards things you can play on the bus/underground, so multi-hour epics need to be split up into ten-minute chunks. Which isn’t so bad if you consider how, say, Total War works.

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:18:19 +0000

Puzzle Quest (as a franchise) really needs to embrace the RPG stuff as an element of the game rather than just a way to make Bejeweled seem less like Bejeweled.

I want lockpicking and enchanting and all that stuff to actually be developed as class-specific content (or somehow related to developing skill points) rather than just a break in the action for every class.

I guess I want a Puzzle Quest that is also Fallout. I guess I’ll get to wait for Hell to freeze over.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:50:08 +0000

I’ve paid for several Android games. I hated all of them. The best Android/iOS titles seem to be the ones that are based off of boardgames, which isn’t really a resounding vote of confidence in the creative potential of the tablet format.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:48:43 +0000

See also: Puzzle Quest. Match-three systems are elegant but ultimately limited, so they either need a lot of variety with different game modes and whatnot, or else a metagame that makes the gameplay seem a little more worth it in the long run.

(For that matter even Total War’s real-time battles would get old much more quickly if they weren’t embedded in the empire map.)

By: Gap

Gap — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:18:41 +0000

I have yet to find a tablet game that I genuinely liked. F2P sours me on pretty much anything (even if it’s good value relatively, it still feels like I’m being hustled), and the format is flooded with trite puzzle games and/or shallow time sinks.

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:15:28 +0000

It’s a bummer that the game has such an awful meta-game bolted onto it. It’s always fun to play a relatively unimpressive game which wraps itself in an engaging system which manages to make you forget that the meat of the game is pretty mediocre. I got a lot of mileage out of Grand Ages: Rome just because they had a clever little RPG system that let you break the ho-hum city-building mechanics over your knee.