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TUAW Smackdown: iPhone time management games

Filed under: Gaming, iPhone, App Review

Time Management games challenge you to run some kind of business operation while balancing your resources against the demands of customers. In the following write-up, I tested five popular time management App Store games to see how well they delivered the fun and strategy of challenging yourself against time. As you’ll see, not every game delivered the same level of fun and overall gameplay. Here’s how they stacked up.

At $2.99, Sally’s Spa is our absolute favorite of the time management games we tested for this write-up. In this game, you run a virtual spa, providing steam baths, massages, manicures, pedicures, and more. You aim to keep your customers happy and radiant (literally) by dragging them from one station to the next, applying spa services, and balancing their needs against your limited resources of time and equipment.

As your salon earns money, you re-invest into improvements such as hiring employees to automate some of the stations and upgraded equipment to provide higher levels of satisfaction. The challenges grow more sophisticated over time (although I could have done without the whole eyebrow tweezing service that appears late in the game), as you attempt to perfect your spa-fu.

The game is addicting, well designed, and the small details have all been very well thought out. It’s charming, engaging, and a great deal of fun to play.

Are You Alright is currently on sale for just $1.99 and offers you a near equivalent to Sally’s Spa. It offers essentially the same game except not quite as refined or polished. Are You Alright plays out as an earlier version of Sally’s, with less editorial oversight because it fails to match the fine detail execution of Sally. Clearly the same development hands programmed both applications.

In Are You Alright, you run a medical clinic instead of a spa. Exams take the place of beauty treatments and you put together skeletons, remove shards of glass, and scan for bacterial infections rather than offer massages and facials. Some of the actions you need to perform in your daily tasks are morbidly hilarious ,and yet AYA is simply not as fun a game to play as Sally’s Salon is. It’s missing a great deal of refinement.

Polish and attention to details can really make or break an iPhone game app, and Sally’s tiny nuances are missing from this near-clone. If you’ve played Sally’s to the end, you might still want to pick up Are You Alright to keep going with the same kind of gameplay, but I think you’ll find it a bit of a letdown from the real thing.

Turbo Subs costs just $1.99. In it, you run a sandwich shop, providing subs, sodas, cookies, and chips to your customers. The graphics are acceptable, the music is awful, and the gameplay tends toward the simple side. It’s very, very easy to perform extremely well to the point that you can buy up all the improvements for each level long before each level is finished, leaving you with “nothing left to buy” for round after round.

There’s really not a lot of planning you can do with Turbo Subs. Each time you empty coffee, you can remember to start a new batch and you can pre-make your cotton candy, but beyond that it’s simply a matter of speed to serve each customer, making sure to group all your actions to get the highest number of points. For early levels, just leave all your tips out until you’ve served all six customers and then collect them at once to earn insanely easy multiplier bonuses.

The thing is, though, that despite the bad music, the cheesy graphics, and the lack of planning, Turbo Subs is pretty darn addictive. Because it doesn’t take a lot of brain power, it lends itself well to use on the go as you play a level or three while waiting at the bus stop. Like Sally’s, I found myself returning to Turbo Subs quite a lot.

It would be nice if the designers added more interesting interactions to the game and would get rid of that stupid little petty thief (at least let us call the cops), but even as it stands, Turbo Subs is a fun game and a great time waster.

Jane’s Hotel arrived with high praise and personal recommendations, so I was so disappointed to find that its game play didn’t really live up to the hype. In this game, you run a hotel, and like the other games of this kind, you need to wait on customers. Here, you fetch newspapers and coffee, distribute room keys, and instruct the maid to clean up rooms and water plants.

I found the menus and tutorial text hard to read, with poor font choices that upped the froufrou and decreased legibility. Like Are You Alright, Jane’s Hotel could have done with a better UI supervisor to finish tweaking fine details.

Most frustratingly, Jane’s Hotel doesn’t really provide very good feedback about how well you’re doing and how happy your customers are. After a few levels, the goals just get harder and harder and each level soon ends with “YOU LOSE” or something like that. I forget exactly what it said, and I certainly wasn’t willing to play yet another tedious round to find out the exact wording for this write-up.

That’s because after a while playing this game, I seriously wanted to slap the customers. Jane’s Hotel feels a lot less like playing a time management game and a lot more like being a mommy to a bunch of whiny kids. “Where’s my TV?” “Where’s my Newspaper and Coffee?” “Why haven’t you cleaned my room?”

Like other games of this type, you can upgrade equipment after each round but in Jane’s you don’t really get much of a choice. Not only do you more or less have to buy plants, then you have to start looking after them and watering them or you’ll get in trouble with your customers.

To sum it all up Jane’s Hotel is dreary, joyless, and a chore to play. It feels poorly tested, and it’s missing an elegant GUI as well as captivating gameplay.

Diner Dash was also a big let-down. For $4.99, you can run a virtual restaurant, serving customers as a waitress. You seat them, take their orders, deliver food, and bus the tables after. That’s pretty much it. Oh yeah, you can also serve drinks.

There’s almost no planning possible in Diner Dash. It’s just the same actions, over, and over, and over, with some weird rules about bonuses for seating people in seats that match their clothing colors. (As if any woman alive would pick a seat because it matched her dress? I mean, really?)

There’s a lot of down-time in Diner Dash, most of which involves you standing at the manager’s podium while insanely long lines of people listen to you explain why this early in the game there are only 4 or 6 tables and that they have to wait for seats. This apparently mollifies them and increases their patience levels and eventual tips.

Diner Dash just doesn’t have the kind of thinking element that would make it fun to play. There’s no real strategy component and since you are graded on doing the same kind of thing all at once (bonuses for serving each table one after the other, bonuses for then cleaning up those tables one after another), things quickly blur into a kind of tedious sameness that repeats over and over again.

Serving people, waiting for them to eat, and then cleaning up after them over and over again may be your kind of fun, but it wasn’t mine. Like Jane’s Hotel, Diner Dash was a chore rather than a game.

TUAWTUAW Smackdown: iPhone time management games originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split

You know that Condé Nast tablet / digital magazine demo we saw recently (non-ironically paging through a copy of Wired)? Well now Time Inc. has gotten in on the same game, showing off its version of a digimag running a touch-friendly issue of Sports Illustrated. The company not only buzzed everyone with the charming walkthough video — a floating hand paging through SI on a sleek, black tablet (embedded after the break) — but also had a live, functioning variation of the product up and running on a touchscreen HP laptop. The gist of the project seems to be that the publisher will be able to offer this digitized version of its magazines in some sort of agnostic format, one that would be accessible to PCs and phantom Apple tablets alike. Peter Kafka over at All Things D says that he had a chance to play with the demo and it was, “quite a bit of fun.” While it’s clear that both Time and Condé Nast are taking parallel routes to online publishing (the former is purely in concept mode, the latter is working with Adobe on digital versions of its titles as we speak), one thing is painfully clear: both companies have shockingly similar ideas about what the future of magazine publishing looks like. We hope Apple has been informed.

Continue reading Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split

Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OnLive claims to run gaming service on iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Hardware, Rumors, Software, Odds and ends, iPhone

OnLive is a company that has been claiming to do the seemingly impossible — they plan to set up a sort of “cloud gaming” console, where instead of hardware in individual houses (like we have now; you buy a console for your home), they’ll have hardware over the Internet, and stream your game to you like watching television. All of the processing and coding will be done on a remote server, but with signals flowing from your controller, it’ll seem like you’re just playing Xbox at home. It all works in theory, but in practice, Internet connections aren’t solid or stable enough to send commands and full HD video back and forth without enough lag to make things unplayable.

Still, without actually releasing a product so far, OnLive claims they can do it, and now they’re claiming to do it on the iPhone as well. AppleInsider reports that at a recent event in New York, OnLive showed off the same game service running on “2 iPhones, a tv, and a computer” simultaneously, with gamers on all the devices able to communicate and watch each others’ gameplay. CEO Steve Perlman admits it’s a “tech demo,” but doesn’t go into detail on what that means (it could simply be a demo running separately on the devices, to show what it would be like, or I’ve heard of OnLive events where the server is sitting in the room next door). And of course, there’s no date or information on an actual release yet.

OnLive’s service definitely sounds possible someday — as Internet connections get faster and hardware gets even cheaper, it’s not a stretch to think we’ll eventually move the heavy processor lifting to another location, leaving much tinier consoles and PCs taking up space on our desks and TV stands at home. But so far all it seems they’ve got is an idea (and the money that excited financiers have put into the project). We’ll have to believe it works when we see it.

TUAWOnLive claims to run gaming service on iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition out on iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

That was fast — LucasArts has released the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition out to the iPhone, and it’s available on the App Store right now for the low price of $7.99. I say low because even though that’s higher than many games for the platform, this one is not only one of the best-loved games of yesteryear, but it has also had its graphics completely redone, voiceover added for every scene and character, and a completely remastered musical score as well. Plus, if you get nostalgic for the old version, you can seamlessly switch between the new and old at any time while you play the game. Pretty darn cool.

Plus, the price can also be considered low because this exact same game released just about a week ago on the Xbox Live Arcade for $10. So not only do you now get to play it in a portable version, you get to play it for $2 less. Hopefully this is the first of many LucasArts classics that we’ll see on the iPhone. Just keep an eye out as you play for any really evil-looking doorstops — we hear they’re quite fearsome.

TUAWSecret of Monkey Island: Special Edition out on iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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