I talked before about this game called Dice Dreams that came with my phone. It was fun for a little while but as I wrote about, with each level the cost to build the "set" to advance to the next level kept getting higher and higher and taking longer and longer--unless of course you're willing to shell out a bunch of money.
Finally it got to the point a few months ago where I just abandoned the game and uninstalled it from my phone because it was getting to the point of tedium. So I needed a new game as sort of my backup game when I had nothing to do on Empires & Puzzles, which is my primary game.
I tried this game called Royal Match because it said it didn't require in-app purchases. And of course it doesn't, but like Dice Dreams it gets to that point where if you don't start making in-app purchases you're going to get nowhere fast. The levels in that game are mostly like a Candy Crush-type thing. You know, match 3 or more things to clear the level. It starts out pretty easy and I blazed through the first 300 levels in a week or so. But then they start making the arbitrary maximum number of moves a lot lower, so basically the only way to win is to get a huge combination every single turn. Or of course buy a bunch of continues and/or items. When you first start playing you get some free items and can earn more, but as the levels get harder and harder, you slowly dwindle your supply. The goal as always being to make you spend money. Having been through that with Candy Crush years earlier, I quit by the time I got to level 500-something.
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I briefly tried a couple of others before Facebook advertised a game called Transformers Earth Wars. As you know if you actually read this blog, I've loved Transformers since the 80s, so a game featuring that was up my alley. Instead of a match-3 game it's more of an RPG. Like Empires & Puzzles, you build a base and mine raw materials (alloy, energon, and then "ore-13") to build more stuff. You also get "crystals" to recruit main characters and "chips" to recruit the smaller Targetmasters or Micromasters, which for some reason includes smaller characters like Rattrap from Beast Wars.
The game won some love from me right away because I started out with Jetfire, my favorite Transformer. And then it gave me a few more Jetfires: the weird "Cybertron" one, the one based on the GI Joe Sky Striker (aka an F-14), and the Shattered Glass alternate universe variant. I got some of my other faves like Grapple, Skids, Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime, Whirl, and two versions of Optimus Prime. It was pretty fun for the first week or two getting new characters and building up my base and advancing on the story campaign and so on. I even unlocked the Decepticons so I could recruit Megatron, Starscream, Bludgeon, and so on. You don't have to build a separate base for them.
You can eventually get "Combiners" but to do that you have to get 5 characters of 3 stars or higher. And then there's some other thing you have to do so they can go together or something. I think right now the most I have is 3 characters in a set for "Optimus Maximus." You can also get Titans like Omega Supreme, Metroplex, Fortress Maximus, Trypticon, or Scorponok, but I'm not really sure how.
After a week or two the game started to do like a lot of these games. It took longer and longer to advance to the next level and get new stuff for my base. I couldn't make most of my characters more powerful because to "research" them to the next level could take over a day--unless of course you pay.
Far more annoying to me was even though I had probably less than half of the characters, I kept summoning duplicates. Those duplicates get recycled into some "shards" that can eventually used to summon new duplicates! At least that's how it starts to feel. I mean one time I had 9 summons and got 8 duplicates and 1 lesser version of a character I already have. Another time I had 4 summons and got 3 2-star Arcees. 3 out of 4 tries! I'm no C-3PO, but I'm pretty sure the odds of that happening if the system were truly random are pretty fucking remote. Programmers might think they're being clever to rig things this way, but when something like that happens, it's like a cold shower and I think, "Well, this sucks." Then I don't really want to play anymore.
And it sucks because I love Transformers and I like collecting the different characters just like I did in real life until they sort of got to the point where there weren't many new ones I wanted and I had no money anyway. I want to play your game because I think it's pretty neat as sort of a Transformers RPG. But you're making it so hard to like your game when you rig it so I can't hardly ever get new characters who are any good or upgrade the characters I have.
I know that the companies making games need money, but A) I don't have money and B) Even when I spend money it'll screw me over. Thus there's not much incentive for me to spend what little I can afford. That's how it's been with Empires & Puzzles for a while now but I don't want to quit because I've invested so much time and energy into building my camp and roster and so on. Plus, ALL of these games are rigged the same way. Unless you're going to play free solitaire or something, they're all going to do this bullshit to try to coerce you to spend money.
But the problem is the more they try to coerce you, the more it becomes drudgery instead of fun. A month or so ago, Empires & Puzzles added a new list of daily goals that give you meager rewards. I call it "homework" because that's basically what it is; it's like getting a bunch of assignments to do in your spare time. That's really not fun. I mean, who really likes homework? Kids play games instead of doing homework, right? The Transformers game has its own homework, though less so. Each day there are 3 new goals to get points you can use to get meager rewards. And you can eventually send your characters on "missions" that get them experience and some meager rewards. The experience can help at first but when you can't "research" most of the characters, that starts to be less and less of an incentive. Mostly I just do it to get some meager rewards like "Z-Energon" that can eventually be used to research two characters at the same time. Though of course it'll probably take months to save up that much--unless I pay.
Everything is geared to making you pay, and pay, and pay. And when you don't have money, it's kind of a reflection of how much it sucks being poor in real life. In real life, most of the best experiences are reserved for those who can pay for them: vacations, space tourism, fancy cars, good food/booze/drugs, and so on. Occasionally us poors get some schadenfreude like when those rich guys died in that sub, but that's not too often. Usually we have to content ourselves with what we can get and maybe we tell ourselves it's just as good or even better. Like people who would say a McDonald's cheeseburger is as good or better than some fancy Kobe beef burger made by a famous chef. Yeah, sure it is. [eye roll] Or like saying my Ford Focus is just as good as some rich dude's Bentley. Ha ha, sure it is.
So eventually these games turn kind of sad because they only reinforce the income gap. The 1% can afford to buy access to get all of the characters and make their base totally awesome. Another percentage can buy a little access to get some good stuff. And poor shits like me have to scrimp and save to make even the slightest progress. It really does get sad and kinda depressing.
It would be nice to have a world where everyone could get equal access to fun stuff and nice things. And where even our games aren't rigged to try to bleed us dry. But that's not likely to happen, is it?
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