Games on Phones

Happy New Year, all. I hope you had some lovely festive times, and enjoyed seeing 2013 off or seeing 2014 in, or maybe even both. I thought I would start the year with an insightful and fascinating rundown of apps for games you can play on your phone. You’re welcome.

1. Dots. This is my friend Daisy’s latest game of choice. Like all good games, the concept is alarmingly simple. Your screen is filled with different coloured dots, and all you need to do is link dots of the same colour. For exciting big scores, make squares with them. It’s worrying that I can while away an hour doing this, and yet I’m apparently unable to get a score above 200.

2. Candy Crush Saga. I think by now everyone’s been through the Candy Crush tunnel, yes? The hatred of the cubes with little black nets on them, the dread of having to do a high-score speed round, the sadness when you reach a ‘get the fruit and nuts to the bottom’ level, the sheer joy of finally passing a level you’ve been stuck on for a literal actual month. My affair with Candy Crush happened in the Spring of 2013; every second of my train commute, and a good deal of my working day was spent feverishly swapping the candy around or desperately waiting for time to pass so I could earn another life. Disturbingly like some kind of crack addiction. Eventually, I had to go cold turkey and delete the app completely. Life is just too short.

3. Candy Crush Knock-Offs. It seems everyone’s trying to get on the Candy Crush success bandwagon. And to be honest, fair play to them. Jelly Splash looks exactly the same to me, except the creators have cleverly set it apart by giving the coloured blobs eyes. Genius. And now there’s a new game, the Papa Pear Saga. Again, the concept seems identical, except this time we’re apparently ‘bouncing around a wonderfully wacky world of fruity pegs’. Excellent. My main problem with this one is that Papa is a green ball in a helmet; he’s clearly not a pear. Oh, and for a long time I thought it was called Pop-A-Pair Saga, which, to be honest, might have been better.

4. The Simpsons Tapped Out. This one is my favourite. I’ve never actually played it, but it sounds mental. Essentially, you build Springfield and then you run it, a bit like God or some kind of dictator. You start off with Homer and gradually find more characters, and you make money by building things like the Power Plant and the Kwik-e-Mart and then sending people to work in them. Cletus Spuckler the Redneck also seems to play a major role.

The best part is the updates. So while your phone will beep to inform you that you’ve been tagged on Facebook or that something newsworthy and important is happening in the world of real life, you’ll also be getting things like:

“Cletus has finished brewing moonshine.”

“Homer has just finished a 12-hour shift at the power plant.”

“Sideshow Bob has been spotted in the area.”

“Cletus has helped Brandine give birth to another Spuckler.”

And my personal favourite:

“Apu has finished relaxing in the Brown House.”

Now I just need someone to invent an app that will let me relive my favourite Amiga Commodore 64 game Bubble Bobble, and my life will be complete. You know the one; you had to build bubble towers so the little dragons could reach the top of the screen. Genius.

PS. I sort of thought the title of this blog sounded a bit like Game of Thrones and was ergo mildly amusing. Then I thought it sounded a bit like the 1981 Duran Duran smash-hit Girls on Film and was therefore definitely mildly amusing.

I now feel it doesn’t actually sound enough like either to be mildly amusing and is therefore basically just shit. However, after all this thinking, I can’t be arsed to think of a better title. Bet you’re glad you read to the end, aren’t you?