I have spent way too much time this weekend playing tiny tower. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my holiday—just that, every fleeting moment I could snag between grilling, family events and fireworks, I would dash to my phone to restock my tiny businesses.

As time-wasters go, Tiny Tower has a leg up on the competition. The writing is clever (and delightfully referential), and the pixel art feels fresh in a market over-saturated in nostalgia. The art’s strength is in abstraction of the familiar: an Apple Store, a wood-grilled pizza parlor, and a brewery are all represented, each row no more than about 50 pixels tall. With a nod to its social-game ancestors, Tiny Tower even abstracts Facebook: your ‘bitizens’ will post status updates about their jobs, favorite pop-culture quotes, or speculations on 8-bit existence. Sam Cooper, one of my “Mapple Store” genius bar associates (complete with blue polo—you can customize each character’s outfits) muses, “If we were thinking with portals then we wouldn’t need these elevators!”

Any game that can engross both me and my stalwartly non-gamer girlfriend has to be doing something right, and the pacing of tiny tower is perfectly tuned: floor pricing (=floorNumber^2 * 150, as near as I can determine) starts out low enough to permit rapid development, and scales exponentially as you build out your businesses (and get addicted). Your stores’ income scales, too, providing you maintain a balance between residential and commercial floors—the price of the next expansion tends to be just barely out of reach, and this feels fair. To date it has not taken more than a few hours of inventory management grinding to make it to the next floor, and if you can’t wait, that’s where Nimblebit provide the easy out of in-app purchases to get more towerbux. Reviewers have discussed Tiny Tower’s freemium model already so I won’t repeat their findings here, beyond applauding Nimblebit for creating an entirely optional payment model that still grows ever more enticing as the times and costs involved in the game scale.

Your narrative role within Tiny Tower is confusing, to say the least. The game’s interactions cast the player alternately as zoning board, inventory manager, landlord, human resources director, and… elevator operator? That last one is the most unique among sim-style god-games, and it ends up being the majority of what you do when the game is open: in between building new levels and restocking merchandise, you spend most of out time shuttling bitizens up and down your tower, rewarded for your engagement by the random appearance of time-saving VIP characters that can sell out a specific product or shave three hours off a build time. You don’t have to leave the game open after restocking your inventory, but you’ll want to. You are also periodically asked to play the front desk and identify particular inhabitants of your tower, for a variety of reasons. ID actions occur about every five minutes you have the game foregrounded: perhaps a package has been delivered for bitizen Peggy Moore, or perhaps (and this happened!) the game informs you that only Fred Duncan is a bad enough dude to save the president. These are good mechanics, adding to the games character and allowing you to play at your own pace as you get to know your pixellated minions.

And what of those bitizens? Between the expansions, restocking, and elevator maintenance, this unabashedly simple game does offer flashes of insight into the workings of an economy. Many of my bitizens have creative talent, but ended up stuck in dead-end retail jobs; more than a few of my tower’s inhabitants had to spend some time working at a sub shop before they landed their dream gig at that travel agency. I’ve grown attached to my tiny champions of commerce, reading each sprite’s personal stories between the lines of the games’ wall-posts and popup notifications.

Tiny Tower is a well-made game, and I’m glad to be playing it. I’ve got to run, though—I need to restock the bike shop on 11, and one of my bitizens just warned me there may be some angry birds trapped in the ventilation.

Tiny Tower is available for iPad and iPhone—for free—from the Apple App Store. Good luck maintaining your social life!

Once I bought into the necessity of hunting and gathering for cash within the game, most of the tasks came naturally. You play a cowboy; cowboys seek fame, fortune and money. Most things you do for fame and fortune in Red Dead gain you completion percentages. By the time I completed the story I had already reached 97% completion. That last 3% of game gave me just enough time to begin to tell my own story within the gameworld, creating the start of a new chapter in the lives of the Marstons. That experience provided me more narrative closure than did the game itself.

Red Dead Redemption is like that—I played the game on its own terms, but with my own personal style. A few weeks after the credits rolled, I had a conversation with my brother about the final storyline event. During that confrontation, my brother chose to use the Cattleman Revoler, the starting weapon of the game. He selected that weapon because he believed it was John Marston’s old gun, which he believed would mean more to your character than any of the weapons you purchase or find during the rest of the game. To him, the cattleman revolver was the symbol of Marston’s journey, and the only tool that could truly close the last chapter. By way of contrast, I chose a modern pistol—not for its stopping power, but because it had been given to Marston by the very forces he fought so hard against. I wanted to use my enemy’s own weapons to exact my revenge.

These were roleplaying decisions. They were driven by our interpretations of the characters, not any game mechanics. We had played all the same missions, but in the end, we didn’t choose our weapons based on power or flexibility. In most shooters the choice of weapon is clear—what has the most ammunition, or the most power? It is a rare game that can make you choose for emotional reasons. We chose based on our interpretations of the character we inhabited, and how we had reacted to the events we had been through together. I think that says more about how captivated we were by Red Dead Redemption than any broad generalizations ever could.

There are a couple of games I have been playing lately that I have particularly reacted to, and as I am currently stuck on a bus in deepest Connecticut I thought I might take a break from replaying Spider to reflect a little on a handful of iPhone ports that have most interested me: Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard, Popcap’s Plants vs Zombies, and Lazy 8 Studios’ Cogs.

I left some comments about Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard over at Creative Applications’ post about the recent iPhone port, and as it happened CreativeApps’ Filip judged my reactions interesting enough to reward me with a download code for the full game. I first played the free version of The Graveyard shortly after it was released, and for a game that takes under ten minutes to complete it really impressed me. (If you haven’t tried the game you should go form your own impressions—the core game is free on both computer and iPhone.) Cast in the role of an elderly woman, your only goal in the game is to walk into a graveyard, sit down on a bench, reminisce about lost loved ones, then stand and walk back out… hardly a complicated exercise, but the execution managed to really pull me in.

The first time I played I was extremely frustrated with the speed of my avatar, limited to a shuffling limp after having become so used to sprinting, flying and otherwise racing through other games. This is the first win for The Graveyard: I was frustrated because I felt old. Anything other than taxes that makes a fairly recent college graduate feel old is worth recognition, but the identification with the character actually strenghtened as I played. Looking back on my first play session, I started the game frustrated by how my avatar’s age limited my movements, but by the time I left the graveyard I was content to take things at the pace they came. In ten minutes Tale of Tales essentially walked me through the process of coming to terms with aging. While it will be quite a number of years before I can verify these reactions, that was my first takeaway.

Death is treated in a very matter-of-fact way in the game, and the song you listen to once you reach the bench recounts all the deaths your character has witnessed over her long life. Newborns, elderly relatives, sick children: everybody ends up the same in the end, with no more than a stone in the ground and an old woman’s memories to memorialize them. The song ends with the woman’s contemplation that she will soon join this row of stones. In a graveyard death is not frightening, it is all around… your character has come to terms with the coming end.

In the free version of the game, this is how it ends: you stand, you shuffle back to the main gate, and you close the game, returning to the triple-A shooter du jour or indie masterpiece of the moment. That is exactly what I did, but when I was browsing games several months later it had left a strong enough memory to spur me to head over and grab the full version. In an unfortunately typical situation my life exploded too much to take advantage of my new purchases, the game sat on my drive for several more months, and I didn’t end up playing the full version until I redeemed Creative Applications’ App Store download code earlier this week. The full version of the game adds only one feature: mortality. Unlike in the free version, once you put money down you can die.

In fact, every time I have played the full version, I have died. I cannot speak to the experience on a PC, but I can comment on the peculiarities of the mobile port. The first time I saw my avatar’s head slump forward I was on the train, playing with the sound off on my morning commute. The dischord around me on the T and the silence of the game (remmember that a large portion of the game’s content is a song about the dearly departed) made the whole experience rather surreal. It had been long enough since my initial playthrough that I couldn’t recall whether this was normal, so for a time I waited for her to stand, thinking perhaps the music hadn’t ended yet. When it became clear the old woman had passed away, I turned off my phone and got off the train, rather perplexed by how much less effecting the game was out of context. I made sure to wear headphones the next time. With the music and the atmospheric sound effects it was more definitive when she passed on… the music stopped, she seemed to consider getting up, then slumped forward instead. After having identified so tightly with the character in the free version, this time I found myself reacting much as one does to the news somebody you don’t know has finally passed away. Anticlimactic, expected, and peaceful, this was the antithesis of player death in almost any other game.

There are a few things about the implementation on the iPhone that I feel weaken the overall experience. First, the game does not override the currently playing music in iTunes. While I am normally greatful that games allow me to play my own tunes, in this instance I feel that random shuffle rather cheapens the experience. The Graveyard is such a concise statement that it would hardly be that much of an inconvenience to mute the sound for a couple minutes.

The other thing, and this may be true of the desktop version as well, is that if you die the game starts where the last one let off: You see yourself sitting on the bench, lifeless. In my opinion this diminished the feeling of finality the death had the first time I witnessed it much more than starting fresh would have done.

Is this a game that should have been ported to the iPhone? I feel that in some ways writing a game in Unity encourages the creation of ports, and this may be a case of “Well, we could, so why not?” After all, it’s nice to have a larger market, especially for indie studios with niche audiences. The chaos and unpredictability of your surroundings when you play an iPhone game stand opposed to the atmosphere of The Graveyard, and the game’s failure to override your own soundtrack, tends to weaken the impact of the game.

But then again, isn’t that the point?. Death is no more distant on the subway than it is in a graveyard. Whether you’re listening to Brahms, birds or the Black Eyed Peas does not have one iota of impact on your base mortality. So in the end, the juxtaposition of a carefully limited work of art with the sprawling chaos of the real world might go farther to emphasize the game’s message than the most carefully controlled environment ever could.

Whether it really belongs on the platform or not, I am glad Tale of Tales released The Graveyard for my phone. I don’t know how much this rerelease will earn the studio, but I hope that people will take a chance on these “artsy” games. Every game like The Graveyard and Rohrer’s Passage makes the App Store a better place.

Get The Graveyard in the App Store

This became far more verbose than I had anticipated, and having started in deepest Connecticut I now find myself rolling through Manhattan. With that in mind, I will defer commentary on the other games until a later time.

Introduced to the band through “Dissolved Girl’s” brief appearance in The Matrix, I backtracked from Mezzanine to Blue Lines, eagerly awaited 100^th Window in 2003, and somewhere along the way acquired their limited edition Singles ’90/’98 collection. I have gone to see movies purely because this band recorded the score. Nowhere along the way would I have necessarily have claimed they were one of my favorite bands, but I have been a devoted listener for over a decade and I somehow own their complete discography. Suffice it to say that I was pretty excited to hear they had a new album coming out, especially after seven years of silence.

When Heligoland finally arrived, it wasn’t until I hit track four that I really believed I was listening to a Massive Attack album. 100^th Window, though my least favorite album, was still a direct evolution of the sound the band employed on Mezzanine; it was only with the familiarity of long-time collaborator Horace Andy’s voice and the rolling beat on “Girl I Love You” that I could connect Heligoland to the back catalogue. It is a different sort of album, and the style of the band has condensed—the sound is darker, a sort of sonic Pandora’s box that sometimes feels even more threatening than the densest moments of Mezzanine—but the guest vocalists are used to greater effect than they have been since perhaps 1994′s Protection, and there is an uplifting aftertaste to each song. The voices of Horace Andy and Robert Del Naja keep the new sounds grounded, and the rest of the songs each fall into place. It took a couple of listens, but this is definitely a Massive Attack album.

It took years for the spare minimalism of electronica over the past decade to mature into balanced work like Gui Boratto’s album Take My Breath Away. Massive Attack have undergone a similar evolution since 2003, and it is fitting that it was Boratto’s remix of “Paradise Circus” that finally sold me on what they have become. Heligoland is an album created a full decade into the 21st century. Massive Attack have stripped down their sound, rebuilt it, and infused it with a clarity they haven’t had in years. This album is dark so it can be uplifting, resolute so it can surprise you, and it truly sings in remixes. I’m a fan.

The album is available on iTunes.