Game: Godfinger, ngmoco:), 2010, iPhoneBeer: Rolling Rock Extra Pale, 12 fl. oz., 4.6% abv
# of beers consumed during play: 1
Level Reached: 30-something
Level of Intoxication: Buzzed
Game
Godfinger, a game whereby the player assumes the role of omnipotent creator, is one of those "casual heroin" games. For those people within the civilized populace who are predisposed of addictive behavior, but are reluctant to actually find a dealer and purchase schedule I controlled substances, this product will suffice nicely. This game also falls squarely in the realm of "pretending to go to the bathroom at work just so you can sit on the toilet and catch up on your gold collecting" games, of which there are way more than the average person is even aware of. Ironic then that smartphones, which were originally developed to increase the productivity of your average worker drone, are actually causing said drone to fall into a holding pattern of un-productivity. Videogames: bane of capitalist nations everywhere.
Gameplay
The premise of Godfinger is simple: open the game, play for about 15 minutes doing repetitive yet strangely alluring tasks, then log out. Once logged out, dwell listlessly on the prospect of logging in again and curse the Earth for turning on its axis so painfully slowly. If you've read this far and surmised that Godfinger is one of those timer-based games, you have surmised correctly. Go ahead and get yourself a cookie out of the jar. If you don't have cookies, then go fetch yourself whatever it is that passes for a treat in your bleak little world and come back, the rest of us are waiting on you.
Godfinger--as the name may imply--puts you in the shoes of a god who controls and rules a little 2D world with his or her finger. With your fleshy wand of ultimate power, you will summon rain, lightning bolts, floods, firestorms, and terraform the land and move buildings. None of this compares though to the vastly underrated power to pick up your followers by their feet and fling them maliciously off the screen. Oh sure, you can zap them with lightning or roast them in a firestorm, but the primal glee that accompanies the act of flicking them across the planet is only rivaled by the fact that the game actually measures said throw and rewards you for it. Seriously. The developers of this game know exactly the kind of assholes people are and have included a game mechanic to tap into that. Point in fact, the game designers included virtually every device possible for griefing the minions featured within the game, making this less of a world building simulator and more of a fancy, high-tech way of projecting your intense hatred of your co-workers into a safe and consequence-free environment. Of course, if you are the kind of person who is a slave to actually playing a game in parallel with its intended objectives, Godfinger is pretty fun for you too.
While there is no ultimate goal or end to the game, Godfinger strings you along by assigning tasks which yield breadcrumb-like rewards for successful completion. Such tasks include using a specific power on a specific object, making your minions do certain things, building a required number of buildings or decorations, et cetera. In most cases, attaining any given goal is accomplished by the core gameplay conventions, which are as follows, in rough order of importance and/or repetitiousness: buy farms, make followers farm for gold, collect gold, find exhausted followers and punish them for being exhausted by flinging them around and/or striking them with lightning and/or dropping them in the lake before finally dropping them off at a tavern or water fountain to refresh themselves. There, that's it, I just described the entire game in minute detail. And of course, therein lies one of the biggest problems with the game itself: after a while, logging in, doing those tasks, and logging out seems like more of a chore than fun, particularly after you've exhausted your vocabulary of hate on all your followers and have discovered that if you don't log in often enough, the gold your minions farm up for you actually turns bad after a set amount of time.That's right, in a devious twist of gameplay design, if you don't play the game at set intervals, you the player are punished by having your gold rust and become worthless. So if you don't want your time waster to be a waste of time, you have to make sure to waste time at the right times. Which wouldn't be so bad if the game wasn't so goddamn crash prone.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that...
As far as the game goes, it's a fun if slightly repetitive time waster, which is perfectly fitting for the iPhone. Unfortunately, people who have a device such as the iPhone want their apps to be, like, stable...which is apparently a new concept over at the ngmoco:) codehouse. Godfinger has something like 10,000 reviews, which are fairly evenly split between 5-star glowing reviews by those who are just starting out and are gripped by the clutches of follower-flinging oblivion, and the 1-star scathing diatribes who have gotten tired of an app that crashes, lags, hangs, glitches, and causes the entire device it is installed on to exhibit unusual behavior. Lest you, the reader, think I am criticizing Godfinger by others' reviews, allow me to give you a window into my own personal experience. Once I got above level 30, I noticed times when the app would lag very badly, to the point where the sound would stutter, the framerate would drop to almost zero, and the controls would be entirely unresponsive. An app restart would typically clear this up, though I would lose whatever progress I'd been working on. Later, the app started exhibiting even more uncouth behavior, whereupon the whole thing would dead-hang at the splash screen, and later, ingame. Most of this behavior was attributed to the 2.2 update, and after the game crashed to the home screen several times in one day, also mysteriously screwing up my baseband until I rebooted (the part of the iPhone that allows me to make and receive phone calls, y'know, no biggie), I stopped playing the game. Once an update was released which promised bug and performance fixes, I downloaded it, installed it, and encountered many of the same problems as before. The lagging was back as was a strange crash behavior that would force my email client to refresh and as I was already at a sufficiently high level in the game where nothing interesting or new was happening, I uninstalled Godfinger and haven't looked back. More's the pity since the game mechanics and polished graphics had so much potential, especially if new content, goals and powers were forthcoming. But, like I said in my own 1-star review of Godfinger in the app store, the last thing I need on my $600 phone is software that doesn't work, no matter how pretty it is.
Graphics/Sound
The visuals in Godfinger are superb, particularly on the iPhone 4. All the graphic assets in Godfinger are hi-res, and they positively shine. Details such as the individual blades of grass swaying in the breeze, the leaves in trees and the accents in the followers' clothing are all amazingly rich and lovingly crafted. Lively touches such as butterflies flitting from flower to flower and the way the clouds billow realistically add a level of polish and verve to the game not often (if ever) found on mobile platforms. Similarly, the myriad special effects on offer, from the awesome way water flows and undulates, to the particle effects from lightning and fire strikes, all the way down to the appearance of the sun's rays and the burst effect when activating a god power are stunning in their smooth animation and incredible presentation. On a similar note, the characters themselves are all unforgivably cute in a creepy, xenophobic "I'm really glad there is no real life counterpart to you" way. The way their mouths look remind me vaguely of Wallace and Gromit, which is by no means bad, and their animations (especially when in dire, life threatening distress) elicit more smiles out of me than plugging the search term "idiot kid" into YouTube. The game's UI is simple, well thought out and intuitive, and is--as user interfaces should be--largely invisible to the game experience as a whole. Visually, the game is so accomplished I'm almost tempted to give it a pass on graphical merit alone...Almost. I'm not even kidding when I say that Godfinger has some of the best 2D graphics I've ever seen. Whoever the art director is on this game should get a raise, a promotion, and if possible, a Maserati made out of chocolate and a huge freezer-garage to keep it in.
If the eyeball-candy in Godfinger is the cream, then the sound must surely be the sugar. Few games really strike me with their sound production. Most times when critiquing the music and sound effects in any given game, words such as "adequate" "unobtrusive" "easy to ignore" and "donkey" come to mind (Okay not the last one really, I just threw that one in to see if you were paying attention). Godfinger is different though. While the music is entirely non-existent, liberal use of sound is used to fill the aural gaps. From wind blowing over dusty terrain to crickets chirping in the verdant grass, the planet you rule actually has a feeling of environment, something many of the most expensive big budget titles seem to miss almost constantly. In addition to the excellent ambient noises--indeed, as an exclamation point to them--are the sounds of your god powers. When you create mountains out of molehills and wide stretching plains out of useless mountains, the sound of tumbling earth comes rumbling forth. When you summon lightning from the heavens, the resultant crack is zappyrific, and when said lightning bolt hits the innocent follower who was just standing there minding his own business, the high-pitched scream he makes is stupefyingly hilarious. In fact, the sounds of the followers are so well done, and carry with them so much character, that single facet alone breathes enough life into the game to make it worth playing, that is until the wanton crashing gets out of hand.
Story
This is one of those games that don't have so much a story as a premise, which seems to be popular among the games which inhabit Mobile Deviceland. One supposes that when games are played in bite sized 5-10 minute chunks, wading through cutscenes tends to dilute the experience. While Godfinger hasn't even the barest sliver of writ story, it can be argued that the player is creating their own narrative through their playstyle. Whether that narrative is one of happiness and prosperity or suffering and humiliation depends on the person playing.
Beer
Rolling Rock is one of those beers that is so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible. Its availability is widespread, yet its appearance so pedestrian, and its placement in most retail beer coolers so inconspicuous, that most pairs of eyes sweep right past it in search of the more well known brews. I am convinced this is actually intentional on the part of the distributors of Rolling Rock, since they've had more than ample opportunity to change the packaging on their product to something more eye-catching.
Smell
As can be expected out of an extra pale, there's quite a bit of grain in the odor. This isn't bad really, just pedestrian, and in fact, gives the beer a pretty good foundation. The teeny-weeny hints of bitterness and the slightest blast of baby skunk ass give this beer some character, even if there isn't enough to really set it apart from other pale lagers.
Taste
While the smell may be totally unremarkable, the taste seems to hit a sweet spot as it were. As one drinks, they are hit with the feeling they've drunk this particular drink before, but not in any "been there done that" sense. No, instead, as the clean bitter taste slides over the tongue, many drinkers may feel a distinct notion of nostalgia, of backyard bar-be-ques, of parties with good people and good music, and of saying the wrong thing to a wealthy relative while intoxicated and getting that sudden icy feeling of knowing your portion of the inheritance has quietly slipped away and been permanently divvied up among your other family members. One thing this brew is particularly suited for is lounging poolside and soaking up the sun's rays as your body soaks up the alcohol. Thanks to the clean taste and easy drinkability this is a fine summertime beer which also goes surprisingly well with the odd videogame.
Intoxication
The relatively low alcohol content in this beer means easy drinking with an even easier intoxication curve. It would take several beers before any real mental or bodily impairment would begin to take hold, and at no time would the drunk take a sinister or belligerent turn. One of the especially nice things is the fact that speech seems to work fairly unhindered, and with careful consumption, the drinker would be able to maintain an indefinite buzz with no debilitating side-effects such as the irrational urge to jump through that plate-glass window over there.
Feel
The feel incurred as one brings the bottle to their lips is fairly bubbly, but not overwhelming, being crisp and refreshing rather than feeling like a mouthful of Alka-Seltzer tablets. The fluid slides down to the stomach and finds a quiet corner where it won't bother anybody while it's being digested, leaving the drinker to feel quite good about him/herself and their choice in beer. Thankfully there's very little bloating, if any, and if a person is so inclined as to power through a six-pack, once done, they will likely feel good enough to engage in any number of summertime leisure activities.
The Matchup
In this case, the game and beer in question are fairly dissimilar. In Godfinger's instance, there is a great deal of polish to the property's outside qualities, and very little foundation given to the core, leaving a fantastically pretty game with very little long-term fun-factor. Rolling Rock on the other hand has very little bling-bling on the outside, but makes up for it with a perfectly fine core which, while inhabiting a solid middle ground in quality, is still a much better choice than a great many other properties on offer. Together the two products make for an entertaining afternoon, but while I would definitely go for some more Rolling Rock in the future, I have a feeling that now that I've put Godfinger down, I won't be picking it back up again. Such is life.
Cheers/Game on.
# of beers consumed during play: 1
Level Reached: 30-something
Level of Intoxication: Buzzed
Game
Godfinger, a game whereby the player assumes the role of omnipotent creator, is one of those "casual heroin" games. For those people within the civilized populace who are predisposed of addictive behavior, but are reluctant to actually find a dealer and purchase schedule I controlled substances, this product will suffice nicely. This game also falls squarely in the realm of "pretending to go to the bathroom at work just so you can sit on the toilet and catch up on your gold collecting" games, of which there are way more than the average person is even aware of. Ironic then that smartphones, which were originally developed to increase the productivity of your average worker drone, are actually causing said drone to fall into a holding pattern of un-productivity. Videogames: bane of capitalist nations everywhere.
Gameplay
The premise of Godfinger is simple: open the game, play for about 15 minutes doing repetitive yet strangely alluring tasks, then log out. Once logged out, dwell listlessly on the prospect of logging in again and curse the Earth for turning on its axis so painfully slowly. If you've read this far and surmised that Godfinger is one of those timer-based games, you have surmised correctly. Go ahead and get yourself a cookie out of the jar. If you don't have cookies, then go fetch yourself whatever it is that passes for a treat in your bleak little world and come back, the rest of us are waiting on you.
Godfinger--as the name may imply--puts you in the shoes of a god who controls and rules a little 2D world with his or her finger. With your fleshy wand of ultimate power, you will summon rain, lightning bolts, floods, firestorms, and terraform the land and move buildings. None of this compares though to the vastly underrated power to pick up your followers by their feet and fling them maliciously off the screen. Oh sure, you can zap them with lightning or roast them in a firestorm, but the primal glee that accompanies the act of flicking them across the planet is only rivaled by the fact that the game actually measures said throw and rewards you for it. Seriously. The developers of this game know exactly the kind of assholes people are and have included a game mechanic to tap into that. Point in fact, the game designers included virtually every device possible for griefing the minions featured within the game, making this less of a world building simulator and more of a fancy, high-tech way of projecting your intense hatred of your co-workers into a safe and consequence-free environment. Of course, if you are the kind of person who is a slave to actually playing a game in parallel with its intended objectives, Godfinger is pretty fun for you too.
While there is no ultimate goal or end to the game, Godfinger strings you along by assigning tasks which yield breadcrumb-like rewards for successful completion. Such tasks include using a specific power on a specific object, making your minions do certain things, building a required number of buildings or decorations, et cetera. In most cases, attaining any given goal is accomplished by the core gameplay conventions, which are as follows, in rough order of importance and/or repetitiousness: buy farms, make followers farm for gold, collect gold, find exhausted followers and punish them for being exhausted by flinging them around and/or striking them with lightning and/or dropping them in the lake before finally dropping them off at a tavern or water fountain to refresh themselves. There, that's it, I just described the entire game in minute detail. And of course, therein lies one of the biggest problems with the game itself: after a while, logging in, doing those tasks, and logging out seems like more of a chore than fun, particularly after you've exhausted your vocabulary of hate on all your followers and have discovered that if you don't log in often enough, the gold your minions farm up for you actually turns bad after a set amount of time.That's right, in a devious twist of gameplay design, if you don't play the game at set intervals, you the player are punished by having your gold rust and become worthless. So if you don't want your time waster to be a waste of time, you have to make sure to waste time at the right times. Which wouldn't be so bad if the game wasn't so goddamn crash prone.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that...
As far as the game goes, it's a fun if slightly repetitive time waster, which is perfectly fitting for the iPhone. Unfortunately, people who have a device such as the iPhone want their apps to be, like, stable...which is apparently a new concept over at the ngmoco:) codehouse. Godfinger has something like 10,000 reviews, which are fairly evenly split between 5-star glowing reviews by those who are just starting out and are gripped by the clutches of follower-flinging oblivion, and the 1-star scathing diatribes who have gotten tired of an app that crashes, lags, hangs, glitches, and causes the entire device it is installed on to exhibit unusual behavior. Lest you, the reader, think I am criticizing Godfinger by others' reviews, allow me to give you a window into my own personal experience. Once I got above level 30, I noticed times when the app would lag very badly, to the point where the sound would stutter, the framerate would drop to almost zero, and the controls would be entirely unresponsive. An app restart would typically clear this up, though I would lose whatever progress I'd been working on. Later, the app started exhibiting even more uncouth behavior, whereupon the whole thing would dead-hang at the splash screen, and later, ingame. Most of this behavior was attributed to the 2.2 update, and after the game crashed to the home screen several times in one day, also mysteriously screwing up my baseband until I rebooted (the part of the iPhone that allows me to make and receive phone calls, y'know, no biggie), I stopped playing the game. Once an update was released which promised bug and performance fixes, I downloaded it, installed it, and encountered many of the same problems as before. The lagging was back as was a strange crash behavior that would force my email client to refresh and as I was already at a sufficiently high level in the game where nothing interesting or new was happening, I uninstalled Godfinger and haven't looked back. More's the pity since the game mechanics and polished graphics had so much potential, especially if new content, goals and powers were forthcoming. But, like I said in my own 1-star review of Godfinger in the app store, the last thing I need on my $600 phone is software that doesn't work, no matter how pretty it is.
Graphics/Sound
The visuals in Godfinger are superb, particularly on the iPhone 4. All the graphic assets in Godfinger are hi-res, and they positively shine. Details such as the individual blades of grass swaying in the breeze, the leaves in trees and the accents in the followers' clothing are all amazingly rich and lovingly crafted. Lively touches such as butterflies flitting from flower to flower and the way the clouds billow realistically add a level of polish and verve to the game not often (if ever) found on mobile platforms. Similarly, the myriad special effects on offer, from the awesome way water flows and undulates, to the particle effects from lightning and fire strikes, all the way down to the appearance of the sun's rays and the burst effect when activating a god power are stunning in their smooth animation and incredible presentation. On a similar note, the characters themselves are all unforgivably cute in a creepy, xenophobic "I'm really glad there is no real life counterpart to you" way. The way their mouths look remind me vaguely of Wallace and Gromit, which is by no means bad, and their animations (especially when in dire, life threatening distress) elicit more smiles out of me than plugging the search term "idiot kid" into YouTube. The game's UI is simple, well thought out and intuitive, and is--as user interfaces should be--largely invisible to the game experience as a whole. Visually, the game is so accomplished I'm almost tempted to give it a pass on graphical merit alone...Almost. I'm not even kidding when I say that Godfinger has some of the best 2D graphics I've ever seen. Whoever the art director is on this game should get a raise, a promotion, and if possible, a Maserati made out of chocolate and a huge freezer-garage to keep it in.
If the eyeball-candy in Godfinger is the cream, then the sound must surely be the sugar. Few games really strike me with their sound production. Most times when critiquing the music and sound effects in any given game, words such as "adequate" "unobtrusive" "easy to ignore" and "donkey" come to mind (Okay not the last one really, I just threw that one in to see if you were paying attention). Godfinger is different though. While the music is entirely non-existent, liberal use of sound is used to fill the aural gaps. From wind blowing over dusty terrain to crickets chirping in the verdant grass, the planet you rule actually has a feeling of environment, something many of the most expensive big budget titles seem to miss almost constantly. In addition to the excellent ambient noises--indeed, as an exclamation point to them--are the sounds of your god powers. When you create mountains out of molehills and wide stretching plains out of useless mountains, the sound of tumbling earth comes rumbling forth. When you summon lightning from the heavens, the resultant crack is zappyrific, and when said lightning bolt hits the innocent follower who was just standing there minding his own business, the high-pitched scream he makes is stupefyingly hilarious. In fact, the sounds of the followers are so well done, and carry with them so much character, that single facet alone breathes enough life into the game to make it worth playing, that is until the wanton crashing gets out of hand.
Story
This is one of those games that don't have so much a story as a premise, which seems to be popular among the games which inhabit Mobile Deviceland. One supposes that when games are played in bite sized 5-10 minute chunks, wading through cutscenes tends to dilute the experience. While Godfinger hasn't even the barest sliver of writ story, it can be argued that the player is creating their own narrative through their playstyle. Whether that narrative is one of happiness and prosperity or suffering and humiliation depends on the person playing.
Beer
Rolling Rock is one of those beers that is so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible. Its availability is widespread, yet its appearance so pedestrian, and its placement in most retail beer coolers so inconspicuous, that most pairs of eyes sweep right past it in search of the more well known brews. I am convinced this is actually intentional on the part of the distributors of Rolling Rock, since they've had more than ample opportunity to change the packaging on their product to something more eye-catching.Smell
As can be expected out of an extra pale, there's quite a bit of grain in the odor. This isn't bad really, just pedestrian, and in fact, gives the beer a pretty good foundation. The teeny-weeny hints of bitterness and the slightest blast of baby skunk ass give this beer some character, even if there isn't enough to really set it apart from other pale lagers.
Taste
While the smell may be totally unremarkable, the taste seems to hit a sweet spot as it were. As one drinks, they are hit with the feeling they've drunk this particular drink before, but not in any "been there done that" sense. No, instead, as the clean bitter taste slides over the tongue, many drinkers may feel a distinct notion of nostalgia, of backyard bar-be-ques, of parties with good people and good music, and of saying the wrong thing to a wealthy relative while intoxicated and getting that sudden icy feeling of knowing your portion of the inheritance has quietly slipped away and been permanently divvied up among your other family members. One thing this brew is particularly suited for is lounging poolside and soaking up the sun's rays as your body soaks up the alcohol. Thanks to the clean taste and easy drinkability this is a fine summertime beer which also goes surprisingly well with the odd videogame.
Intoxication
The relatively low alcohol content in this beer means easy drinking with an even easier intoxication curve. It would take several beers before any real mental or bodily impairment would begin to take hold, and at no time would the drunk take a sinister or belligerent turn. One of the especially nice things is the fact that speech seems to work fairly unhindered, and with careful consumption, the drinker would be able to maintain an indefinite buzz with no debilitating side-effects such as the irrational urge to jump through that plate-glass window over there.
Feel
The feel incurred as one brings the bottle to their lips is fairly bubbly, but not overwhelming, being crisp and refreshing rather than feeling like a mouthful of Alka-Seltzer tablets. The fluid slides down to the stomach and finds a quiet corner where it won't bother anybody while it's being digested, leaving the drinker to feel quite good about him/herself and their choice in beer. Thankfully there's very little bloating, if any, and if a person is so inclined as to power through a six-pack, once done, they will likely feel good enough to engage in any number of summertime leisure activities.
The Matchup
In this case, the game and beer in question are fairly dissimilar. In Godfinger's instance, there is a great deal of polish to the property's outside qualities, and very little foundation given to the core, leaving a fantastically pretty game with very little long-term fun-factor. Rolling Rock on the other hand has very little bling-bling on the outside, but makes up for it with a perfectly fine core which, while inhabiting a solid middle ground in quality, is still a much better choice than a great many other properties on offer. Together the two products make for an entertaining afternoon, but while I would definitely go for some more Rolling Rock in the future, I have a feeling that now that I've put Godfinger down, I won't be picking it back up again. Such is life.
Cheers/Game on.