> What you're talking about is not so much casual gaming as it is the dreaded > "free-to-play" model. The point is that you're not supposed to grind away or wait for > your turns to reset, you're supposed to cough up a couple of bucks to keep going. I > have no idea who wastes money on this kind of crap, but somebody must because > everyone is doing it these days. I'll be glad when it finally goes away.
IMHO, freemium or IAP (In-App Purchase) games on iOS are often such despicable crap. But that's how developers make money these days - making a quick buck on those who feel they can pay their way to instant gratification and powerups. I have to force myself to remember that the classic games were basically still about making money; they were just more subtle about it. There's a kind of precedence in the later games which allowed you to continue as long as you had coins to insert: Double Dragon, 1943, UN Squadron, Magic Sword et al. The difference is that with the arcade games, if you actually built up enough skill, you could spend less and less money on each subsequent pass to the finish. I suspect that's not the case with IAP.
> > What happened to actually BEATING a game, instead of forcing the > > player to grind away at the next upgrade that is thousands of points/coins away? It > > doesn't make the game more immersive, it makes it ANNOYING and eventually makes me > > stop playing it. > > Is this really all that different from pretty much all early arcade games? Most had a > finite set of levels that looped (almost) indefinitely, leaving you to play just for > the fun of it or to chase high score bragging rights.
There's nothing wrong with testing yourself for endurance and high scores. Ahhh, Slap Fight. My old nemesis, whom I managed to loop to a third cycle, only once in the arcade, and never since even in MAME.
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