Time to Play

(continuing my review of Facebook games)

It's ironic that the two best games, Robot Builder and Nitrous Racing have both come to (bitter) ends.  While the terrible games continue unslowed.

As I've looked for a game to replace NR, I uncovered a new failure mode for FB games: limited time to play.

The amount of time it takes to play a game is a continuum.  You have minesweeper or solitaire which take just a few minutes, to RPG's which take tens of hours.  The nice thing about a short game, you can string the games together to play for an hour or two.

Unless they are Facebook games.


I'll mention two by name, but I'm sure they are not unique in this regard (indeed you see  it in the Frontierville model, where you only have so much energy, and then you have nothing to do).

Diamond Dash
This is a typical matching game like Dr. Mario or Bejeweled.  Game play is typical, and it tracks level (a sort of function of number of games played).  But it only lets you play 1 game every 8 minutes (games are fixed at 1 minute).  And you can only accumulate ~5 games.  So, you play for 5 minutes, then you have to go away for an hour.

Triple Town
This actually has some promise.  It is a twist on the typical matching game, in that matches are "upgraded" instead of removed (I feel like I have played this style before, but I cannot place it).  Successful play is rewarded with coins, which can assist in future games.
Except, you only get one move per minute, and can only bank 75 moves.  So again, you play for a few minutes, then you're forced to move on.

What is the reasoning behind this?  I cannot imagine.  It cannot be server load, because these are Flash games which run locally.  Worse, leaving and returning forces a re-download of the app, which must spike their bandwidth usage (although Triple Town seems a lot smarter about caching).