Stripped!

Last November, a representative from GameHouse (http://www.gamehouse.com) sent a somewhat personalized press release announcing its new game, Super Collapse II. It somehow stayed at the bottom of my when-I-have-a-moment FIFO queue, which, no matter how hard I beat it, will not convert to LIFO. (Anything below the halfway point in the FIFO queue might just as well be in the circular file.) Anyway, she wrote again in December, and in January, the game went gold.
She wrote throughout January—perhaps even called—and it was something I really meant to get to, but didn’t. In February, she wrote again, ever vigilant, and finally, overtaken by guilt, I downloaded the game. The complicated instructions go something like this: “Click groups of three or more like-colored blocks to clear them from the board.” Sounds like about a million other “post-Tetris” puzzle games, and…well, it is. Yet since then I’ve jumped into a session almost every evening, somewhere in between real life and EverQuest (yes, still), Morrowind: Tribunal (yes, still), Master of Orion III, and a variety of other titles. It hits hard like PopCap’s Bejeweled (which I still find myself playing from time to time) and is just about as mesmerizing.
Wondering how GameHouse managed to retain such a persistent PR person, I visited its website. It turns out that every GameHouse title is Super. There are a dozen or more Super titles, including Super Glinx (“Link similar shapes in rows and columns of two or more. Clear all the shapes before time runs out!”), Super Candy Cruncher (“Only a master Cruncher can eat candy while avoiding the Dreaded Black Jellybeans!”), Super Bounce Out (“Do jumping jacks in your tube top! Show too much cleavage and you lose precious seconds!” OK, not really, it’s actually “Line up similar balls in rows of three or more. Clear as many balls as you can!”), and at least seven other Super titles.
Reviews of games like this usually skew one of two ways.
Game industry journalist: “Simple. Looks awful. Surprisingly addictive, though. Try it.”
Grandmother from Nebraska: “Most fabulous game ever! Super duper! The whole family can play!”
While, we don’t generally review titles like this one, we do, as you may have observed, reserve a bit of space to mention these little gems when we discover them. It’s just that there are so many of them—freeware, shareware, and retail—that it becomes impossible to include them in any significant way. Many are exceptionally entertaining, and many casual gaming sites are hoping to cash in by offering downloadable trial products that you eventually need to “buy now” to receive the full version. The tough part about trials and demos is finding that delicate balance between offering too much gameplay (no need to purchase the game) or too little (not enough to hook the player). But the proliferation of these simple, stripped down games indicates that someone must be doing something right.
Quite some time ago in this column I took a look at what I called “the really little guys,” speculating about why small development companies exist, and why they make these little games. After having been hopelessly hooked on several, maybe it’s time to look at why we play them. A number of reasons spring to mind. They are generally less expensive but not necessarily less filling; they are easy to jump into and out of; losing a save game is not an life or death situation; there are no huge tech trees or booklets of hot-key shortcuts; they’re cute and colorful; and most of them don’t hurt your brain after a stressful day at the factory. Sometimes, when you need to de-stress, it’s just too hard to be bombarded by the elaborate machinations of a game that requires just too much multitasking.
While the large companies with multi-million dollar budgets are steeped in marketing decisions, mergers and acquisitions, decision by committee, pushing the technical envelope, office politics, product placement, and letting focus groups tell them what’s fun, perhaps they’re losing something along the way. They go through all of this because, well, they have a whole lot to lose with every release. These smaller concerns seem to know that fun is not necessarily in all the trappings. Fun can be, and often is, downright minimalist.

“The proliferation of these simple, stripped down games indicates that someone must be doing something right.”

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #150