Going Back to Two Classic Mobile Game Sequels

Well, there's a horrible mouthful of a title for you.

A while back, I decided to look back into a couple of mobile games mainly because I was looking for a short-form game I could play on my phone at work while waiting for our eclectic kettle to heat 8.5 oz of water to not quite boiling for my instant coffee.  Not that Fire Emblem Heroes isn't that, but sometimes I feel like I want to play something that isn't a tactics-lite game and since Spirit Stones is no longer a thing anymore, I figured I would go back to two mobile game staples.  My thoughts went to the 2009 classic Angry Birds and 2013's Plants vs. Zombies 2.  After a brief look through the Google Play Store, I couldn't locate the original Angry Birds which I've just learned was renamed Rovio Classics: Angry Birds and/or Red's First Flight, depending on the platform store of your choice, so instead I downloaded Angry Birds 2, released in 2015, but both iterations of that original game no longer seem to be available for Android.

To make a longer story shorter, I was disappointed and disgusted by both.  And promptly uninstalled them in under a week.

A lot of what ended up turning me off from Plants vs. Zombies 2 back in 2014 (less than a year after its initial release) still holds true, although I only made it to the second world.  This time around, I felt like I was inundated with popup ads for either in-game boosts or for other advertised products.  I was also annoyed that the Snow Pea Shooter that I had purchased back in 2013 was no longer tied to my Gmail account/login*.  There really isn't a lot I can or want to say about this game aside from I (still) really don't like how monetized everything feels and while I do recognize that it is a free game and that EA needs to make their money somehow, it felt exceedingly predatory in a way that made me feel like I was dipping my fingers into some sticky substance that made my fingers smell bad.

Angry Birds 2 was another beast altogether but still part of the same bad-smelling tree.  Everything from a loose grasp on which birds were firing in what order, a loose explanation of the exact function of the cards and how they worked, poor level design that allowed for lack of a better term, gotcha moments, and so many instances of forced ad watching and monetization to continue playing.  Maybe it was because I chose the wrong or less efficient angry bird for the next selection of levels while progressing through the story mode or maybe I just lost my touch after not playing many of the now 29 games in the series.  But it really just felt gross in the same way that it felt like my fingers were touching something physically revolting.  

I assume this is what a lot of people were talking about in regards to Diablo Immortal when they were taking the game seriously.  Maybe I was trying to take PvZ2 and AB2 more seriously than I thought?  I thought I was downloading a free-to-play game that had been out for nigh-on a decade or more.  I dunno.  I just felt repulsed by how much each of these games was trying to ask if I wanted to supersize my free-to-play meal and how easy it would be for The Squire to click "Yes, buy that pack of gems and additional birds to fire from a slingshot for $14.99" and I no longer wanted that on my phone.  I know that all of the free-to-play games I have and actively play like Fire Emblem Heroes, Mighty DOOM, Diablo Immortal, and DuoLingo all have some form of popup ads both for their respective in-game products and for unrelated third-party services, but for whatever reason, these two games in particular felt different.  Maybe it was the frequency, maybe it was something else that I have yet to admit to myself.

Thank you for your time, and please leave 5¢ with the receptionist on your way out.

A real-life ad from Angry Birds 2 that I had to watch to continue playing if I didn't want to cough up real-life money, and pretty accurate about how I felt overall.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I Am So Far Away

*P.S.  While grabbing additional pictures from Plants vs. Zombies 2 for this article that I ended up not even using, I re-downloaded the game after uninstalling it.  This time, I received a pop-up notification saying that there were two accounts associated with my email that I would have to select to continue playing, with the only real discerning information being that one account had a couple hundred gems and the other had zero, so when I selected the higher gems account, I found that my original game was somewhat restored, but only in that I had access to the Snow Pea, but none of the actual progression, so I would have to restart from the beginning.  And I don't feel that the core gameplay has changed since 2014 enough for me to want to attempt the horror that are the beach levels.