Tiny Tower

For iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone, etc.

That screenshot you see above. That's the spectre that haunts my every waking moment. The game hunts you down. Like an impatient lover, it stalks you eerily and serenades you at night. It sends you messages when you least expect them. It does not rest until it find you. Only it does not give you love...only tasks.
Tiny Tower is the recently released by NimbleBit, which has been in the business of destroying productivity for several years now, and is most well known by its earlier release of Pocket Frogs, a game I've never played but already hate.
See, I recently got back from vacation. I have a big pile of photos and manuscript I've been trying to get through, only I can't. I can't get through any of it. Because of this.

It's a photo of somebody in an elevator. The little buttons at the bottom are the directions. Down for down and so forth. That is how you spend the majority of this game. Up. Down. You work for tips. Working for tips from a game!
I didn't want to intrigue anybody by describing this game, which I feared would have the same effect as, say, telling somebody about the magical monkey's paw you saw at a curio shop. But it is fairly simple. And the worst part about it? Free. It is part of what seems to be a growing stock of 'Freemium' games, which were popularized by Zynga, the monsters responsible for the inundation of my Facebook inbox with messages about rapidly ripening strawberries, mob hits, and vampire things.
Gameplay is simple enough. You have a tower. Each floor is one of two types- either residential, which holds up to five 'Bitizens', or a business of one of five types. The types really don't matter. They could just be color coded abstracts for all I'm concerned. Your bitizens have job 'skills' in each of the business types, from 0-9. Each business type has three products it sells, and each product requires an amount of time to restock. Once restocked, a stream of bitizens come in and purchase the products. At the game's core lies a diabolical time management game, where you constantly balance restock times with product prices, VIP arrivals, and floor construction times.
Now, it doesn't seem all that interesting until you build a few floors. With a perfectly built in-app purchase model, you never really need to make a purchase to play the game. You can cash in 'Tower Bux' for big stacks of coins that you need to build new floors or restock your businesses. How do you get Tower Bux without paying real bux? Oh...that's where your obligations fall by the wayside. You get tipped Tower Bux for a 'Find the Bitizen' minigame, where you are given the task of locating a specific Bitizen in your tower. You locate the Bitizen, click the floor, and are given the Tower Bux. Your eye twitches. Your veins widen and the drug surges through, soaking every scrap of flesh in your body.

You can use the Tower Bux to speed up restock times, speed up the construction times of floors, upgrade your elevators, and other time-saving functions. The worst part of it all is that if you just wait, you don't need Tower Bux at all. If you wait for the game's mechanics to just work, you can play forever without a single Bux, for the most part. Perhaps the only real use for Tower Bux is purchasing upgrades for your elevator. Once your tower starts reaching into the skyline, the basic elevator just won't do. The more Bitizens you can shuttle up into your tower, the more Bux you can get tipped. The more VIPs, which randomly appear in your lobby, you can get into the tower. There is the Big Spender, which buys out all of one product of the floor of your choice. The Construction Worker reduces the construction time of any construction floor by three hours, and as I type this I have a floor with over 7 hours left until completion. Remember...if I just wait seven hours, the floor will be built. The Delivery Man will reduce the production time of any business's product by three hours. There is also a Celebrity VIP who will increase the patronage of any floor temporarily. The catch is that if you are not actively playing, the VIPs will not appear. So you need to sit and shuttle Bitizens, begging for tips, waiting for Celebrities to show up at your tower. You're just a doorman. They should have called this game 'Tiny Doorman', except that you kind of moonlight as a building manager. Or some crap.
So what, big whoop, right? Restock some stores, shuttle some people into the building, build a floor. Turn it off. No problem. Except that the game will notify you whenever an item needs to be restocked into the store. Big deal again, right? The caveat is that when you get a tower of respectable size, there is always something that needs to be restocked. Always. That that when you are trying to go to sleep, this shows up.

When you're at the gym. When you're on the way to work. When you're at work. When you're driving home from work. When you're pulling guard in a machine gun nest. When you're in line at the Post Office. When you're about to ask your boss for a big raise. When you're operating a backhoe. When you're in a meeting with your boss. When you're in the bathroom. When your boss is yelling at you. When you are sunbathing. When you are cleaning out your desk. When you are mowing the lawn. When you are waiting in the unemployment line. When you are at church. When you are putting a basket of hash browns in the Fryolator. And so on.
It never stops. Each Bitizen has a 'dream job', and when you assign them to that job, they increase the stock amount of a product by double. You have three products at each business. They are worth one, two, and three coins. You can produce the two more valuable products only if you have two and three employees. The employee's skill number in that type of business will give you a discount on restock fees. If all three employees are working their dream job, you get double stock of all three products. If it's not a product that you need to restock, it's a Bitizen that needs to be moved from one job to another in order to boost stock and round out inventories.
One thing that I really don't understand is BitBook. It's an ingame social networking tab that features little postings and musings by the Bitizens. I have read that some of the posts by the Bitizens are tips to improve your tower, but I haven't found anything of use in the thousands of BitBook posts I've seen so far.

The most disturbing part about BitBook is that a lot of people complain that you are not able to post on it. The fact that not being able to participate in a useless ingame feature generates complaints is more than a little stirring.
The game also allows you to create a skyline of other peoples' towers. Simply put their name into your friends tab and they will populate the skyline. This is another dangerous feature because nothing makes you want to generate Tower Bux more than seeing someone who has a tower fifteen stories taller than your own.

The Good

Gameplay addictive to the point of torture. Extremely well balanced time management mechanic. Free to play, and purchases are not necessary to fully experience the game.

The Bad

Obnoxious amount of notifications that interrupt everything you are doing that, if turned off, will cause a serious disruption in your supply chain. No multiplayer support.

Tiny Tower= 89%

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