I can see why, because the enjoyment of this game is never ending. No, most players have invested months, some people even have years on this game. You don’t play this game for a week, and be high level and get everything in the game. But, what I’ve noticed is that this is a long-term game. It’s so much fun, especially if you enjoy management games. Whereas Tiny Tower handled much of the clicking and restocking onscreen, Pocket Planes relies on multiple menu-like game screens that are poorly designed and take some getting used to.I’ve recently started playing this game. Unfortunately, unlike Tiny Tower’s streamlined interface, Pocket Planes often feels clunky. It doesn’t hide the fact that NimbleBit wants your constant attention or pretend that it’s a deep game. Pocket Planes turns you into an airline tycoon and gives you a host of pixelated buttons to click and meaningless tasks to perform: loading planes full of cargo and passengers, purchasing new planes, leveling up hospitals and checking your passengers’ profile statuses. Like NimbleBit’s previous smash hit Tiny Tower, Pocket Planes also fits pretty well into this formula. He suggested that companies like Zynga purposefully manipulated players into wasting their time, money and attention on a game that lacks any true substance. In the lecture he was addressing the rise in popularity of social games like FarmVille. In doing research for another article I was writing, I came across a lecture by renown indie developer and game critic Jonathan Blow from a few years ago. NimbleBit’s games fit into this strange Pavlovian societal function perfectly-now we’ve got stores to restock, airplanes to board and BitBook profiles to check to fill our empty bus rides and boring conversations with. The truly distasteful part though is that whether it’s scrolling down Twitter feeds or even just swiping back and forth across the rows of icons on our home screen, the tasks we pull out our smartphones to accomplish often equate more to escaping awkward social situations than actually helping us be productive. More than a useful tool or means of communication, whipping out our iPhone or Android device has grown into a full-fledged nervous tic in our collective subconscious. I have a growing suspicion that our obsession with smartphones is a bit more distasteful than we acknowledge.

Pocket planes