Tag: Retrospective »

How do you take a series in a new direction when it’s already so well established as The Room? That must have been the question facing Fireproof Games when it sat down to work on The Room: Old Sins. The fourth game in a series is always going to be a tough one to make, and even more so when it’s the newest entry in one of the best-loved franchises in mobile gaming.

Obdurately stick to what came before and you leave yourself open to accusations of resting on your laurels, or try something new and risk losing what made the previous games so great in the first place. But in the end The Room: Old Sins took both paths, and Fireproof created another mobile masterpiece.

Candy Crush Saga would be perhaps an ill-fitting choice for the game of 2013: it was hardly the "best" game of the year by traditional "Game of the Year" metrics, and it didn't even release in 2013. But Candy Crush Saga was still the game that defined mobile gaming in 2013.

There weren't many games that were the cultural phenomenon that Candy Crush Saga was: walk down the aisle of an airplane and there was always someone on a tablet or phone matching fruits around. It was the one mobile game that friends who never talked about mobile gaming would talk about. And it wasn't just casual gamers: anyone who's friends with Touch Arcade editor Eli Hodapp on Facebook suffered the wrath of his lives requests for a while there.

The thing that was most fascinating about Candy Crush Saga, though? Did anyone really have an unequivocal, gushing love for it? Whenever the game would be brought up, there was always some degree of resentment toward it for being so addictive, in the sense that people just could not stop playing, paying, and bugging their Facebook friends with requests.