The Ballad of Ricky Collins

This Ricky Collins fellow is a popular dude

For the past two weeks, the iOS games from the guys at Nimblebit have me hooked.  All it took was a friend showing me her Tiny Tower and seeing the little "bitizens" dressed in various costumes.  Somehow I avoided the game up until this point.  Prior to this, my only familiarity with the game was when Zynga made its own version of the game, just with Farmville characters. 

The game started out simple enough: build a floor to your tower, either apartments or shops, move in more bitizens, assign them jobs in the shops, and keep the stores stocked.  Then you get more money so you can build more floors, upgrade the shops to hold more stock, try to assign people their dream jobs, evict bitizens who aren't skilled at their jobs, save up so you can get a faster elevator, keep checking to see if you have the appropriate stores to complete missions, curse when you just paid six tower bux to speed up the completion of your new floor and two construction worker VIPs show up in a row, agonize over what an appropriate costume would be for a bitizen working at a Frozen Yogurt shop, think for hours about a creative name for the Soda Brewery...

It just goes on and on and on.  If you want to take a look at my current tower, here it is.

The alternate title of this post was "Is That a Plane in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?"

Then Nimblebit went ahead and released Pocket Planes.  At first, I didn't think I liked it.  I thought it didn't have the same addictive charm of Tiny Tower.  "Who cares about running an airline?"  Then the game grew on me.  My small network of airports located in Central America started to expand to the rest of the Americas.  My fleet grew in number.  As I received more revenue I could open higher class airports that could support larger airplanes, as more jobs completed equals more money.  And more money lets you buy more airplanes and more airports, which gets you more money, which... hey, this sounds a lot like Tiny Tower!

What's next, Outer Space?  (Oh, wait, Angry Birds already did that...)