In a bid to monetize its user-friendly but financially dragging giant, Sina recently imbued its Weibo microblogging platform with its own currency — the weibi — and games. But are these games actually any good? I dove into a few of them to find out. This is the fifth in a series of reviews of Sina Weibo games.
Little Amusement Park is the worst amusement park simulator ever.
Perhaps I should explain. Basically, this game follows the same basic path of games like WeiCity and Ha Ha Market, where you create a small community and then try to make money off it while insufferably upbeat music loops in the background.
Little Amusement Park wants to be the Roller Coaster Tycoon to WeiCity‘s SimCity, and it fails just as badly as WeiCity does, but in a different way. Where WeiCity just begs you for money like a spoiled child or a gambling addict who is in debt to the mob, Little Amusement Park opts to waste your time in an even less productive way: by freezing.
Welcome to Amusement Park Hell
I’d like to describe how the game works, but I literally couldn’t even get through the tutorial. A significant percentage of my play time was spent staring at the screen above while the idiotic background music mocked me with its cutesy toots and bells. When that happened, I’d reload the game, getting a little further through the tutorial each time before accepting a “mission” gave me that screen, or some similar freeze, and I had to reload the page. Again.
Now, to be fair to the folks who made this game, sort of, I am using Google Chrome on a Mac to play. The game probably works OK if you’re using IE6 in Windows XP (a pretty popular combination in China). That said, every other game I’ve tested has worked fine on this exact same hardware and software. If they didn’t bother to test for it — or if I’m wrong and the game is buggy regardless of what browser you’re on — there’s really no excuse for that.
Having now looked at a bunch of these games, I also can’t help but think many of these developers have missed out on something very important for any successful new game: the hook. You’ve got to have something that gets the player’s attention when they first start and makes them want to keep playing. Bigger games (like console and PC games) often do this through introducing the story, smaller games (like browser and mobile games) often do this by introducing a simple core gameplay element. The absolute best games do both at once. What good games almost never do — and this is something that nearly all of these Weibo games do — is immediately dump you into the middle of a dry tutorial. Some games need a tutorial, sure, but give first-time players a taste of what they’re working towards first, or there’s no reason for them to bother with it.
In the case of Little Amusement Park, it was moderately fun to play during the moments when it wasn’t frozen. It felt an awful lot like WeiCity, but it didn’t beg me for money, so it might have been kind of fun once I escaped the tutorial. But of course, I never did.
Mostly though, it made me want to play Roller Coaster Tycoon again. I’m guessing that’s not what the devs were going for when the first set out to make this thing.