I’m still not in the frame of mind to play anything “long” and “epic”, but the casualest of games? Bring it on! It only took me two days to finish all the levels of Farm Frenzy: Animal Country and get a silver rank in about 75% of them. That’s what I like about these casual games.

1. They’re short.
2. They’re easy to get into. Just pick up and play.
3. I can tell whether they’re good or not within 5 minutes. None of this “It gets better after 20 hours” nonsense.
4. Payoff is immediate and regular. I can finish a challenge or a puzzle in a few minutes and get the results on the spot.
5. They’re easy to pick up and put down. More in theory than in practice, but I can still get a complete experience in two or three minutes.

Compare that to something like Tokyo Mono Hara Shi, where I just spent 40 hours only to find out I don’t have enough friendship points to qualify for the “good end.” Atlus actually expects me to start again from scratch, as if the game is anywhere near worth that amount of time.

I suppose a brief description of Farm Frenzy is in order. I hear there are about 10 games in the series on different platforms, and they all play exactly the same way. You start out with a goal of things to produce, e.g. 5 hats and 5 dresses in, say, 5 minutes. There’s no penalty for exceeding the time, but you get points bonuses for finishing early. These points are needed to upgrade your farm tools and unlock further stages, so you naturally want to do as well as you can.

That’s where the “frenzy” part comes in, as you tap, tap, tap and poke, poke, poke at your livestock, your produce, the bears that keep killing your doodz and basically everything that appears on the screen. Tap the mayonnaise factory to make mayonnaise, then tap the finished good to put it in your storehouse, tap the truck to take it away, tap the ground to grow grass to feed your— OH $#%^, it’s a BEAR! TAPTAPTAPTAPTAP! Trap it in a cage and sell it for money. Pick up and ship the pork the live (?!) pigs drop. Then back to the tapping for as long as it takes to meet your objective.

It’s as simple as that, but once I started I just couldn’t stop. I didn’t have time to think about stopping, because there’s so much to do at any given moment. It might be easier if you don’t care about finishing in time, but I found the extra challenge spiced things up. It certainly opened my mind to more flexible ways of playing, including some that might seem counter-productive.

Two examples. First, let’s say you start out with 0g and 5 cows. Your first instinct is to hang on to them for dear life. They cost 10,000g each, after all. But there’s a good chance that a bear might chase one away anyway. Plus if you’re racing against the clock you don’t have time to feed them and wait for them to produce milk to sell. It’s better to sell one or two immediately and use the proceeds to upgrade the farm, then buy the cows back later when your cows produce milk (1000g a bottle).

Example two, you start out with 70,000g and nothing else to your name. You can buy 700 chickens, or 70 pigs or 7 cows or 1 ostrich with that money. You can choose to upgrade all your facilities. Or you can take what looks like the long way round and blow all 70,000 on the ostrich. One ostrich feather gives you 7,000g. Two of them give you one cow and 4 pigs and bam, you’re in business.

Ideas and manipulations like these are what kept me coming back for more and more. My wrists are tired, my knuckles are cramped, my DS screen protector is scratched to hell and back, and it’s all totally worth it. I feel truly refreshed after all that mindless tapping, and finally ready to tackle something more tedious, like a dungeon crawler. UnchainBlades, here I come!