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Sheepish Addiction…

Sheepish Addiction…

Ok ok. It’s a lame pun. But it’s exactly how I feel!

It all started one fine evening. I had to go to our neighbour’s place to drag 宝贝 home for a bath. I found the 2 of them hunched over an iPad mini (sigh… Despite my best efforts to keep her away from gadgets. Oh well… I guess it’s ok once in a while.)

Me : Eh!! It’s time to go home!!
宝贝 : wait! I’m trying to finish a game with Barry!
Me : (alarm bells ringing in my head at the mention of game) what game? Is it some violent game?!
Barry : it’s a sheep game! She even beat me a few times! (Gah! Must have been the dota sessions I played every day while I was pregnant with her!)

They showed me the game. I allowed her to play one last game in my presence before we went home for her bath.

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It’s called Bump Sheep.

And then, because it looked really interesting, I downloaded it. And now I’m hooked… That was since Thurs….

Now I’ve to play it secretly in the toilet so that she doesn’t know I’m addicted to it.

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My best score so far…

Anyway it’s a very simple game. It’s like the military game I played some time back. You deploy troops in 5 different rows to push back your enemy’s troops. Except they are really cute sheep. You have the little Mary-have-a-lamb smallest sheep to the impressive bloodlust giant stags.

And they have cool win-lose poker cards at the end of the game.

Enough said… Back to my game…

Candy Crushing!

Candy Crushing!

Candy crushing has taken over the iPhone and Facebook communities by storm. For the uninitiated, it’s a matching game like bejeweled but more fun and addictive as it has incorporated more variety.

There was just a handful of us on the map when i started, now it seems like the whole world is on the map. Ok lar. A bit of exaggeration.

It took me a loooong while to get here. But here I am!!! Completion!! For now! Until they add new levels. So I must blog about this achievement while it lasts. Now I can add it into my résumé. 🙂 Logical thinking, tenacity, perseverance, management of addiction.

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Management of addiction is perhaps the biggest achievement in this game. It is darn addictive. It’s been frequently reported in the news on the staggering amount that people actually spent on the game. Someone actually spent $4000! And he’s a child. That’s not even including the massive number of people who have spent slightly less than that.

Me arh? $0 lor. I’m the giam gana. Can’t bear to spend money on games. (Excluding diablo 3 :p)

We were just discussing about this and Boonk said he knew of people who paid to get full sets of lives ($1.28 only. Can’t even buy a bowl of Fishball noodles with that) instead of begging their friends to send them lives. Or it takes just $1 to get 5 extra steps at the end of the game. So tempting when you see the last irritating jelly sitting there, beckoning you and you’ve run out of moves. Argh!!

Not only that, newspapers have reported that this evil candy crushing has drastically reduced productivity at work. Hmmm… Freakonomics writers should examine if the last economic recession was brought about by bejeweled or angry birds??

For me, yes, the temptation was indeed great. To keep going at it, to keep going up at levels, to stay ahead of my friends. This evil evil game. But yet I’ve a real life out there. Children to take care of, work to be done, a life to be led. Well, you just need to learn how to manage it. So is the game evil or it’s just weaklings we are?? I can only applaud the game creators for creating this game that is so well balanced, not too difficult to discourage and not too simple to bore the players. They are brilliant.

The rest is, well, up to ourselves. I’ve read Facebook posts of people who have proudly declared that they have deleted the game to stop themselves from playing it. Is this an achievement? I hardly think so.

I attended a course. The speaker mentioned that many people are afraid to walk around town with huge wads of cash, fearing that they would drop the money. If you can’t even take care of a few hundred bucks in your pocket, how are you going to manage your wealth?

It’s the same theory. If you can’t even stop yourself from bringing up the app every time you switch on your phone, how are you going to manage your life?

Candy crush is like a marathon. Sometimes you start off early, you get overtaken by others, and vice versa. You get to the end but it’s not the end, because they will be adding more levels to the cash cow.

Wa! So much theory about candy crush arh??

At the end of the day, it’s hell of a fun game!!! Just don’t let it take over your life.