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When I get depressed, I spend money since, you know, owning things is basically happiness, right? Yeah, okay, it’s stupid, but at least I’ve started to focus my purchases into small ones. Like iPhone games. When I make one of these purchases, and the results are awesome, well, all the better.

My recent purchase in this vein was Game Dev Story, a simulation game for the iPhone. People were talking about it in the iPhone gaming thread, and linked a video, which I will now link to you here. It looked pretty fantastic, and I was feeling shitty, so I ponied up 4 bucks to try it. It’s probably the most expensive iPhone game I’ve bought in a long time, but seeing as I played it for literally like 7 hours yesterday, I kind of feel it was worth it, especially since I’m still wanting to go back for more.

In case you don’t want to watch the video, or want my take on it, Game Dev Story is a simulation game where you run a game company. The game runs through something very similar to the history of games. For example, you start with just an Atari stand-in and a PC as possible development platforms, but that soon balloons out to Genesis-alikes, NES-alikes, Virtual Boy-alikes, and so on. It deviates as some points for gameplay, but most of the time the systems released correspond to how they occurred in reality, and have similar benefits and drawbacks. It makes sense to go with the NES, for instance, because it’s just that popular. However, the game takes into account your games, and if you really want to make the Virtual Boy a success, you can pump tons of money into making a string of successful, Triple A Virtual Boy games, and give it a boost in market share. You can also play the numbers: a passable game on a system with nobody developing for it means there’s a fanbase whose more likely to buy anything put before them, after all.

You’re the manager, so you basically make decisions. What kind of games should be made? You can see demographics and information on popularity for various genres. Making games in unpopular genres means less cost, as you don’t have to keep up with the joneses, but you’re also cutting off some potential buyers who want another Samurai game, for instance. You also need to keep track of your employees. When do you hire? When do you fire? Do you spend money training employees, or level them up, causing them to have bigger annual salaries? Or just dump them and hire someone more qualified? Or outsource more important tasks? You also have to work with advertising and keeping the buzz going on your game, as well as keeping your company’s fanbase happy. Do you hire booth babes for E3, or don’t go at all? Maybe your fans won’t like it if you don’t make another RPG, even if you really want to make that Dating Sim. At the same time, unless you diversify and try different genres and types of games, your studio won’t improve and you’ll lose creativity.

I never had much problem being successful at this stuff, but it was still fantastic fun naming my games ridiculous things and seeing how they did. You pick from a genre and game type for every game, and I enjoyed trying to figure out exactly what the games were. For example, my “Historical Trivia” game became “Which Assassin?” a game of assassin trivia. My “Educational Romance” game became a sex ed game. My “Online RPG Romance” game became “Fetish Online.” The role-playing element of the game was entertaining to me as well.

Still, there’s some things I would have liked to see. For example, I can set anyone to be, say, the “art director” for a game. It would seem logical that someone who was constantly the “Art director” would eventually up their Graphics stat, but that wasn’t the case. It would have made sense to me to be able to level people by “giving them a shot” on less important releases. The advertising in the game also seems less important than it really would be. It tends to just be one score for everything, but it would make more sense to have advertising based on specific games coming out. Finally, the game doesn’t let you have a back catalog, pulling things from retail shelves after a few weeks of release, so I can’t try to do things with stuff like “Steam sales.”

These are all minor nitpicks, though. The game is really fun, and I highly recommend it, especially if you have an iPad. (the interface is a bit hard to use on my iPhone, but I doubt it would be an issue blown up on the iPad’s screen. Just a guess, though.) If you have any interest in the game development community at all, you’ll certainly find something fun in Game Dev Story. Buy it! Or at the very least, put it on your AppShopper watch list for a sale. It’ll be worth it.