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Read to the end for the person responsible for that U2 album.

I'm not much of a mobile game player. In the early days of the iPhone, I played Plans vs Zombies and Angry Birds like many but I never got super into mobile gaming. Occasionally a game would come along that I got obsessed with for a few months.

Flight Control was one of those. The concept was simple: you were Air Traffic Control at an airport. Planes came on the screen and you had to draw a line from the plane to the runway for it to land. It got complicated quickly though because soon you'd have smaller & faster planes on the screen too along with very slow helicopters. I happened to learn about Flight Control while wasting some time at the Lincoln Center Apple Store. It's long gone from the App Store, but still on Steam and for that intensive run, I was pretty good at it!

Lately I finally gave a look at Apple Arcade. This has been what I call a "dabbling" service from Apple, one in which a company doesn't seem to be 100% behind a product but wants to see where it goes. Arcade has been around for years and yet doesn't make much noise.

I stumbled upon an old classic while browsing Arcade a few weeks ago: SongPop. This is a modern version of Name That Tune but now it's multiplayer with people in your home. The developers took a page from the Jackbox games and made the setup as simple as scanning a QR code and playing in a browser. This makes playing with others dead simple.

My kids had a blast playing it and it was fun to see how many modern artists I don't know but also how much I blew them out of the water with anything from the 90's. Go figure!

Back to Arcade I went to see what else was there. Then I found it. A game that bore resemblence to another game I got obsessed with: Mini Metro. This game was called Mini Motorways and is an Arcade gem. Of course I had to try it.

And now I've lost more hours to this game than I'd like to admit. The concept, again, is simple: stores and houses appear and you have to draw a road to connect them. Keep traffic flowing so the stores don't get overloaded and the game keeps going. It's enthralling to me and maybe it has to do with being organized or logical or just easy to play but hard to master. Either way, I love this game.

I can't say Apple Arcade is a success or even worth the subscription based on only two games I like, but it adds a bit more value to the package I'm already paying for. The recent addition of Nintendo controller support to the AppleTV sweetens things even more for this Nintendo player.

It's easy for me to recommend Mini Motorways and Mini Metro because they appeal to me in one of the best ways. Will you like it? That I don't know. But for a set of games that are simple, fun, not filled with in-app purchases, and are available for multiple platforms, they may be worth a look.

-Aaron

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TODAY'S RANDOM FACTOID

There are more public libraries in the US than Starbucks or McDonalds's. Source