Does anyone still play Tower Bloxx?

I bought the original Tower Bloxx back for my Sony Ericsson phone, and it was a brilliantly simple game which was very fast to get into and addicting to play.

Later, they released Tower Bloxx 3D, and it was the same game only with 3D graphics which didn't add anything at all to the gameplay experience. It was sluggish (on the w880i I had) and only drained more batteries out of the poor phone.

Now, they have Tower Bloxx 3D Deluxe on the iPhone, and even with the "update", there's only more bloat added to the once slick and simple game:

1. There's an intro which cannot be skipped.

2. It takes over 30 seconds to get into the game from launch.

3. If you have to quit, the game doesn't resume where you left.

What does this mean?

The game is a 1-click distraction game where a level can be completed in a minute or two, which makes it very suitable for micro-breaks. But if a level can be completed in a minute, that means you will spend 33% of your time waiting for the game to load.

And for such a simple game as this, do I really have to click "Play" after I launch it? Did the developers think that I only launched it to watch the intro again? And equally annoying is the Facebook Connect" question. I see the button, and I ignored it. I do not want a pop-up asking me if I missed it every time!

I've e-mailed the developers about this three times, and only received an answer once (and it wasn't a very good answer). I've also noticed a bug that nobody seems to mention, but perhaps I'm picky here (see attachment, but you need to view it full size).

So, my question is:

Does anyone else find this annoying to the point that you've stopped playing the game even though you want to?

I actually still have my SonyEricsson w880i, and will probably keep it for a very long time because of a superbly brilliant Advance Wars clone called Ancient Empires, but also because of the original Tower Bloxx, which still is the best version.

Also, people might wonder why on earth I put the effort in to write such a long post about a simple 1-click game. Well, to me it seems that Digital Chocolate doesn't care at all about their customers, since they released two "sequels" rather rapidly after the original which indicates a pattern that they want your money, but doesn't really care about your continued satisfaction with the product since you already paid them (the Facebook "update" reinforces this, imo). And since they make casual games, the casual customers might be too casual to complain, so they get away with it. (For the interested, Digital Chocolate is headed by Trip Hawkins, who founded EA... a company which as you may know, isn't known for being very nice.)

 

Just to find out if I'm the only crazy person or not, could someone please launch Tower Bloxx (if you can stand the loading times ) and see if they can spot the garbled graphics from my screenshot posted above?

It should be immediately visible from the starting position (telephone pole and wires, unless I'm mistaken)...