When Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy was first released in 1999, fans of The Simpsons fans were quick to cry “Ripoff!” It was a cartoon on Fox about a disfunctional working class family that certainly owed a huge debt to the work The Simpsons had done before it, but it proved to have its own style and ending up becoming one of the popular shows of all time. It's currently in its 12th season with no sign of slowing down and has spread across to all other forms of media and merchandise. How many shows have survived their own cancellation? But even with its success it still didn’t stop the controversy, and people (and even whole shows of The Simpsons and South Park) didn’t hesitate from taking potshots at it due to a perceived lack of originality.
History’s about to repeat itself. The first mobile game for the series, Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff is at first glance almost exactly like The Simpsons: Tapped Out, which is one of the most popular titles around. The similarities are pretty blatant- if you look quickly at screenshots from both games it would be hard to tell them apart, as both feature bright, isometric, cartoon cities under construction.
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Even the stories are identical. In The Simpsons: Tapped Out you’re trying to rebuild the town of Springfield after an accident at the nuclear plant wipes it out, whereas here in The Quest for Stuff you’re trying to rebuild the town of Quahog after a fight between Peter and the Giant Chicken destroys it. As in Tapped Out you find popular characters from the show and set them to work performing timed actions that can take anywhere from a few minutes to hours and days. Once again you’ll build buildings from the show and place them in any way you like, decorating your new creation with all manner of decorations and slowly repopulating it with the huge cast of characters. It’s a free-to-play title so of course there’s premium currency, here Golden Clams instead of Donuts, which let you speed up jobs and buy premium content that can’t be obtained otherwise.
It’s pretty much exactly the same kind of game as The Simpsons Tapped Out and it makes sense- Fox switched developers from EA Mobile to TinyCo but they know what works, and certainly wanted them to follow in the footsteps of their previous success. But to write it off as a carbon copy may seem premature, because it’s obvious that there are things here that The Simpsons doesn’t offer.
One thing are the animations. When you tap on a characer you can choose from a number of actions they can perform, and each one features a different animation. For intance, you can see Peter doing the Bird, Herbert trying to woo Chris Griffin by holding up his gramophone a la Say Anything, or Stewie travelling to the past in a time machine and coming back wielding a sword, covered in blood. They’re incredibly well done and there’s more going on in the screen because of it. Even some of the background decorations are animated, like the Crippletron, which does the robot when you tap on it.
Characters don’t exist in their own void, either- they’ll walk around and interact with each other, with some of the actions requiring multiple characters to complete- like when Peter forces Chris to act as a TV antenna. What’s more, certain actions will trigger events that affect the entire town (and apparently the whole world), like alien invasions, religious cults and more. You’ll have to work to help save the town, or at least stop it from reverting to its former destroyed state. Other events will allow Peter to realize his lifelong dream of becoming a pirate, search for Gold Digger Island with Quagmire, survive the Mayor Adam West’s Running of the Bulls and of course, get revenge on the Giant Chicken.
It's difficult to play a demo of a game like this and get the full experience- it's really meant to be played in spurts here and there, and while we were shown later sections of the game in order to show what a fully developed town would look like it's only through tons of exploration that you'll really learn everything that goes into it. Perhaps the most promising new feature is the item system, that lets you acquire all types of things for later use. Performing actions doesn’t just net you cash, you can get a whole multitude of items. Some are needed for specific actions and others can be saved in order to purchase new costumes for characters. Peter for example can don a gold suit, a Mermaid outfit, or as a hooker among others It gives you more reasons to try specific actions and not just go for the day-long ones all the time, like The Simpsons: Tapped Out Does.
Along with that each character has a "Facespace” page, a Facebook riff taht features posts written from the point of view of each character that aadds upon the evnets that occur in the game. Since the game’s dialogue was written with the writers from the show they’re exactly as funny and irreverent as you’d expect.
The game will come available with months of content right of the bat but along with that there will be new content three to four weeks after the game’s launch. TinyCo is promising that there will be updates that tie directly into episodes of the show, as well. Ideally they’d launch the same day as the episodes and the new events would be ready to go right away. They’re planning tons of major updates, enough for the next couple of years, and are prepared to go as long as possible.
This license is certainly a big success for TinyCo, who is otherwise a relatively unknown developer of mobile games. Their biggest claim to fame is VIP Poker, the poker game that’s apparently so addictive that John McCain played it instead of paying attention to a senate hearing on Syria. That bit of a press helped increase the game’s sales greatly, but the small team (25 people) didn’t expand until the deal with Fox, after which it almost doubled. TinyCo isn’t solely focused on Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff, as they have other games in the works, but it’s certainly the biggest part of their company’s plan right now.
It's clear they're more than up to the task, but I worry that they'll face criticism for its similarities to work before it, just as the show did. We'll see if the game manages to find its own individual voice as well.
Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff has a release date of April 10 for both iOS and Android.