It’s really remarkable, and yes, a lot of fun too. Freeways looks like a simple Flash arcade game on its surface, but behaves like a sophisticated traffic management simulation in practice. Similarly, sometimes you’ll design what you think is the most ingenious freeway design ever conceived, only to see traffic jams crop up in places you never expected due to problems you never anticipated. It’s a deceptively engrossing experience, as sometimes you can dream up some wacky design that you figure will never work in a million years and then find out that it’s actually getting the job done. Once you complete a map you can check on the efficiency of your design, or lack thereof. Traffic will begin pouring out the moment you create a road, and it’s up to you to create freeway exchanges that let traffic flow freely and allow drivers to get to and from their destinations. Your job is to connect specific destinations to a number of different freeways by intuitively drawing the paths right on your screen.
The latest Justin Smith release is Freeways ($2.99), a traffic management sim of sorts, and like his previous games you can’t judge this book by its cover. I don’t know if that’s on purpose or a happy accident but either way his library of games is a gift to us gamers. There are even more examples, but the bottom line is that Justin Smith makes games that look almost laughably bad on the surface but always have some sort of hidden meaning and depth. It’s a perfect mobile game to pop out and play a few holes here and there, but if you squint your eyes just right, you can also pull some deep philosophical meanings out of Desert Golfing. I guess it technically has an end, but most people will never see it and most don’t seem to care. This totally stripped-down 2D golfing game has you whacking a ball into a hole in as few strokes as possible, moving from hole to hole in stark, barely changing environments until… well, until the world falls into the sun, or something. Beyond its wacky surface, though, there is a ton of depth, and it’s remained on my phone since its original release nearly a decade ago. One of my all-time favorite games is Enviro-Bear 2010 ($1.99), which is a silly game about a bear driving a car with absurdly difficult driving physics. Sometimes I wonder if Justin Smith from Captain Games realizes his own genius when creating games, or if he just makes games that happen to be stunningly brilliant.
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