Beauty Town - Fashion, Friends & Fun reminds us why open betas suck
So the name of the game is Beauty Town - Fashion, Friends & Fun, but what do you see when you look at the loading screen? That's right, Beauty Town BETA. No matter how many Greek alphabet letters game makers stick at the end of their titles -- alpha, beta, gamma, et al -- if a game's been set loose upon the Facebook masses and there's a press release with the red carpet all rolled out, then it's safe to assume it's playable, right? Wrong!
Make no mistake, when Beauty Town loads, it's tons of fun, just like The Sims Social. But it's stuck in open beta hell right now, again, just like The Sims Social; except, Beauty Town hides it better. It does this by using lots of loading screens. They come with an image, a great big "Loading!" caption, and then a game tip below. Every time I see a loading screen now, I get scared it'll just hang there and the game will never move again. So far, I've counted 5 different loading screens, but there's more if you note the times the game matches the images to different captions, like some shell game and I'm the oblivious mark. Alright, I think I'll be quiet about the negatives now and let the other players do the rest of the kvetching for me.
So what's great about Beauty Town? It's combines two genres: the dress-up game (e.g. Crowdstar's IT Girl) and the store management game (e.g. Playdom's Market Street), but helps promote healthy body image and provides fashion advice to its players. Your customers also come personalized. Each one will have a unique story, and you can either help make them happy by picking the right outfit (based on the tips the game gives you) or you can pick the wrong pair of shoes and send those customers crying. And yes, you'll actually hear them cry.
But do you know what's really, really hilarious? The bottom of the game screen has a bar (seen above) that has buttons to take you to their official Facebook fan page, a place to rate them 5 stars, and a feedback page. But if you 'like' the official Facebook fan page, you land on a page called BeautyTownTest (seen below). So yes, even their official Facebook fan page is in BETA! If you want the real page, you need to click on the 'Give us 5 Stars' button, which should take you there.
The press release says that Beauty Town - Fashion, Friends & Fun was "created by Dynamo Games and funded by Channel 4 and Creative Scotland's Digital Media IP Fund". That's all well and good. It all sounds quite impressive. Now, can someone in that bunch polish up this diamond-in-the-rough of a game?
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Click here to play Beauty Town - Fashion, Friends & Fun on Facebook now >
