Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer Review — Software-Assisted Pretend

Video games express themselves through light and sound, but there is another oft-neglected element of the gaming experience: body movement. Moving my fingers across a controller is so rote as to be imperceptible to me as an adult, but I still feel a thrill whenever a game asks me to pursue a more novel kinesthetic experience. Once upon a time, from about 2004–2014, this was the major area of ludic hardware innovation. Nintendo’s DS and Wii, Sony’s Sixaxis, PlayStation Move, and Touchpad, Microsoft’s Kinect, and most relevant to this review: Apple’s iPhone.

Console manufacturers have largely moved away from motion and touch controls, though they vestigially persist through the Joy-Con and DualSense controllers. Their unique capabilities are occasionally exploited for optional control schemes or minor gimmicks, but it’s very rare to find a game primarily designed around the features that make a new pair of 2017 Joy-Cons cost $89.

By comparison, all modern smartphones are still pretty much variations on Apple’s 2007 design; your phone probably contains a touchscreen as its primary hardware interface, and some kind of tilt sensor that sees less frequent but still common use. What ludic possibilities can be realized with these enduring tools? 

Well, you can simulate drinking beer.

Video games are toys, and the simple joy of movement present in a great platformer has its parallel in the joy of tilting a phone towards your mouth to make your virtual beer flow off-screen. When you press A in Donkey Kong (1994), pixels move across a screen, and a speaker makes a noise. We call this “making Mario jump.” Somehow, our brains not only translate this sensory information into a meaningful schema, but produce pleasure in response to this spell of light, sound, and movement.

So it is with the warm golden glow of a bubbly beer with a perfect head of foam, accompanied by the sound of flowing liquid and the motion of my hand and lips. What’s missing? Well, there’s the taste, but in my experience, the taste of beer never quite lives up to its appearance. It pairs okay with greasy food, I suppose. The component of a real beer that I miss more is the feeling of an ice-cold glass sucking the warmth out of my hand.

But there are also a few things virtual beer can do that real beer cannot. It can make a friend laugh, if only once or twice. It can give a kid the thrill of imitating adult behavior, without really breaking any rules. And of course, it can lead Crystal from Gamesline to meditate on the values of entertainment software, and how they change across history.

What I played for this review is not the original 2008 iBeer by Hottrix, for it no longer has an up-to-date Android app available. I did download an old APK of iBeer, but the basic features and low-resolution graphics put it behind the current premier iBeer knock-off on Android: Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer by Just4Fun Mobile. This version has much more obtrusive ads than the original iBeer ever could have, for iPhones of the era lacked the kind of connectivity that allows the free version of Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer to quickly fetch a full-screen sound-on HD video—or worse, a playable demo of a mobile game!—every time I finish a beer. However, Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer does only charge $2.49 to remove ads, versus the $2.99 price of the original iBeer app.

Derivative games poisoned by the worst ads in history are pretty much what you can expect from a mobile game storefront these days. There’s also the casinos, and the not-quite-casinos that are designed to continually extract money through addiction. Of course, video games have been praised for their addictive design since at least the 80s, including early mobile hit Angry Birds, so the currently dominant model of daily-login freemium games grew out of deep roots in the industry. But for a brief moment in the late 00s and early 10s, phone games were primarily structured as a one-time purchase between $1-5. And one of the most popular iPhone games of 2008 was a simple beer drinking simulator.