Flower Garden

Developer: Snappy Touch
Category: Games/Entertainment
Version 1.2
Release Date: May 15, 2009
Size:6.1 MB
Price: $2.99
Rating: 10/10

Flower Garden is a refreshingly original iPhone app. It breaks away from the traditional game mode and really rides a line between entertainment, sim, and gaming and it's end result is just plain being nice and sharing the love. I had no idea what to expect when I fired up Flower Garden for the first time, and I was very pleasantly surprised as I made my way through the process of planting, growing, caring for, and ultimately cutting and sharing my new iPhone flower garden. The concept of taking care of a sim being is very cool and one that has been extremely successful on lots of other gaming platforms. Now here is a great sim care app for the iPhone.

To start off with, there are 12 empty flower pots in a grid. Select the seeds icon and decide which seed packets you want to plant. Flower Garden starts you off with the quickest and easiest seeds in the selection, and as you progress you unlock flowers that require more care. This concept is great, it really brings the user back to the app time and time again. There are nine varieties of flowers to plant, care for and mail in all.

Plant the seeds in pots in a window and water them well. Spin the pot in the window just like you would with your real plants at home, and the seeds will begin to grow. In the background are the soothing sounds of birds, the trickle of the water and the breeze that makes the flowers sway in the wind. Some varieties grow and blossom very quickly, and some take days, during which you need to check in from time to time and water and spin the pots. If you don't your flowers wilt. When the flowers are fully grown, tap on each one and select the scissors to cut them off and gather a bouquet. Once you have the bouquet you want, it's time to share the love. Select the mail icon and you get an e-card with your bouquet above it. Fill out a note and send it off. Your sweetheart gets a jpeg attachment that is really cool, a very simple and well designed e-card flower bouquet and note.

This simple app is not so simple under the hood. It makes full use of the iPhone's technical abilities with multitexturing, environment mapping and real-time simulation. The fact that this app is more of a service than a game makes it really worthwhile. There is no maxing out the possibilities and that makes it very, very sticky. If you want to keep sending bouquets, you need to keep taking care of your garden, so the app gets frequent use.

This app will definitely survive past the 30 day average that the majority of apps get used for.

I really like Flower Garden, and I moved it right to my home screen above Mail. Suffice to say every woman in my life has been getting bombarded with virtual flowers- and I'm a newly popular guy with the ladies ( all of a sudden I'm "SO thoughtful and sweet!" ). On top of it all, I can actually grow these flowers and come up with more than a flower pot filled with dry, brown, wilted stalks. I'm no green thumb, but on the iPhone I'm a serious gardener. This app is fully worth the $2.99 price, you will use it over and over again, and the best part is the warm, fuzzy feeling you will get when you share the love.