Candy Crush has been crushed

deleted... gone... no more on my iPhone.

The game itself seemed innocent enough- match coloured candies with each other to complete levels, match 4 candies get a special candy match 5 get a chocolate ball.

Then I started playing and got totally sucked in... loved it, hands down best game ever. Started thinking it needed a warning label on it- it's addictive and frustrating- especially when you don't link it to Facebook and you run out of lives and have to tinker with the phone's date and time settings to get more... (yes I did that).

Yesterday I played for at least 4 hours!! Ridiculous I know but I was determined to not let it beat me!
I got to Level 35 last night and discovered that to keep playing I needed to either pay 99c to unlock more levels or get my Facebook friends to give me more lives.

It was then I realised what a trap it all was. 99c seems cheap really not even a whole dollar... but then I thought how many levels does that give you? Why would a game purporting to be free then suddenly demand that you pay for it?  I had already been tempted to part with my hard earned cash to buy things like extra lives, extra moves, a hammer to smash the candy. I would get excited when I discovered that I'd unlocked boosters, only to discover that I'd only unlocked the privilege of parting with more real $$ to use them.

The last straw was when I got to Level 35 and discovered that I'd have to solicit my friends into giving me a key to unlock the next level. These are real people... There is no way I am going to beg them to give me a key to unlock more levels, I use Facebook to connect with people not promote a game to them!

It was a good reality check actually.. how much time did I waste on it? Time is so precious.. I only have one life to live and definitely don't want to get to the end and discover that I could have done so much more if I only put down the iPhone!

A good lesson learnt...