RememberTheme Park? That awesome sim from Peter Molyneux’s pre-Lionhead studio Bullfrog? Good, wasn’t it? Not only did it have bags of charm and character, but its attractive presentation (albeit with a few grammatical errors — “charity begin’s at home” anyone?) masked an incredibly deep, immensely satisfying business sim.

And the things you could tweak and spy on! You could find out what an individual little person wandering around was thinking. You could adjust the amount of salt on the chips and inflate the prices of the conveniently adjacent drinks stand. There were tons of rides on offer. Even building your queues was a strategic challenge — how do you make them look shorter than they actually are? And when you had a badass park, you could sit back and watch the money roll in, satisfied with the knowledge of a job well done.

Fast forward to this week, and Theme Park has been released on iOS. “Yay!” you may be thinking, eager to sink your teeth into something with more depth than the ubiquitous Tiny Tower. “Finally, a true classic of PC gaming resurrected for the smartphone era!”

It’s not an unreasonable thing to be excited about. Theme Park’s mouse-driven interface would be ideally suited to a touchscreen, particularly a nice big one like an iPad, and the original game itself still holds up well today.

As you may already know, however, the version of Theme Park which has hit iOS is not the original Bullfrog classic. Very far from it, in fact. It’s a brand new game.

No bad thing, you might be thinking. RollerCoaster Tycoon picked up the park management reins a while back and has been doing well since, so why not incorporate some advances in the genre?

Why not indeed. Instead, EA in their infinite wisdom have decided to turn Theme Park into a freemium social game with quite the most outrageously priced premium items I’ve ever seen.

Let’s take the social game angle first. Aesthetically, many social games resemble the isometric 3D strategy games of the late 90s in terms of visual presentation, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Gameplay is generally pretty free of any strategy, instead involving buying the most expensive/best item you can afford/have unlocked, and then clicking on everything you’ve built every few minutes to collect cash and experience points. As you level up, you unlock different items. Occasionally there are incredibly patronising quests to complete. The whole thing is one big Skinner box, designed to get you hooked enough to want to spend money.

Real money can be spent on the acquisition of “Super Tickets”, which can themselves be spent on either speeding up lengthy build times, unlocking rides early or, and here’s the kicker, purchasing some “premium” rides which can only be bought with Tickets. If you’ve played The Sims Social, it’s just like the items that can only be purchased with premium currency SimCash.

So far, so freemium, you might think. But the real kick in the teeth is the price of some of these items. The most expensive rides cost in the region of £35 to purchase. £35. For one virtual item in one not very good game. That’s £35 you could spend on an actual game in a shop. Or a large selection of actual full games on the App Store. You could even purchase several Square Enix titles from the App Store for that, which just goes to show how insanely priced it is.

Fortunately, App Store reviewers, usually imbecilic morons but for once seeing the Emperor in all his nudey glory, have been rightly panning the game for this. Unfortunately, it only takes one “whale” to buy even one of those premium items to make the whole thing worthwhile for EA.

So in short, I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed that such a beloved game franchise is tarnished with this nonsense. And I’m disappointed at the shameless money-grubbing that this title represents.

But am I surprised? Of course I’m not, and that’s perhaps the saddest thing of all.