The Infinity Blade or Minigore series, for example, or anything made by Illusion Labs. These games are genius and most consoles don’t even have a touch screen or utilise it well like some smartphone games do.
Also why do people look at me weirdly 👀 when I play games on my phone in public while waiting for something?
I see mobile games as the natural evolution of flash games from the old days. I used to spend my time playing those games and I had fun, but I would never insist on them being the best experience I’ve ever had in gaming. They were just cute games to spend some time on. To use your examples, Minigore is just like Boxhead. It may be fun but there’s nothing “genius” or ground-breaking about it.
In the end, gaming is just an experience, and our emotional attachment to it decides our rating. I hardly care about Call of Duty, but the people who spent their childhood playing online with friends rate it as one of their best/most formative gaming experiences. Surprise, people’s opinions on things are subjective.
By the way, as you’re the same guy who dunked on Uncharted, The last of us, God of war and Witcher for being games that rely too much on story exposition and have too little gameplay, you seem to have a preference for games with zero/near zero story and offer immediate gratification via gameplay. That’s also a characteristic that lots of mobile games share, so that may shape your preference as well.
Personally, I rate mobile games very low because I hate their monetization and I despise touch controls.
Damn i forgot about boxhead… I must have spent more hours in that game than anything in my Steam library back in the day.
No one in their right mind would do proper gaming on a phone. Touch interfaces are shit.
But I enjoy those mobile-only games 😅 How would I play them otherwise? And I think touch interfaces allow for some gameplay you wouldn’t ever get anywhere else, like swipe actions and multi-finger gestures, which you can see in games like Infinity Blade or Fruit Ninja (or even True Skate, which seems to have quite a following, not my fave personally but I can’t imagine that on any other device)
Well, I guess it’s time for my biannual reinstallation of true skate!
Mobile games get a lot of shit for some very valid reasons, but so many have written them off entirely because of the microtransactions and/or touchscreen controls when there are some very good games that don’t suffer from either of these issues.
You’re absolutely right though, it allows for things like true skate to exist which is brilliant. And if you can be bothered to hunt out the good paid games you can avoid microtransactions entirely. Bloons Td6 is arguably the best value game I’ve ever paid for given the hours I’ve sunk into it over a year or so. Cost me £6 once and has never asked for another penny.
Also the room series is fantastic, as is monument valley. The good ones are out there, but people will download a few free games, get bombarded by ads and microtransaction “deals” and write off the whole genre.
If you like the Room series, have you tried the Forever Lost trilogy or anything by Fire Mapel Games?
Some of the greatest puzzel games I have played.
I haven’t but I’ll give them a go, thanks!
I also enjoyed the rusty lake series if you like point and click mystery puzzle games.
I will look that up, never heard of it. Thank you too.
Nintendo Wii/WiiU/DS/Switch did it better.
I also have some Sim City game on my phone. It’s great for when you have a couple of minutes to waste waiting on a train or something. I have nothing against mobile games itself, but I wouldn’t consider that gaming.
As someone that used to be a somewhat competitive gamer back in the days, I don’t like being lumped in with people playing mobile games. We are not the same. Call me a gatekeeper, but my aunt playing candy crush just isn’t a “gamer” in my book.
I’ve yet to meet a game with a touch screen interface that doesn’t annoy the hell out of me
Tower defence games work well on touchscreen if you enjoy strategy type games.
Between bloons and kingdom rush there are also some top tier games available on mobile.
Yeah beyond tower defence games I agree.
Peglin and slay the spire are both great on the phone!
Solitaire!
It’s rare I find a mobile game that is truly a game and not merely a slot machine with a different appearance. And of those that are decent games, there are far better equivalent games on literally any other platform. For example, Galaxy on Fire 2 is a great little mobile game space sim like Freelancer. But Freelancer is still a better game and could work just as well on a mobile device.
I’d love some console alternatives to certain classic mobile games for me, do you know of any good dual-stick shooters (like Minigore or Guerrilla Bob), or swordfight/strategic combat type games like the style of Infinity Blade/Epoch/Dark Meadow?
I should note I always love 3D graphics and can barely play any 2-dimensional games
Infinity Blade looks like Dark Souls on rails. You could try Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro or Elden Ring. If you want to get more in depth tactical swordfighting, you could try Mount & Blade: Bannerlord which also comes with the RPG, grand strategy and 4X elements in addition to the swordplay.
As for twin stick shooters: I really liked The Ascent which is the most current game of that genre I know of.
I watched the videos of minigore and boxhead someone posted
Looks like a couple steam games i have. Vampire Survivors (which just came out with couch co op mode)
And another one i was gifted that im very much enjoying is Halls of Torment
But they are retro 2d games so you probably arent interested at all. Basically the same genre so should be very relatable if you ever develop a stomach for it. But they will always be there if you ever change enough and start to feel nostalgic
Going back to your original point is phones because of their nature are very limited. From battery life to using half of the screen for the controls.
The types of games created usually have a better version on other devices.
But when it all boils down to it phones arent developed as gaming devices so devices that are designed to be gaming devices will naturally give developers the best tools to utilize that just a phone isnt going to offer.
None of this means you cant have more fun with a mobile game. Your experiences are your own. But when talking about things in a broader perspective rather than a personal one, its gonna be hard to compete with gaming specific devices.
Much like a pc assembled for gaming is going to offer a massive advantage over a literal supercomputer because in spite of the massive advantage in computing power, the latest super computer just isnt designed to play games, or rather, games arent designed for super computers so the superior hardware is not taking advantage of its capabilities.
I would be very interested in what a game designed for a supercomputer would be able to do, probably some VR thing that would blow all our minds, but until enough people have one in their home, whos gonna figure out what to do with all them FLOPS for a game?
Staggering would be the cost to develop such a game and it just isnt possible to recoup the cost of such a thing.
Again would love to see what the people who could do it would do with it but it wont happen in my lifetime and i could maybe see the year 2100 if science helps me out or im just freakishly lucky
I should note the best game ive ever played is a text based multiplayer game you can play on a telnet program (if it still existed) and was a free game. Nothing like it exists for me today, but i would play it again if i could get ahold of it. Its basically a text based mmo or what is the closest thing to it. It was probably wow that killed it
because 99.9% of them are cheap cash grabs and little more than a clicker game which just changes some arbitrary numbers to simulate progression.
Many mobile games are just thinly veiled attempts at monetization. Get people hooked, then start adding time-bound gates you can unlock, add PvP with loot boxes and multiple types of premium currency that’s hard to keep track of. Doesn’t matter what the game is about - you can do this to racing games, fighting games, gardening games, whatever.
That said there are still mobile games that are fun and genuinely good gameplay - I used to love Minigore too, after it was available on Android. But these are few and far between.
The vast majority of mobile games are not designed to be good games. They are designed to be addictive vehicles for advertising and micro transactions.
The rapacious micro transactions we see in games today started on mobile. People associate mobile games with that model. I have some mobile games, but these days they’re all premium. The gacha system just starts to feel like work to me after a while.
As to the stares, non gamers always sneer at gamers. You’re playing games in public. They’d probably give you the same looks if you had a handheld console.
No offense but how old are you
7
Multiple things:
- A lot of mobile games include ridiculous micro transactions
- a lot are copy paste concepts or are missing game depth and complexity (comparable with Minesweeper or Solitaire)
- the standard input device (touch) is not great for traditional games developed for physical button games
There are definitely exceptions to the problems, but I haven’t found a mobile game yet that catches me for 100h.
If you like tower defense games bloons td6 will.
£6 for probably an average of 30min - 1hr per day for the last year for me. With shit loads of content still not done and lots I haven’t learned yet.
Because the big majority of mobile games are filled with ads, pay to win, made for ipad kids, have a very simple concept and are generally just copy pastes of the thousands of shitty games on the store.
Part this and part gate keeping.
The only reason I can imagine people actually caring enough to look is if you’re playing with sound enabled in a public place, put your headphones on if so. No one wants to hear the sound from someone else’s phone.
I guess the only other thing I can imagine is if you get too into it, maybe? If you’re frantically tapping your screen, that’s gonna draw attention too.
When I game… I game hard 😎
No sound in public though, I would never be that obnoxious (or confident lol, too embarrassing)
I guess you’re twitching all over the place then.
People just like to dunk on things to make themselves feel better. And this can be especially a thing in gaming because lots of gamers are badly-adjusted and desperately need to feel better. It’s nothing really to do with mobile games specifically at all, you see the same thing with anything outside of the very narrow window of “real” games ie the games these people happen to be into.
It’s one thing to have a preference, it’s quite another to look down on other people for having a different one. We’re all just choosing to spend our time staring at pixels on a screen.
Sure there is a ton of elitism in gaming but are we going to ignore mobile games are the birthplace of the shit monetization we see in modern AAA gaming. There is a reason why sports games and mobile games were the only gaming related things Konami wanted to do for the longest time (now they are just cashing in on lazy ports). Low expenses, high turnout! Like there are a likely a ton of great games on mobile phones but we can’t ignore the market is filled with glorified slot machines. Many mobile gamers have been pushing for this unfortunately.
That wasn’t really OP’s question though. I’m not a fan of mobile games either, mostly for the same reasons as you but also tbh just because I don’t like using my phone for much when I could get a better experience on a bigger screen.
But “I have some problems with the choices of the mobile gaming industry as a whole” is a very different statement to “lol mobile loser why don’t you try some real games?”
While yes that is the level headed answer but gamers aren’t level headed. People associate people with their game choices with the decisions of the developers/publishers all the time. We see this with people who do Gacha, COD, Etc. Where people’s hatred is for these people for supporting said things. The “true gamers” see most mobile gamers as gamblers and children because of the industry/monetization around it.
We’re all just choosing to spend our time staring at pixels on a screen.
So true lol. Slightly unrelated but I had an epiphany once that we use our touch devices so frequently, and of course we’re interacting with data in different ways, but physically we’re just sliding our fingers around on a pane of glass with lights behind it all the time. Must look so weird to monkeys 😂
Monkeys, and old people who never learned it! My grandma can just about manage to call me on WhatsApp but sometimes I’ll try and demonstrate basically anything else and she genuinely can’t see the difference between gestures I’m using, or which parts of the app are interactive or not.
Same in gaming. She saw me playing WoW once in about 2008 and I remember her being genuinely confused about how I could possibly tell what was my character and what was everything else. Even though, you know, your character is always in the middle of the screen. Just couldn’t grasp it no matter how long she sat and watched!
Bless 😅
Infinity blade had a story. When people think mobile they think endless grind like clash of clans. Where the grind and wait is the game.
Play whatever you want, I doubt you’re getting weird looks for playing anything in public.
I personally despise the mobile gaming industry as a whole for its propensity for going live service or shovelware in the vast majority of instances. Of course I can think of gems in the rough but in many cases it went for a business model I ended being disappointed in.
At the end of the day, the switch and steam deck are far preferable on the go gaming platforms that suit me much better.
