For once, anon is not fake. May still be gay
Mobile gaming is awful these days. The vast majority are just cash grabs.
That said I look forward to Balatro being released
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There was a dude on reddit who started doing short reviews of mobile games he liked, then ended up creating an app that focused on curated community reviews. It’s not perfect but at least it’s got decent filters for genres, which alone makes it a hell of a lot better than wading into the play store
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=minireview.best.android.games.reviews&hl=en_US
It’s really bizarre how phone gaming’s golden age was before the smartphone era, having buttons helped a lot. Later java ME games and symbian everything were very cool, I still listen to the songs of Asphalt 4 to this day.
Don’t get me wrong there are cool games too after mihoyo started getting ambitious, but they also ported their games to PC and consoles where it’s better to play.
I still remember stuff like dead space mobile, those where true, actual games that showed you the potential phones COULD have
now the gaming industry (conventions and everything else to), is now utterly dominated and muddled by the likes of candy crush and genshin impact, its actually sad
Rollercoaster tycoon classic -RCT 1+2 in one -Touch interface + port by original rct1+2 dev -100 or so scenarios -No added mxt or pay to skip anything, --gameplay is exactly like PC release -Original soundtrack
I think the fact that RCT Classic is only worth getting on mobile because there are better options on PC doesn’t help make the case that RCT Classic should be a shining example of ‘mobile gaming’. RCT Classic is bit above the bare minimum for an acceptable rerelease of older games.
This really upsets me and periodically bums me out. I used to like trawling through the top lists to see the various games that were on mobile. This is back in like 2011-2013. Typically monetization was either a free/premium version split, or an energy system. Now it’s beyond 99% garbage with 99% of the last 1% being ports. The 1 of 1? Slice and Dice, that game rocks.
and then you go through the top paid games just to find… the same top paid games from the last decade. Nothing of value is being created or getting recognition
There could be a vicious cycle where game devs who want to be taken seriously don’t touch mobile games, so as mobile game devs develop skills and experience, they move away from the platform.
Also a lot of the thick frameworks that many devs rely on these days require a lot of computing resources that maybe mobile devices have trouble keeping up with. I could see scenarios where a mobile game is worked on for a while but abandoned due to awful performance in early testing while a similar desktop game doesn’t get killed because it’s being developed on a high end system and later gets optimized to run better on weaker systems.
Though tbh, I have no idea how top phones compare with high end desktops these days and am just assuming that they are way behind, while low end desktops might be more comparable to high end phones for performance.
I suspect that most of it comes down to passive cooling, most phones dont have active cooling systems like fans so even if it has decent specs its gonna bottleneck rather rapidly.
There were brilliant games from the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s that ran on comparatively primitive machines. A decent phone today can very easily emulate a Gameboy an N64 or even a Playstation 1 or Xbox.
I understand that many people think good graphics = good game and vice versa but I think an interesting story, novel puzzles or original concepts are so much more important than how real a game looks. High-end computing power is simply not required to make a great game.
I agree with other people in the thread, people just don’t want to pay £40, £50, £60+ for a mobile game, they want it for free and then complain when the games are a grind unless they pay all the micro transactions. Good games won’t come unless people are willing to pay for them.
