Anon checks out mobile gaming

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

“These days?” As if it was ever good?

It was in the early days of the Apple App Store. Games were 59p to buy. No in-app purchases and were generally good indie titles. “Helsing’s Fire” comes to mind. Miss that game!

Before it went f2p, yeah. Angry bird, pvz port, world of goo, ridiculous fishing, all fun stuff

I played the original Plants vs Zombies back in the day and thought it was pretty good. I got a new tablet recently and decided to try out the latest version - and holy fuck it is significantly worse. Rather than trying to be a good game, every possible aspect has been monetized.

So yeah, I’d say the early 2010s was a time where you could at least find some good stuff that wasn’t ruined by enshitification.

Exactly. I played a lot of mobile games in the early 2010s, and have avoided mobile games since. There were some bangers back then that really weren’t that expensive.

Well, it is kinda true. Many old games I had on my phone that were free and didn’t have ads, in the last few years have received updates to do literally nothing, but include ads. So “these days” is the case for some.

These days mate, you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail if you just say mobile gaming is good

I happily wasted a lot of time playing Worms and angry birds back in the day. It was even better on a tablet. Doodle Jump was another good one.

Those were the days of yore, before in-app purchases and microtransactions.

There’s a Worms mobile port? :O

I always just emulated the SNES version while wishing it had touch controls.

I remember playing Perfect Cell on iOS when I was younger and having a really great time

The secret is to find one that works on aeroplane mode

With a bit of know-how, you can make a mobile version that works quite well: https://github.com/blake502/balatro-mobile-maker

Come join is at !androidgamers@lemmy.world

We have more than 200 members, and more than one screen of posts!

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

I’ve seen several curated recommendation websites born and die over the years. I’m surprised that MiniReview still works.

There’s also slant.co and multiple blogs like AndroidPolice, although they all now feature sponsored content - ads for shitty Android 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.

I’ve not seen hard numbers but it really seems a high end phone is pretty comparable to a low end laptop performance-wise these days. Both do a great job of displaying webpages, playing web video and can kinda crunch through an optimized enough video game at a low enough resolution

Same. I used to play a number of games, and even paid for a few, but the gems are just too hard to find these days.

So now I pretty much never play games on my phone, which does a few things:

phone battery lasts a lot longer
my time on my phone is more productive
I use a lot less data, so I pay less for my plan
I don’t need flagship phones (not a photographer)

So now I mostly use my phone for:

phone things (calls and texts)
audiobooks
news
videos - I restrict myself to downloaded videos to help reduce wasted time

I have a Switch and Steam Deck, and quality game selection is much better there anyway.

Inb4 Gaben announces the SteamPhone

That could honestly be cool. If he could get calls and texts to work on SteamOS, I’d probably buy it.

The only games I ever have on my phone now are gachas and paid for games.

Also, I agree that Slice and Dice is awesome. I got the itch version which came with both android and linux versions.

The hours I’ve sunk into slice and dice! That game rocks!

Yup! I wanted Slay the Spire, but the port is awful and this fills that void.

The port is fantastic, have you used it since the initial round of upsates?

Slice and dice, magic research (2), Simon tathams puzzle pack, Bart Bontes color series, unciv, pathpix, pirates outlaws…

There isn’t only ports and garbage, you just need to go deeper than the front page (and not ever browse by “free”)

There’s also a good loop hero port

I bought Slice & Dice after reading this comment and others in this thread and yeah, it’s pretty great. Thanks for the recommendation!

Good mobile game = ports from PC games and emulators

miHoYo games could be so much more if they are PC/Console games instead of mobile.

The only truly mobile game that I can think of that I can say is good is Pokemon GO, and I don’t even like it but is the only game that truly uses the uniqueness of the mobile platform as a game feature.

I’m in a closed beta for WalkScape, which is a single-player RPG that uses your pedometer for all game progress. Travel to another location? Chop down trees? Craft a bronze mining pick? Stomp grapes into wine? All of them progress only as you take steps throughout the day. A great little game to check in on now and then, and I feel utilizes the mobile platform well.

That’s a good idea, but it’s hard to work considering that true gamers don;t walk at all. /s

Seems like a good idea, maybe we’ll have 2 good mobile games than.

That sounds like the best things I currently use PoGo for. I love chewing through eggs with my daily bike rides

It’s neat, if fairly barebones. You pop open the game, see if you’ve completed your current activity (reached a destination you walked to, finished crafting through your item stack, gathered materials until your bag is full) then designate the next thing you’ll do. But, it’s F2P, ad-free, and the devs are very genuine! There’s another beta wave soon because they’re showing it at Gamescom! https://walkscape.app
Also, it’s more forgiving than POGO since it uses STRICTLY pedometer (step count), so it doesn’t try to see if you were running too fast, changing location, etc.

Pokemon Go was good enough that I didn’t even mind that it was a NSA plot!

I, for the love of God, cannot play Genshin on mobile. The controls are absolutely garbage. On PC tho, it is really good.

My problem with Genshin is not even that. The game is a mobile first and that limits the mechanics of the game.

If the basic Normal/Hard Hit + 1 skill + ultimate is shit on mobile imagine if they implemented combos like DMC.

Try Wuthering waves, the combat can get a lot more interesting imo

It is way deeper than that though, or at least that’s what I think about the endgame content.

Sure, exploration is piss easy, but the Abyss not so much.

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