Mobile Games

[BryanM]

The Puzzle and Dragons thread technically covers this topic, but maybe a thread with an explicitly broader title might have more life. While mobile games are the kind of thing you do alone in the dark, let this be the place to let it all out.

Trends in video games are kind of like trends in music - experiments, something popular kicks off a ton of copy cats (good lord, how Street Fighter 2 created an entire genre that was just Street Fighter 2 clones), sometimes things fall out of favor. The current new big thing is the Battle Royale - Fortnite, Fall Guys... everyone and their dog is making one now, even Super Mario. Before that was the gacha game, before that the MMO, before that the open world 3d game vis-a-vis Grand Theft Auto, and so on.

The amount of defunct mobile games is enormous, I wouldn't be surprised if shutdowns in a year outstrip new games. You can fill a graveyard of the things, just a landfill of beautiful kusoge. The problem is..... and it's a big one.... the preservation of these games is going to be difficult in the future. That's a lot of lost precious kusoge!

When it comes to MMO's, somebody often cares enough to write a server to at least keep them playable and archived. When it comes to wretched Tiger games, they're simple enough people have made simulators. But the amount of debris when it comes to mobile games and the effort it takes to write servers for them, means the vast majority of them will be lost, like greed down the drain.

.....

Look at this photo of SEGA Heroes. LOOK AT IT! Who the fuck is this supposed to be for? Who the fuck could argue this was a good idea? How often do you see garbage that smells this bad?

It's gone now. You'll never be able to truly experience this horror, only gaze longingly at its magestic shadow.

.....

I also hear there are some games that have some merit. If you're one of those weirdos who likes to talk about good things, that's ok too.

[WelshMegalodon]

School Idol Festival is actually really fun. I'm not surprised that it spawned as many copycats as it did.

One of my non-gamer friends is now a rhythm game god thanks to School Idol Festival.

[Ruldra]

Battle of Polytopia is the best mobile game I played to date. Take Civilization and streamline it so that a match can end in 20 minutes. It's fun but eventually gets boring once you learn how to deal with the AI. That's when you start playing online and then things get to a whole new level. The discord community is very active and you can have from 1v1 to 12 player free-for-all and anything in between, anytime.

And the best thing about it is the asynchrous multiplayer. You receive a notification when it's your turn. Get in, do your moves in 2 minutes, send it and off you go. No need to stay online at all times. Makes things a lot more practical for those of us with limited time.

The game is free but to play online you need to purchase one of the several tribes. Let me know if you do so we can exchange codes and play a bit.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I refuse to get smarphonised for as long as I can (it's like the smartphonised ones take the internet, whereas the rest of the world is for me to witness most of the time). GBA SP remains my portable gaming device. That being said, I sometimes wonder what shape and form smartphone gaming will take by the point I'm forced to use one.

[Marc]

I don't mind admitting I'm currently pretty addicted to Threes.

I think mobile gaming was pretty innovative and bloody good fun in the early days of the IPhone. Before monetisation crept in.

[guigui]

I once fell in the Puzzle & Dragons trap, you can see me quite active in its own thread.
By falling in the trap I mean playing this game only more about 4 hours a day (sometimes way more), getting online at regular time to get rewards (even waking up at night to do so), seeing the playscreen every time I closed my eyes, knowing about 500 gacha and their respective abilities, letting my wife do all the housework while I was playing, almost getting divorced because of the thing. Bad.

I stopped playing and gave my account to a pal, and now I'm trying to stay away from games with microtransactions, stamina bars, gacha. Definitely regret it though, because I genuinely think the gameplay in P&D is good, and rewards skills.

Now I'm only playing some mobile games that have been ported to the NSW.

[Vexorg]

I actually started playing some Puzzle and Dragons again recently, although it's clear that none of my teams fit into the current meta, and I have no idea what the current meta even is. On the plus side, I've somehow managed to accumulate somewhere around 350 magic stones, so I don't think I'd need to spend any money on it ever. That said, I do see they've added a fair number of fixed team challenges (story mode) and seem to do a lot of fixed team ranking challenges as well. I've been enjoying those even if I'm not great at them.

Aside from that, pretty much the only other game I play on my Android phone is a very small amount of Pokemon Go (back before Covid we had a group of people who would do raids at the office, now I'm too far from the nearest Pokestop or gym to do much) and Sudoku.

[null1024]

I play two mobage these days.
...well, play is a very strong word -- neither game has given me any reason to not just use the skip battle feature in a while now, which is a shame.

One is Pokemon Masters, which is a bit entertaining when you do actually get into a battle, and a few fights are actually hard [depending on your team -- there are entirely broken setups that trivialize everything].
There's a weird amount of passion in the project, the game has a lot of personality to it. It's a real shame the team is stuck making gachasoft.

The other is Rockman X DiVE.
yeah, it's SEA release only right now but whatever man, I installed the APK from the website
It's fairly fun to play, but basically requires a controller. The touch controls are unfathomably bad. Luckily, I do have a controller, but it's a pain if I'm actually on-the-go since I don't carry the controller everywhere.
Stage design isn't anything to write home about, and it has that beat-em-up style thing where you have to kill all enemies in an area to advance, but it's okay. Run, dash, shoot, jump, occasionally switch weapon because it needs to recharge. Your gun locks onto enemies automagically.

The most annoying thing about the game is that it's very PVP focused, and the balance in PVP is... well, it doesn't exist. There are characters who flatly just win, and there are characters who flatly just lose, and heaven help you if you don't have like Cinnamon or Black Zero or whatever.
The single-player campaign is moderately entertaining, but each set of stages has a fairly large level-up requirement before you can go in without needing to take absolutely no damage. You can bumble through by just spending extra lives [and for whatever reason, the extra star requirements for each stage don't take into account the fact that you died, just your HP at the end and completion time], but that's no fun and you'll run out eventually.

I guess I also still play Honkai Impact, except I haven't logged on in days now.
There's actually a lot to actually enjoy about the game and the graphics are great and the controls are great, but I basically only bother playing when there's an event, and collecting all of the daily stuff and setting up your auto-battles and sending everyone on errands and whatever takes like three literal minutes of menuing.

[Marc]

Oh, of course, Jeff Minter's stuff goes without saying. Llamatron and Gridrunner in particular were brilliant. Still hoping for a PS4 port of Llamatron.

[Mero]

The only game I have on my phone anymore is Toon Blast, I play a few screens when I get home from work in the morning, or until I run out of lives (whichever comes first). Been playing it for probably close to a year, currently on somewhere around screen 3350.

[silvergunner]

If you obsessed by rythm games(like me) I highly recommend ARCAEA and Cytus 2
I put a lot of time and money into it and don`t regret it.
In my opinion the currently best mobile(rythm)games!
(My device: iPad Air 3)

[MJR]

The only mobile game I play is 'People vs. People', which is pvp puzzle game, and very enjoyable one. Of course, I am biased because it is made by my old colleague. But I wouldn't still be playing it after all these months if it wasn't so good. It's ftp, but the monetization is sensibly done - you can progress perfectly without having to pay anything, it's chest opening timer is only gated for those who want to play longer sessions at a time. And since it's very fast paced pvp puzzle, I am perfectly comfortable on having only 5-10 minute sessions myself.

[BryanM]

Like everyone else and their dog, I've been having a bit of fun with Genshin Impact this week. That's the one that looks like Breath of Wild with RPG elements. The story is typical non-offensive fantasy fluff; I guess what appeals to me most personally is that I've never played a single one of those generic "open world parkour" games. The difference between video game bullshit where a tiny rock on the ground blocks your ability to move and video game bullshit where you can climb over anything, is like hell and heaven.

It's mostly a fairly mellow walking simulator where you look at pretty scenery. I like the tavern, it is very tavern-like. Nice verisimilitude.

A $0 game that can be played on PC, Playstation 4, Android, or IOS. (Though playing on Playstation requires using a platform-locked account, which is the stupidest thing ever. Consoles really don't just let you use your internet like a human being with basic rights, don't they?) Considering its performance on my PC, actually playing this thing on a phone or tablet will require a really powerful one.

The dream of $0 AAA games with way more content* doesn't seem impossible these days.


* ("You just play as Link? In 2020?!")

I once fell in the Puzzle & Dragons trap, you can see me quite active in its own thread.
By falling in the trap I mean playing this game only more about 4 hours a day (sometimes way more), getting online at regular time to get rewards (even waking up at night to do so), seeing the playscreen every time I closed my eyes, knowing about 500 gacha and their respective abilities, letting my wife do all the housework while I was playing, almost getting divorced because of the thing. Bad.

I stopped playing and gave my account to a pal, and now I'm trying to stay away from games with microtransactions, stamina bars, gacha.

Argh, I got addicted to Granblue Fantasy for a couple years, which is way dumber than being addicted to something like world of warcraft or cocaine. It gave me way more appreciation for what "addiction" actually means - it's definitely one of those things society does not teach itself whatsoever about. I jokingly call these developers "demon lords", but they're seriously completely evil. Thank god I'm the king of FTP and have zero interest of spending money on these things. (The point, to me, is to want things. You can't want things that you have, so buying them would destroy the entire point. It's like an inverse of Buddhism, that suffering is the point.)

In the case of Granblue, it has the aesthetics of Final Fantasy 6, which Squaresoft never bothered to try to ever recreate in the post-SNES era. The nostalgia trap, especially with how "AAA" devs have abandoned 2 dimensional art, is a great unserved vacuum that mobile games were able to move into.

..Also one of the things that brought the game to my attention was the "monkeygate" drama where a guy spent thousands of bucks to not get a monkey or something. I thought that was very cool. In retrospect it was kind of like knowingly putting my arm into a garbage disposal unit. Very BryanM-like.

[To Far Away Times]

The best mobile games that I've played were the Dariusburst port with some changes from the PSP version (and was a one time purchase) and Pokemon Go and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. I did also play Candy Crush for a bit, but once I read that the monetization scheme affects the piece order and realized it's not really a skill game I bounced off that super quick. In Pokemon and Animal Crossing I was playing and having fun, in Candy Crush the whole game was designed around trying to manipulate the player into buying some bullshit.

But by and large I really can't get into mobile games. I'm pretty good about not buying any of the mtx stuff, but whole F2P design is just so predatory and affects every aspect of the game design. They're fun for a few hours (maybe), then they introduce gates for progress and the monetization is so in your face that the whole thing just feels like a farce.

Oh, I should add that Zen Pinball and Pinball Arcade are both good games. I sunk a lot of time into both. They work well with touch screens and are a lot of fun. They are one time purchase games as well.

[Davey]

I've been hooked on Clash Royale for a few years now. Ugh.

When I first saw it, I didn't think much of it. A casual, mainstream mobile strategy game? After playing Japanese twitch games almost exclusively for nearly two decades, it's nigh impossible for normal shit to pique my interest. But some family members were having fun playing it together, so I figured I'd install it to play along, thinking I'd probably uninstall it like a day later. Instead I got hooked. I never spent any money on it, but put in countless hours over the years.

I think the core gameplay is surprisingly good for a mobile game, but it's not F2P friendly (literally takes years to max out a deck) and they've done a piss poor job of keeping the game fresh and engaging. The player base has been dwindling for a quite a while, which is to be expected for a game that's 4 years old, but the recent big update that was supposed to turn things around was a huge letdown for most players. I used to know several people IRL that played; most of them have quit during the past year.

Nowadays I mostly play out of habit. It’s just so easy to pick up and play for a quick fix. I quit for a little while, but quarantine downtime triggered a relapse. A few months prior to that, I decided to quit, then the next day a tournament started playing on one of the TVs at the gym just as I started doing cardio, and a day after that my brother asked me do a war battle for him while I was visiting. The universe seems pretty insistent that I not walk away from the game.

it's very fast paced pvp puzzle

Will be looking into this tomorrow

But yeah, speaking of games that I actively enjoy and don't just go through the motions:

Star Realms
If you’ve played any deck building games before (Dominion, Ascension, etc.), you know the drill here. One of the best games in the genre. I first bought the game a few years ago and played a little here and there, but quarantine got me playing regularly, which got me to buy the expansions, which got me playing even more. One really nice thing is that it’s the same app on mobile and Steam and uses the same account. Buy once, play anywhere.

Dr. Mario World
When this was first recommended to me, I was really skeptical. And yeah, the single player mode, which I assume most people would consider the main game, is about what I expected: a Candy Crush clone with Nintendo IP, more or less. Gross.

But there’s a PVP mode that’s surprisingly good. As a long time fan of vs. puzzle games, fast ones especially, it didn’t disappoint. I quit at first because it was kind of buggy in the early days and I’m weary of anything with a freemium business model, but a couple weeks ago I randomly got the urge to play again and have been on a kick since then. Not sure how long that’ll last though.

Threes
Simple single player puzzle game. Interesting little distraction, although I don’t play too often. I imagine this is to me what crossword puzzles or Sudoku are to normal people.

[Necronopticous]

Hah! The Puzzle & Dragons thread is a blast to the past.

These days I play Love Nikki Dress Up Queen.

[BryanM]

Nikki Murder Detective sure is a breath of fresh air. I'll love anyone who makes a game that isn't just whacking things with a stick in combat.

Talking about Clash Royale, Blizzard announced they've licensed their warcraft IP to some Clash Royale ripoff. At least unlike Heroes of the Storm, they're only SIX YEARS TOO LATE, instead of sixteen. It's really a waste that they have all that money and no desire to try to make anything new or actually desired by the market. (Pokemon Online still only has one (1) game now that Megami Tensei Imagine is dead: Tem Tem. Just.. money sitting there waiting for someone to pick it up.)

I don't think it's necessarily wrong to reskin someone else's game, just make something about it different. For example, Figurine Fantasy is yet another idle heroes type game. But, its aesthetic is rather unique for the market. 3d models that look like real figurines, the lighting model makes the different types of plastic look like kinda like real plastic. A Toy Story type trapping for gross nerds that like creepy figurines. Live the dream of collecting plastic models without having to spend $200 on each one.

I'm not sure "Clash Royale, but worse, with the Warcraft name slapped on" is as much effort as that.

[Ed Oscuro]

Can't find anything about this Nikki Murder Detective on the web, only a novel and a bunch of depressingly RL content. Link?

All of hap, inc.'s "Hidden my game by mom" games are worth a look and they were free, last I checked. Very simple and spartan graphics, re-used constantly, but they illustrate puzzle scenes in which you must figure out how to do something to retrieve the game. The game got a bit of a boost for 3DS, Switch, and now PS4 versions under the more fluent title "Mom Hid My Game!" but apparently there's also been some differences and it may not be a straightforward replacement for the mobile titles. With the first game launched in 2016, I guess these qualify as classics, now. Boy, time flies.

In other news, dat grind: AFK Arena, Guardian Tales, Contra Returns. AFK Arena is pretty, not too time-intensive most of the time, doesn't have a horrible grind, and has a few fun minigames. It's basically a digital bonsai tree, except with many more little trees inside, and sometimes the leaves figh...alright, I'm done talking about this.

Guardian Tales is a fairly overlooked title with tons of pop culture references and gameplay shamelessly inspired by classic Legend of Zelda games - but it's a lot more than that and has some surprising juxtapositions of cute characters and grimdark worldbuilding, to the point that one of its chapters ("Worlds") is essentially an anime-ish take on Nazi concentration camps, for better or worse. Somehow, it's not a flaming disaster in every way. Guardian Tales offers a LOT of free episodic content, and it's also a huge time sink. Nothing says you have to care about the guild system and PVP, but it's going to be hard going in the latest content packs without some max-level characters, which will take a very long time to grind out. Still, lots of constant enjoyment up to the point you get caught up, at which point that guild/daily grind takes over until the next content release.

Contra Returns is just for the lols. It's barely more than any other Chinese asset-flip mobile game, except now some of the assets are vaguely Contra-themed! Its worst sin is that it makes a total hash of the classic Contra gameplay, with terrible control and lots of lag even in many PvE modes.

[BryanM]

That was a joke about how the Nikki games often feature violent content. Shining Nikki is kind of famous for it.

It reminds me of how soaps have to scrape into wacky places to keep things fresh. 40 years ago, Luke had to find a way to shut down the doomsday weather machine the bad guy was using to take over the world. 30 years later, he got drunk and ran over his grandson. With his car. Lots of things happen!
____

As you all probably can already tell, I'm an ArKnights booster. Yeah I know; it's a cliche, it's the golden child and so on.

I loathe the daily incremental chores that really should just be a pick up button, I wiggle my nose and skip the looong story dialogues before every stage that are there just to be there, vomit in the general direction of auto'ing solved stages; but the core underlaying game is one of my favorite games. It's not afraid to punch you in the face sometimes and require you to actually use your noodle a little.

The world building is actually very competent. The landscapes are my favorite; everything looks lived in. Objects look like they were manufactured in an actual factory. Fashion is a big hobby of the designer - clothes people wear look like something people would actually wear. There's not much of that randian superman nonsense either, individuals join organizations in order to make money, have a safe place to sleep at night, and not starve to death. One of the factions, Penguin Logistics, has a CEO who's a rapping penguin.

For some reason, perhaps from how cute that was, I initially thought the Student Union faction was like one of those ridiculously overpowered student councils from the animes, but it's not that kind of anime. They're the survivors from being locked into their school by a terrorist group, lord of the flies style. Some cannibalism was involved.

It's an edgy beastgirl military apocalypse world, no matter how wacky things get sometimes.

With the upcoming english dub, another game in the franchise, and animated series, they're definitely on an expansionary upswing.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Stick Ranger's a lot of fun. It started life as a Java game (play it here: https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/ranger/) and while it works better with a mouse-based interface, the touchscreen controls are very serviceable. Lots of fun to experiment with different class combos, though the mobile version is an ad-supported game (so when I'm sick of them I tend to play it in Airplane Mode which blocks them entirely without issue).

I also really like the Wizardry-style "Wandroid" games for Android. There's 6 of them in English currently (no English versions of 7 and 8 yet). Very oldschool wireframe dungeon, no enemy graphics, but fun to play and explore.