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.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worms2armageddon.app
It’s great fun on a tablet.
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 [email protected]
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.
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.
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.
I would bet they add steam phone to the steam deck instead. Would be something new and with everyone just having wireless earbuds it could work.
Yeah, but then your buds die, and you’re either the schmuck holding a steamdeck to the side of gheir head, or the asshole holding their steamdeck an inch in front of their face with their GP on speaker explaining in grim detail the colour of the fluid seeping from their piles…
You can plug in your buds case to charge on your steam deck. I don’t know anyone who regularly encounters that issue though. That’s like saying your phone can die mid call and then you won’t be able to make calls. Like sure, it’s happened to people but by in large everyone always has theirs charged and we didn’t NOT make wireless phones popular because of this one specific scenario.
Don’t have a steamdeck, I did know you can charge stuff off it though. Idk about you, but I often forget to charge my buds, and forget things like my external battery or cables(or the buds themselves) at home as I run out the door.
I wasn’t saying that these scenarios would be a daily occurrence, but I can definitely remember enough times that I’d have to count on both hands I’ve seen someone making a call on the bus with a phablet or tablet. And maybe where you live people have enough respect for the people around them, but every city I’ve ever lived there’s someone talking really loud on speaker about something they really shouldn’t be at least once a month that I personally encounter.
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.
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
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?
Wait when? The latest experience I had was interminable loading on start and constant save wipes.
When was your experience, and which device? The 2.2+ version has been stable for me. I tried on android phone, tablet, and ipad.
I think I last used it last winter, but looking at the play store it’s had an update since. Already looks like the startup is faster!
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.This looks very promising. Thanks for linking to it here. I hope it gets launched soon.
Looks pretty sweet! Thanks!
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.
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.
The last levels of Abyss is more about team comp + good items than what you can do with the combat.
Of course you need to dodge and switch characters efficiently but the ceiling of the game is low. You have some interesting things like the 2H characters jumping + attack but is not like a essential skill of the game.
Try Wuthering waves, the combat can get a lot more interesting imo
I remember that the game anticheat doesn’t work on linux, if they change that I’ll try it.
Ah that’s a shame, I hope they change it and you get to try it out some day!
Pokemon Go was good enough that I didn’t even mind that it was a NSA plot!
The only computer most huamns have ever used is a smart phone.
this makes me sad
If you’re under 20 and/or not in the US or Europe, probably.
I have some news about worldwide demographics
I used my first computer around 2004. I was under 20, and not in the US or Europe (uhh… Morocco is literally 14km from Spain so it’s close enough, right?)
Morocco is close enough, its in that same weird area as Caucasian countries where it isnt in Europe but its close enough to benefit from Europe.
Weird coincidence: all of them participated in Eurovision at one point. Yes, even Morocco.
Canada: “Am I a joke to you?”
Yes, and you pay with monopoly money
Well the Canadians have see-through plastic money. It’s the Americans who have money printed on pieces of old bed sheet.
I feel like plastic is a downgrade from linen
Oh :(
I was early into mobile gaming, and it used to be AWESOME! It was a platform oozing with potential. Every game that came out on mobile was excellently crafted…until Candy Crush came out. It literally ruined the whole genre.
I wouldn’t exactly call Doodle Jump the pinnacle of gaming.
If you play games like monument valley 1 & 2, dadish, 20 minutes till dawn and games similar to that you’ll see how polished mobile games can be.
Edit: Game name correction
Don’t forget World of Goo
World of Goo 2 isn’t on mobile :(
Doodle Jump wasn’t the pinnacle of gaming, but everything about it was polished to perfection. The devs really put in the effort and finished the game, which is a rare feeling even in AAA games today.
Rose tinted glasses here, extremely simple game loop and it still had bugs and hit box issues under some conditions
But the potential was there, not a mtx nightmare in 80 percent of games. I would still say that great games like minedustry or better are still possible nowadays
Not being an MTX nightmare should be the bare minimum, not something deserving of praise.
Minedustry hast no mtx, it’s even free on Android. I bought the game on steam to support the developer even tho I don’t play it on steam
Perhaps not, but it was definitely fun.
Of course not. That title belongs to Fruit Ninja.
The best game I’ve played on Android is the Kotor port.
The second best game I’ve played is the Into the Breach port.
Into the breach might work really well on phone. 🤔
It does, the gameplay works well on a small screen (actually better than Kotor in some ways), and I’ve generally found that turn-based stuff works well on touchscreens. Twitchy action stuff doesn’t work so well - I found the GTA ports unplayable.
Also, I think Aspyr did a really nice job retooling the Kotor UI for smartphones, and they also did Kotor II.
Into the Breech works well on every level.
Though I do occasionally want an endless mode…
Every good game on mobile is a port of something made for another platform.
Well there are Gems like Temple Run, Subway Servers, Jetpack Joyride (earl Angry Birds). But most are cheap garbage with lots of ads.
Plants vs zombies was originally pretty good. I had originally bought it many years ago. Tried to play it again recently and the thing I paid for is some ad infested dumpster fire. Made me ignore all mobile games. Even the good ones can be ruined as you have no control of updates when you change phones.
PvZ was a port to mobile from PC, just fyi.
You can usually find the APK files online FYI, you just have to download and run them. If youre on apple though IDFK.
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Except for slice&dice
Terraria, but it’s a lot better on PC. You can transfer your character files and maps with a little effort though.
DevilutionX is pretty good if you liked Diablo 1.
And then there are the insane lists of ROMs/emulators.
Pokemon was a fun emulate, anything else people like? Kirby games might be good too. Hmmm
GBA Final Fantasy ports are great as well as Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Also highly recommend Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga and Golden Sun
A lot of people don’t realize their phones can emulate PS1 fairly easily now.
If you’ve got a good phone you can even emulate GameCube, Dreamcast, PS2, & 3DS; which opens up a lot of options.
At least there is Stardew Valley.
Old-school RuneScape being on mobile makes it the best mobile game of all time
OSRS just feels like it was meant for mobile even playing as a kid. Loving the mobility of no exp waste now
Besides some small things like Sudoku or Crossword, OSRS is the only game on my phone
Slay the Spire.
It was unplayable for years on android 13 and would crash every time. Finally they fixed it.
This is the ultimate mobile game
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is fun
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is cross-platform now, so technically it’s not mobile-only. And DCSS is much better than SPD, imo, as someone who has dumped unholy amounts of time into both.
What’s DCSS?
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
Ok and which version is the best (for mobile and in general)
It was good like a decade ago but the dev team turned a fun and quirky roguelike into basically Diablo
You referring to DCSS or SPD?
dcss, spd never had pretentions of being an RPG like older roguelikes such as dcss
There’s an insane number of PC ports. You can play Myst or GTA SA.
On the multiplayer side, genshin is very much your traditional MMO, if you like that. You can also play Eve or Hades star.
In terms of a competitive scene for years we had vainglory (forever in our hearts), and now we have LoL wild rift.
Yea but touch screen controls are the worst. I hate using those virtual joysticks
Genshin is more your traditional singleplayer Gacha with MMO elements in my opinion. Also the first successful open-world Gacha so it gets some brownie points for that.
