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.
I’ve yet to meet a game with a touch screen interface that doesn’t annoy the hell out of me
Solitaire!
Peglin and slay the spire are both great on the phone!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
gatekeepers gotta gatekeep
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.
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.
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.
Problem for me is phones are uncomfortable to use for gaming in so many ways. My hands aren’t even that big, and my thumbs cover a lot of the screen. Then phones get hot when using them a lot. Not to mention staring that long at a mobile screen makes my eyes feel like raisins. Plus it’s really shit posture to sit with your neck bent at a 90° angle looking straight down into your lap. None of these are very enjoyable for a gaming experience.
I won’t even talk about the crazy predatory nature of most phone games being aggressive dopamine hijackers, cause that’s covered in the thread already, but that too.
I assure you no one cares you’re playing on your phone in public. Unless you have your game sound on speaker. Then they’re staring at you because you’re annoying them.
