Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone
18 replies, posted
[quote]The video game arcade is the cathedral of the games industry.
Veteran players see these increasingly endangered places as shrines to design purity, difficulty and player skill, bathed in the glow of flickering monitors.
They were, after all, the places where the conventions of the medium were forged, and their gradual disappearance has only served to make them more alluring.
Mobile gaming, meanwhile, receives a great deal less reverence, thanks in part to its vast popularity.
Despite design masterpieces like Monument Valley, The Room and Hearthstone, smartphone titles are collectively seen as casual time-killers, lacking cultural clout. Term’s like “free-to-play” and “microtransaction” are used with derision, and viewed as evidence of capitalism muscling out creativity.[/quote]
[URL="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/28/atari-co-founder-nolan-bushnell-mobile-games-make-me-want-to-throw-my-phone"]Sauce[/URL]
Buying lives with quarters is the original microtransaction
True. The only Mobile game things I care about are Hearthstone and Fallout's Pip-Boy App.
I immediately regret posting this
[quote]They can be so focused on graphics that they forget they have to get the timing right[/quote]
I feel like this statement also holds true to many console and PC games as well.
Oh [I]that[/I] Atari. I was really confused because I thought this was talking about Infogrames for some reason.
I mean he has like. Half of a point I guess. Mobile games are pretty frequently just cash grabs but a lot of them don't even get played.
And there are definitely some great mobile games out there. One of my favorites is Lifeline. Couldn't put that shit down for more than a few hours. And things like Neko Atsume are great time killers. I don't think anyone considers mobile games to be more substantial than any other genre of video game but idk.
I'm not a huge fan of discrediting the mobile game genre just because there are a lot of shitty ones. There's a lot of shitty regular games too. Comes down to what you discover and play.
[editline]28th April 2016[/editline]
But I mean if he's into bringing better mobile games to the market, then he should go for it.
I always struggle to find good games on a phone that aren't just ports of older games, even the games I do find that are semi-playable, or with an interesting premise are usually rife with microtransactions to catch the whales, Like I like stuff like Fallout: Shelter but even that game is just a massive time sink and barely has any depth, it says a lot when the only games I've got on my phone are a time sink and a bunch of old Square enix RPGS, i.e Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger.
I just don't feel like the rest really want to give me a game, so much as they want my money more, I pretty much agree with this guys assessment.
[QUOTE=Pascall;50219327]I mean he has like. Half of a point I guess. Mobile games are pretty frequently just cash grabs but a lot of them don't even get played.
And there are definitely some great mobile games out there. One of my favorites is Lifeline. Couldn't put that shit down for more than a few hours. And things like Neko Atsume are great time killers. I don't think anyone considers mobile games to be more substantial than any other genre of video game but idk.
I'm not a huge fan of discrediting the mobile game genre just because there are a lot of shitty ones. There's a lot of shitty regular games too. Comes down to what you discover and play.
[editline]28th April 2016[/editline]
But I mean if he's into bringing better mobile games to the market, then he should go for it.[/QUOTE]
I also personally think that the mobile platform has greater potential to capture the game design of classic arcade-style games, since the input and output is much simpler than having a few hundred buttons on a controller or keyboard. Arcade-style games had a very simple game design, and generally progressing through the game simply added more challenge to the game, with very little variety in the design itself (faster enemies, less lives, less time, etc). Mobile games are, in my opinion, great "short-burst" type games, where you might play the game for a few minutes while waiting on the train. As such, the mobile platform has a great capacity for simple arcade-style game design (of course, it also has a great capacity for much more than that).
The simple fact that a phone is a boredom-breaker for most people means that mobile games can attract this kind of design better than a PC could
Phone games remind me of the flash browser games of the 2000's. I'm okay with them, but in the 2000's, everything was free.
Sometimes i play openTTD on my phone, it may be not a real phone game but i can spend some hours with it
I don't pay for phone games. I just use whatever money I get from google rewards to buy stuff whether it be micro transactions in free games or purchasing full games. No reason especially since mobile games are really boring or automatic now.
There are some pretty good mobile games, but it's like getting one of those CDs with 1000 games on it and trying to find the 3 that are actually worth playing.
Fallout Shelter, Pocket Mortys, Hearthstone, Shattered Planet, and Trexels are all pretty good, and what's currently on my phone
Slayin for android is pretty fun (its on iOS too but I think its paid there)
There are a lot of good mobile games, but they are buried under a humongous mountain of shit. For every decent game, there are ten games made by obscure Chinese developers which are blatant rip-offs of other games. And of every good game, less than half are not free-to-play.
Apple needs serious quality control on the App Store.
Only games I play on mobile are sudoku and nonogram apps. Really can't stand playing any sort of traditional video games on mobile.
After using my S4 for a while, the only games I'm playing on my phone are emulated Gameboy Advance TBS games like Fire Emblem and FF Tactics Advance. Very helpful for those long queuing hours.
Personally, I think that there are some good serious genres for mobile like platformer (those running games), puzzles (2048, The Room), sims games (The Sims, not flight sims), or TBS ( Think Xcom, not Clash of Clan). Simple controls that can tolerate crude finger accuracy (either by using few controls or allow undo). Classic arcadey games is also a good pick to kill some time.
One of the few genuine mobile games that I liked was Battleshipcraft on iPad, where you build ships with LEGO-like blocks and duke em out in World of Warships-esque skirmishes. Too bad that game was too easy to hack and thus removed from the app store.
Mobile games are like the games industry before the market crash, so I can understand the disdain.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.