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It’s really bizarre how phone gaming’s golden age was before the smartphone era, having buttons helped a lot. Later java ME games and symbian everything were very cool, I still listen to the songs of Asphalt 4 to this day.
Don’t get me wrong there are cool games too after mihoyo started getting ambitious, but they also ported their games to PC and consoles where it’s better to play.
true, i avoid games on my phone because the touchscreen is just the worst possible interface for most games.
the current day phones gaming capability is massively hindered by the shit storm you have to sift through in order to play any of them. Most of which is due to shitty advertisement companies having malicious ads and intrusive practices. It’s basically a hard requirement nowadays to use some sort of DNS blocker for them
phone gaming’s golden age was temple run and jetpack joyride, cmv
Snake 2 with the wrapping borders
Old school RuneScape is on mobile.
2009scape (free and open source recreation of Runescape circa 2009) is also on Android via an unofficial port
But as others have said, the best phone games were developed for other platforms
I know this doesn’t have anything to do with the thread, but sprog is it really you?
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
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.
GBA Final Fantasy ports are great as well as Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Also highly recommend Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga and Golden Sun
Among us
I enjoy Magic: the Gathering Arena. And there are a few decent rogue likes
I still remember stuff like dead space mobile, those where true, actual games that showed you the potential phones COULD have
now the gaming industry (conventions and everything else to), is now utterly dominated and muddled by the likes of candy crush and genshin impact, its actually sad
How is a giant open world with a cool campaign not impressive for a phone game? Just play it like a regular game instead of doing endgame content, the story’s combat is easy to not force anyone to pull.
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.
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.
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 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.
God damnit… Slice and Dice really is good. I end up coming back to it to waste time a lot.
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
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!
A year ago or so I would have said Clash Royale. But now… nah.
You’ll find plenty of videos that explain this better than I can, but at this point the devs clearly hate the community, the game is more pay to win than ever, evolutions are completely broken and the devs barely care to balance the game anymore.
It’s pretty obvious that right now they just want to squeeze as much money as possible from the game before it completely dies out.
And that describes mobile gaming in a nutshell.
They literally only have to pander to a small handful of whales to justify pay to win microtransactions. I’m sure the average player never spends any money on it.
clash royale
Holy hell I was straight up addicted once, then the devs ruined it all…
Yea picked up the game a week ago, after not playing for 2 or 3 years and wow is this game unballanced. At this point it’s just realy anoying. And my 2013 deck is obviously not meta anymore, but to level a new deck to a point of playability takes an obscene amount of work.
The best mobile games are ports like Terraria and Slay the Spire, or old fashioned emulated games, but you need a controller to make it feel okay.
Yep. I have AAA games on my phone I’ll never touch because playing Pokemon moon doesn’t feel right on a slab of glass. Can’t get into it.
Mobile gaming is awful these days. The vast majority are just cash grabs.
That said I look forward to Balatro being released
With a bit of know-how, you can make a mobile version that works quite well: https://github.com/blake502/balatro-mobile-maker
“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!
I remember playing Perfect Cell on iOS when I was younger and having a really great time
Before it went f2p, yeah. Angry bird, pvz port, world of goo, ridiculous fishing, all fun stuff
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.
These days mate, you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail if you just say mobile gaming is good
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.
The secret is to find one that works on aeroplane mode
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.
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
Perhaps not, but it was definitely fun.
Of course not. That title belongs to Fruit Ninja.
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
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 :(
I got mini metro on my PC. Felt like that would have been a great game to have on a phone
It’s on mobile.
Yea I know. But I can’t speak for if it’s shit or not.
It’s okay but the large screen on a regular monitor is huge advantage
Its pretty dang nice on mobile. I pay for the Google Play Pass (Apple Game Pass competitor) because it shares to my family and amongst all of us it adds up to making sense to pay $20/yr it costs, and I’ll pop open a game of Mini Metro every so often and play the daily challenge map
Duskwood
Some indie mobile games are great (Nameless cat, Zombie catchers (before being aquired by DECA), Simon Tatham’s puzzles, foss fdroid games (Simple Solitare), Cookie clicker, etc.
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, 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!
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.
Seems like a good idea, maybe we’ll have 2 good mobile games than.
That’s a good idea, but it’s hard to work considering that true gamers don;t walk at all. /s
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.Looks pretty sweet! Thanks!
This looks very promising. Thanks for linking to it here. I hope it gets launched soon.
