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.
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 vast majority of mobile games are not designed to be good games. They are designed to be addictive vehicles for advertising and micro transactions.
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.
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.
When I game… I game hard 😎
No sound in public though, I would never be that obnoxious (or confident lol, too embarrassing)
I guess you’re twitching all over the place then.
No offense but how old are you
7
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.
We’re all just choosing to spend our time staring at pixels on a screen.
So true lol. Slightly unrelated but I had an epiphany once that we use our touch devices so frequently, and of course we’re interacting with data in different ways, but physically we’re just sliding our fingers around on a pane of glass with lights behind it all the time. Must look so weird to monkeys 😂
Monkeys, and old people who never learned it! My grandma can just about manage to call me on WhatsApp but sometimes I’ll try and demonstrate basically anything else and she genuinely can’t see the difference between gestures I’m using, or which parts of the app are interactive or not.
Same in gaming. She saw me playing WoW once in about 2008 and I remember her being genuinely confused about how I could possibly tell what was my character and what was everything else. Even though, you know, your character is always in the middle of the screen. Just couldn’t grasp it no matter how long she sat and watched!
Bless 😅
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.
The kind of game I like to play usually have keys to move the characters, keys for actions, keys for selecting items or weapons, them the mouse to move the viewpoint, fire or block.
These controls map poorly to a slate of glass.
Even the games I used to play, like Tetris or platformers, work badly if you only have virtual buttons to press.
It may be fun for you, but I just can’t get the hang of it.
Question to you: Why do you care if others mock the games you like to play?
Does it make you feel like less of a “gamer”?On some level, all games are just pushing buttons (or a screen) to make our brain produce the happy chemicals.
I like how everyones complaining aboit micro xactions and monetization like console and pc games aren’t also doing that. Compare apples to apples, if you’re only going to talk about the free to play mobile games, you cant compare them to the $70 dollar titles on console and PC. Give it enough time and your PC free to plays and mobile ones will be monetized almost the same, weather thats due to new laws or the industries playing the long slow game of adding more and more monetization without spooking off the customers.
How do you know they’re looking at you weirdly?
Cuz people like to play games with each other without ever needing any object, place, or particular reason. Its how we learn
I’m not much of a gamer admittedly but I have no issues with touch controls. I played several GTA games (III, Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories), KOTOR 1 & 2, and several shooters on mobile. Right now I play Genshin Impact almost entirely on mobile and am not noticeably worse than when on PC, and I’m starting Hitman: Blood Money as well. Mobile is severely underrated in capacity, and while there is a learning curve and it is more limited than PC, you adapt pretty rapidly.
But most mobile games suck now. IB has been gone for ages— slain by Epic Games on the plains of Koroth— and it’s hard to think of a good AAA mobile series that came after. Most mobile games seem like thinly veiled money grabs. Even Blood Money was preceded by a godawful sequel to an actually good Hitman: Sniper game filled to the brim with classic mobile microtransaction drivers. I have Apple Arcade included with my subscription and it’s better for not having MTX, but the games themselves aren’t too complex.
And well, maybe that’s because companies expect mobile players to lack the time for long sessions. So a lot of the games feel like they’re designed for brief sessions like that failed streaming service. The view on that seems to be changing, thankfully, as more AAA games are getting ported again so maybe mobile will get another renaissance.
