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What kind of games do you play on iPhone or iPad or PC? Do anyone like Cooking Craze?

I think games made for phones are the absolute worst. I don't understand how an industry primarily made up of vapid entertainment can be so profitable. And I hate how it is so powerful that its influences are seeping into other industries.

How? Massive user base, low price, easy access through built in marketplace. Compared to the PC market, it took ages before we got Steam, GoG and Origin. Before 2000-ish we had to physically walk to stores and buy games, receive them through the postal office, trade pirated copies with friends - only way to get games online was through pirate sites.


I prefer PC games, i haven't played anything for a looooong time though. My taste is varied, but i prefer open world games. I looked in my Steam library a few hours ago and i have a crapload of games (80+) i've bought on sale that i haven't even installed and tested yet.

The idea that this is an all-or-nothing concept for mobile gaming is a complete myth though.

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAb9QlR9XsA

This is Dungeon of the Endless. It is on Steam as well. The game is *incredible*. It combines a squad-based RTS with roguelike exploration and tower defense. Despite being tower defense, it is NOT a "sit back and watch your strategy unfold" game like much of that genre. You will be very, very active the entire time as your squad *must* participate in combat if you want to not die. It also manages to be both turn-based and real-time at the SAME time.

The game is very, very deep. There's a bazillion different strategies to pursue, and tons of content. All sorts of towers and structures you can build, all sorts of weapons and equipment for your characters, and special active and passive abilities, RPG-style level-ups, resource management, and unique enemies, as unlike alot of TD games, enemies dont just blindly waddle through like morons. You have to learn how each type of monster behaves and what it's going to do. There are certain enemies that might make a beeline for your crystal (lose it and die). Others might attack and chase your heroes. Some may cast debuffs, still others seek out your resource production structures, and there's one that just sits in some far off room, constantly growing and providing a very nasty buff to every monster on the floor. It is a *complicated* game, and the difficulty is very brutal. A full run takes about 6 hours, too. It starts off with cruel difficulty, and just gets more and more nasty as you go through the game's 12 floors, yet it is never unfair. The interface is very well done even on iOS.

Or there's stuff like Siralim. This game has since been ported to PC (it's on Steam now) but for quite a long while, it was iOS only. Think of it as an ultra-complicated version of Pokemon. And Pokemon, if you really dive in, is bloody complex to start with, but this goes waaaaaayyyyyyyy further than that. It's very overwhelming to new players. There's about 5 kersquillion stats to deal with, hundreds of monsters, and combat is 6-on-6 at once, not one on one like in Pokemon. EVERYTHING about the game is super complicated and the difficulty is high.

There's also bullet-hell shmups. And I dont mean some sort of dumbed down ones. Look up Mushihime-sama, for instance. That received a very direct port to iOS some time ago. They added some easier modes to it for new players (the original is notorious for being damn near impossible) but the original modes and absurd difficulty is there. Bullet hell shmups are actually very common on iOS, as it offers a *very* accurate control method that outdoes even arcade sticks, giving you perfect accuracy in movement.

And those examples, I chose because they exist on PC as well and are easy to look up; there are LOTS of games like these that only exist on iOS or Android. My iPad is my primary portable gaming device, and it's packed with so many games that it's out of space, yet only TWO of those games are the stereotypical sort (one of them being Angry Birds, because hey, it's just fun).

The real problem is not the game selection: It's the stores you buy the games from. They push the stereotypical crap so freaking hard that it drowns out all of the really cool stuff you can find on there. You have to already know where and how to look, in advance, before you can find the bazillions of awesome things on there. Well, I dont know how the Android store is, but the App Store on iOS is bloody horrible. I dont even use it to find games; I have other resources for that, because I'd NEVER find these by just looking on there. It's really quite frustrating, because it does not help sales for these awesome games and developers one bit.

But hey, consoles are like that too. The Big Guys (like Activision, EA, Ubisoft) push their shallow, greedy crap so bloody hard that the really GOOD stuff, the deep and not-greedy stuff, gets drowned out. It's not that mobile game stuff bled over, so much as it's just that the big publishers are horribly corrupted. If the "premium microtransactions" had not appeared on console and such, the Big Guys would have simply come up with a different method of sucking your funds out your nose. In fact, they did: Loot boxes. Those originated on PC, NOT on mobile. These giant publishers have even more insidious plans coming, too.... and not on mobile.

I don't really play mobile games, but if a port of Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3 were to be released, I'd play it.

You're right in that it is completely impossible to find anything of worth on mobile stores. Typically mobile stores primarily categorise their products as 'free' and 'premium'. Firstly, that's a stupid way to categorise things, as when I'm looking for a game I'm more interested in what sort of game it is, what genre, etc. Steam is much superior to this with its genre categories and its user tagging system.

Secondly, those categories are useless as the stores don't even bother to categorise them properly. There are virtually no games in the free sections of these stores that are actually free. Free to me means free, like Battle for Wesnoth, Cave Story or Dwarf Fortress. The premium sections are typically full of $1 junkware that are designed to encourage further microtransactions, or my favorite, paid games that are permanently discounted for a limited time to $0 with microtransactions. Any attempts at categorising these games into genres is laughable, as you have 'Strategy' genres filled to the brim with Bejeweled clones, 'RPG' genres filled with clickers, and 'action' genres filled with gacha games.

There's only been a few games I've ever bought to play on my phone from mobile stores and that includes the port of Baldur's Gate 2, and some ports of SCUMM (point and clickers) and CAVE (shmups) games. None of those were honestly that great to play on my phone and I often felt I'd be having much more fun playing them on something with decent controls. I've been enticed to try some of Square Enix's games such as their remake of The World Ends With You and Final Fantasy Tactics, but I held off because they have a terrible reputation for their games breaking with operating system updates which they never fix.

The only really good games I've played on my phone have been games not designed for a phone such as Nintendo DS games like Advance Wars, Fire Emblem or Etrian Odyssey. These work well with the Note series of phones, which include a stylus. VNDS is also a great program that I've used to play some decent games such as Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night on my phone, which is used to play visual novels ported from PC. Right now I'm playing through Katawa Shoujo.

Ah, you're playing on a phone... that's a problem right there.

I've tried gaming on an actual phone (I normally use my iPad), but.... yeah, it aint happening. The ONE game I'll play on the phone is Dungeon Raid.

But something like Cave's shmups? I have *all* of them (and loads of shmups not made by Cave, on iOS), and they're REALLY not made for phones; they're made for tablets. Yeah, TECHNICALLY they work on a phone, but.... like with a HUGE number of other games, phones really drag the experience down far.

On a tablet though? You get shmup controls more accurate than any arcade stick, and this is something I say after so very many years of playing this genre (I got started with Cave's stuff way back when they came to PS2 and cost like $120 to import). Hell, DDP Maximum is one of my all-time favorites, and that one isnt a port, it's a game they made that's unique to mobile for some baffling reason... but it's also one of the best things they've made, period. But trying to play a shmup on a phone? I think I did that like, once. Wont do it again. Gotta be a tablet. The screen space is just waaaayyyyy too important there.

But yeah, your controls in a general sense in ANY game are going to be hampered badly on a phone VS a tablet (particularly since on small screens your own fingers are going to then cover important things, which doesnt really happen on tablets). That dramatically smaller screen hurts things alot. I can imagine some games just being outright unplayable on a phone, despite working wonderfully on a tablet.


And yeah, those stores are horrid, arent they? You really have to look in entirely different places to find the cool stuff, and THEN take those links to the actual store pages. It's bloody stupid. For me, I've gotten used to it over the years, but for anyone new to this.... how are they supposed to figure that out? Well, they arent supposed to, are they... that'd bite into the profits from the bigger guys, CANT HAVE THAT! Bah. That's a rant for another day though. A really, really long rant.

Also yes Square's stuff is all terrible. Worse, it's PROGRESSIVELY terrible. Like that time they released that "All the Bravest" game... talk about a blatant cash grab! That's one of the nastier examples of that sort of thing happening recently. But then, they're a big huge publisher of doom. They dont NEED true quality anymore to make money, and they absolutely know it. Just like EA and Ubisoft.

Well the disappointing thing is that the Final Fantasy Tactics mobile ports are probably the best versions of that game when they run, and I know that The World Ends With You is an excellent game and should translate well to a touch screen, being a port of a Nintendo DS game, with much higher resolution art. I would easily pay the $17 or so for them if I could have confidence in the games continuing to be supported, but you don't get that sort of guarantee the same way you do on either consoles or PC - on consoles it'd just never happen, and on PC even if it was abandoned someone out there would fix it.

On the other hand, I can't just blame them for abandoning the games either. I suspect as much as a lot of people balk at blatant cash grabs like All The Bravest, it probably makes more sense for them to make games like that rather that supporting their more substantial games post release. These games don't need a large playerbase to make them a lot of money, just having a few whales lets them make more money at very low risk.

I have played Dungeon Raid and thought it was decent, a much cheaper low production version of Puzzle Quest. If Puzzle Quest released on Android it'd probably be one of my favourite games, but instead a bunch of 'free' microtransaction laden spinoffs came out for it instead.

Well, All the Bravest and that "freemium" sort havent been the only travesties that Square has done these days. Just that alone wouldnt be enough for me to declare them as "progressively worse".

No, it's more than that with them. Just look to some of their recent PC versions of stuff for that one. Hell, there are some of those that are direct ports of the mobile versions. That's a whole other level of epic laziness and a lack of giving a crap. And then there's the recent Secret of Mana remake, which I hear is bloody terrible for reasons I dont remember. Or there's the Chrono Trigger one; that one I do know the reason: It's a port of the MOBILE version. This publisher has gotten so bloody lazy that they take one of the most beloved classics, and give you not a port, but a port of a port, and a really lazy one at that. The game currently sits at a godawful 40% score on Steam (that's really, REALLY low).

Not that this is a surprise: Almost every single product Square has released on PC is just a port/re-release of some older game. They've almost become Capcom: Just recycling the same old things over and over rather than making new ones (the main exception being the occaisional FF game), because they absolutely know they can get away with it while still making big money.

It's a shame, really. They were a respectable group once, but.... yeah, those times have long since passed. That's the thing about some of these publishers though: In the mobile market people complain alot about freemium games and judge the publishers based on those, but if you take the same publishers and let them onto the PC or console markets, they're just going to make cheap crap there too.... it's just that it'll take a different form. And probably be filled with microtransactions. Hell, have you heard of that "games as service" crap? That's gonna be even worse than lootboxes (while probably containing lootboxes). Or there's Activision's horrible multiplayer scheme... that one's a nasty story just on it's own (and it's probably going to spread, once they've tested it, because if it works everyone else will want a piece of that pie too).


Honestly at this point I'm just glad I tend to stick to indies. Watching the Big Guys make jerks of themselves over and over is bloody depressing. But that's a whole other rant for another day.


As for Puzzle Quest, yeah, I remember that game. Still remember when it came out, way back when. Had the original DS version, it got alot of hours out of me. Though personally I prefer Dungeon Raid.

Well there's a reason they keep revisiting their earlier efforts, they were all a lot better received than anything they make nowadays. I don't know why they made that remake of Secret of Mana though, it's really one of those games that was good at the time, but by today's standards doesn't hold up. But its low poly visuals aren't really a step up over the original's sprite art, and other inclusions like voice acting just emphasise the triteness of the story.

The only thing they've made that has had any real success lately has been Final Fantasy XIV. As far as I'm aware it's the second most successful MMO behind WoW, which is an achievement even if it's not something I personally love - I just can't get into MMOs anymore. But like everything they make, there's nothing really original about it, it's just a very polished tab target MMORPG.

I'll play old DOS games on my PC. I also play emulators of classic game consoles on PC