God I fucking hate mobile games. It’s so sad that’s what kids are growing up on now.
I feel like mobile games have only gotten worse as well. Like I saw my nephew playing some last year and there’s just stuff happening, he doesn’t even react to the stuff half the time and the game keeps going? It felt like when video games get portrayed in tv in the 90s and early 00s where the games are just completely incoherent, and the reactions of the characters don’t seem to align at all.
I know that a lot of the combat in gacha games has an auto-battle mode because realistically people don’t care much about the gameplay and are just farming 7 different in-game currencies so they can roll more gacha.
the people need their number-goes-up simulators for when they have no numbers in real life that can realistically actually go up.
Young people games are incoherent
I mean, I think in this instance it’s specifically games designed around getting screen-on time from 3-7 year old lol.
I see what you’re talking about now. Sure, the gambling psychology they insert in mobile games to addict its users and disrupt attention span is illegal in China and should be illegal outside China too
Don’t know if that’ll happen 'cause I played flash games as a kid and despite some very small curiosity I have about some of them I’m not nostalgic for them at all and wish I spent my time as a kid playing any other game.
That’s… I good point actually.
I also played flash games and maaaaan they were baaad. No nostalgia for them in the slightest
I had nostalgia for them for a while, some were actually really intricate and maybe even good, and some of my friends have white whale flash games lost to time. But yeah, there’s no tidal wave of nostalgia products for various reasons
Personally my feeling is there’ll be some nostalgia for the better mobile games but if there’s any preservation effort it will probably recreate them without the microtransaction bullshit lol
I do think someone else on the thread may have a point that the only reason we don’t see this much nostalgia for flash games is because of the sheer number of them, and the fact that everyone played a different one, before losing interest and getting another one. It’s hard to monetize stick matrix 4 when only a bunch of people remember it fondly, unlike the 80s/90s when a game could be THE GAME for years.
but if there’s any preservation effort it will probably recreate them without the microtransaction bullshit lol
and then you realize that waiting around all day isn’t a game lol
My flash game lost to time was “Zest”, a visual novel about addiction.
Guess I’m the only weirdo here who absolutely has nostalgia for loads of flash games as a kid, there were many crap ones and many, many great ones.
Motherlode, Portal: The Flash Game, Castle Crashers, Super Meat Boy, Every Neopet game ever, Happy Wheels, Bloon TD 1/2/3/4/5, Impossible Quiz 1/2/3, Anagram Magic (+all the multiplayer games on miniclip,), Uno (+all the multiplayer games on omglol), Madness Combat, Fancy Pants Adventure, to name the ones off the top of my head.
I refuse to accept none of these are worthy of nostalgia. Some of them were turned into very successful full-blown games.
Impossible Quiz 1
I failed on the last 10 questions of that one so many times that I gave up lmao. Even as a kid, I didn’t have time for that shit.
It was definitely a game that relied on its concept rather than anything else. I still personally think it was a fun interesting 'un worth playing.
Nah me too. Smash the castle or whatever that trebuchet game that got copied by angry birds was dope
Castle Crashers is getting an update soon after 10 years of nothing lol.
Yeah, like I’ve got a batocera emulation setup, and I have a bunch of old flash games I played as a kid on there, as a curiosity. But I hardly touch them.
The only one with substance that I occasionally go back to is this one puzzle game with little Viking guys trapped in ice, and you have to free them. It’s a cute little time waster, but that’s about it.
this take was reviewed by the Committee of Gaming and your sentence has been determined
I know this is a terrible post. You’re free to arrest me for this one.
The games people get nostalgic about and remember are determined by a mix of actual quality, how many people played them new, current availability, and whether they’re tied to any ongoing franchises.
Everybody remembers the old Mario games because they were actually good, they were the most produced NES carts, Nintendo keeps re-releasing them, and Nintendo keeps making more Mario games which openly advertise 8-bit Mario. A lot fewer people remember The Guardian Legend (which owned btw) because it had a smaller distribution and has no franchise or rereleases and its parent company spends all its time barely managing to market Puyo. Nobody remembers the Adventure Island series, even though there were five thousand of them, because they were just kind of bad. If you go to my personal nostalgia mines of late 90s mac shareware, nobody remembers any of this, because approximately nobody played these, none of the companies stuck around, and it’s a pain in the ass to set up the emulators (Bumbler Bee-Luxe is great, Escape Velocity Nova is great and also available outside a horrible mac emulator).
So for old mobile game nostalgia, I think it’s going to run into a wall. There’s a trillion of them and everybody played different ones, so there’s no critical mass for the Tiny Wings nostalgia fandom. They were made by tiny companies, or just one random developer, who eventually abandon them (either because they move on, or because they don’t want to have the old version compete against more predatory sequels). And the app stores constantly change standards and require apps to be updated, so the apps eventually stop being listed in the store.
There’s a trillion of them and everybody played different ones
I saw a nostalgia video of old flash games, the youtuber showed 20 them, not a single one was one I had ever heard of or seen.
A lot fewer people remember The Guardian Legend (which owned btw)
I’d actually love to see a movie adaptation of that.
Slay the Spire is a mobile game
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a mobile game
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a mobile game
Hyper Light Drifter is a mobile game
I mean yeah I know what you mean when you refer to “mobile” games but another way to look at it is that the gender gap in gaming basically disappears if you include mobile gaming, so the view that mobile games are not real games is arguably springing from male chauvinism.
I think non men deserve to game without predatory skinner box mechanics regardless of platform
Be a retro g*mer, play Flappy Bird
there are a lot of non-predatory mobile games which you would know if you know anybody who plays mobile games
there are a lot of non-predatory mobile games with no marketing budget, no front-page presence on the google play, and no way for your average gamer to pick them out from the ocean of trash
Looking at the front page of the iOS app store games category page I see (excluding ones that say they’re “for you”):
- Age of Empires mobile pre-order (idk what this is, maybe it’s got a bunch of in-game currencies)
- MONOPOLY GO!
- Roblox
- Subway Surfers
- Pokemon GO
- Fallout Shelter
- Genshin Impact
- Monster Train (deckbuilding roguelike battles)
- NYT Games: Word Games & Sodoku
- Call of Duty: Mobile
- Minion Rush: Running game
- My Talking Tom 2 (some kind of game where you talk to a cat?)
- Smash Hit
idk it feels like this site is stuck in the mid-2010s perception that everything on the app store is a Zynga clicker Clash of Clans clone with a yelling man as the icon
here’s a review from Monopoly GO!
From someone who has been playing for a year, it’s going down hill big time. It was never this bad before. It’s near impossible to complete any events, ANY of them without spending hundreds of dollars on dice.
are you actually personally vouching for any of these games, or are you just assuming they’re not skinner box pay to win cash grabs?
I’m not vouching for them, they certainly aren’t all skinner boxes though. You could find a few but the skinner box rate is way above zero for PC and console games these days too.
I don’t know what most of those games are but if you say they are just regular games where you play them and can’t use your wallet as an extra controller i admit to being stuck in the past like a big ol’ silly billy
that person literally copied a list of games from the iOS app store games, did not investigate if any were pay-to-win, did absolutely no fact checking, made no actual claims about the games, but has successfully convinced you that you are stuck in the past.
I wouldn’t say convinced, but i did assume they had actually looked into them
There’s a game called Subway Surfers? While teenagers are killing themselves “subway surfing” in real life? Jeez lol
Subway surfers is an “ancient” mobile game by today’s standards, basically a temple run clone, endless running game. Similar format to minion rush. I remember playing it over a decade ago on my first smartphone.
All the good ones like Monument Valley and Alto’s Journey get ported because they actually transcend the extremely low bar of entertainment for being stuck somewhere with a phone and 7 minutes to kill.
A number of my co-workers play mobile games and they all have like 2+ ingame currencies and “optional” ad boosts and shit.
I will admit I don’t have many friends into mobile games though. I’m old and crotchety so I can accept that my view of the entire platform is biased
I disagree. More than half of those are ports and I actually find it more male chauvinistic to assume that women prefer mobile games.
That’s like telling someone who thinks Barbie is vapid “Actually most women like Barbie so actually you’re sexist.”
65% of women aged 10-65 in the US play mobile games and 49% of mobile gamers are women (page 2 of pdf), this survey was done back in 2017
And most MLM scams target women too, does that make me sexist for hating MLM schemes?
maybe you don’t hang around women who play mobile games, but I know a few including my own mom, and they’re mostly word puzzle games. wordle obviously is big, but that really crowbarred open the door and now there are an absolute ton of word-based games with pretty innovative mechanics.
Gen alpha kids generally aren’t addicted to sudoku and crosswords lol. This seems like a major reach when it’s obvious what the post is talking about.
were people actually addicted to those, or was there just nothing better to do? Accoring to le reddit sudoku has had a decline, and it seems to correlate with the availability of do literally anything on your smartphone.
No, that’s what I mean. My nieces and nephews aren’t playing puzzle games that older people may be on their phones. They’re playing the modern day equivalent of 80s cartoons: corporate unregulated apps designed to get as much screen-on time as possible to push ads and microtransactions. If they were addicted to sudoku it would he an improvement!
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49% of mobile gamers are women
Unless nonbinary people are a huge part of the mobile game userbase, that sounds like a pretty even split of men and women to me.
so the view that mobile games are not real games
the issue is probably about low quality, gimmicks, and exploitation, I think the problem is reinforced when your counterargument is a bunch of ports (exceptions that prove the rule), you might as well start calling all steam deck compatible games and emulatable retrogames mobile games.
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In the early days it was actually pretty normal to buy premium games (most pre-smartphone games were paid and I remember buying multiple games when I had an iPhone 3G), but as soon as people realized you could continuously milk people for subscriptions and microtransactions on a device they carry with them everywhere, it was all over. I’m sure there are still passionate devs making good mobile games, but that’s not where the money’s at.
Separately, premium apps are a lot more common on iOS to this day. I don’t know if there’s anything about the App Store that encourages this or it’s just a quirk of history, but I figured it was worth noting.
I had Bejeweled on my phone back in 2007 ad free and it was glorious. Unfortunately it was the old way of doing things where it was purchased through your cell phone provider, rather than through Google Play or the Apple Store.
The current version is a fucking mess of ads, microtransactions, and dumb multi-player gimmicks.
High quality paid games with decent graphics were a thing for the very first smartphones and iPods. I remember buying Need For Speed Hot Pursuit on a cousin’s iPod 14 years ago because we didn’t have a PlayStation or Xbox 360 to buy the game on yet. It was actually a decent port. But then mobile developers realised that you could milk in app purchases and that killed the paid game genre.
yeah after I bought my $800 cellphone and $800 laptop, I’m totally going to also buy $800/year worth of consoles (I just assume all 3 consoles + games + controllers + online subscriptions cost $800/year).
but also mobile games do kind of suck, like wtf im not going to pay you for fake fish.
It’s already happening. Young gen Z is already having nostalgia for angry birds, geometry dash, subway surfers/temple run/minion rush, jetpack joyride, fruit ninja, smash hit, etc. These are all games I played over a decade ago when I got my first smartphone in high school.
tbf the old angrey birds was probably actually good and it is no longer possible to play it the way it use to be played (unless
?)
I don’t buy it. I grew up in the 8 and 16 bit era and I only have a small collection of about 5000 retro roms… oh…
Eh, I’m an old fart and I certainly don’t get nostalgic for everything from my youth. There weren’t any mobile games, but there sure were a lot of plastic “collectables”. They’ll probably find something to be nostalgic for, but don’t underestimate the amount of “How the fuck was this blatant cash grab legal?” that they will feel about their old classics.
You have become the very boomer you once despised
NOOOOOOOOOO I DON’T WANT TO GRILL
I genuinely don’t think this will happen. I know it’s easy to bash whatever the new, current thing that wasn’t the thing in my day, but are Gen Alpha actually passionate and emotionally invested in their mobile games?
Without a pulling story, a world that captures your imagination, that ensnares your mind and makes you think of all the possibilities in that world and/or at least meaningful social aspects, I don’t think people have much to really remember or get nostalgic for. Maybe I’m very ignorant of mobile games, but I think an extremely small percentage of these really manage that, at least a far smaller percentage than other games. (And if mobile games like that really do exist, let me know, because I’m still waiting to personally experience a single one)
Like someone else said, nostalgia at best for mobile games would be like the nostalgia for flash game sites like mini clips back in the day. A few games would stand out as, “oh yeah I played that” followed by a joke about how easily entertained they were as children.
I really just don’t relate to that. I have so much nostalgia for flash games.
I do too tbh but I’ve heard the “I was easily entertained joke” way too often every time they get brought up
I have gotten passionate and emotionally attached [read: hyperfixated] to a handful of games and it’s always been a waste in retrospect.
Interesting, I’ve never felt that.
You have adhd?
I’m already nostalgic for angry birds :(. That said, the vast majority are terrible and ads cause me physical pain at this point.
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They’re going to make those pay to win games with those ads built into them, aren’t they
.There’s going to eventually be some subversive indie darling that uses the ads as a mechanic.
HDR streamed location-based augmented reality animal crossing farmville NFT VR IoT hybrid when???
I remember kingsofchaos and hobowars from back in the day, because cellphones were unsmart and internet payments were a lolno back then, there was only ads. I guess you could call clash of clans and evony gen2 of that, basically adding graphics and skinner box payments. Perhaps gen3 of these games will be like “scan your starbux coffee receipt to build your army faster”
I’ve seen a few guys feeling nostalgia for a mobile porn game
Gacha Trash, the Movie, with a nostalgic soundtrack by the Costco Guys
Half of the movie will be lynch mobs chasing devs to the Benny Hill music playing.
what do you mean 10 years i’m already nostalgic for infinity blade
