1198: ThreeDeeEss

After some hesitation — and despite owning several games for it — I finally got my own 3DS today. We’ve actually had one in the household since Andie’s last birthday — it belongs to her — but with the combination of Fire Emblem: Awakening and the copy of Luigi’s Mansion 2 my brother got me for my birthday (thanks!) I figured it was probably about time I got my own rather than depriving Andie of the opportunity to play Harvest Moon whenever she pleased.

And, as predicted, just a short period of time with the 3DS has reminded me once again that people who claim traditional handhelds are on the way out and that mobile phone/tablet gaming is the future are talking out of their arse. Yes indeed.

The quality of the experiences on the 3DS and Vita is just in a completely different league to that you get on a smartphone. Completely. It also makes the rapidly-widening schism between free-to-play/”freemium” and traditionally-sold “pay once, play forever” games extremely apparent.

Today, for work (last day! Woo!) I reviewed the new Transformers game for iOS and Android. Said game is the latest in the interminable string of “card battle” games that are available for those two platforms, which means it’s a monotonous, tedious, strategy-and-gameplay-free experience that has only the most tenuous link to its source material. It is, in short, designed as little more than a means of getting people addicted enough to the sight of little bars filling up to want to pay money to “collect” virtual cards that don’t actually exist. “This is a super rare card!” they’ll say, failing to point out that it is data rather than a physical object and is thus only as “rare” as they decide it should be at any given point in time. There’s no joy in playing that game; it’s mindless busywork — something to do for the sake of having something to fiddle with rather than something that actually engages your brain and makes you interested in what’s going on.

The phrase “mindless busywork” describes probably 90% of the new mobile and social games that are released every day. Which is why I have no desire whatsoever to play them in my free time.

Compare and contrast the crap that is Transformers Legends to Fire Emblem: Awakening on 3DS, then. Ostensibly, the two games are of the same genre: RPG. And yet the difference in quality is apparent from the moment you fire up the game. And it only gets more painful to even contemplate this difference as you go on.

Fire Emblem is a game designed to entertain you and challenge you. It’s not designed to massage your ego through giving you tasks to do that are completely free of any sort of challenge, and then extract money from you while you’re feeling good. It has the means of extracting money from you through its paid (optional) downloadable content, but the experience in and of itself is complete, and it doesn’t nag you at any point to do something that will cost you money. It doesn’t tell you how long you can play before you have to either stop or pay, it doesn’t tease you with “if you pay $5 you might get this awesome hero” nonsense — note, “might” — and it doesn’t thrust gigantic screen-filling adverts in your fucking face every five minutes like most modern mobile games do. Nothing breaks immersion for me more quickly than happily playing a game then suddenly everything stopping and the device on which I’m playing said game asking me if I want to download another, completely unrelated free game. The answer is, without exception, “no, fuck off.”

And if the adverts don’t break immersion, the “user retention” strategies certainly do. “Play the Daily Spin now!” announces a game that is attempting to be a gritty depiction of medieval life, failing to see how completely inappropriate a slot machine is in this context. “Spin the wheel for prizes!” barks Gollum in the official mobile game of The Hobbit. “Get free coins every day!” bellows whatever shitty puzzle game has ripped off Bejeweled and monetized it out the arse this week.

No. So long as mobile phone gaming is the preserve of sleazy chancers who prey on the weak and stupid, traditional handhelds have absolutely nothing to worry about.

Were you an advocate of mobile and tablet gaming, you may well point to the disparity in price between mobile games and 3DS/Vita games and make some sort of non-specific sneering noise at this point. My response to that is very simply “you get what you pay for.”