1152: Gaming on the Go

I play a lot of mobile games for my day job. Some of them are great. Some of them are fucking atrocious. Very few of them hold my attention after I have reviewed them. I’ve been trying to pin down why this is, and it comes down to a variety of factors.

Firstly, and probably most seriously, is that I don’t get any real feeling of “accomplishment” (or perhaps more accurately “fulfilment”) from playing them for the most part. In the vast majority of cases, I find myself drawn to games that have a bit more “structure” to them, usually in the form of a strong narrative. So many mobile games — particularly those with social features, or which purport to be a “mobile MMO” — completely eschew any sort of narrative in favour of a completely open-ended experience with no discernible end and no real “goal” save for the short-term objectives set by the ever-present quest system. If I have nothing to aim for, I have no incentive to play. And no, “reach level 50” isn’t enough of an incentive for me — I know it is for some people, just not for me.

Secondly is the fact that it’s often difficult to shake the feeling that in many cases, there are plenty of better games I could be playing. I play something like Candy Crush Saga with its obnoxious £35 in-app purchases and just feel that I’d rather be playing Bejeweled 3 on PC; I play something like Infinity Blade and feel that if I wanted to play an extended Quick-Time Event, I could just play Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain and have a decent story to go along with my occasional carefully-timed button pushing; I play a slot machine game and I’d rather slit my wrists.

Thirdly is the frequency with which in-app purchases ruin everything. If they’re not throttling your play sessions (hello, Real Racing 3), they’re unbalancing the gameplay so that you need to pay money to progress — that or grind the same level for three thousand years to earn the money you need for the slightly better gun that is always just out of your reach. I also just get a bad taste in my mouth any time I play a game in which I have the choice between using my skill to progress or simply paying up to bypass anything that might be a bit difficult. Again, I know there are people who are fine with this; I’m just not one of them.

Fourthly is the fact that so many mobile games are so fucking completely clone-tastically identical to each other that I have absolutely no need (let alone desire) to play them in my free time. I have no desire to ever play another bubble shooter, Bejeweled ripoff, slot machine game, text-based “card battle RPG”, isometric-perspective citybuilder or “hardcore” (hah) strategy (hah) game. I wouldn’t mind so much if these developers were ripping off good ideas, but as far as I can tell they rip off the lowest common denominator, “most likely to make idiots pay through the nose in IAP” ideas, flooding the market with complete turds and making the genuinely good games utterly impossible to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

What this leaves me with is a significantly reduced proportion of mobile games that I can actually find enjoyable. If you discount all the directionless free-to-play crap in which the sole purpose of playing is mindless busywork with no long-term goal, there’s significantly less in the way of quality interactive entertainment. But thankfully there are still developers out there who cater to people like me, even though people like me don’t necessarily lead to obscene monthly profits.

Today I reviewed a title from an indie studio called Vlambeer. The game was called Ridiculous Fishing and has been in development for two and a half years, which is an incredibly long time for a mobile game. The reason for its incredibly long gestation period is that shortly after the team started development, they discovered that a large mobile game publisher called Gamenauts had completely ripped off their game idea (from an earlier Web-based version of what would later become Ridiculous Fishing) and released their own iOS game before Vlambeer could even officially announce their own offering. Understandably demoralised, they put the project on the backburner and almost cancelled it, but this week it finally hit the App Store and has been doing very well. It’s a $2.99 paid app with no in-app purchases whatsoever. I bought it immediately without hesitation; I like the developer, and I was sorry to see how bummed they were when their game was cloned. I also want to support the survival of the “pay once, play forever” business model, because it’s a dying breed in the mobile sector.

Ghost Trick. Chaos Rings. Sword of Fargoal. Anything by Jeff Minter. Anything by Cave. Support these developers and the great work they do, because if you don’t, mobile gaming will become a wasteland even more devoid of creativity than it already is. Fuck it if the price of admission isn’t “free” for these games; “free” doesn’t mean “free” any more. Forgo a latte and a sandwich from your local coffee house and support the hard work of developers who have brought you quality creative entertainment rather than regurgitated clonesville crap.