2063: No, Apple TV Isn’t “Game Over” for Xbox and PlayStation

Cometh the new Apple announcements, cometh the silly season of people making all sorts of bold statements about how what Apple is doing is somehow The Future, even if what Apple is doing is actually the same thing as other people have been doing for several years, only with more shiny knobs on.

The latest instance of this happening comes courtesy of Forbes, where contributor David Thier gave Smule’s Jeff Smith the opportunity to wax lyrical about How Amazing iOS Is, and How Amazing tvOS Will Probably Be.

Smith brings up some good points about “mobile” development (I’m going to keep calling it that, even if we’re referring to Apple TV, because the iOS and tvOS ecosystems are intertwines) — the most important being the fact that iOS and Android are both relatively “open” platforms so far as development is concerned; pretty much anyone with the knowhow can download development tools and crank out an app or two if they have the inclination to learn the ins and outs of both development and the two platforms’ respective publishing processes.

This is admirable in some respects: it lowers the barrier of entry to fledgling developers and allows them to get their name known without being subject to the whims of a monolithic megacorporation like Sony or Microsoft, though it’s worth noting that the barrier isn’t completely gone; Apple still has a reasonably rigorous approvals process for the App Store, though unfortunately this isn’t always enough to prevent some fetid turds from filtering through.

We’ve seen more than a few success stories over the last few years, where small developers put out a simple game that turned out to be a huge success, though, as with Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen (who was unprepared for the attention his shitty but popular game attained and subsequently retreated from the Internet) these tales don’t always end entirely happily.

But unfortunately a low barrier means that it’s easier for people to get over it, and, as well as allowing talented but unknown developers to get stuck in, it also allows the very worst kind of shovelware to get churned out by the bucketload. And, as we’ve already seen over the last few years, neither Apple nor Google are inclined to do anything about the massive “cloning” problem on mobile, where the market is flooded with literally hundreds of knockoffs of a popular game, all in the hope that, in the best cases, they can score some sweet income from people who think they’re downloading the actual popular game, and in the worst cases, mislead ill-informed customers into downloading something outright malicious.

We see this elsewhere, too. Popular PC digital distribution storefront Steam used to be much more heavily curated than it is now, and while its somewhat more relaxed approach these days means that we get lots of stuff on there that we wouldn’t have seen three or four years ago, it also means that there’s a veritable deluge of crap hurled at an unsuspecting public on pretty much a daily basis. This is bad for customers, who are forced to wade through lots of inferior products in order to find what they’re looking for, but it’s also bad for developers, because it absolutely tanks discoverability; sometimes word of mouth is enough to mitigate being pushed off the front page of “new releases” by the latest triple-A game, but more often than not something small-scale gets released on Steam and is promptly never heard from again.

Smith’s assertion that Apple TV means “game over for console” appears to be otherwise based on the fact that the iPhone and iPad made fairly rapid leaps in graphical fidelity and performance over the course of several hardware generations. But what this — and his enthusiasm for the relative “openness” of the iOS and Android marketplaces — doesn’t take into account is the quality issue. Sure, there are developers putting out decent-quality games for mobile devices (and, Smith clearly hopes, many of these will jump to Apple TV when the new tvOS arrives) but I am yet to play any mobile game that truly competes with a game on a dedicated games-playing platform, be it a handheld like the Vita, a console like the PlayStation 4 or a gaming-spec PC. The experiences you get on the latter platforms are just more fleshed out; they may be more expensive to buy a ticket for in the first instance, but once you’re in, you’re in for a good long while, immersed fully in the experience.

By contrast, the sort of games that iOS and Android developers are mostly inclined to put out are short, bite-sized experiences designed to be dipped in and out of throughout the day. This is fine for those who just want a bit of lightweight entertainment or brain exercise, but it’s far from ideal for those of us — and there are many of us! — who take our gaming time seriously, sitting down with a game much like an avid reader would sit down with a book, or a movie buff would enjoy their favourite director’s works. Mobile platforms treat gaming as disposable, moment-to-moment entertainment; the market for Xbox, PlayStation, PC and handhelds, meanwhile, expects more substance — something more than a timewaster: something they can truly call a hobby.

So no, Apple TV isn’t “game over” for Xbox and PlayStation. It will probably do quite well, sliding nicely into the niche the Wii left behind and which the Wii U has subsequently struggled to fill — family entertainment for people who don’t really know a whole lot about gaming and are disinclined to explore in great detail — but there’s no way it’s ever going to replace dedicated gaming boxes for those who take their playtime deadly seriously.

1983: Drifting Along

Wedding in a couple of days (well, technically tomorrow at the time of writing), but there’s not a lot to say about it right now other than “it’s happening on Saturday”. So in an effort to write about something else — and spare you Heavensward gushing for another day or two, at least until I finish the main storyline — I thought I’d talk a little more about Drift Girls, a mobile game I discovered a short while back and have been playing at least a little bit every day ever since.

Drift Girls, lest you forget — or are unfamiliar — is an iOS and Android game by Korean developer NHN BlackPick, localised and brought to the West by a company called Toast. It’s a curious little game in many ways — in some respects, it’s similar to the “gacha” collectible card games that are a particular popular product of the Asian mobile development market, but in others it’s entirely its own beast. Either way, it’s a genuinely great, enjoyable game that I’ve been having a whole lot of fun with.

It’s kind of a driving game, and it’s kind of a dating sim. Both of those elements are intertwined, however; the girls you woo in the dating sim part of the game become passengers while you race, and different girls provide different bonuses to your car’s performance. There are also other benefits to dating, too; reach the maximum affection with a girl and you have the opportunity to whisk her away for an “overnight date” with everything that implies, which makes you “feel better” and improve your vehicle’s performance by a significant amount for the following day.

One of the interesting things about the game, though, is the fact that each and every one of the girls in the cast feels like they’ve had some effort put into their writing — not just in an attempt to show that they have a personality, but to make them feel like they’re all part of the game world. As you get to know each of the girls, it becomes apparent that some of them know one another, and you’ll often get to know several sides of what initially appeared to be a fairly simple story. Later in the game, too, as the overarching main scenario storyline starts to pick up speed with international smuggling, the Mafia and all manner of other silliness, you get the opportunity for another perspective on events by building up a relationship with the lead detective and prosecutor on the case.

The fact that there’s an ongoing narrative and each of the girls clearly has their own little mini-story to work through makes the dating aspect of the game far more than a simple grind to get the girl who provides the biggest bonuses as quickly as possible. Aside from that, too, a system for “exceeding the girl’s limits” by completing challenges allows you to boost their stats considerably as well as uncover a bit more of their personality and story.

But what of the driving bit? Well, it’s very simple, and I’m actually pretty glad of that. Full-on driving games on touchscreens suck beyond belief, so I’m extremely grateful to NHN BlackPick for taking a greatly simplified approach: all you have to do is rev your engine to get a good start, then time your drifts left or right as you enter a corner, then occasionally set off an nitro boost to go a bit faster. In many ways, it has more in common with a rhythm game than a driving game, but it manages to be genuinely exciting, with some lovely graphics, cinematic camera angles and cheesy but entirely appropriate throbbing dance music in the background.

The metagame is fun, too. While there is a “gacha” mechanic for drawing new cars and parts to attach to them, where I’ve found the most fun is in taking the car I started with — a “one-star” Mini-equivalent — and gradually building it up to remain competitive as the opponents in the game get stronger and stronger. So far I’ve successfully upgraded it to “four-star” standard, which is enough for story missions now, but I’m starting to run into a few situations where it’s not quite enough to beat tough opponents.

I compared this type of mobile game to a more traditional MMO a while back, and having spent probably more time with Drift Girls than any other mobile game of its type — along with my hefty experience with Final Fantasy XIV — I stand by that statement. The gradual creep of power; the joy of getting to a point where you can afford a new piece of equipment or get lucky with an item drop; the feeling of progression; the necessity to keep on the “gear treadmill” to continue to progress — all of these things are typical MMO characteristics that are very much present in Drift Girls, and they make for a compelling, addictive experience that has stuck around in my consciousness a lot longer than I thought it would after the initial “haha, wtf is this” appeal wore off.

Turns out it’s actually a really good game. So I think I might just sneak in a quick race or two before I go to sleep tonight…

1967: Drift Girls – Surpassing My Expectations

A few weeks ago, I happened to come across a site promoting an upcoming new mobile game called Drift Girls. On paper, it sounded like my sort of thing — a combination of dating sim and arcade driving mechanics — but I was wary of it for being on the mobile platform, primarily because playing driving games with a touchscreen suuuuuucks.

Regardless, I signed up to be informed when it was available (and to be in with a chance of winning some in-game goodies when it launched) and I was pleased to see this morning that the game had apparently launched either last night or early this morning. So, with some trepidation, I decided to fire it up and take a look.

And… and… well, it’s good. Really good, actually.

The basic structure is similar to most other free-to-play gacha games out there, since those are a proven model for profitability, expandability and social features. In this case, the things you’re collecting, fusing, evolving and upgrading are cars and car parts, and as usual there’s more than a slight element of “gotta collect ’em all!” to the gameplay — though personally speaking, I find collecting things like cars somewhat less compelling than collecting characters, so I feel far less “guilt” in this game when sacrificing things I don’t need to level up the things I am using.

There are a few twists, though. Firstly, unlike some past street racing-themed free-to-play games that didn’t even bother to depict the races — yes, this is a thing that actually happened, and several times, as I recall — Drift Girls has some really rather lovely-looking 3D racing sequences that make good use of the limitations of touchscreen-based mobiles to provide an enjoyable, snappy experience that rewards skill as well as making the numbers on your stat sheet go up.

The control scheme works because it doesn’t expect you to do too much. All you have to do is rev your engine at the start line, preferably so it’s in the green area of your rev counter to get a Perfect Start, and then press and hold one of the two directional “drift” buttons when you reach a corner. Timing your drift appropriately will increase your speed through the corner as well as earn you nitro boosts, which can be either triggered for a big speed boost or saved until you finish for some bonus monetary rewards when you finish the race. That’s it, essentially; the challenge comes from increasingly complex courses and increasingly unforgiving opponents, so you’ll need to improve both your own skills and your car’s stats in order to progress beyond a certain point.

Here’s where the dating sim aspect comes in. Shortly after the opening, the game presents you with three eligible young bachelorettes and invited to spend some time with one of them. You can take the girl on dates or buy her gifts to increase her affection, and higher affection means that she provides you with more significant bonuses as well as some other… benefits. Yes, if you max out her affection, you can shag her… I’m sorry, “take her on an overnight date”, which, if you pick the right place to take her, will confer on you a long-lasting 100-point stat bonus, which is significant in the early game.

Mechanically, then, the girls are “equipment” of a sort, but the developers have actually bothered to put some effort into the writing, with each girl having a distinct personality, a backstory that she gradually reveals as you get to know her over the course of a few dates, and her own set of reactions to various in-game events such as winning, losing, challenging particularly difficult races and all sorts of other things. You’re even rewarded for each of these events that you see, even if it’s only a couple of lines, so there’s incentive to stick with one girl and get to know her fully — though you can also be a bit of a player if you really want to, too.

It would be easy to dismiss Drift Girls as shallow fluff of the usual sort you see on mobile, and sure, there’s a certain amount of the usual free-to-play stuff going on — energy bars, premium currency, that sort of thing — but like many of the other actually good free-to-play games I’ve had the pleasure of playing recently, the game isn’t stingy with rewards for non-paying players, and it’s overall a highly polished experience that is just plain good. Not “good for a mobile game”, but good.

If the premise sounds intriguing, then I recommend giving it a shot — and feel free to add me as a friend in the game under the ID “AstralFire”.

Grab it from Google Play or the App Store.

1958: The Way to Get Me Interested in Football is Exactly What You Think It Is

I hate football. Loathe, despise and detest it with a passion only normally reserved for my A-Level four-part harmony teacher (at the time, anyway; I’m sure we’d probably get along just fine now), several of my past managers from previous employment (the same is not true for these cunts) and anyone who uses the term “problematic” more than once a month.

It’s not as though I haven’t tried to like it over the years. I recall begging my parents to be allowed to go and hang out at the pub to watch some World Cup matches while I was at school (and being turned down, as I recall); likewise, I remember getting so drunk so early in the evening on my brother’s stag night in Brighton that I actually quite enjoyed an England vs Poland match; I’ve bought a few installments in the interminable FIFA series over the years in an attempt to enjoy them with friends; and I even tried picking a team and following their progress for a little while before just getting so completely and utterly bored with the whole thing that I gave up completely.

Turns out what you need to do to get me interested in football is send it to space. And position it so that the fate of the universe rests on the outcome of matches. And make most of the players pretty anime girls, and the remainder pretty anime boys and penguins. And make matches last approximately a minute of real time. And put it on my phone with a rockin’ electric guitar soundtrack. In other words, make it almost entirely unrecognisable as football.

Enter Soccer Spirits from Com2uS, a South Korean mobile game developer-publisher whose past work I have enjoyed to varying degrees. As with most developers from the region, their focus is exclusively free-to-play games, and they have a pretty wide portfolio running the gamut from the ever-popular farming game tapfests to more complex card battle titles. Soccer Spirits falls into the latter category, and it’s actually one of the best examples of the genre I’ve seen to date.

Soccer Spirits places you in the role of… well, it’s not entirely clear, since the player’s presence doesn’t appear to be acknowledged at any point, but I guess you’re effectively playing as the whole team. You pick one of two characters to begin with, and these also come with a few friends to start off your team. It’s not long before the existence of the Galactic League is revealed, and for some reason that isn’t made entirely transparent through the game’s borderline nonsensical but nonetheless entertaining story, you and your team are selected as Earth’s representatives in these sporting conflicts that are supposedly held in lieu of “proper” wars. In space.

The basic metagame involves the usual process of collecting cards of varying degrees of rarity, “feeding” them other cards that you don’t need to power them up, “evolving” them to more powerful forms and attaching various bits and pieces to them to boost their special abilities. This is all executed in fairly traditional fashion — though it must be said, the game does a much better job of explaining things than many of its peers — but it’s how you actually use these cards that makes the game so interesting.

In many mobile card battle games, battles are either abstract or completely non-interactive. There are exceptions — Brave Frontier springs to mind with its JRPG-style turn-based battles, and Love Live! School Idol Festival puts an interesting twist on the formula by turning your cards into the markers you tap on in a rhythm game — but a more interactive style of play is something that some developers still seem to be trying to get their head around a bit. Soccer Spirits succeeds admirably, with an enjoyable, fast-paced game that bears very little resemblance to actual soccer, but is fun nonetheless.

You put your cards into formation on the field. Each card has preferred positions it likes to play in, and putting it in one of them will give it stat bonuses. The match itself is played as a sort of turn-based affair with a bit of Final Fantasy Active Time Battle system going on. Cards gradually fill an “Action” meter over time, and when one fills up, that card gets a turn. Depending on its position, it will have the option to pass the ball to someone on the same line as it, attempt to penetrate the next layer of defensive cards, shoot at the goal or use a skill. Skills vary from attacking skills that boost power to buffs that assist the overall team, and many cards also have passive boosts that help your whole effort out, too, with particular benefits coming from the player you select as your “Ace”.

Conflicts on the pitch are resolved as RPG-style battles in which stats, abilities and elemental affinities are compared between the two cards, and they inflict “damage” on one another accordingly. If a card’s HP is reduced to 0, it is out of action for a short period — though not eliminated completely — and this allows an ideal opportunity to penetrate or shoot. In many cases, penetrating or shooting is combined with an attack — striker-type characters tend to have skills that enable them to make particularly powerful shots that will usually flatten weaker defenders.

To win a match, someone just needs to score one goal — no playing to 90 minutes here. In many cases, this means that a powerful team of cards can obliterate its opposition in a matter of seconds (though the game represents this as a number of “minutes” of sped-up time) which helps to keep the game admirably snappy, interesting and enjoyable — though given that I was showered with enough goodies to recruit what appears to be a virtually unstoppable team right at the outset of the game, I wonder how much strategy there will be as I progress.

Like many other mobile games that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by recently, Soccer Spirits is unobtrusive in its use of premium currencies and energy bars — though doubtless this will become more of an issue as I progress further. It’s liberal with the rewards, meaning you can get your hands on some decent cards to add to your collection pretty quickly — but there are also a lot of incentives to try and collect as many as possible, particularly if you’re able to finish “sets”. It’s a good use of the formula, and the artwork — clearly the work of several different artists, each with their own very distinctive styles — is absolutely gorgeous.

So there you have it. I’m playing a football game. (Kind of.) And enjoying it. What next? Cricket? Hahahaha.

1945: Mobile Free-to-Play: Another Tale of East vs. West

Brave Frontier has some lovely and distinctive artwork; screenshots in this post are all from it.

I’ve been highly resistant to mobile free-to-play games for some time now, a fact I primarily attribute to the extremely well-paid but soul-crushing period I spent reviewing them for the industry-facing sites Inside Mobile Apps and Inside Social Games, both of which have subsequently been folded into AdWeek’s SocialTimes blog.

I describe this period as “soul-crushing” not because I disliked the work or the people I worked for — on the contrary, it was an enjoyable opportunity to work with some fun people — but because it was just so utterly disheartening, as a fan of “games as art”, to see the cynical money-machine games being churned out by the boatload, with no-one truly having the confidence to innovate, instead simply reskinning established systems with a different theme and hoping no-one would notice.

Amid the dross churned out by companies like Zynga, King and their ilk, there were the occasional little gems, though, and they almost always hailed from our Eastern cousins in Korea, Japan and other nearby regions. Eastern mobile game development was by no means infallible, of course — titles which grew to inexplicable popularity, such as Rage of Bahamut, were often just as vapid as their Western counterparts — but on the whole, when a genuinely good free-to-play mobile game hit the app stores, it was, more often than not (and with a few notable exceptions) of Eastern origin.

Screenshot_2015-05-18-22-02-50 — This feisty lady is the pride of my party at present.

Fast forward to today and I find myself enjoying not one, not two, but three separate free-to-play mobile games, and there’s a fourth that I had some fun with but have left alone for a while now. All of these games are, once again, of Eastern origin; meanwhile, offerings from established Western big hitters like Zynga, King, Nimblebit, Gameloft and EA all fail to hold my attention because they’re still relying on the same old crap they were a few years back when I was reviewing them.

So what’s the difference with these Eastern-developed games? Well, primarily it’s the amount of effort that appears to have been put into them — and the fact that they’re fun.

Brave Frontier, which I’ve talked about in a few previous entries, for example, is an enjoyable battle-centric RPG in which you assemble a party of collectible heroes, power them up and send them on quests — either story-free “Vortex” quests which are themed each day of the week and allow you to acquire specific items more easily, or a lengthy, story-driven campaign that, while cliched, has actually proven to be surprisingly compelling so far.

Puzzle and Dragons, meanwhile, takes the Puzzle Quest formula of combining casual colour-matching puzzle gameplay with Pokemon-esque collection and levelling mechanics, creating an engaging, enjoyable game that blends the best bits of RPGs and puzzlers.

Love Live! School Idol Festival, on the other hand, not only serves as wonderful fanservice for the anime show itself — which I’m currently in the middle of watching, and am enjoying a great deal — but is also a really fun rhythm action game.

Finally, I don’t play much of Valkyrie Crusade any more, but it made enough of an impact on me to want to write about it in a bit more detail over on MoeGamer.

Interestingly, all four of these games are based on the same basic system — something which I criticised Western-developed free-to-play mobile games for above — but manage to distinguish themselves from one another by the additional elements they stack on top of this basic structure. Western free-to-play games, conversely, tend to adopt one system and stick with it, without adding anything in particular to the formula.

There are a few common systems in use in Western mobile free-to-play games.

There’s the “citybuilder” genre, which superficially resembles simulation classics like SimCity and Transport Tycoon, but actually requires no strategic thought or knowledge of human geography. Instead, these games effectively act as a simple toy set in which you wait for timers to expire, then tap on buildings to get money out of them, which you then subsequently invest in more buildings so you end up with more timers to wait to expire and then tap on. Paying up in these games can skip timers — which are often ridiculously lengthy — and allow you to get more currency without having to actually “grind” to acquire it. Examples of this type of game include Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower, EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out and numerous attempts to stomp SimCity into the ground, Fox’s Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff and Gameloft’s My Little Pony. Farming games such as SuperCell’s Hay Day and Zynga’s own FarmVille are also pretty much the same as citybuilders, too, except they involve building up a small farm instead of a whole city. Mechanically, however, they’re exactly the same.

There’s the “casual puzzler” genre, which generally rips off PopCap’s Bejeweled by challenging you to swap coloured gems/sweets/fruits/farm animals around to make lines of three or more like-coloured gems/sweets/fruits/farm animals, at which point they disappear and more take their place. These generally involve a linear sequence of levels, and paid options in the games generally take the form of additional “lives” to continue playing after failing a level several times — lives otherwise regenerate over a long period of real time — and, in many cases, power-ups to make the game significantly easier, to a game-breaking degree in some cases.

Then there’s the “midcore strategy” game, which, in the same way as the “citybuilder” genre bears only a superficial resemblance to the original SimCity, bears only the most cursory of resemblances to actual strategy games. Midcore strategy games generally involve building a base through a similar means to a citybuilding game — yes, that means more timers to tap on, this time to get resources — and recruiting units, which also take varying periods of real time to build. There’s usually a competitive element to them, though, where you can take your recruited units to another player’s base and throw them at it in the hope that they might be able to do some damage. While these sequences tend to resemble classic real-time strategy games such as Command & Conquer and StarCraft, the lack of input you generally have means that coming up with a “strategy” is next to impossible, so it becomes more a matter of a numbers game: how many powerful units can you afford to throw at your foes? Payment options in these games are generally similar to citybuilders — speed up timers, buy currency, acquire exclusive units and buildings to give yourself an advantage over other players.

There are other types of Western-developed mobile free-to-play games, but these three types are by far the most widespread. The thing they all have in common is that the paid options deliberately break the game; they’re effectively paid cheats. The most egregious example of this is the ability to simply buy in-game currency rather than having to earn it: it effectively removes any need for the player to develop any sort of “money-making engine”, which has been a core part of simulation and strategy games involving resource management since the early days. But “power-ups” such as those seen in King’s games are almost as bad; in some cases, these power-ups even allow you to completely skip a level, meaning you’re effectively paying not to play the game. (Powerups like this are inevitably paired with unreasonable difficulty spikes or nigh-unbeatable levels, forcing many players into a position where they feel they have to pay up if they want to continue playing.)

The three Eastern games I mentioned above, as I noted previously, are all ostensibly based on the same system, known as gacha. This is a system based on those capsule toy machines that you see in supermarkets, and which are rather popular in places like Japan. Essentially, using either a currency earned in-game or one that you purchase with real money, you can “draw” something to add to your collection — a playable character in Brave Frontier’s case; a monster to add to your party in Puzzle & Dragons’ case; a card depicting one of the Love Live! cast in the case of School Idol Festival. Generally speaking, the things you draw using the “hard” currency — the one you can pay for — are better than the ones you acquire using the currency you earn in-game (which usually takes the form of a “social currency”, earned through interacting with other players in a rather limited manner). This may sound game-breaking in the same way as buying a power-up in Candy Crush Saga or buying currency in CityVille, but there’s a key difference: you still have to do something with the things you acquire by paying, and they’re not an immediate “win” button. Sometimes you’re not even able to use them right away.

Take Brave Frontier as an example. While it may be tempting to simply throw money at the game in an attempt to recruit an entire party of five- and six-star heroes, this simply won’t work early in the game due to the “cost” limit placed on your party, which increases as you level up your player. Not only that, but these five- and six-star heroes still start at level 1, so you’ll still need to actually play the game in order to level them up and get them fighting at their maximum potential; otherwise, they simply look cool.

Notably, these games generally also allow you to acquire the “hard” currency at a slow rate and enjoy a trickle-feed of these high-quality heroes/monsters/adorable wannabe idols. And, in fact, this makes acquiring one feel more meaningful and more of an event; it actually makes it feel less like the game is trying to force you to spend money, and instead inviting you to do so if you’d like to enjoy more of the same. I don’t mind admitting that I tossed a fiver at Brave Frontier during a special “you might get one of these special heroes!” event the other day because I’ve been enjoying playing it; I certainly haven’t, at any point, felt like I need to spend money on it to enjoy it, however; my current party (which is pretty kick-ass, I have to say) has been assembled entirely for free.

The big contrast between Eastern and Western philosophy with these games, then, appears to be the attitude towards getting the player to pay up. Western games, in my experience, are fond of creating what is rather horrendously called “fun pain”, which can be alleviated by paying up; in other words, inconveniencing the player in an otherwise fun experience to such a degree that they reach for the credit card just to shut the game up. Eastern games, meanwhile, appear to provide paid items as an optional extra that is, under no circumstances, required to have an enjoyable experience with the game.

The other thing that’s interesting is that Eastern games appear to be more open to the idea of combining different gameplay types together — Puzzle & Dragons, for example, combines an interesting twist on match-3 puzzlers with RPG and gacha mechanics, while Valkyrie Crusade features gacha, turn-based RPG combat, deckbuilding and optimisation, and even citybuilding, the difference in its use of the latter aspect being that while you’re waiting for your wait timers you have other things to do rather than twiddling your thumbs or reaching for the credit card.

There are exceptions to both of these rules, of course; there are great Western free-to-play mobile games just as there are horrible, shitty, exploitative Eastern free-to-play mobile games. But on the whole, in my experience, it would appear to be the Eastern-developed games that have the right idea — creating a fun experience and hoping at least a few people will be happy to pay up in gratitude for a fun experience — while the Western free-to-play mobile market, more concerned with making a quick buck, seems to be floundering somewhat.

1935: Brave Frontier: Pete’s Completely Unofficial and Possibly Inaccurate FAQ

I like writing guides, as I’ve discussed before, so instead of making some “hilarious” walkthrough of my tedious daily routine as I’ve done in the past, I thought I’d write something actually useful to someone: a guide on what I’ve learned about the game Brave Frontier, which I’ve talked a little about recently, and which isn’t entirely forthcoming with all the information you might need to get the most out of it during play. Without further ado, then.

What is this game?

Brave Frontier is a free-to-play mobile RPG from Alim and Gumi. It’s available for both iOS and Android devices. There’s a linear story to follow, but it’s mostly a game about collecting and upgrading “units” — various heroic characters and monsters whom you can recruit into your team, level up and evolve into more advanced forms of themselves.

Do I have to pay to play?

Brave Frontier has an energy system that depletes as you take your party on quests, with later quests or those with larger, more significant rewards costing more energy to take on. If you have insufficient remaining energy to take on a quest, you can either use a “gem” to restore it completely to its maximum level, or wait for it to regenerate at the rate of roughly one point per three minutes. As you level up, you’ll gradually gain more maximum energy; one point every few levels, and a more significant jump every five levels.

Gems are also used for “rare summons” — immediately acquiring units of higher rarity levels — and restoring the separate, much shorter energy bar for the player-vs-player Arena mode.

Depending on how casually you play, you’ll probably find there is no need to pay for gems — especially in the early levels, when you level up quite quickly and your energy bar is fully restored on each level-up.

How do I get gems?

You can pay for them, but you also get one free every so often; specifically, for completing an entire area in the main story campaign, sometimes as a daily login bonus reward if you play for several days in succession, sometimes as a “Brave Points” bonus for earning points by completing daily objectives.

How do I get units?

There are three ways of acquiring new units:

1) Receiving them as a drop from a quest. With the exception of daily and special event dungeons, these are usually very low rarity units.

2) Acquiring them through “Honor Points”. You receive honor points when you borrow another player’s character to fill the sixth slot in your party, with 5 points awarded if they’re a stranger and 10 points if they’re on your friends list. You’ll also receive honor points when other people borrow your character to use in their party in the same way. 100 honor points equates to one “free” summon, but again, these tend to be quite low rarity for the most part. It’s usually best to save up your honor points until there’s a special promotion on promising specific units you wouldn’t normally be able to get through these means; the game will make you aware of this when it’s available.

3) Acquiring them using gems. 5 gems equates to one “rare” summon, which will net you a unit of three-star (“Rare”) or higher rarity. These units will probably form the backbone of your party, but note their “cost” value; when building your party, the total cost of all the units you use cannot exceed your current cost cap. Cost cap increases with your player level alongside your maximum energy.

How do I make units better?

There are three things you need to do to improve a unit: level it up, level up its Brave Burst, and evolve it.

Levelling it up requires you to “fuse” it with other units. Each unit fused to the base unit gives you a particular amount of experience based on what it is, with slightly more experience being given if its elemental type matches that of the base unit. More valuable, rarer units are worth more experience. The most experience can be acquired from units that drop in the “Metal Parade” dungeon in the Vortex Gate; keys to unlock this are issued in the Administration Office in Imperial Capital Randall every weekday except Wednesday, so be sure to go and pick them up as often as possible. Note that when you unlock it, the Metal Parade only stays open for an hour, so only unlock it when you have enough energy to make the most of it!

Levelling up a unit’s Brave Burst — its unique special move — relies a little more on randomness than standard levelling. A unit has ten levels of Brave Burst, with some more powerful and rarer units able to acquire a Super and Ultimate Brave Burst after this. To level up a Brave Burst, perform fusion, and look for material units that say “BB UP?” or “BB UP!” on them. “BB UP?” units give a small chance of levelling up the base unit’s Brave Burst when fused, while “BB UP!” units will guarantee an increase in Brave Burst. Generally speaking, units that are appropriate to use for levelling up a Brave Burst can be identified by the type of Brave Burst they use. Healer units require other healers to level up their Brave Burst, for example, while attacking units require other units with offensive Brave Bursts.

Evolving a unit is the process you perform when a unit reaches its level cap. The level cap is determined by the number of stars the unit has, or its rarity. Three-star units have a level cap of 40, for example, while five-star units can be levelled to 80. Note that there’s a “Zel” (currency) cost every time you perform fusion, and this gets more expensive the higher level a unit is. There’s also a Zel fee to pay at evolution time.

To evolve a unit, you must collect the required additional units. These are usually found in the Tuesday daily dungeons in the Vortex Gate. For lower-rarity units, you’ll need Nymphs; as you progress through the tiers, you’ll need Spirits, Idols, Totems, Pots and Mecha Gods. Initially you won’t know exactly what evolution materials are required for a unit, but once you’ve encountered or acquired the units in question once, they’ll be revealed for your reference. Refer to the Brave Frontier Wiki to find the specific units you need if you get stuck.

Keep an eye out for special units such as Frogs — these provide significant, one-off bonuses when fused without requiring a level-up. Some increase attack power, some defense, some recovery power, some HP. Some even open up a second slot for equipping Spheres.

How should I build my party?

It depends how much effort you want to put in. I use a single standard setup for everything I do; it has a mix of different elemental types, a healer unit, a unit who can boost the acquisition of Brave Burst crystals during battle and a unit that can boost attack power. This is good for most situations.

The main quest is split into dungeons that tend to be centred around a single elemental type, so if you want to optimise your party you may wish to build a full party of each elemental type, then choose the appropriate complementary element to the enemies you’re facing. Remember, elemental weaknesses are a one-way circle for the most part: fire beats earth beats lightning beats water beats fire (and so on). Dark and light have a reciprocal relationship, meanwhile; they both beat each other.

Special events and daily dungeons are often more challenging than the main quest, so you’ll want to bring along your best units for these. For the Metal Parade, you’ll want to bring units that hit a lot of times, since the most damage you can do to a Metal unit with a single hit is 1 point.

Pay attention to the unit you choose as Leader, too. Not only do you get the benefit of their Leader skill, which is usually a passive buff of some description, this will also be the unit you loan to other players. In other words, you want your Leader unit to be as attractive as possible (stats-wise or, if you’re feeling shallow, the prettiest girl) to encourage people to use it and provide you with Honor Points.

Note that different instances of the same unit can have different “types”, so be sure to pick one that you’ll find the most effective. “Lord” type units are balanced. “Anima” type units gain more HP than usual when levelling up. “Breaker” type units gain more attack power than usual. “Guardian” type units gain more defense power than usual. “Oracle” type units gain more recovery power than usual.

How do I fight?

Fighting is a simple case of tapping the unit’s status bar to cause it to attack; there’s no need to wait for one unit to finish its turn before triggering another one, either. In fact, if more than one unit hits something at the same time, a “Spark” is triggered, increasing the amount of damage by a significant amount.

After all your units have taken a turn, you’ll receive Brave Crystals (BC) and Heart Crystals (HC). The former are randomly distributed throughout your party and increase their Brave Burst gauge. The latter are likewise randomly distributed and restore hit points. After this is done, the enemy gets a turn. Note than many enemies — particularly bosses — have more than one action per turn, some of which can hit your whole party at once.

You can use items to turn the tide of battle; remember to acquire these from the Town before you leave, and use them before triggering any attacks, since you can only use them at the start of your turn.

Use Brave Bursts wisely. Although you get a bonus to the amount of BC and HC dropped if you “overkill” an enemy, there’s little sense in unloading everyone’s BB on a single fairy. If you can dispatch a group with normal attacks, do so and save your BB for larger groups or bosses. Also make sure you familiarise yourself with your units’ Brave Bursts before you get into battle; not all of them are offensive in nature!

How do I level up quickly?

Remember you level up separately from your units. Benefits of levelling yourself up include a higher energy cap, a higher “cost” cap (allowing you to include more, rarer units in your party) and a full restoration of your energy bar and arena orbs.

You get experience for every “Quest” you complete, whether it’s in the main quest or the Vortex Gate. Vortex Gate quests are usually worth more experience than you’d usually get for that amount of energy spent in the main quest, but they’re often tougher — and you get nothing if your party is defeated before you beat the boss.

The fastest way to gain experience is with the weekly Karma dungeon on Mondays. Not only does this drop absolutely tons of Karma, a currency used for upgrading the Town and unlocking more effective equipment and consumable items, but also provides a significant amount of player experience. There are three “levels” of this dungeon; start at the bottom and work your way up. You will require some seriously powerful units to be able to defeat the boss at the end of the level 3 dungeon, so don’t jump in there unless you’re absolutely prepared.

How do I get more money?

Two ways. Firstly, there’s a weekly dungeon at the weekend that drops a lot of Zel. Secondly, every Wednesday you can pick up a Jewel Key from the administration office in Imperial Capital Randall. This can be used to unlock the Jewel Parade, which works in the same way as the Metal Parade: it stays open for an hour, after which you’ll need another key to get back in, so only open it up when you have the energy to use.

Jewel Parade drops Jewel-type units, which are completely useless for anything other than selling, so take full advantage of this. Acquire as many as you can before the Parade closes, then sell them off for vast profit.

How do I win in the Arena?

You don’t have direct control of your units in the Arena, so all you can do is make sure you send your best possible units for the job: it’s a good idea to have a healer unit of some description, as this can turn the tide of a battle in your favour. It’s also a very good idea to take units with powerful Brave Bursts that can attack the entire enemy party at once, and any units that can provide buffs or increases to BC drop rates are useful, too; generally speaking, whoever gets to Brave Burst first will usually be the victor so if you can push yourself into a position where that’s more likely to be you, you’ll be golden.

What do I do in the Town?

Three things: acquire raw materials, upgrade the town’s facilities, and buy/craft things. The Synthesis shop sells consumable items such as health potions and temporary buffs; remember to “equip” these to your hotbar before entering a difficult quest, as they will make a huge difference. The Sphere shop, meanwhile, allows you to create equippable items that either add special effects to your attacks or increase stats and resistances. Don’t neglect these; they can make an otherwise seemingly weak character into a valuable member of your party.

Should I play this game? It sounds stupid.

It is kind of stupid and ultimately fairly pointless — but if you’re someone who enjoys collecting things, making them fight other things and making on-screen numbers gradually get bigger over time, you’ll probably have at least a bit of fun with it. It has some lovely art and great music, too.

Can I add you as a friend?

Sure. Type in my ID — the easy-to-remember 9630492642 — and we’ll both get happy nice things to share.

Where can I find out more?

The Brave Frontier Wiki is a terrifyingly comprehensive resource of information for this game.

1931: Further Tales from the Frontier

I’m quite surprised that a free-to-play mobile game has managed to maintain my attention for over two weeks now: you may recall a short while back when I talked about Brave Frontier, and I’m still playing it today.

I think the reason it’s “working” for me is that I’m not attempting to make it the focus of my gaming life or anything, but it’s something enjoyable to do during brief moments of downtime — sitting on the bog, waiting for pasta water to boil, being unable to get to sleep, that sort of thing. It also helps that it’s a fairly solid game at its core, too; it’s not the deepest game in the world, but it has enough substance to keep it interesting in short bursts.

What I find curious about it is that it’s essentially Pokemon with all the fat trimmed off, and yet while Pokemon didn’t hold my attention at all across the three installments I’ve tried — Red, Gold and Y — Brave Frontier has managed to keep me interested, and I think it’s because of all the stuff that’s been trimmed out from the Pokemon formula.

Pokemon, to me, always feels like it’s not sure what it quite wants to be. It has the structure of a traditional RPG, but then the collectible, tradable and upgradeable aspect of a trading card game. It is arguably more widely renowned for its competitive metagame than anything significant it brings to the storytelling table, though it has managed to spawn a number of anime series and movies since it first burst onto the scene. The “JRPG” side of it and the “collectible monster battling” stuff always seem to be somewhat at odds with one another, and I think that’s what’s caused me to lose interest in them partway through every time I’ve tried.

Brave Frontier, meanwhile, focuses on the collectible battling side of things almost exclusively. There’s no exploration, no wandering around caves, just battles of various descriptions and, between those battles, upgrading your units to be more powerful, stronger and capable of taking on tougher opponents. It’s satisfying to build up a team that works together, whether you’ve been trying to go for a specific angle (all the same elemental type, for example, or perhaps a strongly defensive group that can survive against hard-hitting enemies) or whether you’ve been working with the hand you’ve been dealt, as I have been.

And the game presents you with interesting, meaningful choices to make every time you boot it up. I still dislike the use of “energy” bars in free-to-play games throttling your play sessions, but as I noted in my previous post about Brave Frontier, this game makes use of it as an interesting “risk/reward” mechanic by presenting you with the option to effectively “gamble” your potential play time against the possible rewards available.

You can spent small amounts of energy working your way through the “Quest” mode, which is a linear sequence of battles of gradually (very gradually) increasing difficulty tied together with a surprisingly not-that-bad, if cliche-tastic storyline. In doing so, you’ll acquire a selection of not-very-good units (that can be used as “fusion fodder” to upgrade various aspects of your actually-good units) along with the game’s currencies, and you’ll also get a decent amount of experience.

Conversely, the daily dungeons that pop up throughout the week each cost significantly more energy to participate in but offer their own unique special characteristics and greater, more predictable rewards — the Monday dungeon, for example, offers significantly greater amounts of experience points than usual, providing you with the ability to level up your “Summoner” character quite quickly, in turn increasing your energy stock and the amount of “Cost” points you’re allowed to spend on building your party; other dungeons throughout the week offer units that are required to “evolve” level-capped units to their next tier, large amounts of gold coins or various other rewards. Part of the thing that makes the game interesting is that you have to discover the value of each of these dungeons for yourself; it may not be immediately clear why you’d want to hunt down elemental idols, for example, but once you figure it out you’ll know that you need to check in on that particular day to get your hands on some.

There’s a certain amount of random-number generation (RNG) at work, of course, but as any MMO player will tell you, that’s sort of part of the fun in a perverse, masochistic sort of way: imagine how much more satisfying it is to acquire something you’ve been trying to hunt down for over a week rather than having it handed to you on a plate. It’s frustrating and annoying at times, sure — I’m currently in the aforementioned situation as I attempt to track down the last “Evolution unit” I need to upgrade my party member Selena into her next tier of power — but, as manipulative as it is, it keeps you coming back for another try.

Oh, and I’ve reached a stage now where my party is winning in the player-vs-player “Arena” significantly more than it loses now, which is satisfying to see. But then the game took me down a peg or two by throwing a boss at me that absolutely obliterated my entire party within a few turns. Time to get busy with the Fusion, I guess…

1921: Keeper of the Records

I’m not sure what’s inspired me to check out a few popular mobile games recently, but hot on the heels of Brave Frontier, which I talked a bit about the other day, I decided to take a peek at Square Enix’s newest attempt to make a free-to-play mobile Final Fantasy game after the absolutely atrocious Final Fantasy: All the Bravest.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper was initially a little offputting by its association with DeNA; my past experience with this company is that they churn out identikit free-to-play games — mostly of the “gacha” variety, where you randomly draw various things each day in the hope of collecting a complete set, and can pay more to get more draws — that tend to be devoid of gameplay, polish and indeed any reason to play them whatsoever.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover that Final Fantasy Record Keeper is actually a solid, interesting game in its own right. It’s not a narrative-heavy Final Fantasy game, mind, but it’s pretty up-front about this. What it instead provides is the “gacha”-style collecting mechanics that DeNA have so much experience with combined with some actual gameplay, with mechanics and everything.

The basic formula is pretty simple. Over the course of the game, you assemble a team of characters from past Final Fantasy games, reimagined in 16-bit era pixel art in the case of the more recent installments (VII onwards). You equip this team with “relics” (equipment) and abilities, then take them into a dungeon to work your way through a series of battles and eventually defeat a boss. There’s no exploration involved; a dungeon is simply a string of predefined enemy encounters, with each costing a particular amount of “stamina” to participate in, meaning that your play sessions are throttled after a particular amount of time and until either your stamina recharges or you pay up to immediately refill it.

This is pretty much business as usual for gacha-style games, but Record Keeper actually fleshes out the battles with something akin to Final Fantasy’s traditional “Active Time Battle” system, whereby battles are both turn-based and real-time at the same time: characters’ “time bars” gradually fill, and when they’re full, they can take an action. (In a twist on the original formula, somewhat reminiscent of Final Fantasy XIII, they then have to charge the bar again before the action is actually performed.) While this is happening, enemies are making use of their abilities in the same way.

The battles are fairly straightforward, though the ability to exploit elemental weaknesses and challenge special objectives during boss fights makes things a bit more interesting than just tapping the “attack” button over and over again. Where things get interesting is in the customisation aspect, which is always the strongest part of any gacha-style game.

In Record Keeper, the things you “draw” each day (or exchange the game’s premium currency for) are the relics, not the characters. These items of equipment have set bonuses to various stats, and certain characters can only equip certain types of equipment. You can level up equipment by sacrificing unneeded items or specific upgrade materials, and when a piece of equipment reaches its level cap, you can combine it with another instance of the same item to buff it up to the next rarity level and then begin the levelling process all over again with a higher cap. Certain pieces of equipment also have special abilities attached to them, all of which are unique to particular characters and based on their iconic moves from their respective games.

Alongside this, the abilities your characters can use have to be crafted using orbs you find in battle. Each character can initially equip just two abilities, and initial abilities only have two uses, meaning you have to carefully think about whether you really need to use that ability when you’re in a dungeon, as they don’t recharge until you leave, are defeated or are victorious. Abilities can subsequently be upgraded using additional orbs, however, which makes them more effective and gives you more uses of them; they can also be swapped around between characters, too, so if you make changes to your lineup the newcomers don’t have to start with crap skills.

Alongside all of the above, you then have the makeup of your party to consider. Characters get large bonuses to their stats and experience points earned if they are from the game the dungeon you’re currently playing through is from — for example, Cloud is much more effective in Final Fantasy VII-themed dungeons, while Kain is much more effective in Final Fantasy IV-themed dungeons — but have certain restrictions on what abilities and equipment they can use. Level up an ability too much and you might find a favourite character is no longer able to use it, so you have to be a little bit careful and plan ahead.

Like Brave Frontier, I’m not sure how long I’m going to stick with the game, particularly as it appears to be devoid of any sort of social features and thus the incentive to compete against — or cooperate with — other people. For the moment, though, it’s an interesting “collection”-style, battle-centric RPG featuring characters and settings from a series I’m very fond of — though I’m a bit disappointed that, as usual, Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV are ignored thanks to their “online game” status as opposed to the series’ more traditional single-player installments.

You can find out more about the game and get links to download it — it’s available for both iOS and Android devices — on its official website.

1915: Brave New Frontier

I’ve been out of the mobile gaming, umm, game for a while now because my stint working for the now-apparently-defunct Inside Network opened my eyes to the revolting realities of mobile free-to-play games and how people in suits and sneakers genuinely thought that games where you tap on something every two hours and then have to spend money were somehow innovative.

I’ve made no secret of my general distaste for this business model, but having left it alone for a little while, I’ve felt more able to come back and look at some of these games with a slightly less jaded pair of eyes. I looked at one called Valkyrie Crusade over on MoeGamer ~~a while back~~ a year or so ago and was surprised to find myself having a reasonably good time — though at the time of writing, I haven’t touched it for a few months now.

More recently, someone I follow on Twitter had been posting some screenshots and enthusiastic noises about a game called Brave Frontier (iOS, Android), so I decided to download it and give it a shot. It has an appealing, colourful art style with a combination of pixel art sprites and super-deformed chibi-esque character art, and promised to have a little more in the way of “gameplay” than many similar titles, most of which revolve largely around collecting “cards” and then tapping a “Continue” button repeatedly until you run out of energy or patience.

Brave Frontier isn’t massively different from this formula, but the simple addition of a bit of interactivity to the formula immediately makes it a more interesting, enjoyable game that is ideal for dipping into for a few minutes at a time while you’re on the toilet or waiting for public transport.

Here’s how it works. You’re given an initial few units, one of which is reasonably good and the rest of which are a bit shit, but fill out the slots in your party reasonably. You can take these through “quests”, which are sequences of a few battles in a row, culminating in a boss fight. Battles are very simple: you tap on a party member to cause them to attack, and if you time your taps correctly so that multiple units hit at the same time, you cause a “Spark” which deals additional damage. Units also have elemental types that have a significant impact on both attack and defence power.

When all your units have attacked, you get to grab all the goodies that fell out of the enemies while you were clobbering them. These include the game’s various currencies, health points and Brave Burst points, the latter of which fills a gauge and allows a unit to perform its unique special move. Health points and Brave Burst points are assigned randomly so you can’t guarantee a particular unit will be able to perform their Brave Burst on command, but you can force an enemy to drop more of these shards by ordering your party to focus their attacks on a single enemy, cause an “Overkill” and obtain additional rewards. This, of course, leaves them open to attack from the remaining enemies.

You repeat this process through a series of battles, with your units not automatically healing or recharging between. You fight a boss — most of which so far haven’t been significantly tougher than the main enemies — and then you get rewards, which include materials and additional units.

Outside of quests, you can “fuse” units together to level them up — they don’t gain experience simply through battle like in a regular RPG. Fusing “metal” units of the same element as a unit provides a significant bonus to the XP they receive, and when you get a unit to its level cap (which varies according to the unit’s rarity) you can “evolve” it into a more powerful incarnation by using materials. You can also use materials to craft useful items and equipment for your units, and one of the game’s currencies to upgrade the village you call home base — this provides you with resources every so often, and also has a bunch of facilities you can unlock over time, providing you access to more and more items and equipment as you upgrade it.

The game makes use of the free-to-play model’s beloved “energy” system, which means you’re only allowed to play a certain amount before you either have to pay up or wait for it to restore. Now, I’m not a huge fan of this system, but so far in Brave Frontier it’s been fairly unobtrusive, with energy consumption pretty much matching up with the average length of a play session. In other words, by the time you’ve run out of energy, you’ll probably want to go and play or do something else anyway. Interestingly, there are a bunch of “dungeons” that you can take on that require significantly more energy to enter than normal quest battles; the rewards for these are significantly greater, however, as is the overall challenge level. This means that you can choose how you spend your energy rather than it being a “flat rate” — do you blow 50 points at once for the chance to get your hands on some rare, useful, powerful goodies, or do you make steady progress through the main story to unlock access to new areas and acquire “gems” which can be used to recruit the more powerful, more rare units?

I don’t know how long I’ll stick with the game, but it’s enjoyable enough at present, and the art style is lovely. If you happen to be playing, feel free to add me as a friend using ID 9630492642.

1333: Passé

Considering how exciting the iPhone was when it first launched, I’m surprised how unmoved I am by the prospect of the new ones. At present, my 4S is still working just fine, and for the first time in many years of phone upgrades, I’m feeling no particular desire to have the latest and greatest piece of technology in my pocket.

I think part of the reason is what I’ve already said: my 4S is working fine, still — though it remains to be seen whether iOS 7 will kill its performance — and thus I certainly don’t need a new phone. The other part is the fact that smartphone upgrades each year have become so incremental that it’s just not particularly exciting any more — the new iPhone looks much like the old iPhone, and will probably work much like the old iPhone, except perhaps a bit faster, depending on what it is you’re doing.

One reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone, iPad, whatever would be if you’re a big game player on these devices. And I’ve come to the conclusion recently that I’m just not.

This may surprise you, given the amount of waffling on about games that I do on this here blog, but it’s true: I haven’t played an iOS game for probably months now, and every time I look at the App Store, I have very little desire to even try a lot of the stuff that churns its way through the front page and into the abyss beyond, never to be seen again.

There’s the odd exception; I still have something of a soft spot for the various excellent iOS versions of board and card games, but in most cases I’d rather play the real thing. For the most part, though, iOS gaming carries little to no interest for me; it’s not for me any more. It is, instead, for children, or people who aren’t particularly “game-literate”, or people who don’t mind increasingly obtrusive business models. There’s relatively little with any “meat”, though; nothing you can get stuck into for hours at a time, and in fact an awful lot of games are specifically designed to stop you from playing after a short while by causing you to run out of “energy” or “fuel”, or for your car to require “repairing” — and, of course, you can instantly get back into the game if you’d just hand over your credit card details… No, thank you.

I’m probably painting a somewhat unfair picture of the iOS landscape there, since I know there’s a lot of talented developers working on the platform — some out of necessity, some out of choice — but I’m sort of over the idea of mobile gaming, for now at least. There are too many exciting things going on on other platforms — including dedicated gaming handhelds — for me to muster up any enthusiasm for a platform prone to making really, really stupid collective decisions when it comes to the way games should be made.

Perhaps I’ll revisit mobile gaming if it ever emerges from the free-to-play rut it’s currently stuck in, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon.