Anyone else hate cellphone and tablet games?

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I cannot stand it when people say cellphone and tablet games are video games. Phone and tablet games are really boring because they don’t test my skills. Turn based combat games are my favorite genre.

It’s ridiculous and maybe if people played more PC and console games, maybe people wouldn’t have phone addictions.

There's good games on phones, they're just incredibly difficult to find out of all the free to play garbage, gacha games and conventional games hideously reconfigured for touch controls. The phone app stores do a terrible job at curation, making it impossible to figure out what you're actually buying so you have to rely on external sources. I like shmups and music rhythm games on phone, touch controls work well for them.

I rarely play any games on my phone, but the few good games I've played on Android include:

Aki To Blue - a bullet hell vertical shmup made by ex-Cave developers. If you're looking to test your skills, this is a good one to start with.

Danmaku Unlimited 2 & 3 - two bullet hell vertical shmups with a great visual aesthetic and soundtrack, pretty easy to get into.

Sound Shooting!! - a mix of a horizontal shmup and music rhythm game. Free for all of its content, with the option to pay to unlock everything from the start. I've never seen a reason to pay to remove the progression system.

Groove Coaster - a music rhythm game. Free for several bundled songs, other songs are DLC, with the option to pay for packs.


Other than those, Nintendo DS games work well on phone using Drastic. Advance Wars, Fire Emblem and 9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors are great for it. And I know there's actual ports of The World Ends With You, Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright, which were all pretty awesome Nintendo DS games. I played them all back on the original hardware but I can't see why they wouldn't translate well to mobile, they're all originally designed around touch controls.

And if you like turn based games on phones, there's XCOM and Battle for Wesnoth. I don't really like playing long form games on my phone, so I can't comment on the quality of their ports, but the original games are excellent.

Last edited by Enigmatic_Oddity on 27 Jan 2020, 5:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Admittedly I do play mobile games. The shame, I know.

Usually fairly simple ones, I tend to play them as I zone out. I dislike having idle hands most of the time, so I like to have something to mess with. Doodling, fidgeting, playing a simple mobile game. I'm not great at sitting still. There's a game on my phone where you can sort colour squares into the correct place by hue. Usually I think about something else whilst I'm doing it, but it gives me something to do with my hands. It passes the time while I wait, such as in waiting rooms or if I have a bit of time before the start of one of my lessons.

Doodling can also fill this urge, but people can get nosy when I do so. I'm not the best artist. Alternatively, making lists of things I'm going to do later is also an option. I enjoyed a mobile app with slider puzzles for a short while, but I completed all the levels too quickly, it was too easy. Also, I liked an app with interactive stories, getting to pick what direction the story was going in was fun. Especially the ridiculous options, like yelling "You are my sworn enemy, hear me roar!" to a character you've never met and seeing them react.

However, the only truly annoying aspect to it was all the in-app purchases it kept promoting. It was downright comical at times. Asking if you want to buy a nice in-game outfit or wear rags instead. Of course I chose rags each time, because I'm not going to spend money on a virtual dress. What I did like was the graph it provided based on my game choices, mapping how I played the game (whether I was kind to characters, if I chose trickery over brute force etc).

I enjoy choice games that offer that kind of information, and knowing what other players chose in comparison can be interesting.

Usually when I'm playing a mobile game I don't think of it as a video game. I don't consider myself to be a gamer. Most of the time I only play The Sims. I used to have a few more PC games, but they no longer run on my computer. Old ones from around 2000-2002. Back when my old PlayStation 2 worked, I used to enjoy the games I had. The Simpsons: Hit And Run was a lot of fun.

I haven't seen many video games recently that have caught my interest. Personally, I dislike war games and prefer comical violence over the graphic realistic kind. I also tend to dislike video games that encourage a completionist attitude. The kind that threaten "If you don't find all sixty hidden rocks in this game we'll give you a bad ending!" I'm the sort of person who usually focuses on the main goal of the game unless you offer me side quests that are actually interesting to me. Games that interrupt you with tasks such as rearrange my flower bed when your greater focus is saving the world tend to annoy me. I've played games that have scolded me for avoiding these tasks.

There was a Professor Layton game that wouldn't let me progress any further without completing about twenty or thirty puzzles first. An old woman popped up and basically kidnapped me until I completed all the puzzles I'd been avoiding. The puzzles weren't related to the greater plot, the game just decided I hadn't completed enough content to move on.

Despite my narrow focus on sticking to the plot, I'll admit that I do sometimes procrastinate in games. I just like to do it on my own terms. One of my favourite things to do in the old games was playing them in an unconventional way. I liked finding unorthodox solutions that went against what the game suggested. For instance, I used to play a game that offered a map and a path to where you were supposed to go.

On the way, you had to fight monsters. I noticed that the monsters were travelling through tunnels (you often had to throw them in there to get them out the way) and they were getting to each section of the game quicker than me. The game had measures placed in to stop you going into the tunnels such as giant springs to throw you out of the pits. However, I wondered if it was possible to travel underground as a means of a short-cut. Sure, it was dangerous and downright reckless but I managed to find a way to get past all the monsters and use their tunnels. I'm surprised the game let me do this. Usually it tried to throw me out, but I found ways around that. I made the monsters chase me, making them go over the spring in the process and be thrown at the person I was fighting. Sure, I was meant to be using the weak magic spells I knew, but why not indirectly throw a cartoon monster that happened to be on fire at them instead? It seemed more effective to me.

Unfortunately, that did no damage to them since you weren't supposed to use the monsters you fight against as secret ammunition. The character acted like nothing had happened, in fact the game glitched the monster into non-existence when it came into contact with them. Which seemed a shame. I also tried to trick my opponent into walking backwards into a monster trap, since I was curious if that would actually work. The plan somewhat worked, they walked into it but the game caught on and glitched so the character was no longer in the trap. It can never be that easy, can it?

Sometimes I am successful in going against a game. For instance, I played a DS game once where the developers had seemingly overlooked a design flaw. I noticed if I zigzagged between the start of different paths I could go through the level without having to fight any enemies, I could just have a nice walk instead. Completing everything in record time and full health. The only slight issue was that I ended up approaching the exit point of the level from the wrong side/direction. So I was stuck on a ledge that I probably wasn't meant to be on. However, I got around this by jumping in the air and firing my weapon at a wall to propel myself backwards through the exit. Random characters kept congratulating me for being in such great health after facing so many foes, saying that I must be strong. I think the game might have been judging me.

There was another time I went against that game, I managed to get to a location that shouldn't be accessible until you've defeated a certain enemy by travelling a bizarre route. Characters kept thanking me for something I hadn't done yet.

I've considered playing The Stanley Parable before. That seems like my kind of game (from what I've seen of it).

I kind of like pokemon go, though I haven't played it in a while, but that's a little different since it requires you walk around and catch the pokemon, and walk to gyms to battle them. Then aside from that I like the band Iron Maiden and they have a phone game that's kinda fun...but still don't play that too often either as I don't really like playing games on such a small screen(I wish it was a computer or console game)

I mostly play league of legends on my laptop, and console games on my Xbox One X. I'd play league on a console if I could, but that one is PC only so if I want to play I have to play on a computer.

I used to have a tablet and I enjoyed some of the games and apps such as The Sims Freeplay or The Simpsons Tapped. But that was in the early 2000's-2010s when some mobile games were actually good. Now they're 110% horrible. The ads for the games now are full of nothing but filthy, evil lies, the real games look nothing like them.

I hate it when the ads say "Only left-brained people will win this game". I'm left-handed, so the right-side of my brain is more dominant. Those ads are handist or brainist or whatever.

Or they say, "Why is this game so hard?", and they show them selecting a can of gasoline to put out a house fire.

And the "children's" games that feature popular Disney or My Little Pony characters, but the games are horrifying and show blood and gore, not unlike the "Elsagate" videos on YouTube.

There should be a law against those ads and their games. There probably is, but I don't know how they get away with it anyway.

Yes. Touchscreen controls are so bad. I hate how cellphone and tablet games have replaced console and handheld games for so many people. My young cousins used to be inseperable from their DS Lites but now they only play iPad games.

My girlfriend's friend's son was playing some games on his mother's iPhone X and I felt so sorry for him when I saw that he was playing the paper dolls dress up game. It was such a simple game that it made Pong look StarCraft. It's all his known for all his young life. He'll never know what it's like to play Super Mario World or Donkey Kong Country.

The only thing I like about cellphone games is that they work with my bluetooth headphones, unlike the Switch, 3DS or Vita. Nowadays about 80% of the headphones in the hifi shop are bluetooth but Nintendo are pretending bluetooth headphones don't exist.

There's nothing wrong with touch controls, it's when games aren't designed for them that it's a problem. Bluetooth headphones aren't really ideal for gaming either, they have a massive amount of latency.

Yes bluetooth has latency on Android. This is caused by problems within Android. That doesn't mean bluetooth would have latency on a portable console, if a portable console had bluetooth.

Bluetooth has considerable latency regardless of how its used, owing to the additional compression and processing required.

Mneh ... if they keep people happy and out of trouble, why worry? While I don't "hate" such games, I don't find them challenging, either, so I simply don't play them. If others want to, then that's their business, not mine.

It depends on the game, I suppose. It also depends what you call a video game. I used to argue that visual novels weren't games because they didn't have any gameplay, even if they did have choices. But I do call them games now, because everyone else does and I realised that arguing that they aren't simply isn't worth the effort.

"Free-to-play" (the unwritten other half is "pay-to-skip") is very common on mobile, as is gacha (spend X virtual currency to unlock a random unit, where X can be earned by waiting, playing, or paying). They go hand in hand, too. I used to turn my nose up at these as well. A friend got me into Epic Seven a month or two ago though, and it's turned out to be surprisingly fun. Mainly because the detailed story and strategy involved makes it feel more like an RPG-with-gacha-mechanics than a gacha-with-RPG-mechanics. And it's actually more fun if you don't pay for anything than if you do. Like Enigmatic_Oddity said, why would you pay to skip, if you enjoy the game? So... basically what I'm saying is, there are definitely games for mobile that are well thought out and challenging, they just have a really bad reputation thanks to the... not so great mobile games out there.



Are you sure you're not secretly me? This is one of those things I've always asked myself, "why doesn't anyone else seem to feel this way?" I feel like I'm constantly bombarded by advertisements for and people talking about FPS's and photorealistic RPG's/open world games, when I'm just... plain not interested (give me a good old arcade game over this any day).

War itself isn't really an issue for me though, I loved Fire Emblem 9&10 and Valkyria Chronicles (and I tried to get into Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence, but I just didn't end up having the time to properly figure it out), but then they don't do the realistic violence of course.



Weird arbitrary barriers to progress bug me. They probably bug most people; it's why the likes of Super Metroid went down so well: they made sure that you're only blocked by things that actually make sense as blocking you, or at least they make it feel that way even when it technically isn't. (There's a whole youtube video on this somewhere, it was a while back so I don't remember where but I could probably find it if I tried, it went into great detail on how the game tricks the player into thinking the world is bigger and more open than it actually is, and how this trickery is a good thing 'cause it makes it more enjoyable.)



I just wish games still did this. Older games were much more likely to do this because of the restrictions of the technology at the time: space being at a premium meant as many possible values of any data type had to be used for something important, meaning invalid combinations that happened due to some oversight tended to do something interesting, whereas in a modern game they'll just boringly crash the game instead. I don't know how many hours I've sunk into watching youtube videos of Sonic glitches, Pokémon glitches, Mario glitches, ... And yet decades on, they still find something new once in a while!



This sounds hilarious. You don't happen to have a video of that at all do you? The thought of firing at a wall to launch yourself backwards reminds me of Iji (a free, indie PC platformer), where the developer actually used the idea of shooting your rocket launcher at too-close proximity so you damage yourself as a mechanic for advanced players, as it'd often launch you off in some direction you wouldn't be able to get to otherwise. I know it's intentional rather than unintentional here, but you get the similarity.

I guess I got off topic for most of this post but it was that or pass up the opportunity to have a good ol' ramble about fun times in years gone by

Relevant ProZD video

I play mostly word games on my phone, as I like words and letters.

Actually, just deleted the only game on my phone (a build a city type one).
Got fed up with how much time I could be spending on other things I’ve been frittering away on it

I hate that they started microtransactions. Which I guess wasn't their fault that triple A console developers tried to implement it but still... Was a terrible idea to begin with.

Microtransactions for software aren't a problem, and they're hardly new as they've been around since the 80s to 90s. The real problem is the difficulty for users to find what they're paying for with any given purchase. It's difficult to tell whether you're getting full functionality for a timed period, indefinite partial functionality, functionality that can be changed at any given time as per some terms of service, whether there are microtransactions, whether those microtransactions represent additional content, content that is expected from but conspicuously absent from the standard product, or content that is predatory in nature using mechanics such as gambling.

I don't use iOS and can't comment on its store, at least not since I last used it about a decade ago. But as for Google Play, when you buy an application and the only information you can find on the store is 'contains in-app purchases', it's completely failed to give you enough information to determine whether you should buy it. To compare, looking at a game on Steam you can see what those in app purchases are and go to a separate page for each individual thing to find out what they represent.

Let's compare two music rhythm games on the Google Play store, Groove Coaster and Tapsonic Top. Both are listed as free, and if you go to the store page for each they both just say 'in-app purchases'. But they're completely different in terms of how you'll pay for their content. Groove Coaster contains some free songs and you can pay for additional songs. Tapsonic Top contains an energy meter that recovers over time and limits your playtime, which can be replenished by paying money. It also contains characters of various rarities needed for gameplay progression that can be obtained through gambling with money.

Nowhere on the store page for either is any of this information listed, yet this is information that's vital for the consumer to know on deciding to play one over the other. That's the real issue with mobile games - there's currently no transparency on monetisation prior to using the products.