Good mobile game = ports from PC games and emulators
miHoYo games could be so much more if they are PC/Console games instead of mobile.
The only truly mobile game that I can think of that I can say is good is Pokemon GO, and I don’t even like it but is the only game that truly uses the uniqueness of the mobile platform as a game feature.
I, for the love of God, cannot play Genshin on mobile. The controls are absolutely garbage. On PC tho, it is really good.
My problem with Genshin is not even that. The game is a mobile first and that limits the mechanics of the game.
If the basic Normal/Hard Hit + 1 skill + ultimate is shit on mobile imagine if they implemented combos like DMC.
Try Wuthering waves, the combat can get a lot more interesting imo
I remember that the game anticheat doesn’t work on linux, if they change that I’ll try it.
Ah that’s a shame, I hope they change it and you get to try it out some day!
It is way deeper than that though, or at least that’s what I think about the endgame content.
Sure, exploration is piss easy, but the Abyss not so much.
The last levels of Abyss is more about team comp + good items than what you can do with the combat.
Of course you need to dodge and switch characters efficiently but the ceiling of the game is low. You have some interesting things like the 2H characters jumping + attack but is not like a essential skill of the game.
I’m in a closed beta for WalkScape, which is a single-player RPG that uses your pedometer for all game progress. Travel to another location? Chop down trees? Craft a bronze mining pick? Stomp grapes into wine? All of them progress only as you take steps throughout the day. A great little game to check in on now and then, and I feel utilizes the mobile platform well.
That’s a good idea, but it’s hard to work considering that true gamers don;t walk at all. /s
That sounds like the best things I currently use PoGo for. I love chewing through eggs with my daily bike rides
It’s neat, if fairly barebones. You pop open the game, see if you’ve completed your current activity (reached a destination you walked to, finished crafting through your item stack, gathered materials until your bag is full) then designate the next thing you’ll do. But, it’s F2P, ad-free, and the devs are very genuine! There’s another beta wave soon because they’re showing it at Gamescom! https://walkscape.app
Also, it’s more forgiving than POGO since it uses STRICTLY pedometer (step count), so it doesn’t try to see if you were running too fast, changing location, etc.This looks very promising. Thanks for linking to it here. I hope it gets launched soon.
Looks pretty sweet! Thanks!
Seems like a good idea, maybe we’ll have 2 good mobile games than.
Pokemon Go was good enough that I didn’t even mind that it was a NSA plot!
There’s an insane number of PC ports. You can play Myst or GTA SA.
On the multiplayer side, genshin is very much your traditional MMO, if you like that. You can also play Eve or Hades star.
In terms of a competitive scene for years we had vainglory (forever in our hearts), and now we have LoL wild rift.
Genshin is more your traditional singleplayer Gacha with MMO elements in my opinion. Also the first successful open-world Gacha so it gets some brownie points for that.
Yea but touch screen controls are the worst. I hate using those virtual joysticks
Dicey Dungeons is an example of a game that I think is actually BETTER on mobile (cheaper too). Awesome game, and the touch controls really streamline it.
Slice & Dice is another game that tge mobile version is better than desktop
I can’t believe nobody mentioned Vampire Survivors yet? I know it’s a port, but it’s amazing on mobile.
I still remember stuff like dead space mobile, those where true, actual games that showed you the potential phones COULD have
now the gaming industry (conventions and everything else to), is now utterly dominated and muddled by the likes of candy crush and genshin impact, its actually sad
How is a giant open world with a cool campaign not impressive for a phone game? Just play it like a regular game instead of doing endgame content, the story’s combat is easy to not force anyone to pull.
the only good mobile game was MCPE, now it’s minecraft bedrock
For once, anon is not fake. May still be gay
Slay the Spire.
This is the ultimate mobile game
It was unplayable for years on android 13 and would crash every time. Finally they fixed it.
I replayed Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 on mobile. It’s a surprisingly good port.
Same with Knights of the Old Republic. But that’s just it: every decent mobile game is a port.
Wait where did you download kotor for mobile?
It’s on Google play for $10 but if you really want to know where I got it, it was a free promotion several years ago when Amazon was doing their weird “Amazon Underground” alternate store or whatever the hell it was.
Terraria, but it’s a lot better on PC. You can transfer your character files and maps with a little effort though.
DevilutionX is pretty good if you liked Diablo 1.
And then there are the insane lists of ROMs/emulators.
Pokemon was a fun emulate, anything else people like? Kirby games might be good too. Hmmm
A lot of people don’t realize their phones can emulate PS1 fairly easily now.
If you’ve got a good phone you can even emulate GameCube, Dreamcast, PS2, & 3DS; which opens up a lot of options.
GBA Final Fantasy ports are great as well as Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Also highly recommend Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga and Golden Sun
i remember polytopia used to be good
Professor Layton is on iOS does that count
Layton is baby puzzles. Or at least it made me feel that way after two levels.
It requires you to read for 99% of puzzles so they can’t be for the illiterate larval humans
I’ve been wanting to make a mobile game out of spite because if this
Game development is super hard tho and I’ve only done like 3 game jams
I believe in you! 3 jams worth is already a lot of useful experience.
This really upsets me and periodically bums me out. I used to like trawling through the top lists to see the various games that were on mobile. This is back in like 2011-2013. Typically monetization was either a free/premium version split, or an energy system. Now it’s beyond 99% garbage with 99% of the last 1% being ports. The 1 of 1? Slice and Dice, that game rocks.
Same. I used to play a number of games, and even paid for a few, but the gems are just too hard to find these days.
So now I pretty much never play games on my phone, which does a few things:
- phone battery lasts a lot longer
- my time on my phone is more productive
- I use a lot less data, so I pay less for my plan
- I don’t need flagship phones (not a photographer)
So now I mostly use my phone for:
- phone things (calls and texts)
- audiobooks
- news
- videos - I restrict myself to downloaded videos to help reduce wasted time
I have a Switch and Steam Deck, and quality game selection is much better there anyway.
Inb4 Gaben announces the SteamPhone
That could honestly be cool. If he could get calls and texts to work on SteamOS, I’d probably buy it.
I would bet they add steam phone to the steam deck instead. Would be something new and with everyone just having wireless earbuds it could work.
Yeah, but then your buds die, and you’re either the schmuck holding a steamdeck to the side of gheir head, or the asshole holding their steamdeck an inch in front of their face with their GP on speaker explaining in grim detail the colour of the fluid seeping from their piles…
You can plug in your buds case to charge on your steam deck. I don’t know anyone who regularly encounters that issue though. That’s like saying your phone can die mid call and then you won’t be able to make calls. Like sure, it’s happened to people but by in large everyone always has theirs charged and we didn’t NOT make wireless phones popular because of this one specific scenario.
Don’t have a steamdeck, I did know you can charge stuff off it though. Idk about you, but I often forget to charge my buds, and forget things like my external battery or cables(or the buds themselves) at home as I run out the door.
I wasn’t saying that these scenarios would be a daily occurrence, but I can definitely remember enough times that I’d have to count on both hands I’ve seen someone making a call on the bus with a phablet or tablet. And maybe where you live people have enough respect for the people around them, but every city I’ve ever lived there’s someone talking really loud on speaker about something they really shouldn’t be at least once a month that I personally encounter.
The only games I ever have on my phone now are gachas and paid for games.
Also, I agree that Slice and Dice is awesome. I got the itch version which came with both android and linux versions.
The hours I’ve sunk into slice and dice! That game rocks!
Yup! I wanted Slay the Spire, but the port is awful and this fills that void.
The port is fantastic, have you used it since the initial round of upsates?
Wait when? The latest experience I had was interminable loading on start and constant save wipes.
When was your experience, and which device? The 2.2+ version has been stable for me. I tried on android phone, tablet, and ipad.
I think I last used it last winter, but looking at the play store it’s had an update since. Already looks like the startup is faster!
Slice and dice, magic research (2), Simon tathams puzzle pack, Bart Bontes color series, unciv, pathpix, pirates outlaws…
There isn’t only ports and garbage, you just need to go deeper than the front page (and not ever browse by “free”)
There’s also a good loop hero port
I bought Slice & Dice after reading this comment and others in this thread and yeah, it’s pretty great. Thanks for the recommendation!
and then you go through the top paid games just to find… the same top paid games from the last decade. Nothing of value is being created or getting recognition
There could be a vicious cycle where game devs who want to be taken seriously don’t touch mobile games, so as mobile game devs develop skills and experience, they move away from the platform.
Also a lot of the thick frameworks that many devs rely on these days require a lot of computing resources that maybe mobile devices have trouble keeping up with. I could see scenarios where a mobile game is worked on for a while but abandoned due to awful performance in early testing while a similar desktop game doesn’t get killed because it’s being developed on a high end system and later gets optimized to run better on weaker systems.
Though tbh, I have no idea how top phones compare with high end desktops these days and am just assuming that they are way behind, while low end desktops might be more comparable to high end phones for performance.
I suspect that most of it comes down to passive cooling, most phones dont have active cooling systems like fans so even if it has decent specs its gonna bottleneck rather rapidly.
There were brilliant games from the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s that ran on comparatively primitive machines. A decent phone today can very easily emulate a Gameboy an N64 or even a Playstation 1 or Xbox.
I understand that many people think good graphics = good game and vice versa but I think an interesting story, novel puzzles or original concepts are so much more important than how real a game looks. High-end computing power is simply not required to make a great game.
I agree with other people in the thread, people just don’t want to pay £40, £50, £60+ for a mobile game, they want it for free and then complain when the games are a grind unless they pay all the micro transactions. Good games won’t come unless people are willing to pay for them.
I’ve not seen hard numbers but it really seems a high end phone is pretty comparable to a low end laptop performance-wise these days. Both do a great job of displaying webpages, playing web video and can kinda crunch through an optimized enough video game at a low enough resolution
Every good game on mobile is a port of something made for another platform.
Except for slice&dice
Well there are Gems like Temple Run, Subway Servers, Jetpack Joyride (earl Angry Birds). But most are cheap garbage with lots of ads.
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Plants vs zombies was originally pretty good. I had originally bought it many years ago. Tried to play it again recently and the thing I paid for is some ad infested dumpster fire. Made me ignore all mobile games. Even the good ones can be ruined as you have no control of updates when you change phones.
You can usually find the APK files online FYI, you just have to download and run them. If youre on apple though IDFK.
PvZ was a port to mobile from PC, just fyi.
