God I fucking hate mobile games. It’s so sad that’s what kids are growing up on now.

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    31·
    2 months ago

    I feel like mobile games have only gotten worse as well. Like I saw my nephew playing some last year and there’s just stuff happening, he doesn’t even react to the stuff half the time and the game keeps going? It felt like when video games get portrayed in tv in the 90s and early 00s where the games are just completely incoherent, and the reactions of the characters don’t seem to align at all.

  • AndJusticeForAll [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    27·
    2 months ago

    Don’t know if that’ll happen 'cause I played flash games as a kid and despite some very small curiosity I have about some of them I’m not nostalgic for them at all and wish I spent my time as a kid playing any other game.

      • Chronicon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        I had nostalgia for them for a while, some were actually really intricate and maybe even good, and some of my friends have white whale flash games lost to time. But yeah, there’s no tidal wave of nostalgia products for various reasons

        Personally my feeling is there’ll be some nostalgia for the better mobile games but if there’s any preservation effort it will probably recreate them without the microtransaction bullshit lol

        • TraschcanOfIdeology [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          2 months ago

          I do think someone else on the thread may have a point that the only reason we don’t see this much nostalgia for flash games is because of the sheer number of them, and the fact that everyone played a different one, before losing interest and getting another one. It’s hard to monetize stick matrix 4 when only a bunch of people remember it fondly, unlike the 80s/90s when a game could be THE GAME for years.

        • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          but if there’s any preservation effort it will probably recreate them without the microtransaction bullshit lol

          and then you realize that waiting around all day isn’t a game lol

    • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      Guess I’m the only weirdo here who absolutely has nostalgia for loads of flash games as a kid, there were many crap ones and many, many great ones.

      Motherlode, Portal: The Flash Game, Castle Crashers, Super Meat Boy, Every Neopet game ever, Happy Wheels, Bloon TD 1/2/3/4/5, Impossible Quiz 1/2/3, Anagram Magic (+all the multiplayer games on miniclip,), Uno (+all the multiplayer games on omglol), Madness Combat, Fancy Pants Adventure, to name the ones off the top of my head.

      I refuse to accept none of these are worthy of nostalgia. Some of them were turned into very successful full-blown games.

    • SpookyGenderCommunist [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, like I’ve got a batocera emulation setup, and I have a bunch of old flash games I played as a kid on there, as a curiosity. But I hardly touch them.

      The only one with substance that I occasionally go back to is this one puzzle game with little Viking guys trapped in ice, and you have to free them. It’s a cute little time waster, but that’s about it.

  • hypercracker@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    2 months ago

    Slay the Spire is a mobile game

    I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a mobile game

    Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a mobile game

    Hyper Light Drifter is a mobile game

    I mean yeah I know what you mean when you refer to “mobile” games but another way to look at it is that the gender gap in gaming basically disappears if you include mobile gaming, so the view that mobile games are not real games is arguably springing from male chauvinism.

      • hypercracker@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        there are a lot of non-predatory mobile games which you would know if you know anybody who plays mobile games

        • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          15·
          2 months ago

          there are a lot of non-predatory mobile games with no marketing budget, no front-page presence on the google play, and no way for your average gamer to pick them out from the ocean of trash

          • hypercracker@hexbear.netEnglish
            8·
            2 months ago

            Looking at the front page of the iOS app store games category page I see (excluding ones that say they’re “for you”):

            • Age of Empires mobile pre-order (idk what this is, maybe it’s got a bunch of in-game currencies)
            • MONOPOLY GO!
            • Roblox
            • Subway Surfers
            • Pokemon GO
            • Fallout Shelter
            • Genshin Impact
            • Monster Train (deckbuilding roguelike battles)
            • NYT Games: Word Games & Sodoku
            • Call of Duty: Mobile
            • Minion Rush: Running game
            • My Talking Tom 2 (some kind of game where you talk to a cat?)
            • Smash Hit

            idk it feels like this site is stuck in the mid-2010s perception that everything on the app store is a Zynga clicker Clash of Clans clone with a yelling man as the icon

            • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              18·
              2 months ago

              here’s a review from Monopoly GO!

              From someone who has been playing for a year, it’s going down hill big time. It was never this bad before. It’s near impossible to complete any events, ANY of them without spending hundreds of dollars on dice.

              are you actually personally vouching for any of these games, or are you just assuming they’re not skinner box pay to win cash grabs?

              • hypercracker@hexbear.netEnglish
                8·
                2 months ago

                I’m not vouching for them, they certainly aren’t all skinner boxes though. You could find a few but the skinner box rate is way above zero for PC and console games these days too.

            • Acute_Engles [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              9·
              2 months ago

              I don’t know what most of those games are but if you say they are just regular games where you play them and can’t use your wallet as an extra controller i admit to being stuck in the past like a big ol’ silly billy

              • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                4·
                2 months ago

                that person literally copied a list of games from the iOS app store games, did not investigate if any were pay-to-win, did absolutely no fact checking, made no actual claims about the games, but has successfully convinced you that you are stuck in the past.

              • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                8·
                2 months ago

                Subway surfers is an “ancient” mobile game by today’s standards, basically a temple run clone, endless running game. Similar format to minion rush. I remember playing it over a decade ago on my first smartphone.

        • AndJusticeForAll [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          2 months ago

          All the good ones like Monument Valley and Alto’s Journey get ported because they actually transcend the extremely low bar of entertainment for being stuck somewhere with a phone and 7 minutes to kill.

        • Acute_Engles [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          A number of my co-workers play mobile games and they all have like 2+ ingame currencies and “optional” ad boosts and shit.

          I will admit I don’t have many friends into mobile games though. I’m old and crotchety so I can accept that my view of the entire platform is biased

    • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      16·
      2 months ago

      I disagree. More than half of those are ports and I actually find it more male chauvinistic to assume that women prefer mobile games.

      That’s like telling someone who thinks Barbie is vapid “Actually most women like Barbie so actually you’re sexist.”

    • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      so the view that mobile games are not real games

      the issue is probably about low quality, gimmicks, and exploitation, I think the problem is reinforced when your counterargument is a bunch of ports (exceptions that prove the rule), you might as well start calling all steam deck compatible games and emulatable retrogames mobile games.

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          High quality paid games with decent graphics were a thing for the very first smartphones and iPods. I remember buying Need For Speed Hot Pursuit on a cousin’s iPod 14 years ago because we didn’t have a PlayStation or Xbox 360 to buy the game on yet. It was actually a decent port. But then mobile developers realised that you could milk in app purchases and that killed the paid game genre.

        • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          In the early days it was actually pretty normal to buy premium games (most pre-smartphone games were paid and I remember buying multiple games when I had an iPhone 3G), but as soon as people realized you could continuously milk people for subscriptions and microtransactions on a device they carry with them everywhere, it was all over. I’m sure there are still passionate devs making good mobile games, but that’s not where the money’s at.

          Separately, premium apps are a lot more common on iOS to this day. I don’t know if there’s anything about the App Store that encourages this or it’s just a quirk of history, but I figured it was worth noting.

          • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            I had Bejeweled on my phone back in 2007 ad free and it was glorious. Unfortunately it was the old way of doing things where it was purchased through your cell phone provider, rather than through Google Play or the Apple Store.

            The current version is a fucking mess of ads, microtransactions, and dumb multi-player gimmicks.

    • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      yeah after I bought my $800 cellphone and $800 laptop, I’m totally going to also buy $800/year worth of consoles (I just assume all 3 consoles + games + controllers + online subscriptions cost $800/year).

      but also mobile games do kind of suck, like wtf im not going to pay you for fake fish.

  • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    2 months ago

    The games people get nostalgic about and remember are determined by a mix of actual quality, how many people played them new, current availability, and whether they’re tied to any ongoing franchises.

    Everybody remembers the old Mario games because they were actually good, they were the most produced NES carts, Nintendo keeps re-releasing them, and Nintendo keeps making more Mario games which openly advertise 8-bit Mario. A lot fewer people remember The Guardian Legend (which owned btw) because it had a smaller distribution and has no franchise or rereleases and its parent company spends all its time barely managing to market Puyo. Nobody remembers the Adventure Island series, even though there were five thousand of them, because they were just kind of bad. If you go to my personal nostalgia mines of late 90s mac shareware, nobody remembers any of this, because approximately nobody played these, none of the companies stuck around, and it’s a pain in the ass to set up the emulators (Bumbler Bee-Luxe is great, Escape Velocity Nova is great and also available outside a horrible mac emulator).

    So for old mobile game nostalgia, I think it’s going to run into a wall. There’s a trillion of them and everybody played different ones, so there’s no critical mass for the Tiny Wings nostalgia fandom. They were made by tiny companies, or just one random developer, who eventually abandon them (either because they move on, or because they don’t want to have the old version compete against more predatory sequels). And the app stores constantly change standards and require apps to be updated, so the apps eventually stop being listed in the store.

    • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      There’s a trillion of them and everybody played different ones

      I saw a nostalgia video of old flash games, the youtuber showed 20 them, not a single one was one I had ever heard of or seen.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    2 months ago

    It’s already happening. Young gen Z is already having nostalgia for angry birds, geometry dash, subway surfers/temple run/minion rush, jetpack joyride, fruit ninja, smash hit, etc. These are all games I played over a decade ago when I got my first smartphone in high school.

  • Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    Eh, I’m an old fart and I certainly don’t get nostalgic for everything from my youth. There weren’t any mobile games, but there sure were a lot of plastic “collectables”. They’ll probably find something to be nostalgic for, but don’t underestimate the amount of “How the fuck was this blatant cash grab legal?” that they will feel about their old classics.

  • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    2 months ago

    I genuinely don’t think this will happen. I know it’s easy to bash whatever the new, current thing that wasn’t the thing in my day, but are Gen Alpha actually passionate and emotionally invested in their mobile games?

    Without a pulling story, a world that captures your imagination, that ensnares your mind and makes you think of all the possibilities in that world and/or at least meaningful social aspects, I don’t think people have much to really remember or get nostalgic for. Maybe I’m very ignorant of mobile games, but I think an extremely small percentage of these really manage that, at least a far smaller percentage than other games. (And if mobile games like that really do exist, let me know, because I’m still waiting to personally experience a single one)

    • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      I remember kingsofchaos and hobowars from back in the day, because cellphones were unsmart and internet payments were a lolno back then, there was only ads. I guess you could call clash of clans and evony gen2 of that, basically adding graphics and skinner box payments. Perhaps gen3 of these games will be like “scan your starbux coffee receipt to build your army faster”