Mobile Games – Page 5

Bel VS Mobile Gaming

September 3, 2015 by Belghast

The Eureka Moment

I just had a moment of realization while checking on the progress of Vault 816… I am not a mobile gamer. While I really enjoy the idea of playing Fallout Shelter, I always have the same thought I have with any mobile game. “Man I wish I could play this on my desktop or through a web browser.” There are games that I enjoy the idea of playing… like Fallout Shelter, Alphabear, Dragon Coins, or Final Fantasy Record Keeper. The problem is I get frustrated by the imprecise controls. Using your finger to move objects around the screen feels so much more cludgy than doing it with a nice tight mouse pointer. Granted if I were a smaller person I would probably not be having any of these issues.

Sausage-Like Fingers

I am 6’4” and have huge hands… I can palm a basketball. Attached to these huge hands are useless sausage-like fingers that have the fine motor skills of sleepy toddler. The more I think about it… this fact has gotten in the way of my enjoyment of almost every mobile game I have played. At first I thought the bulk of my problems would be resolved were I simply playing on a larger device. However as I graduated from my iPhone 3s to a Samsung Galaxy S2 to a Samsung Galaxy S5… each time the screen size increased sizably but the difficulty never went away. When I finally got my own iPad I still felt like throwing it across the room anytime I was asked to do anything that required a modicum of detailed movement.

I realize there is such a thing as a stylus, but then I am having to fiddle with an awkward device on top of an already awkward control scheme. The problem is… there really are games that I want to enjoy on mobile devices. Fallout Shelter for example takes two things that I have loved in the past… the Fallout Franchise, and Sim Tower like gameplay. During my pre-college and college years I spent silly amounts of my free time playing both of these games. I spent enough time playing Sim Tower to be able to build freaking airports at the top of my towers. I have played each of the Fallout franchise games multiple times, and even though I rarely play the original… I feel like I could pretty safely pick it right back up and meld into the nostalgia nicely. So I am the core demographic of this game… except for the whole control scheme problem.

I honestly have no clue why I felt like I needed to write this post, other than having my own little Eureka moment. For the longest time I thought my dislike of mobile gaming was more about the game experiences that you have on a mobile device. Now I realize that is wrong… there are plenty of “gamerly” experiences available. My problem is that I struggle to get any sense of control while playing a mobile game. Finger based movement against a slick screen always feels chaotic to me. It reminds me of how frustrated I get when trying to use a trackball. I guess I am just accustomed to the mouse, keyboard and controller… and when it finally comes down to relying on my own digits to make things work… I find the experience frustrating. I am wondering if anyone else out there with sausage-like fingers suffers from this same issue? We should totally form a support group or something.

#Blaugust Day 20: Record Keeping

August 20, 2015 by Thalen

It seems like at any given point I have sufficient brain space for at most two mobile games. I think the energy mechanic most of them use is a lot of the reason; I feel like I'm wasting resources if I let my energy fill completely and sit there for a while. Currently one the two games I'm playing is Fallout Shelter. The other, which I've been playing for a couple of months now, is Final Fantasy: Record Keeper.

From what others have told me, previous mobile Final Fantasy games have not had a good track record. Final Fantasy: All The Bravest appears to be particularly reviled as a mindless cash grab. Happily Record Keeper is a lot more engaging and requires actual strategy to play. The real-money aspect is a bit pricey, but the special currency (mythril) comes at a decent pace in game and you can absolutely play without ever spending cash.

The basic premise of Record Keeper is that there's a world that maintains records of important battles throught the multiverse in the form of magical paintings. Some evil force causes these to be damaged and so you must travel into the paintings and experience the battles they record to restore them. The battles reward equipment and orbs which are used to create all the classic FF abilites that you can then equip. Completing paintings gets you special rewards including rarer equipment and orbs, and most importantly new characters.

This, to me, is the main draw of Record Keeper; the ability to build a stable of your favorite characters from across the Final Fantasy milieu and relive fights from the various games with teams built out of that stable. Boss fights typically have the same tricks and special features they had in the original games, and Dr. Mog, your mentor, can provide tips for each boss fight before you go in if you don't already know how it works.

Quistis, Arc, Gordon, Lightning, and the Warrior of Light
face Medusa in the Tower of Owen

The monetization, like a lot of Japanese based games, is a gacha system. In this case what you're randomly getting is equipment from the various games, ranked from 1 to 5 stars. 5 star is the best, but also the rarest. You get one free draw a day, which could be anything (usually 1 or 2 stars, but I've gotten a couple of 4 star items that way) or you can buy draws that are guaranteed to be at least 3 star. If you pay cash for this, it works out to $3 for a single item or 11 items for $30. A bit pricey for my liking but you can get plenty of draws using in game currency.

Along with the regular paintings, there are also events running on a regular basis. These are usually themed on a particular character or characters and let you unlock new characters who aren't available through the normal paintings. Right now the Lightning event is just about to end, and an Aerith event started a couple days ago and runs for the next week or so. If you miss a character, it'll eventually come back around again, but the character unlock is usually fairly early in the set of event fights with rare equipment and orbs as rewards for the really difficult ones.

You can finally get her back

All in all, Final Fantasy: Record Keeper is a really fun game that will hit anyone with a love of Final Fantasy right in the nostalgia. If you decided to give it a try, using this link to get the game will get both you and me a little added mythril so you can start drawing new equipment that much sooner. Check it out!

#Blaugust Day 14: Of Vaults and Cards and Other Things

August 20, 2015August 14, 2015 by Thalen

Kinda late with the blog post today. Normally I try to write them the night before and schedule to post the next morning, but a combination of gaming later than I really should have and lack of any clear notion of what to write about meant I had nothing written when I went to bed. Just means I'm writing at lunch.

Fallout Shelter finally came out for Android yesterday, so I downloaded it to see what people were going on about a month ago. It's pretty enjoyable so far, though I'm obviously still in the very early game which is often the best part in these sorts of things. We'll see if it holds up further in once leveling and finding new things slows down. I did get lucky and pull a unique dweller and a legendary weapon from my first and second lunchboxes, so I've had him out exploring the wasteland and bringing back more stuff. So far raider attacks haven't been much trouble to deal with thanks to the early infusion of armor and weapons. I did have a scare for a little where my water production fell off and my overall happiness started to tank; I managed to reassign some people and make it through though and then prioritized expanding water production once I had the caps.

#Blaugust Day 14: Of Vaults and Cards and Other Things

My litle Vault, ticking along

Over in Marvel Heroes, I finished leveling Magneto to 60 last week and started running Thing up through the story to take advantage of an xp bonus for the Fantastic Four that was in over the weekend. I've been enjoying the Thing's gameplay more than I expected. I tend to prefer dodgy ranged characters and he's very much an in-the-thick of the action brick. His secondary resource builds when he deals or receives damage so you want to leap into the middle of a bunch of guys and start whaling away. I finished up Chapter 4 yesterday with him and have reached level 34, so again, no problem leveling in the story.

Dear Gazillion, I will pay cash money for this costume

Finally, I played a fair amount of Magic Duels last night trying to clear out a couple of quests. You can have up to 3 simultaneously and it seems you get one new one each day. I had a full load, so I wanted to get at least one completed so as not to wasted today's. One quest was to put 20 counters on creatures over the course of any number of games, and the other two were both Archetype quests, which ask you to win 4 duels with particular deck types. It's important to note that you have to make a deck using the Deck Builder for it count for those quests. I know Kodra, who's up on the current cards and meta, hates the deck builder but for me it's helpful to give me an idea of what sorts of decks are viable these days.

I ended up putting together a red/black deck built around creature sacrifices, ideally creatures stolen from my opponent, that was a lot of fun when it worked. I feel like it needs some fine tuning, as it could be brutal when things went my way, but I had a couple terrible defeats as well when the cards weren't with me. For another quest I made a blue/white air superiority deck that worked remarkably well in the duels I used it in. There the point was to overwhelm my opponent with flying creatures while handling his creatures via special abilities to tap or destroy them and a few hefty blockers.

Tomorrow I should have the first of what I hope will be many book reviews going up, and I also have an idea for another ongoing series that I plan to start up Sunday. I just have to actually get the posts written. Come back tomorrow and see if I succeed!