mobile

Seeking Mobile Experiences

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One of the things that I noticed while going through my Giant Wall of Games list ™ is that during the 2020 Calendar year I pretty much played NOTHING on my phone. That isn’t entirely true, because I downloaded and tried a few things but nothing significant enough to actually log in the list. There were a handful of games that I installed and immediately uninstalled for various reasons, but in the past I had something like Dragalia Lost or Pokemon Go that was always on the list. So on a whim yesterday afternoon I put out a call to my Twitter family.
Okay friends. Since I have long considered mobile development a largely poisoned well. I figure I will crowdsource this… best mobile games available for Android that are not f2p monetization/gacha traps or match 3 games…. GO!

@Belghast
The problem I have with mobile gaming is that the discovery mechanisms seem to largely be dominated by either Gacha games or games with otherwise similarly questionable free to play mechanics. There are also a number of games that I would clump into a category of being a port of a game from another platform but that are made worse by touch screen controls. I have a number of SquareSoft mobile ports and they are an infinitely worse experience than playing the same game on pretty much any other platform. What I seem to be lacking however are the games that either wouldn’t work without a touch screen interfaces are somehow uniquely enriched by having one. Some of the constraints I am looking for are as follows.
  • Must be Android – I have zero iOS devices by design
  • Must be a Direct Purchase, One Time Unlock, or Free to Play with very optional and non-obtrusive monetization
  • Should be a gameplay experience uniquely enhanced by the touchscreen interface and not just a port trying to make up for those shortcomings
  • No Match Three Games – While I love Bejeweled, I need to move past that
I have to say I absolutely love my Twitter family because once again they came through for me with a massive list of titles to try. This mornings post is as much for my own benefit as it is for sharing these picks with the world, because I wanted a nice clean way of keeping track of it. A few of the titles that were thrown out were games that I had tried and ruled out for one reason or another, so I am dropping them from the list. The titles that are currently in the running for eventually garnering my attention are as follows.
Ultimately the above block of six games is what I chose for my very first cohort. Monument Valley is a game series that I had heard really good things about but ultimately forgot existed. You Must Build a Boat is a game that I have heard someone at some time in the past raving about it… I thought it was Kodra but it might just be a fuzzy memory of Liore when Cat Context existed. Loop gets bumped up in priority because it is was created by a mutual, so absolutely going to check that out. Eve Echos is a game that I had already installed but never actually got around to checking… so just grouping it in by default. Pathfinder Adventures because i was curious and Pixel Dungeon because also curious.
Mobile gaming is pretty much a bedtime activity for me, and last night I managed to try out one of the games before sleep ultimately claimed me. I had not really been sleeping well for a few nights so I did not make it super far. Monument Valley is gorgeous and is exactly the sort of game I am looking for. I am not exactly sure how this game works without a touch interface, and as a result it isn’t just making up for that limited toolset but exploiting it. The puzzles are interesting and change enough to feel fresh each time you move onto a new monument. I made it through five before my eyelids were too heavy to continue, but I am probably going to be playing this one for awhile until I either complete it or get distracted by some other shiny object. Since this has apparently turned into a post with just an excessive number of bullet point lists… why not add another? I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the folks who participated yesterday in throwing out game ideas. There was a flurry of them that all came in at once, and I think I have accounted for them all… but apologies if I inadvertently miss someone. Yall are awesome in my book. Essentially over the years I have developed this borderline toxic attitude that mobile gaming is by nature mechanically worse than gaming on pretty much any other platform. I am trying really hard to break this mental block. My hope is that by exposing myself to the games that my friends consider the best, I will start to see the potential of this platform that I have largely relegated to idle match three games and Gacha gambling. I know there are unique experiences that can only be had on a mobile phone, so I am hoping to find more of them. Now this is the point where I reach out to my readers as well. If you have any mobile games that you love and feel like are must play experiences, please drop me a line below in the comments. I will look into all of them and potentially add them to the list above. The post Seeking Mobile Experiences appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Seeking Mobile Experiences

by
One of the things that I noticed while going through my Giant Wall of Games list ™ is that during the 2020 Calendar year I pretty much played NOTHING on my phone. That isn’t entirely true, because I downloaded and tried a few things but nothing significant enough to actually log in the list. There were a handful of games that I installed and immediately uninstalled for various reasons, but in the past I had something like Dragalia Lost or Pokemon Go that was always on the list. So on a whim yesterday afternoon I put out a call to my Twitter family.
Okay friends. Since I have long considered mobile development a largely poisoned well. I figure I will crowdsource this… best mobile games available for Android that are not f2p monetization/gacha traps or match 3 games…. GO!

@Belghast
The problem I have with mobile gaming is that the discovery mechanisms seem to largely be dominated by either Gacha games or games with otherwise similarly questionable free to play mechanics. There are also a number of games that I would clump into a category of being a port of a game from another platform but that are made worse by touch screen controls. I have a number of SquareSoft mobile ports and they are an infinitely worse experience than playing the same game on pretty much any other platform. What I seem to be lacking however are the games that either wouldn’t work without a touch screen interfaces are somehow uniquely enriched by having one. Some of the constraints I am looking for are as follows.
  • Must be Android – I have zero iOS devices by design
  • Must be a Direct Purchase, One Time Unlock, or Free to Play with very optional and non-obtrusive monetization
  • Should be a gameplay experience uniquely enhanced by the touchscreen interface and not just a port trying to make up for those shortcomings
  • No Match Three Games – While I love Bejeweled, I need to move past that
I have to say I absolutely love my Twitter family because once again they came through for me with a massive list of titles to try. This mornings post is as much for my own benefit as it is for sharing these picks with the world, because I wanted a nice clean way of keeping track of it. A few of the titles that were thrown out were games that I had tried and ruled out for one reason or another, so I am dropping them from the list. The titles that are currently in the running for eventually garnering my attention are as follows.
Ultimately the above block of six games is what I chose for my very first cohort. Monument Valley is a game series that I had heard really good things about but ultimately forgot existed. You Must Build a Boat is a game that I have heard someone at some time in the past raving about it… I thought it was Kodra but it might just be a fuzzy memory of Liore when Cat Context existed. Loop gets bumped up in priority because it is was created by a mutual, so absolutely going to check that out. Eve Echos is a game that I had already installed but never actually got around to checking… so just grouping it in by default. Pathfinder Adventures because i was curious and Pixel Dungeon because also curious.
Mobile gaming is pretty much a bedtime activity for me, and last night I managed to try out one of the games before sleep ultimately claimed me. I had not really been sleeping well for a few nights so I did not make it super far. Monument Valley is gorgeous and is exactly the sort of game I am looking for. I am not exactly sure how this game works without a touch interface, and as a result it isn’t just making up for that limited toolset but exploiting it. The puzzles are interesting and change enough to feel fresh each time you move onto a new monument. I made it through five before my eyelids were too heavy to continue, but I am probably going to be playing this one for awhile until I either complete it or get distracted by some other shiny object. Since this has apparently turned into a post with just an excessive number of bullet point lists… why not add another? I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the folks who participated yesterday in throwing out game ideas. There was a flurry of them that all came in at once, and I think I have accounted for them all… but apologies if I inadvertently miss someone. Yall are awesome in my book. Essentially over the years I have developed this borderline toxic attitude that mobile gaming is by nature mechanically worse than gaming on pretty much any other platform. I am trying really hard to break this mental block. My hope is that by exposing myself to the games that my friends consider the best, I will start to see the potential of this platform that I have largely relegated to idle match three games and Gacha gambling. I know there are unique experiences that can only be had on a mobile phone, so I am hoping to find more of them. Now this is the point where I reach out to my readers as well. If you have any mobile games that you love and feel like are must play experiences, please drop me a line below in the comments. I will look into all of them and potentially add them to the list above. The post Seeking Mobile Experiences appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Wizards Unite Impressions

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Hi, I am Belghast and I am susceptible to hype… and like pretty much all of geekdom I have been playing around with Wizards Unite over the last few days since it’s release. First off… the servers were absolutely on fire when it clandestinely launched the night before its official release announcement. However by the end of the day on the 20th things seemed to be moving along normally. Niantic seems to have learned its lessons from the Pokemon Go launch and the fact that the game works at all… they seem to have planned adequately for the initial crush of users. The play experience is not unsurprising for anyone who has played either Pokemon Go or the prior Ingress. If you live in a city core you will have lots of things to do. If you live in the suburbs or god forbid rural areas… the game will be a solitary wasteland. In the above image the middle pane is what the Wizarding World looks like from my office in the heart of downtown. The last pane is what the world looks like from my front door… because apparently I live on Privet Drive where we excel at quiet and mediocrity.
The gameplay largely revolves around recovering “confoundables” or spells gone awry by some force that we have not quite figured out. The timeframe of the game appears to be set in that of the Cursed Child with Harry and Hermione taking key positions in the Ministry of Magic and our character occasionally has need of interacting with them as we are on the SOS task force. Basically we are Wizard Cops trying to protect muggles from seeing things that they should not be seeing, and also rescuing various members of the Wizarding World that have been attacked by these rogue spells. Howe we do this is by casting spells with our wand by tracing a shape on the touchpad screen. I’ve not nabbed a screenshot of this interaction but basically something along the lines of a Z or and E shape will appear on the screen and you are graded for how closely you can trace the shape. This grading appears to denote how successfully the spell was cast and how easy it is for the confoundable to resist said spell. Each time you need to cast a spell you consume something called Spell Energy… which in this game would be the equivalent of your stock of Pokeballs.
You regain by visiting the Poke Stop equivalent in this world. So far I have encountered Inns and Greenhouses, but there might be other times scattered around the world. You play a soft of mini-game but effectively it is just a roll of the dice because you seem to be assigned a random amount of energy that you are gaining. The problem is… each spell cast costs 1 energy, and in most case you get 2 or 3 at most energy back from an Inn with a 5 minute recharge timer. As a result expect to be spending a lot of time hanging out and waiting down that timer to recharge yourself, which again becomes more difficult for those in rural areas. You can of course pay the in game currency of gold to recharge your energy meter. If I remember correctly it was 100 gold for 50 energy. Like every single mobile game they purposefully make the gold system obtuse… given that the prices and the amounts you purchase never line up. Effectively recharging your energy is a little over a dollar. Inventory limits are the key challenge to most things in this game, and similar to Pokemon Go they cost around 150 gold to increase them by increments of 10.
One of the more annoying challenges that I have encountered so far is the ingredients racket. These are used to craft potions and can only be used in a specific combination. However as you wander around the world you seemingly pick them up randomly so you will almost always have stacks of one type and next to none of another type. This is only an issue because ingredients are now what the Item inventory in Pokemon Go was, and you are limited to only 200 at a given time without purchasing vault extensions. I’ve found myself in the situation of having too much of one type of ingredient and being unable to pick up the ones I actually need when I encounter them. The other problem for me personally is the Portkey game, which represent what was hatching an egg in Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is fully integrated with Google Fit and keeps track of the distance that I walk without the app having to be open. With Wizards Unite I am back to the era of needing to keep the app open at all times and drain my battery while playing. It feels like a massive step back and as such I have yet to “hatch” a single loot box to be able to tell you what exactly is located within. I am so used to not having to care about the app being open and having my watch catch my steps and direct them towards egg hatching that I will have to shift up my methodology to make this work. I hope the integrations come quickly.
As far as general game impressions… so far it just isn’t near as infectious as Pokemon Go was. With that game there was a certain amount of exploration and a sense of excitement each time I encountered a brand new type of Pokemon. Sure that excitement is diluted as you catch your 3000th pidgey just to grind experience, but even now I occasionally come across something I have never seen that quickens my pulse a bit. Wizard Cop… seems to largely just have too many dials, is too fiddly… and has a been there done that feeling. You notice in the post how I kept equating things back to Pokemon Go terms…. because most everything you encounter is effectively a reworked version of a mechanic we have already seen. The deal breaker however so far is the Energy problem. This game is only fun if you can cast spells and collect doodads in the wild. When you have no energy you have no great way of collecting it other than hanging out at a location for a very long time and spinning the same plates over and over. The act of interacting with an Inn takes way longer than that of a pokestop, making it somewhat cumbersome to hit a bunch of them in a row. The feeling of interacting with most of the things with the game just feel less optimized than that of Pokemon Go, and as a result way more time consuming. I could in the past stop in at the local QuikTrip and within a few minutes have captured all of the Pokemon on the parking lot. The equivalent took me a good fifteen minutes the other morning and I still had not gathered everything up. So far… it is interesting but I doubt it will ever reach the national obsession level that Pokemon Go did. The worst part is the fact that this is an AR game… and playing with AR enabled makes the entire experience actively worse as you have to do a fiddly motion controlled line up the stars mini-game in order to interact with anything. With AR off everything is just a straight forward capture, then again I also play with AR off in Pokemon Go so that might not be entirely damning. I am not entirely sold on the experience, but would love to hear your thoughts? Are you finding it more or at least as enjoyable as Pokemon Go? Are you also finding yourself frustrated by the little mechanics? Leave me a comment below.

Outward and Blades

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Outward and Blades

This morning I do not have a ton of great screenshots because for some reason over the weekend GeForce Experience decided to stop doing its thing.  So the majority of the time when I thought I was taking a good screenshot…  I got nothing at all which is insanely maddening given that I rely on these screenshots for this blog.  This weekend I tried a couple of new things, firstly Outward which is billed as a survival game published by Deep Silver and developed by Nine Dots Studio.  For me personally however it is something completely different.  Playing Outward reminds me of how it felt to play Everquest.  I don’t necessarily think this game was intending to be one of the many Everquest nostalgia titles out there, but in my hands it ends up being the best one so far.  I am not entirely sure what exactly throws it in this category, but a large piece of it is the fact that you have no minimap and the overworld map you do have does not show you where your character actually is at any given time.  This means you need to sort your own directions out by following the compass rose or by moving around based on landmarks.

Additionally I have been thrust into a world where I don’t quite understand the rules, and I realize this will fade over time…  but for now everything is interesting and dangerous.  I have no clue what might be around the next corner and if it will end up killing me.  Lastly the game has a system the requires you to venture back into the wild to do a manner of corpse recovery in the form of your backpack that is ultimately left behind when you die.  All of these things combine to provide a much truer experience to how Everquest felt as a brand new player than anything to date, and I am pretty certain that was not at all what this title was going for.  I think the design goal was to have an RPG rooted in the survival game tradition with extremely challenging stamina based combat that makes you choose your attacks carefully.  It succeeds at that, but I honestly don’t think I would have spent nearly as much time playing it this weekend were it not for the fact it was playing upon my memories.

In the above screenshot I remember not noticing that I had a disease for a really long time…  because it was the common cold and not the insane life drain disease that I had gotten before.  The common cold mean’t that my stamina regeneration was greatly impacted…  which also lead to me taking a death in the cave just in front of me.  Little things like that sneak up on you in this game and honestly make it feel way more cruel and brutal that any other similar game.  The story is pretty bleak so far as well given that you are effected by a blood tax due to the fact that your ancestor turned away some religions pilgrims…  that ultimately became the majority power in the setting…  things are pretty harsh.  After returning from being shipwrecked…  the townsfolk demand 150 silver within five in game days or they will repossess your house.  So you are set off on a path of either finding a way to earn that money, ignoring it and letting your house get taken…  or finding a way to do a favor for one of the locals big enough to get some debt relief.  It is a call to action, but sort of a maddening one…  that caused me to restart the game a few times until I sorted out how best to play it.

Outward and Blades

The other new game that I tried out this weekend was Elder Scrolls Blades which promised to be a mobile Elder Scrolls Experience…  which admittedly was something I had been throwing a little side eye towards since the original announcement.  I’ve played Bethesda mobile games before and was greatly concerned about what monetization methods would be built into this one.  Ultimately the choice landed on a timer based system that locks your loot behind a gate of either waiting for it to open or paying to open it immediately.  Additionally the first chest you get has a wide array of stuff that is actually useful to you including a significant weapon upgrade.  The chests that I found following that initial tutorial chest however largely included unexciting common rarity junk, that admittedly is probably useful for the games in built crafting system…  but nothing hear as exciting as getting item drops that you can equip.

Outward and Blades

The game itself feels like a really weird point and click adventure game…  with the addition of real time combat that feels awkward and non-intuitive.  My instinct is to click on the mob with my finger to swing my weapon at that body part.  Instead you have to press and hold and then release to swing your weapon.  You guard by pressing and holding on the shield icon… that isn’t on your screen all of the time and seems to only appear roughly a second after stopping attacking…  making the whole experience feel a little stilted.  The purpose of all of this appears to be to go on missions and complete objectives…  like in this case I was saving some prisoners that you can see caged in the central image of the above triptych.  Then you go back to town and use the resources that you just got to rebuild the town.  The only negative is…  this is fairly time consuming and requires something close to 20-30 minutes per iteration rather than the normal 5-10 minute loop that I expect out of mobile games.  This is definitely something you would play on your lunch break… rather than something you might pop open while waiting in line somewhere.

Outward and Blades

The other big problem that I encountered is that while I have a fairly modern phone that has feature parity with all of the current flagship models…  I apparently was ineligible for app install. If you are curious here is a supposed complete list of devices the game is available for…  which seems to be missing a ton of devices it can technically run fine on.  So when you encounter a situation like this…  you don’t really have to sit and take it or at least not if you are an android user.  Sure Google Play is the most common app store and the one in general you want to use for most purposes.  However there are a bunch out there that will let you install literally anything you want on any device you want…  whether or not it will run is a completely different challenge.  Personally I tend to favor APKPure as I have had a lot of luck with that app in the past and it has some built in patcher support similar to Google Play.  Functionally this is going to be a two part step… firstly you need to enable installing apps from unknown sources and secondly you need to download the APKPure app to your device.  After that you can install Elder Scrolls Blades on your device and log in with your Bethesda.net launcher account.  If everything worked as expected you should be able to try out Blades on any device not listed on the official list.  For me it ran perfectly fine on my ZTE Axon 7…  though admittedly it is a significant battery drain taking me from 100% to 79% before completing the first tutorial quest…  which admittedly was like 20-30 minutes worth of game play.

I will probably poke my head into the game a bit more, but I am not entirely certain if it is really for me.  I was expecting Mobile Skyrim… and what I got was a traditional mobile device game.  Once I reset those expectations I am sure I will probably enjoy the experience and add it to my before bed roster of mobile games.