Mobile Gaming News/Discussion

Sorry I know this isn't news but I was glancing through my email about my work's new cafeteria when something caught my eye and briefly got me excited..

Hearth.PNG
 
No I couldn't care less about that. I bring my lunch everyday to save money. But when I saw Hearthstone I was like, "Wait, what?" So basically today I learned what the ORIGINAL meaning of the word was.
 
So remember a while back Nintendo announced they were going to start doing mobile apps and most people wrote it off because they weren't going to try and cannibalize their existing portable market? Well, they dropped this last night...

 
Extra Credits posted a video about why it is that Fallout Shelter, which seems to almost be the antithesis of what hardcore gamers want with it's F2P and Play to Wait gameplay, is so popular with hardcore gamers. Worth a watch.

 
Extra Credits posted a video about why it is that Fallout Shelter, which seems to almost be the antithesis of what hardcore gamers want with it's F2P and Play to Wait gameplay, is so popular with hardcore gamers. Worth a watch.



Good analysis. While I'm sure no PvP has certainly enticed more hardcore or console gamers to try out Fallout Shelter, I suspect the "loot system" is what keeps many gamers coming back for more (it did for me, anyway). I think the video even misrepresents how easy it is and how frequently one can unlock lunchboxes in-game without paying real money. He also doesn't mention the very rare Fallout 3 characters that you can unlock or the OP weapons like the Fat Man--something FO fans would find particularly appealing. Even the rare higher-stat characters are a lot of fun to unlock for their own sake (not just because of higher stats/power) because they come with a unique costume and look.

Regarding lack of interactivity, there actually is quite a bit to do once you build out your vault to 6+ levels, with dozens of rooms and over 50 dwellers. I know it's interactivity in a management sense, but once I get to that point, I can be continuously occupied for 30-40 minutes, collecting resources, completing objectives for caps or lunchboxes, building and upgrading rooms, rotating dwellers between the production and training rooms, equipping them and selling excess gear to manage inventory, doing various things to increase morale, and of course dealing with or preparing for incidents, like Deathclaws. I actually spend more time "waiting" in traditional AAA action games that have a lot of cut scenes and loading screens.

I would actually still be putting a lot of time into Fallout Shelter if not for the fact that my entry level LG Android tablet can't seem to run the game properly once my vault gets big. I had essentially created a perfect vault with 95% happiness rating and some very rare OP weapons and characters that even Deathclaws didn't stand a chance against until I ran into the same serious lag and crashing issues I had with my first vault. A Fallout game lagging and crashing -- go figure!
 
Downwell is now available on Android. I only bring it up because I had my eye on this game and I knew that it would be a great mobile game for me but I was frustrated because it came out on iOS first and I don't have an iPhone. Now it is out for Android, and I HIGHLY recommend it, regardless of platform. It's incredibly addicting and satisfying. Here's some footage of it.



When I saw this I thought "Yes, this is a game I want to play." This is the PC version but the portable versions are the same.

Android
iOS
PC
 
Downwell is now available on Android. I only bring it up because I had my eye on this game and I knew that it would be a great mobile game for me but I was frustrated because it came out on iOS first and I don't have an iPhone. Now it is out for Android, and I HIGHLY recommend it, regardless of platform. It's incredibly addicting and satisfying. Here's some footage of it.



When I saw this I thought "Yes, this is a game I want to play." This is the PC version but the portable versions are the same.

Android
iOS
PC


Yep, I've been playing the PC version and like it quite a bit. It seems like the trick to getting good at the game and advancing further is learning how to string long combos together. These give you rewards like extra hearts or gems. I've found that the floaty style character is the easiest one to use if you are going for big combos.
 
Yeah a game like that wouldn't work with me on PC just because I prefer games on my big TV to be more longform, for lack of a better term. Mobile games are the exact opposite. I can't play games on my phone that require a commitment of more than 5 minutes. I really like endless runners or just other stuff where the game ends after a short period of time. Last year I put 17 hours into Sonic Dash and got almost every achievement in it, minus 3 of them that have insane requirements that would just result in grinding gameplay. I also really liked that even though it was F2P they didn't force you to buy anything. I think I spent maybe $5 on the game total, which is a lot less than I spent on Peggle (I'm too embarrassed to mention what I willingly spent on that.) And with Downwell I have so much fun that I have to say to myself, "Okay, you really need to stop playing because there's other things to do that are more important than this."
 
As you get better those runs will continue to get longer too. There is a final boss at the end but I haven't managed to make it out of the second world yet.
 

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