Mobile games in general are garbage. Considering the number of games, you could just emulate console games for the rest of your life and in doing so only play games that were built as games, not exploitation machines.
It feels like there was a sweet spot in between the arcade era (where gameplay was tailored to get your quarters) and the mobile era (where gameplay is tailored to get microtransactions), where game designers saw the most success by providing a complete high‐quality experience in a single purchase.
There have been exploitative home console games and non‐exploitative arcade games and mobile games, but to me the overall opposite pattern seems to hold true. Then again, perhaps I’m being blinded by nostalgia for the home console games of my childhood!
I actually think a ton of games from the "16-bit" era up to the first generation to heavily feature online services and game downloads (PS3/Xbox360/Wii—yeah, yeah, I know even the NES had a game download system in Japan, the Dreamcast had a modem, and so on, but you know what I mean) are still damn good, and my nostalgia consoles are the Magnavox Odyssey2 (I'd not... suggest any of those games to a modern gamer without the benefit of nostalgia) and the NES (I'd advance, IDK, maybe ten or fifteen total games on there as still worth playing for sheer fun reasons, not due to historical importance or whatever, despite personally loving perhaps a hundred of them).
Like, Super Metroid is just fucking great. Timeless. That goes for a lot of those games from the early 90s through early 2000s. Symphony of the Night? A masterpiece and still absolutely worth playing. Some of the Final Fantasy games? The series has veered into a different genre, so it's hard to compare those with earlier entries, but mid-period FF games are totally on par with or better than many trad JRPG-style games still coming out. Chrono Trigger? Still excellent. Most of the Gamecube-era Nintendo multiplayer games are about as much fun as their modern versions, still. Some fighting games? Mid-period entries in those series are often better than the newer ones. And so on.
Most of those I didn't play back in the day, so I don't think nostalgia's blinding me.
Theoretically plausible for an American developer, but it’s worth pointing out that in that era (and maybe still today) video game rental was illegal in Japan.
I think that's the reason for the quality of GBA games - at that time the industry already had lots of knowledge on how to create fun experiences and the hardware was capable of providing nice simple 2d graphics
> you could just emulate console games for the rest of your life and in doing so only play games that were built as games, not exploitation machines.
And if you run out of console games to emulate, there is a thriving rom hack community that has created some truly astonishing games (New Super Mario World 2: Around the World, Hyper Metroid, etc.)
Once you get Nethack/Slashem, text adventures and some who-knows-ware licensed games such as Daikatana for Game Boy Color and patched Chinese bootlegs such as Resident Evil and FFVII for the NES, most modern games feel like overpriced propietary crap.
Some arcade games were much worse than others, some of them were basically on a timer, draining your health the entire time so no matter how well you played you'd have to keep dropping quarters in to continue. There were also games that outright cheated in terms of difficulty to extract more money from players. I avoided those kinds of games, but some kids were hooked on them.
The difference is that even the worst arcade games were only a problem for the limited time you spent in the arcade. They weren't sitting in your pocket 24/7 sending you notifications begging you to get back to the game or leaving constant threats that you're missing out on something. Arcade games had only a single currency, quarters or tokens, and those could be freely exchanged and never expired. You didn't need 30 tokens to play, while the arcade would only sell you tokens in a non-refundable pack of 50, but that sort of scam is commonplace in mobile titles. The arcade games weren't collecting massive amounts of your personal data and selling it to data brokers either.
Mobile games are so much more abusive than even the most exploitative arcade games were and people weren't happy about constantly plugging quarters into the arcade games either! That's a large part of why the console market took off. Sadly, it seems like we're coming full circle and even major console titles now sometimes look (and act) like shitty free to play mobile games.
There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
While this doesn't stop me from picking up new stuff occasionally, I have used this fact to crowbar myself off the content treadmill. Why look forward to the movie coming out in six months when my movie backlog is already as tall as I am? Why play these addiction-based mobile games when I've got enough mobile games that don't do that?
Granted, in the case of mobile games, one is really reduced to filtering through the pile to find one that doesn't work this way, but on a moment-by-moment basis, you don't need a thousand good choices... you just need the one. My phone isn't loaded down with games, but the Slay the Spire that is on it, has zero microtransactions, and basically has the same gacha mechanics embedded into it even if you need that sort of thing, is pretty sufficient for most times I've been reaching for my phone lately.
There is a local arcade I've been to a few times, but it's a price to buy in and everything inside is free play after that, so you don't have to worry about the arcade mechanics draining your wallet either.
> There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
This is why doom & gloom reactions about anything that might slow media publishing don't make any sense to me. I'd have to be insanely dedicated to make it through the backlog of very-likely-to-be-good stuff I want to experience for basically any medium, just of what's already been published/recorded/whatever. Like, tens-of-hours-per-week dedicated, for decades, just to make a single pass over all of it. "We can't reform copyright, what if novels stop being written and movies stop being made!" Well... it'd harm my quality of life basically not at all, so, that just doesn't seem like a huge problem to me (putting aside that a huge amount of writing is free anyway, and has a large audience—see: fan fiction).
Maybe I'd finally get through my list of pre-WWII films I want to watch, at least, before kicking the bucket. Catch up on the titles from the first few thousand years of the written word that are still on my to-read list. Big deal if very little more is published, it'd be impossible to run out of great material as it is.
It's even true for the young medium of video games! I'm still likely gonna have probably-good games on my to-play pile that were already published by today in 2023 if I live until 2070, even if zero more games are published starting this second. "What if this reform means less stuff gets published?" God, I just do not care. Hell, if a reform stops most new publishing but makes older stuff cheaper and more widely available, it might be a win for me, overall. Running out of content to "consume" is a complete non-issue regardless of what happens to those industries in the future. There are several lifetimes worth of good-to-great content already.
