Viewing entries tagged
mobile
I always think it must be difficult to carve out a visual identity for a game development studio, as it kind of puts the cart before the horse in a lot of ways. After all not every game will fit into the same style guide, unless their scope remains limited as well. Is it worth giving up a little bit of depth to retain a strong identity? I'm still not sold either way.
It never ceases to amaze me that mobile gaming is often more popular than any other platform these days. I guess I might just be behind the times, but using my phone for playing games always seemed a bit pointless. The combination between awful touch controls and exploitative micro-transaction models has kept me far from mobile games for a long time.
It never ceases to amaze me just how many terrible ports are made of mobile games onto other systems. There are so many aspects of mobile design that differ immensely from desktop or console requirements, which rarely get adapted along with a port. Every now and then though, a game keeps it simple and gets it right.
As time goes on, the difference between PC and console hardware has grown smaller and smaller. While technologies continue to improve and iterate, they lower in cost and general accessibility. I think it's fair to say that even though PC technologies will always surpass the locked-down console capabilities, it's becoming much more difficult to find a noticeable difference in the quality of games made for those systems.
The world of mobile ports to other platforms is often fraught with bad controls, poor optimisation, and a long list of other complaints that make them barely worth considering. Often it's because the process adds a bunch of clunky patches in an effort to make it work, while ultimately distilling out the very thing that made it fun in the first place.
When I started writing these posts about games, I knew I'd be looking at a bunch of older titles that may not be all that relevant anymore. This was never meant to be a blog about the cutting edge new releases, but I didn't think I'd be writing about a game so close to the release of its sequel. I almost figured I'd wait until I'd played the next version, but this game is so damn good, I couldn't help myself.
Seems I've been playing a few mobile ports lately, which could reveal an improvement of mobile games, or perhaps a better understanding of how to port mobile games to PC. A while ago it seemed like every mobile port was guaranteed to be garbage, but it's hard to deny that developers have learned from past mistakes and there are some cool titles available if you look hard enough.
I'll probably give it a post eventually, but one of my favourite games of all time is The Tiny Bang Story. It's a simple little game that mixes solving puzzles with finding hidden objects, but it's all about the presentation. In a game with such simple gameplay, there's loads of room for beautiful art and music to tie the experience together and The Tiny Bang Story does this without ever uttering a word of dialogue, written or otherwise.
