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It feels a bit hypocritical to be writing this post after taking Laraan to task last time over its validity as a complete product. However, I'm going to try and justify why I think the tiny project Ophidia is a genuine and worthwhile purchase, despite its obvious limitations. This logic might get curly and take some getting used to.
There once was a time between when I got my first job, and when I actually had to start paying bills. This was a time of spending money on anything at all, without responsibilities or obligation to tie you down. It was the perfect time for feeding coins into arcade cabinets, long after the arcades had gone out of fashion and jacked up the prices.
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.
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.
