Kotaku’s Mike Fahey has decided to copy and paste a commenter’s whine-fest and has entitled it:
iPhone Games Just Aren’t Any Fun
Maybe not, but this teardown is sure going to be.
I can’t count how many demos or $1 games I’ve bought since I got an iPod Touch back in 2008. Every day I was looking for new games to try out, be it on the poorly-organized App Store charts or on mobile gaming-dedicated websites. If it was free or cheap and looked half-way decent, I’d add it to my Touch and keep it around for a rainy day, or a slow day at work.
I downloaded lots of games, but only free or cheap ones, and, as everyone knows, every other system’s best games are the ones that are free or cheap!
Puzzle games, adventure games, RPG’s, Angry Birds. They all provided minutes of fun. And then I’d delete them.
I have the attention span of a — SQUIRREL!
Download a demo. Play it for a life/round/minute. Delete.
Also, I have zero staying power, because I’m not invested in the games. Tsk, eh?
Download a $1 game. Get the point. Delete. Actually have some increment of fun playing something. Never come back to it again. Delete.
Strangely, I never thought that maybe I was downloading the wrong games.
I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m sick of it. These ‘experiences,’
I like scare-quotes. They enable me to belittle iOS games really easily.
many based off similar ‘experiences’ from other companies selling similar Apps, are lifeless. Sure, Tiny Wings is beautiful to look at, but after getting to level 6 and having the sun set, I stop caring.
Also, those classic, highly focussed arcade games, such as Robotron, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender and Missile Command? All rubbish.
Sonic the Hedgehog? Sorry, touch-screen controls for platformers can disappear along with the US economy. Hero of Sparta made me both stop caring AND curse the controls at the same time.
For some reason, I thought games specifically designed for other systems would work well on the touchscreen. In other news, my microwave is rubbish for frying eggs.
To be blunt, iPhone games aren’t fun.
To be blunt, I AM TEH HARDCORE GAMER!
When I look at my iPod Touch as a gaming device, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. It’s not a gaming device.
I’m slightly obsessed about the ‘hardcore gamer’ thing. And a little weird.
It’s a music player.
If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’.
If it was an iPhone, it would be a music player and a phone.
If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’ and ‘Phone’.
I have used it for games, or rather, tried to use it for games, for over three years now, and not once have I experienced my ‘Tetris Moment’ (Gameboy) or my ‘Lumines Moment’ (PSP) or my ‘Advance Wars Moment’ (GB Advance). That moment when all that the system is and can be is absorbed into your brain. It’s a moment of brilliance which is rare, and after three years of trying to find it amidst the mass of pointless, moronic, copycat, or just plain impossible-to-control ‘games’ on the iPhone platform, I’m done looking for it.
There are no good games for the iPhone at all.
No more wasted time trying to find a diamond in the rough.
Every other system has 100 per cent great games. Phew!
It’s beyond a needle in a haystack now. The App Store is a wasteland that I no longer feel the need to trudge through. There’s so many things wrong with it that the occasional mildly-amusing cheap game that I may be missing won’t matter.
I hate the future.
I’m going to make a prediction: games on the App Store will suffer their own market collapse at some point in the next five years.
PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!
Be it through lack of innovation or consumer indifference, the store will cease to be the money-printer it is right now.
PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!
How many times can people pay $1 for a game they’ve already downloaded fifty times under a different title?
No other games company and system ever recycles IP.
How many in-game lives must be lost to horrible touch-controls that can only be rectified by actual buttons?
I don’t understand multitouch, nor how to avoid games with rubbish virtual controls.
How many minutes must be wasted downloading and installing the next mini-game, only to delete it minutes later because you’ve seen all there is to see?
The Civilisation series is rubbish—there’s just this guy, standing on a field, surrounded by inky blackness. I DELETED IT RIGHT AWAY.
My time is more valuable than that.
Yet not valuable enough that I can’t spend some time writing a poorly thought-out rant about iOS gaming.
I’m not against indie games, or even spirited re-imaginations of existing games
Unless they’re on the iPhone.
but I am against the devaluation of games as fun.
Because if you ignore the thousands of fun iOS games with plenty of depth, there are no fun iOS games with plenty of depth.
The iPhone is a great device (when people don’t drive with it), and kudos to Apple for innovating in a space that had become stagnant with boring cell handsets, but games shall no longer grace my iPod Touch, or my iPhone if I ever get one.
I’m a gamer. I play real games. On real systems.
REAL MEN USE BUTTONS! AND PLASTIC CARTRIDGES! AND PAY OVER THE ODDS FOR BOTH!