Nintendo and Going Mobile

It was a short line in my previous post, but I mentioned briefly that "mobile gaming" was dead before it started.

rip in peace

I don't mean to imply that it's not a money maker or not something that businesses can use to trick young, distracted children and middle aged people looking for time to kill into spending anywhere from 1 to 20 to hundreds of dollars on immaterial, fake currencies for games they will quit playing in less than a month (usually a week), but as a concept of being a viable method of actual gaming, it fails. It's just absolutely the worst. Anyone who praises the successes of mobile gaming isn't talking about how good the games are and how much fun people have playing them, but their monetary success or large "player base" (if we want to call it that).

So, sure, we can say mobile gaming is "successful" in the same way that McDonald's is successful - making absolute garbage that appeals to a large number of very wide and diverse audiences. But we are hesitant to call Candy Crush "gaming" in the same way that we are hesitant to call McDonald's "food."

McDonald's shipment preparing for delivery to the store

Even I play mobile games here and there. I have written about them before, but I've also written about how they are often... unsatisfying. They leave you feeling like you've almost been cheated, like you didn't get quite what you were expecting from the experience. Kind of like McDonald's.

So what does any of this have to do with the post title? Well, I can go ahead and assume we've all heard about Pokemon Go, the new mobile game where you go out into the actual world and catch pokemon which have been superimposed onto the landscape of that actual world. There are other things that happen too. Frankly, I only know the basics because I don't actually play it, but that's okay since this article isn't about Pokemon Go, but rather about this concept of mobile gaming and how it relates to Nintendo.

A More or Less Wonderful Life

One of my favorite Harvest Moon games, and favorite games in general, was A Wonderful Life on Gamecube. It was also one of my mom's favorite games.

it's actually one of the most different games in the franchise, too

My mom started dabbling in video games right before I had become a teenager. The first kinds of games she played were simulation games, typically a lot of stuff with tycoon at the end, The Sims being the game she ultimately binged the hardest on when first starting out.

Caution: Animal Crossing

I recently got back into Animal Crossing: New Leaf. It was sort of an accident. I've been playing MH4U, which is basically the opposite of AC, so I'm not sure what happened.

monster hunting

butterfly hunting

If you've never played Animal Crossing, the wiki page sums the game series up pretty well...

Animal Crossing is a community simulation video game series developed and published by Nintendo, in which the human player lives in a village inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, carrying out various activities.

Yeah... a real action packed game.

AC:NL was released in 2013, which is when I got it, and I was super happy with it, especially considering I actually kinda really disliked the AC that was released for the Wii. I hadn't played it since forever, so I was hesitant to even start up the game again considering your town decays while you don't play. However, when I started it up, my town was missing entirely. My save file was gone. Well, easy way out I suppose - so I started a new town.

Mislead By Remakes

I get excited about remakes, then subsequently disappointed. To me, an upcoming remake is a chance to play a game that I liked on a newer system with updated graphics. I don't know why it took me so long to realize how big of a lie that is.

none of this applies to pokemon games
they are all the same game remade forever
and that is totally okay

Remakes change the original game. Whether it's for better or for worse is up to the player, but when a company remakes a game, they change things about it. That's part of the whole idea of a remake. Clearly, I'm a little slow on the uptake, because I've only just realized it after playing several remakes over the years.

why isn't this wooooooorkiiiiing

I would be more than happy to pay 40 bucks to play the exact same game on a newer system. I guess game companies don't think that's a great idea, and I mean I guess I can see why, so I guess that's just me.

Graphics and You

Giving a game a bad review or saying that a game is bad because of its graphics is an easy way to get laughed at by a lot of gamers.

the enlightened opinions of random internet users

Graphics matter - but not the way some people tend to think. It's not important how stellar the graphics are, it's not important if the graphics look "real", but rather the way the graphics fit into the atmosphere and the environment matters.

Minecraft has made hundreds of million of dollars with very low quality graphics, and no one has stopped playing the classics due to the higher quality graphics available in more recent games. Don't get me wrong, you can judge graphics all you'd like, and stellar graphics really do enhance a game's experience, but here's the thing:

Gameplay and graphics are mutually exclusive.