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.

Bad Mobile Land

I've said before that I like mobile games, but I feel like they will be forever jammed into their awful, freemium, pay to win, ad-riddled format due to their nature. No other "platform," if you'd call it that, is as saturated in 'in-game purchases' as mobile games. It's understandable, since they offer a different experience and mostly target a completely different audience. They don't have to worry about creating games that will convince you to buy a smart phone because basically everyone under 40 already has one - they just have to throw games at people until one sticks.

and some are unfortunately way too sticky

It was undeniably uncomfortable to hear about major gaming companies planning to release more games on mobile. When we're talking about mobile games, it is entirely reasonable to assume it will be "Free*" with more in-app purchases than you can handle. Nintendo released two free to download Pokemon games in their store for the 3DS that follow the same model, it's not unreasonable to assume their mobile games will do the same thing.

pokemon trozei- I mean, shuffle

They aren't going to be making mobile games so that they can break out of the stereotypical freemium game styles and revolutionize what we know about mobile gaming, no, they're making them to take advantage of that model. If it wasn't profitable, people wouldn't be doing it en masse as they are.

It doesn't help when you realize that they are putting less resources into making actual games in order to chase this freemium mobile gaming model. A browse around your local app store tends to come up with nothing but sorrow and despair. It makes the entire aspect of a legitimate mobile gaming format seem hopeless.

But amidst all the pay to win, wait ten days for your action to complete, 'any purchase will remove all ads' games, there are a couple gems. I found one such gem a few days ago.

Jungles, Shipyards, and Orcs Oh My

So 6.2 came out yesterday. This was me, today, on Wednesday.

zeroed in on the druid changes

Yesterday, I went on a day trip and played MH4U, forgetting there was a huge patch. So, I dove in today.

I updated my addons, - except for Master Plan since it wasn't updated and doesn't work and my life is in shambles - half assed some of my garrison chores, and built a shipyard. I'm killing orcs in Tanaan Jungle, and vaguely remembering that there was something about being able to fly.

pigeons?

I didn't read up a lot on the new patch. Honestly, I haven't been keeping up to date with what's coming in and going out in patches for awhile. This is the biggest patch of Warlords so far, and here is an exhaustive list of what I knew about it before today:

• A meta-achievement to grant flying but apparently not yet or something
• Timewalking and relevant weekends (which I wrote about)
• Tanaan Jungle, supposedly kinda like Timeless Isle
• New raid instance
• Shipyards are a thing

Funnily enough, I've really been looking forward to 6.2. Not for anything in particular really, since I haven't been paying that much attention, but for a dive into some (hopefully) exciting new content.

Nostalgia Explained

In my post about timewalking, I touched on how revamping old dungeons and 'updating' them for current content was one of the ways Blizzard has tried to accommodate people who want to revisit some of their favorite old dungeons. I also mentioned that I'm really not a fan of this method.

pictured: not me

Now, I understand the arguments in favor of revamping dungeons. One big one is the stories in them are outdated and they seem irrelevant. Why wouldn't the Gilnean traitors see Shadowfang Keep and say "that would make a good base of operations"? It makes sense that Scholomance would have changed over the last so many years since we first visited it, the school must be getting funding from somewhere. It makes sense that Warlord Zaela would commandeer UBRS and use it as a stakeout point for her planned invasion of alliance cities. Wouldn't it make sense that the old threats within them have been successfully neutralized? Why wouldn't big baddies see these strategically placed structures as a cool place to go start a new cult of evildoers?

But my gut says "Now why would you go and do something like that? Didn't you see the sign that said 'DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON!'?"

How will we finish testing with the self-destruct mechanism active?

You Can Be Bad at Playing a Video Game

I recently saw a joke by a comedian, Dara O Briain. It was about video games, and it was pretty funny on the surface.

"Video games do a thing that no other industry does. You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But, you can be bad at playing a video game - and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game. No other art form does this."

The joke, clip here, continues, expressing how absurd it would be for a book or an album to test your abilities before allowing you to continue.

The exposition to his joke was pretty funny, but after about the 50 second mark where he starts tying the joke into a real life experience with video games, it wasn't funny anymore.

Now, now, I wasn't offended or insulted by his story or his outlook on video games, it just... wasn't funny. I wasn't the audience of that joke. In the rest of the clip what I saw was an older man who was complaining about how weird video games are because he's not good at playing them.

and what's the deal with airline food?

Game Evolution - Why The Game Changes

World of Warcraft has changed dramatically over the course of its life. We all know that the game does change - duh, it's not going to not change. We joke about playing "the same game" for ten years, but really, no one is going to play the same game for so long. The game has to change for people to keep playing it. You'll go back to a game you liked and play it again, but not for, say, six hundred total days worth of time. For a game to accumulate that kind of loyalty, it has to keep its playerbase entertained and happy.

A more curious question is why does the game change the way that it does? What factors influence the designers' decisions on how to change the game?

well...

This subject is misleadingly complex. There's no shortage of people claiming they know exactly what would fix the game, but that actually attributes to part of the problem.

We all know the game has to change, that the driving factor in changing it is to keep people playing, and that the changes made are intended to keep people playing and hopefully increase the amount of people playing it. Anything else would be nonsensical.

What's complicated about that? Well...

playerbase vs. blizzard

Banished

Banished is a city builder designed by Shining Rock Software, which misleadingly is just one stellar dude, Luke Hodorowicz. It was released on February 18th in 2014, but it's still being tweaked and updated regularly. It's just now starting to have player-created mod content.

I got the game the day after it was released, played it for several days straight, and frequently go back to it. This is one of my favorite games, but some people give it flak for a couple reasons. This post is not really a review (I am not even really a reviewer, so get that out of your head), but rather me expressing my (correct) opinions on some controversial gameplay and design within Banished.

The game has almost zero plot so you couldn't really say there are any spoilers, though gameplay and mechanics will be discussed within this post.

The Secrets of Backpedaling

If I could pick any hot topic to get people into a kerfuffle over, the debate about how to set up your keybindings may be my favorite.

Now, everyone has their opinion about this - you kind of have to. You can't really play WoW without being confronted at some point by the facts that 1. you can manually adjust your keybindings however you want and 2. someone will always vehemently disagree with you about how you've chosen to do so.

Whether you move with your mouse or keyboard, whether you click or use keybindings - regardless of your methods or results, someone out there will always decide that your opinions are questionable.

ft. - your opinions

You have two main extremes to this debate - the steadfast clicker who swears up and down that clicking on spells and abilities, even as a healer, is just as effective as using keybindings or mouseover macros - and the keybinding activist who unbinds their turn and backward keys on their keyboard and considers non-mouse-movers to be lesser beings.

Well, this post isn't about my opinion and how it's totally, definitely the correct opinion, but it's just here to shed a little light on a behavior that completely boggles me - completely unbinding your backward key.

Idle Gaming - When You're Too Lazy to Actually Game

unrealistic number of cookies

Ah, idle games. The very phrase elicits feelings of... staring vacantly at numbers. Endlessly clicking on things to earn resources to build and buy more things to get more resources to build or buy other things that give you more or maybe different resources to use to buy and build... other things and, sometimes, you... don't really know why you're playing.

Currently, the most famous of these games is probably cookie clicker. It's probably also the best example of one of the addictive power of these games. If you've ever been sucked in by an idle game, then you already know what I mean. The thing about most games like these is there really isn't... a point.

The goal feels like it's to accumulate more resources and build all the things to completion, but some games have no end. Some games add incentives to restart your game, putting you spiraling into an infinite loop of cookies or cabbages or what have you. Some of them do end, but to be honest, the end is always disappointing.

Idle games have been around for quite a long time - I remember playing one when I was still in middle school, in the early 2000s, before the term "idle game" was even coined. Now, there are a ton of them, sometimes their addictive powers being used for evil, exploiting the 'idle' aspect of them to riddle the games with microtransactions...

...while some people genuinely make great idle games for entertainment.

Qualifications: World of Warcraft Player

Video games are pretty often considered to be a "waste of time." Yes, excessive video game playing isn't the best, but overdoing anything isn't usually a fantastic idea. Fruit is great for you, but if you eat too much, you can get stomach ulcers because of the acidity.

but pineapple kicks ass

It's pretty undeniable that video games have distinct, quantifiable benefits. Of course, the benefits depends on what kind of game you're talking about. Simulation builder and construction games can teach you about resource management, risk vs. reward, and the value of preparation and planning. Even simple puzzle games have shown to greatly offset, or even prevent, the development and onset of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. There are war games purposefully and specifically used to help train soldiers in a safe, simulated enviornment. And, well, World of Warcraft can actually teach you a ton about the real world...

Updated Character Models Aren't Enough

Hold up! Let me explain -

I thought the new models were pretty good

In Warlords of Draenor we're getting new character models. It's something that Blizzard had been asked about countless times and something a majority of people would say is an overdue change for a ten year old game. The new character models have encountered quite a few problems in their development, including mountains of both positive and negative feedback by the players.

Blizzard was in a damned if they do damned if they don't situation - for more than one problem. Blizzard would either have had to keep their old models and their old graphics and had to deal with more and more people questioning why they aren't updating them, or start updating everything - including the player models, which then creates its own slew of problems.

Of course, they opted to improve their graphics. They began adding updated, HD models for important lore characters, for creatures, for armor, the environment - basically everything. They were really starting to up the ante on their graphics for the game, something that they had gotten a lot of flak for. The graphics of World of Warcraft is a discussion in itself, but as we see new MMOs and new games come out with absolutely stunning, smooth graphics and textures - it was just a matter of time until Blizzard put emphasis on improving WoW's graphics situation.