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.

Monster Hunter Strikes Again

Forgive me, as I've only just been getting back into WoW (and totally planned to write about it some more I swear), but MHG is coming out this Friday!

The Monster Hunter games are excellent and you should play them. I feel like perhaps one of the reasons more people don't play them is that they're exclusively console games, and lately have been exclusively Nintendo 3DS games. This is not an acceptable reason to not play them, since Nintendo handhelds are basically the only non-PC type of game system that anyone should really bother having anyway.

The Story This Season

I'm a huge fan of Harvest Moon and similar farming 'simulation/role playing' games. My favorite was A Wonderful Life on the Gamecube, a close second would be Runefactory 4 for the 3DS. Story of Seasons is a newer release from Marvelous/XSEED for the 3DS - Natsume owns the 'Harvest Moon' name, so they were unable to run with that trademark and took a new turn. About a month after Story of Seasons came out, I got it and... well... I kind of don't like it.

yeah yeah go ahead and be upset

Now, I'm pretty alone here - and it really bothers me that I don't like it. I want to like it. The graphics are fine, the mechanics are fine, they have all the same attributes that previous games had, and a bunch of cool new stuff! Well, it would be cool I guess, if I could actually experience it.

Please note, tons of plot and gameplay will be revealed in this post, i.e. spoilers.

Cell Phones and Gaming

I recently got a new smartphone. I asked for something decent that I could take good pictures with (I did not mention outright to the employee that it was to take pictures of my cats) and I took the first thing he showed me because it was free with a 100 dollar mail in rebate, was clearly leagues ahead of my old phone, and seemed fine from the 5 minutes I fiddled with it.

Turned out it was actually a pretty powerful phone with 2GB of ram. So, naturally, now that I had a powerful electronic device intended to be used to communicate with other people, I started looking for games to play on it to avoid communicating with people.

I've written before about idle games, and how I actually like them, and had previously been looking at some sort of dragon game that cookie clicker was advertising, but it was not available on the web.

obviously I want to play this

It was the first game I downloaded on my new phone. It follows the same general guidelines as cookie clicker - click/tap on the egg/gem for points, buy things that give you auto-points, so you can get points faster and buy better things that give you more points even faster so you can buy better things that give you more points... etc. The only thing is, because it was a cell phone game, it had an obligatory 'pay to win' item you can purchase with real money. Of course it did.

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.

AFK Killing Monsters

hunting ft. monsters

I didn't post yesterday - I didn't even turn on my computer - because I was binging on MH4U. It just came out for 3DS a few days ago in the US.

Monster Hunter is a game where you fight... monsters. After the first few quests, which are just simple introductory fluff, you fight increasingly tougher monsters as you progress through the storyline.

MH is also known for its online grouping, where you team up with up to four people to fight monsters together. Fighting monsters together is basically the staple of any online community.
While playing online, or solo but just doing the same quests, you can raise your hunter rank and fight more and stronger monsters.

Obviously, being an online community, people will judge you based on your hunter rank and other people will whine because they're being judged by their hunter rank. Personally, I like playing through the storyline. Not only is it incredibly advantageous to go through the storyline, since only single player mode unlocks all the cool stuff, but the story telling is good.

There are just a slight few mild spoilers up ahead, so go away if you plan on playing the game and want to be surprised by what kinds of things you unlock during the single player storyline.

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.