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.

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?

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.