The frustrating potential of mobile gaming

In-app purchases, cheap cash-in microtransaction farming games, Candy Crush Saga, touch screen controls. The list of frustrations that I have with mobile phone gaming is a long, aggravating one. But do I think that mobile gaming will never be a legitimate platform? Controversially, I would say no. Mobile gaming has the potential to be a fully-featured and satisfying game platform in the future.

This may shock some of the more ‘hardcore’ gamers out there, many of whom will have looked upon the mobile gaming landscape with scorn and mockery. The word ‘casual’ is thrown around a lot when discussing mobile gaming. There is a kind of stigma in the topic where gamers feel that some genres are more legitimate pursuits than others. In terms of simple, ‘time waster’ games that are only made to entertain during short commutes, perhaps this criticism is somewhat valid. However, when talking about mobile gaming’s potential, there is certainly a possibility of more worthwhile gaming pursuits. 

In terms of raw power, the mobile phone market is more capable than it’s given credit for. Razer, a brand famous for PC gaming products, have even found value in the mobile gaming market. The Razer Phone carries 8GB of RAM on top of a state-of-the-art Snapdragon processor that matches rival flagship brands. The result is a mobile powerhouse that can output 120Hz gameplay, a standard not to be sniffed at by any means. 

Even the games themselves are quickly starting to catch up; the surreal experience of playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on a mobile phone is testament to that fact. The humble smartphone is more than capable of handling complex 3D gameplay and graphics. The presence of Minecraft, Don’t Starve, and a growing indie market show that there is more than just Candy Crush available. With mobile’s signature portability, versatility and multi-tasking capabilities, it’s arguable that the platform could even become a preferred medium for the right kind of gamers if the technology is there. The Nintendo Switch is evidence of the fact that there is a desire to play fully featured, low-compromise games in a portable form, and undoubtedly it won’t be long at all until mobile processors come within grasping distance of Nintendo’s highly-successful machine. 

So what are the problems with mobile gaming? Firstly, it has to be said that those gamers who scoff at Candy Crush have a point. The install base of lifestyle users, as well as the barriers of simplistic touch-screen controls, make it difficult to see any real, quality entries in the smartphone space. Why would anybody create a relatively high-price, complex and rewarding phone game? It will make practically nothing in the face of massive, saturated competition that churns out exploitative low-price, free-to-play games that can capture the lifestyle market easily. Gamers on mobile are less tolerant of any game that has a price tag of more than a couple of pounds, so there is a massive culture change required from gamers on mobile expecting everything for free.

On top of that, touch screen controls just suck. To relate back to San Andreas, attempting to play the game on anything but a controller is an infuriating, painful experience. There is no kind of tactile feedback to help your hands know what to do and all you can do is vaguely rub the screen hoping it can catch some semblance of what you want to do. Not only that, but this control scheme means there are great finger-sized areas of screen being entirely blocked out from view. To play any kind of game that’s more complex than swiping at fruit, a controller is most definitely the way forward.

What mobile gaming needs is a unifying standard of controller. Much like how the Xbox 360 wired controller for Windows became the de-facto controller mapping for games on PC that needed joypads over keyboards, there needs to be a brand or product on mobile that universally becomes adopted and imitated as ‘the’ standard for controller maps. If we can decide on how to control the games, then we can start to see more complex games on the market as gamers become adaptable to the playstyles of mobile. I feel that we’re almost there, in fact, as gamepads on mobile start to look to console controllers for inspiration. My own controller for mobile is actually a modified 360 gamepad with a frame for attaching the phone, which is connected to the joypad by Bluetooth. The result is a much more satisfying experience than touch-screen controls, and it works with a wide variety of apps.

Ultimately, the key to solving the problem with the mobile market’s saturation of terrible games is simpler in theory than it is in practice. It requires a wider adoption by more core gamers, and voting by our wallets. If it is proven that there is a profitable market for more satisfying, premium games on mobile, then you can be guaranteed that there will be development. If there is one area where mobile excels it is in quickly and dramatically adopting a profitable idea. 

Until this happens though, gamers will continue to view the mobile market with scorn and righteous mockery, which makes the mobile market one of the more frustrating problems facing gamers today. Unfortunately with its widespread adoption by non-gaming users, its Candy Crush saturation, and its lack of a unified control scheme, it is difficult to see mobile gaming, for all its great potential, become the legitimate and vastly enjoyable platform that I know it can be. But solve those problems, and mobile gaming stands a real chance of being a lovable gaming platform, where the real benefits of smartphones in their growing power and versatility can shine through in a gaming context.

Gaming in 2017: A Review

Given that the year is ending, many websites will be dishing out their awards ceremonies and naming their favourite games in any genre. There will be much debate about the ‘Game of the Year’ with shoe-in favourites such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Call of Duty WW2 duking it out over critics’ favour.

I don’t want to do such an awards ceremony, but now is a great time to reflect on some of the lessons we’ve learned through the year. This was the year we saw controversies over loot-boxes, review scoring and the release of a new console. It is a very interesting time to be a gamer. 

2017’s gaming year truly got started with Resident Evil 7. Its survival gameplay was sublime and subtle, a much more understated affair than previous titles in the series and it all worked to the game’s benefit. As fans had been demanding, for the first time in many years we had authentic and atmospheric horror that brought Resident Evil back into the fold as one of the premier titles in its genre. It both pulled the series back and pushed it forward in the exact ways that it needed, critically turning around a franchise much in need of rejuvenation.

 It wasn’t long after this that we saw the release of the Nintendo Switch. As a concept, the console showed a lot of promise; the actual realisation of gaming-on-the-go as many gamers envisioned from the moment they picked up a Game Boy. This proved to be a major draw for customers as well, turning Nintendo into a name synonymous with success once again and putting an end to the dark days of the Wii U.

Of course, when the Switch came out, it was almost overshadowed by one of its own games: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a masterwork of open world design, that brought the Zelda Promise to fruition. For the first time, gamers held in their hands a true adventure title worthy of the original’s ambition, and despite a few rainy cliffsides, many gamers fell in love with the title.

Controversy surrounded this game’s review scoring thanks to Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition. While I disagreed with his review on a few points, his take on Breath of the Wild, giving it a ‘mere’ 7/10 score resulted in a major backlash from die-hard Zelda fans. This backlash showed an uglier side to the gaming community. It was around this time that ‘meta-bombing’ became a word in gaming vocabulary, referring to the practice of overwhelming a game’s page on Metacritic with negative user reviews. These were just two of many strange, toxic gamer trends that occurred in 2017.

By the time summer had arrived, however, gaming was back in full swing. The release of Crash N’Sane Trilogy brought a sudden mainstream attention on early 3D mascot platformers. Crash was a game with a lot of nostalgic goodwill and this surely helped the PlayStation brand, practically sealing the deal for future HD re-releases. The game’s difficulty was also a popular talking point: who doesn’t remember the cringe-worthy ‘it’s just like Dark Souls!’ type reviews gamers were exposed to at that time? It was discussed how central difficulty was to a game’s overall experience, and the summer of 2017 certainly had gamers everywhere screaming ‘f*ck the High Road!’

As we drew into autumn and winter and big blockbuster releases came out, gaming started to show a little fatigue in the mainstream space. While fan-favourite indie titles such as Oxygen Not Included certainly entertained, lots of gamers were placing their attention on other, more nefarious industry trends. 

This was the time of the Loot Box. With the release of Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, we saw the beginnings of a coming tsunami of Loot Box controversy. Gamers bemoaned the end-game, with good reason; it was purely set up to be a slog to encourage gamers to buy microtransactions, in the form of Loot Boxes.

What came after this was a colossal breakdown in mainstream gaming. While Call of Duty: WW2 released to critical acclaim, attention turned to Star Wars Battlefront 2. The game itself was meant to be an apology for EA’s first crack at the series, which many gamers deemed to be a cynical cash-grab. However, thanks to terrible consumer practices, Battlefront 2 became the symbol of everything wrong in the industry.

There was a massive backlash to the Loot Box practice in Battlefront 2, such that EA’s stock drastically fell. Even the Disney corporation themselves had to step in to help pick up the pieces.

The Loot Box system, as seen in Shadow of War and Overwatch before now, was a gambling-based microtransaction economy where players paid not for items, but for a chance to receive an item they may want (most of the time they would get junk). This was totally exploitative, if not gambling. Indeed, a few courts even stepped in with their own rulings that yes, Loot Boxes were gambling and should be regulated as such. 

Many would see this as a bad time for gamers. On the other hand, this controversy represents the power of gamers as a consumer group. It is amazing that after years of exploitation by big players entering a now-mainstream industry, gamers still have power to change things for the better. EA were forced to swiftly backtrack and their stock was badly damaged for this mis-step. This proved that gamers don’t have to silently stand by and watch the gaming industry go downhill; they can instead step in and kick-ass. If anything, Lootgate represents that the gaming community can still change the course of where videogames are going.

2017 was a strange year with a lot of major news items. My review of the year isn’t exhaustive by any means; I can’t go through all the year’s events and cover it all in the detail it deserves. I left out the release of the Xbox One X and Cuphead, for example. 

But I think that as far as the lessons we have learned from this last year, I can say that 2017 has been most informative; franchises can be re-thought with success, gaming’s community still has major toxicity issues to work out, older series can be brought back to life with a triumphant bang, and gamers aren’t going to just sit down and take bad consumer practices.

2018 will be an interesting year. I’m looking forward to seeing announcements on some big franchises. It may be too soon, but I hope to see the beginnings of a new Halo, and hopefully an actual sequel to some game franchises that are stagnating (a new Elder Scrolls? Or even a new Grand Theft Auto announcement?). 

In more concrete terms, however, what I am most looking forward to next year is the full release of Subnautica. In its current state, the game is well worth playing and is an extremely interesting take on the survival genre, with some beautiful underwater scenery to boot. If it gets a proper performance boost and a full release, I will be very happy.

Thank you for reading my blog over this past year, and I hope you will have a wonderful rest of 2017 and an even better 2018!

-Stev3 L

Sonic Forces Review

Sonic Forces is a mixed-bag of a game that suffers from major problems in plot, gameplay, dialogue and voice acting, not to mention the pacing of the game itself. Coming in at just over 3 hours of gameplay, the game doesn’t offer a great value proposition for players, nor does it offer enough enjoyable Sonic gameplay to make up for its £34.99 Steam price tag. Amidst news of serious PC port problems, the fact that the game itself is so mediocre will come as little comfort to any Sonic fan such that the inclusion of the Avatar character is merely a band-aid on a gaping wound.

I want, badly, to love Sonic Forces. There is just enough charm in its presentation; its graphics being out of this world, along with many amusing call-backs and references to games gone past, that I wish that the game itself was a more fulfilling experience. But it’s hard to love a game that is just so crushingly mediocre, with so many bad-decisions souring every step forward that the game attempts to make.

The storyline of Sonic Forces was always going to be a point of contention and mixed reviews; Sonic the Hedgehog is never known for his involved plots, but the oft-cringeworthy story on show here is seriously scraping the bottom of the barrel. The plot details a world where Sonic was defeated, allowing Eggman to all but take over the world. This seems interesting at first, but there are so many plot mis-steps that there are just no pay-offs. Any promising threads of storyline are quickly thrown out, almost as if the writer had a tiny attention span. The result is that nothing about the characters or the plot make any emotive effect to the storyline. Sonic’s seeming ‘death’ at the start is dealt with literally a few seconds later and revealed as a fake-out. The dark undertones of story involving war and even torture seem laughably out of place in a game where anthropomorphic characters use terms like ‘fist-bump’, ‘selfie’ and ‘true dat’, and fall terribly flat when such dialogue is delivered.

Sonic fans, however, would probably appreciate some aspects of the story, with just enough nods and winks toward the series’ past to get you by. The avatar character initially comes off as a terrible, cringe-worthy idea that encourages the worst elements of DeviantArt fandom. In the end, it’s only a little more than that, but the customisation is impressive enough that I even had a little fun with my character. Despite itself being an undoubtable mis-step, the avatar’s inclusion winds up being one of the best parts of the game, though its story is as hackneyed as lame fan-fiction.

The implementation of the gameplay itself is where the mixed-bag really starts to get jumbled up. Like the story, there are so few ideas taken through to their logical conclusion and little time to let them sink in. The shortness of the campaign is a problem because the gameplay itself never really gets going; by the time you experience any interesting challenge, the game is over.

The avatar and Classic Sonic stages are unfortunately the poorest elements of the gameplay. Classic Sonic himself winds up being strange to control, at times the controls are too stiff, but at other times they’re far too loose. The avatar on the other hand is rather fun to play, but the main problem is in the Wispon (itself a painfully-forced pun on ‘weapon’ and ‘wisp’). Many stages wind up requiring a different Wispon loadout than the one you pick, and often a player will be wishing they could anticipate the game’s design choices; this turns the avatar from a fun experience into a painful and unfair one. If only there was a ‘recommended Wispon’ graphic popping up on each level to alleviate this problem. Modern Sonic stages, ironically enough given the series history, wind up having the fewest problems; but that does not make them sin-free. Far too often these levels suffer from issues that should have been and have been mitigated against in previous Sonic games, so their presence here is simply inexcusable.

A special mention must go to the voice acting; there is one moment near the end of the game where it even sounds like the actors themselves have lost the will to go on. The line delivery at this point sounds like a shameful parody and it drives home the lacklustre nature of the package.

The best thing about Sonic Forces is in its presentation; the graphics look spectacular and some stages have enough of a wow factor to make you think that you are playing a better game. There is one sequence set in space that represented some astonishing visuals that can take your breath away. Unlike Sonic Boom, this game is relatively well-designed and runs smoothly. It is easy to achieve 60FPS in the gameplay and when in full motion it looks truly beautiful. It’s a shame that the cutscenes suffer from some clumsy porting issues, and the news of crashes on the PC version show that the game is far from perfect in the optimisation department. The production values are clearly high, but once again it’s a case where not enough care has been taken to ensure a consistent and thorough package.

Sonic Forces as a game is, as described, a huge mixed bag that represents a poor value proposition; though there are some great production efforts at work, at £34.99 the game itself is so poor in its implementation that there is little to justify such an asking price. The poor design, and mediocrity throughout the game means that it is difficult to recommend to anyone. If you are a Sonic fan, there may be enough here to sate you if you wait for the price to come down to around a third of what it is now, but if you have no love for the blue bomber, this entry in the franchise is something I wouldn’t pick up unless I was Forced to.