Mobile Gaming is Shit

I have a Japanese exam coming up soon and the chances of me passing it are pretty fucking slim.  This is one of the reasons that content has been so thin on the ground and it's partly because when I'm not eating, sleeping or wanking I've replaced a lot of my gaming time with studying.  This means that the only gaming I've been doing for the last few weeks has been little bouts of mobile games during my commute to work or lunch break or streams of Resident Evil 4.

So mobile gaming is shit but not for the reason you might think.  A lot of people rag on mobile gaming but actually in recent years it's been getting a lot better.  You still have your cheaply made puzzle games and various shit quality rip offs of whatever the mobile hit du jour is but it's a lot easier to find something of at least some quality now than it used to be.

For example I've clogged up my phone with a whole bunch of games such as the Shadowverse, a card game which makes Hearthstone look like a soggy pile of shit, Idolmaster, a rhythm game with a staggering number of songs for a free to play, Gyrosphere, a slow version of Monkey Ball and Perchang a fun little puzzler that I play while taking a shit.  Not to mention all the ports of actual games that exist on the app store now, mobile, at least from a selection stand point, isn't as painfully awful as you might think.

However I still fucking hate it because phones were just not designed for gaming and playing games on these things is a highly frustrating experience and a lot of the time I'd rather do my own wisdom teeth surgery than deal with the shit that these games are causing me. 

For example, phones do EVERYTHING nowadays but they also have limited space.  So it's all well and good having a decent selection of games but eventually you'll probably have to delete them for apps that are actually useful or so you can take a picture of that stupid cat you saw on the street yesterday.  But let's say that's not an issue for you because you're one of those weirdos that bought the million gig version of your phone, the controls are still shit.  Touch screen controls are wank outside of tapping or sliding, as soon as you have to start making precise movements or, god help you, playing with one of those stupid on screen D-Pads (Like in Sonic CD) playing the game becomes insanely annoying.  But OK, maybe you're a fucking twat who bought one of those controller add ons instead of just buying a portable system, the biggest problem with mobile gaming is the battery.

Games eat battery life faster than your mum eats sweet and sour pork at the all you can eat Chinese buffet.  Pokemon Go was the best example of this where playing the game for about an hour would drain you from 100 to about 60.  Any game beyond a shitty angry birds clone tends to destroy your battery and this problem is made worse if your phone has a little bit of age on it so the battery life isn't quite what it used to be either.  I started my lunch break yesterday at 80%, played 2 games of Shadowverse and was knocked down to about 20.  On the other hand I can grab my PSP and finish Ys1 Chronicles about 8 times before the battery light even starts blinking.  Yes, I know portable chargers exist but that's just another fucking thing I have to buy with my hard earned cash to play games that just quite frankly aren't as good as proper portable games.

It's nice to see the quality of mobile gaming go up but the hardware just isn't appropriate for any kind of meaningful gaming experience without being tethered to a wall socket or spending a decent amount of cash on extra bits.  Hopefully in a few years I'll be able to make a post talking about mobile gaming being the bees knees and praising how far it's come but by that time I'll probably be dead.