Back At Home!! Quick Mobile Gaming Roundup

Right, well I just got back from my trip on Olive Island.  It was a fun little adventure even if it was completely game-less, but I think theses short breaks from ranting about industry bullshit are required for me to not go insane.

Anyway, due to the fact that I had literally just moved into my new place on the day we set out I accidently left all my proper portable gaming systems inside the new house and was left with nothing but an iPhone to satisfy my mid journey gaming needs, which is a bit shit.  So for now, I'm going to give a quick run down of all the mobile shit I was playing while sitting inside that car for 8 or 9 hours at a time.

First there was Mahjong 5, a Japanese mahjong game for the iPhone that allows you to play online completely for free.  Winning enough games generates you "MJChips" which allow you to play the paid modes for free too which is a really nice feature and motivates the player to play smarter to maintain their scores.

The next game was a strange little thing that was recommended to me by a friend via Facebook.  I'll go into more depth on this game in it's own post because it's surprisingly good for a mobile game.  As a brief description, all I'll say for now is that you play as a high school girl kicking the ever loving shit out of strange men.  It's weirdly compelling.

Finally there was Puzzle and Dragon

This is a gem matching RPG monster breeding type game where you build a party of 6 creatures, go into dungeons, match gems and fight monsters.  It's actually really good with an absolutely staggering amount of creatures to collect, however, I'm just going to leave one image for you on why I enjoyed playing it so much this weekend.

Now the rest of my day will be spent setting up my new apartment, I'll see if I can get some videos up in the next day or so.

The iPhone 5S is a piece of shit but....

A couple of days ago I got an iPhone 5S.  Luckily I'm not paying to use it and I didn't pay to get it thanks to a family plan type thingy provided by the phone company, so at least that's something.

I fucking hate this thing, I hate it so damn much.  I thought the idea behind the iPhone was that it was easy and simple to use and that anyone could do anything on it.  The latter is true, you don't need any kind of technical knowledge to work the thing, but in no way is the iPhone easy and simple.

When I first got the damn thing the shit I had to go through to set it up took WAY longer than it ever should have done.  We now live in an age where it's not enough to set up mail and phone number and just go with it, I have to do all sorts of other stupid bullshit along with it.

One example of this was signing up for fucking Line.  Apparently, everyone on the planet uses Line and if I don't do it then I'm going to lose contact with the world despite having a fucking phone number AND mail address.  So I downloaded Line, which took way longer than it fucking should have done because I had to make an account with the Japanese app store which was a complete pain, but even after I had the app it wasn't just a case of adding friends and chatting...of course not. 

I had to go through this long, stupid process where it sent mails to my number that I had to verify and then it sent MORE mails to my email so that I could verify it again and even once that was done I found the process of adding someone to your line account an arduous and ambiguous process that took way longer than it ever should have done.

So I hate the fucking thing, not for just the above reasons but the list is pretty long so I'll leave it at my application fury for now, but as you can probably tell from the post title it's not all bad.

Mobile gaming for the most part is a complete piece of shit, but recently I've been introduced to a few applications that are actually good games.  Puzzle & Dragons is one example of a mobile game that actually had enough quality to it to get ported to proper systems like the 3DS.  Most mobile games are money grubbing, worthless snore fests but every now and then I come across something worth playing and doesn't require you to pay money to be good at it.

In short, fuck the iPhone but at least the app store has a few good titles to keep me entertained on the train platforms.