Phone Game Ads are Disgusting

 

So I have these two apps in my phone called Torima and Arucoin and the idea behind these apps is that you gain points by walking around and then you can exchange points for amazon gift cards and crap like that.  It sounds stupid but having it chug away passively in my pocket while I commute to work or just generally go about my day has proven pretty useful.  For example when my PS3 controller bit the dust I was able to get a new one on Amazon free of charge using the gift credit I had accumulated.  Also, I've had Astral Chain on the Switch sat in my backlog for a fair while now and that's also a game I got for free via going to work every day.

Within these apps you can watch ads to get bonus points.  My routine usually is that at the end of my day I'll fire up a movie or an episode of some drama on Netflix (it's Peaky Blinders at time of writing) and I'll cycle the ads while I watch for those extra points.  Usually I'm not paying attention but sometimes these ads catch my eye and I just cannot believe how completely evil some of these companies are to try and get you to play their game.

They come in three types.  The first type is pretty harmless and it's just an advert for the game but usually accompanied by some over exaggeration of what the game play actually involves.  These usually take the form of some color matching game that will having you rescuing a character from Saw-esque peril but the actual game is just the color matching with none of the peril.  Fine, whatever, a little deceptive sure but if you get excited for Bejewled clones and you downloaded the app after seeing that type of game, at least you are getting that type of game.

The second is probably the least common but I do see it on occasion although usually on Instagram adverts rather than via Torima but they do occur in both places and that's adverts for games that steal footage from "real" games.  The worst example I caught of this was an ad for some phone strategy game that was based around Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

An example of a real one made by Koei

If you've ever played one of those games like Sangokushi or Nobunaga's Ambition it was essentially the same thing as that but heavily watered down to accomodate for being played on a phone and for the kind of player that plays a lot of phone games.  The advert for the game though used footage, without permission I assume, from one of the later Dynasty Warriors games.  Advertising intense battles with thousands of troops and then the game itself is just menus with PNGs of anime generals.  A deceptive way to pull you in and probably waste your time.

But the absolute worst are the types of game ads that tell you that you can earn money when you absolutely cannot.  The game in the banner of this post, Evertale, is the absolute worst offender of this.  Evertale sort of also falls into the second category where it advertises a sort of creepypasta version of Pokemon which is just completely divorced from what the game is actually like

But I think that strategy of marketing has stopped working because in recent weeks the game advertises that it gives away 10s of 1000s of yen every week to it's players.  I have not downloaded Evertale since it looks like trash but I can GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE you that they aren't paying anybody, I would be surprised if the option is even in any of the menus.  I did a quick google to see if you could earn money via the game and it nothing about it came up, just one YouTube video calling it "the biggest scam nobody is talking about"

But Evertale isn't the only offender here, there are a TON of these ads that advertise shitty tetris clones, color sorting games or Solitare that tell you that you can earn money by playing.  The adverts usually all go the same way where there will be a person trying to buy something at a resturant or store and when they go to pay they don't have enough money.  Upon this realization they will pull out their phone, play one round of Tetris or some shit and then have 100 bucks in their PayPay account.  I will have to admit that one day my curiosity did in fact get the better of me because while I didn't think I'd be getting 100 bucks, some extra change to play Tetris on the train would have been nice.  However upon even just glancing at the menus the options for earning points or payouts aren't even a thing, so of course it was a quick deletion.

For me, someone who's doing pretty well in life looking for extra beer money for doing stupid bullshit, it's whatever.  Glance at it, realize its fake and move on, nothing lost but a few minutes on my commute.  But there are plenty of people who don't have it like me, who are desperate to put anything in their bank accounts to get by who you COULD potentially decieve and convince to download and waste hours on and that just doesn't sit right with me at all.  Even if there were miniscule payments it wouldn't bother me so much but the fact that these people advertise games with cash money only for the features to be completely absent is disgusting and evil.  It boggles my fucking mind that these companies that host these ads for mobile applications don't have some kind of rules on just flat out lying to customers.

Phone ads being awful is something that's pretty well documented online, with this post I'm essentially stating the obvious.  However I feel that the scammier, more deceptive side and it's potentially damaging effects on people who are desperate for any kind of supplemental income are glossed over in favor of "lmao funny gangster game meme ad".  False Advertising is a thing you get sued for, so how these phone game companies aren't being obliterated is beyond me. 

Phone's are pretty powerful nowadays, you could do some potentially pretty good things with them for gaming but while the market is flooded with shit like this they will always be looked down upon as a platform full of low quality titles for brain-dead twats.

Final Fantasy 7 Mobile Games

 

First thing I saw when I woke up this morning was announcements for some FF7 mobile games so I'm going to take a moment to talk about what I think of those.  There was apparently an announcement for some Yuffie-based DLC for FF7 remake but that's exclusive to PS5 which I don't currently own so it can fuck off.  It does seem however if you own FF7R on the PS4 you can get it for PS5 for free which is pretty nice I guess.

The first game that got announced was Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier which is a Final Fantasy......Battle Royale game.  In the same vain as Fortnight, PUBG or Knives Out (if that's still even a thing), the usual deal of dropping into a map and shooting at each other with guns until there is only one person or one team left.  Only this time it has an FF7 skin wrapped around it.  I'm indifferent about this one since Battle Royale is kind of uninteresting to me, the genre lost its appeal pretty quick.

Final Fantasy Ever Crisis on the other hand, looks a lot more interesting.  From what I understand it's an episodic, more traditional style of RPG that involves dudes standing in a line and you picking commands from a menu.  There isn't much gameplay in the trailer to speak of but from what I can tell it seems that Ever Crisis will cover the whole FF7 universe including things like Crisis Core.  Considering that the only things I play on my phone right how are a Hatsune Miku rhythm game and a Mahjong game, having a proper RPG to fiddle with might actually be a welcome addition 

There are some people though that seem to be dismissing these games, not because they are battle royale games or episodic games but purely for the reason that they are on Mobile.  This makes no sense to me because if anything, Square are one of the only companies that make a least somewhat half decent little distractions.  Sure Record Keeper and Brave Exvius aren't the best games in the world and they are full of gatcha bullshit but you could do a lot worse.  Let's not forget as well, there are still people, people who will happily look down on Ever Crisis, that still beg for re-releases of Before Crisis which isn't just a mobile game, but a mobile game released on FLIP PHONES.

I'm not holding out for these games to be the next hot ticket, especially not The First Soldier, but I am hoping they will make some nice little distractions while I'm riding the god awful Japanese subways

Imagine If... Shin Megami Tensei AR Game

 

I remember when Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 Liberation was announced.  It was around the time that Pokemon Go was still riding a wave of popularity and I got the (mistaken) idea that Dx2 was going to be that kind of game but when it came time to download I was sorely disappointing.

 When I spoke about Dx2 on the blog I had a few nice things to say about it.  Despite the awful gatcha system and some legendary amounts of grinding that needed to be done, for a shitty little mobile RPG it wasn't actually that bad.  There was even a mode available to some phones where you could use an AR thing to take pictures with your demons in the real world but it didn't really have anything to do with the game itself.  So I'm going to use this post to sort of dream up what I think a proper Shin Megami Tensei AR game would be like and hopefully someone at ATLUS will stumble on this page and steal the idea.  Probably not but a mans gotta dream.

Your phone in this hypothetical game would take the place of the COMP or maybe the gauntlet from SMT IV.  In fact the gauntlet from SMT IV makes a little more sense because in that game you buy "apps" with "app points" as you level up allowing you to store more demons, get more skills or make various features cheaper.  From your phone then you'd manage your team, manage your items, buy player focused skills and you could probably put the Cathedral of Shadows in the main menu too.

The main meat of the game I suppose would be the same thing as Pokemon Go.  You would go outside, walk around and get into encounters on the map where you would fight demons. In those fights you could kill the enemies for EXP or you could do demon negotiation to recruit them into your party.  That of course isn't enough to hold an entire game by itself so you'd have to lift some things from Pokemon Go, mainly the raid system.  Instead of calling them raids though you could take a page from the Nocturne book at have "Fiend" battles where groups of players would fight a single enemy.  For the 6 people in the world that have played Dragon Quest Walk, sort of similar to how raid battles work in that.  When you beat a raid in Pokemon Go you are granted a chance to catch the rare monster but that wouldn't really work in a game like this, so pulling from the SMT3 book once again, a Fiend could drop a menorah that you could use to access a dungeon.  These dungeons would be separate from the walking around and be done in a first person view, a nod to the classic games for the long term fans, and in these dungeons you'd have a chance to get rare items and recruit strong demons.  Although it would be unfair to lock out players from this side of the game if they aren't strong enough to do the fiend encounters so randomly around the map you could spawn "Amala Terminals" or something like that.  Players could walk to these and take part in a sort of mini dungeon-crawl  and these areas would have their own loot and demons to gather.

Of course, this is just my personal dream of what an SMT AR Game would look like, I'm sure some actual game designer with many years experience over me could put something better together but it's nice to dream about something that could be.  Although, being really honest, I'd rather ATLUS just get SMT 5 out rather than focus on side projects like this.

 

Mobile Rhythm Game Bullshit

 

Recently I started playing a game on my phone called Project Sekai: Colorful Stage and despite the bile I'm about to dispense under this introduction, I'm having quite a good time with it.  It's a rhythm game sort of similar to Chunithm in the arcade but watered down and all of its songs are Vocaloid tunes.  Being the huge Vocaloid weeb boy that I am I downloaded it straight away and I'm actually quite pleased, for a game that I fiddle with for a couple of minutes at a time while dropping a log it's actually a lot of fun 

However there's something that Project Sekai does, as well as many other mobile rhythm games, that pisses me off to absolutely no end and that's song grading.  When you clear a song in basically any rhythm game the game spits out a results screen to tell you how did you, how many points you got and how accurate you were, things like that.  Usually taking front and center on these results screen is an overall grade for your performance.  For example in DDR if you fail a song you get an E and if you do nearly everything perfectly you get a AAA. While in every normal rhythm game this is based entirely on your skill as a player, in Project Sekai and many others it's based on something entirely different.

Like every mobile game and it's dog, Project Sekai has a "gatcha" system where you spend some in-game currency to get characters of varying rarity.  With those characters you build a team and in the context of a rhythm game like this they will have skills in order to boost your score or recover lost life bar under certain conditions.  Each of these characters also has a "power" level which increases as they level up and their power dictates how many points per note hit you get and I'm sure you can see at this point why this is a problem.

So when I play Project Sekai and I Full Combo a song on Expert or Master difficulty do you know what rank I get? A fucking B.  Not because I made any mistakes, not because my accuracy was off or anything like that, but I just haven't done the pre-requisite grinding for an S rank so I'm not allowed one.  While this doesn't seem like a big deal, in game rewards, especially timed event rewards, are tied to your song grading so I'm just missing out on a whole bunch of shit because my party just isn't generating the score I need for it.

Now you would think that this would only be a problem for new players, that after a while you'd build a team and start getting ranks no problem right? Well no, because of course there's a bunch of other bullshit that gives passive score buffs to certain characters or certain TYPES of character that you also need in order to get the grades that you actually deserve which of course means, more fucking grinding.

I know that complaining about grinding in a mobile game is akin to pissing in the ocean but there's something about its inclusion in a rhythm game of all thing that really irks me.  There's no reason it couldn't have just been a standard rhythm game and premium currency used to unlock songs or videos or other cosmetic features like note skins or whatever, I mean it's a Vocaloid game for mobile for fucks sake, it's basically a money printing machine in a market like Japan.

Anyway like I said, Project Sekai isn't the only game that has been guilty of this shit.  Idolmaster did it and Bang Dreamin' did it just to name two others.  Truth be told I'm actually sort of impressed at just how little Project Sekai seems to be pushing the premium currency side of things, they constantly shower you with it and the button for the premium store is a TINY thing in the bottom left of the main menu, much better than what I've seen for other titles.  Plus this game has the benefit of being 100% Vocaloid music which means that it could break down my door and murder my family and I'd still probably play it.

Moral of the story: Tie ranks to player skill, not to my fucking waifu collection, goddamn it!

First Impressions of Dragon Quest Walk

It's not often that a mobile game grabs my attention but the release of Dragon Quest Walk was one I was very excited for, especially coming off the back of Dragon Quest 11.  Before I go any further I have to warn you that as far as I know, this game is Japan only so if you don't live in Japan and don't care about how cool my new toys are then you may as well stop reading now

For those that do care however, Dragon Quest Walk is probably one of the best mobile games I've played ever.  It's got a decent amount of content considering it just launched, it's running special events already and if you're looking for a way to sort of "gamify" your power walks, this is a great way to do it with.

The way you play is very simple.  You start a quest and the game will ask you where on the google map you want to place your goal.  You then have to physically walk to the place you set the goal, fighting monsters along the way and when you arrive you'll be given a story tidbit or you'll fight a monster or something.  Rinse and repeat until your lean as fuck from all that walking.  If it sounds a bit repetitive that's because it is but DQ Walk strikes me as a game that is a fitness app first and an RPG second.  Unlike Pokémon Go, where you can sit in one place with a lure and catch monsters all day, DQ Walk DEMANDS that you be constantly moving.  Sitting in one place waiting for monsters to spawn means that you'll be quickly running out of HP and MP and eventually things to fight.  Keeping moving however and you can tap "heal pots" on the map to recover and get items and enemies will spawn at an increased rate.  The game also has a "milage" systems where every week you are tasked to break a certain number of pots, fight a certain number of encounters and walk a certain number of steps to acquire points which can then be traded for goodies.

There's other systems as well such as raids which I can't comment on because I've yet to do one.  There's a house system where you put an icon on your map that is your home and you can decorate it with furniture and whatnot and players are incentivized to visit your house because each house will have an item on the floor for you to get.  There's also a gatcha system which might make some people groan but at time of writing the gems and tickets for the gatcha are plentiful and getting a 5 star piece of equipment seems to be a fairly common occurrence.  There's some other things I haven't mentioned but if I tried to mention every little feature I'd be here all night

If you live in Japan and you're looking for an excuse to get out of the house and burn some calories, then DQ Walk is a good place to go.  If you don't live in Japan then I'm sorry for you and I really hope that the game gets an overseas release because for a free little mobile game about hitting slimes with swords, it's REALLY good.

Mahjong Madness #1

I just want ONE AR zombie survival game

So a little while ago a friend of mine brought to my attention a game called mobile called The Walking Dead: Our World.  The game looked, at first glace, like a sort of Pokemon Go-esque thing where you go around killing zombies and it looked pretty cool.  However when I got home I found out that going around killing zombies with your phone camera seems to be the ONLY thing you do.  Granted I haven't played it yet and I'm such a sucker for TWD I'll at least give it a try but my disappointment is pretty high.

Ever since the success of Pokemon Go I've had this fantasy about an AR zombie survival game that would involve running around your local area to find supplies and fight for survival.  At the start of the game you'd register a location as your "base", it could be your home or place of work or wherever the hell you like.  You'd build up a base and gather survivors and every so often on the map little caches of supplies would pop up around the area your in.  You'd be tasked with going off and gathering supplies and keeping your camp alive but when you went out you'd be chased about by zombies (or whatever else) and if they caught you, you'd game over.  Maybe if you had a survivor in your camp it could act as an extra life or there could be some perma death system, I don't know, but I just want that kind of game to exist.

I got the same pangs of disappointment when I played Zombies Run, a sort of fitness app for mobile.  I thought it would be just that where I'd have to jog about collecting supplies but from the little I experienced of it, it's basically just a podcast you listen to while you go for a jog and the "fun" comes from the fact it asks you to run a bit faster every so often.  Not a bad app by any stretch but just not the zombie mobile survival game of my dreams.

So if you're a game developer and you stumble on this post, please go and make that above idea a reality.  I'm not a game dev so tweak it and make it actually good but at least give me a credit as "Blog Prick" or something like that.  I know zombies are an over saturated genre but I seriously feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the world of zombie AR, someone needs to get on it.

Diablo Immortal: Just let it die quietly

So recently Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal and fans are PISSED.  In case you saw that banner and got excited because you didn't catch the story yet, don't get your hopes up too high because it's only a mobile game.  Here's a trailer

If you view it on YouTube instead of in the blog, HOO BOY that dislike bar.

Now I get it, oh boy do I understand your rage.  A series with such a long and respected pedigree being reduced to yet another cash grab, probably gatcha in some way, premium currency pay to win mobile dogshit.  The fact that it's not just some little extra thing that Blizzard developed on the side but a thing that was shoved in your face at fucking Blizzcon like it's something you should be excited for.  The condescending attitude when an audience member asked "will we get it on PC?" and the guy, when booed for saying no, replied with "What, don't you all have phones?!".  You have every right to be boiling mad but just stop and think for a second.

There are tons of generic shitty hack and slash games on mobile already.  I hate to admit it but I sunk quite a lot of time into a hack and slash RPG on mobile called HIT for a pretty significant amount of time about a year ago.  All that time ended up being wasted though since it's just another deleted free game on my app store account now.  At the very least, we know that Diablo Immortal will have a degree of polish to it, so if you're going to play a shitty mobile hack and slash game at least a Diablo flavored one might be worth keeping on your phone for the occasional fiddle with on a bus or while you're dropping a fat shit.

Plus it's not like Blizzard are dropping everything to focus on this one mobile game.  Diablo 3 just got a Switch release so if Immortal really disgusts you that much but you want portable Diablo anyway, just go play that.  You don't see Final Fantasy fans losing their shit over Record Keeper or Brave Exvius, you can at least be happy that Blizzard are still giving D3 the love it needs to keep going for another console generation at the very least.  If you hate the look of it that much, it really is as easy just not downloading it from the app store.

Booing, disliking videos on raging online won't really do anything.  If no one downloads it though, if that game is dead from day 1, THEN Blizzard will know they cocked up.  I get that your mad but calm down and let it die quietly instead of giving it publicity so that all the know-nothings and curious children with a tablet don't end up keeping the game alive for years to come.

I personally will never play it because it'll never stack up to Dragalia Lost.

Dragalia Lost

So this is a game that came out last month for mobile devices that kept popping up on my Facebook feed after a few of my friends started playing.  The first thing I noticed is that it's an original mobile game that has a big fat Nintendo logo on it and along side that a big fat Cygames (Shadowverse, Grandblue Fantasy) logo.  After umming and arring about it for a while thanks to it's MASSIVE 2.5gb download size from the app store I decided to just give it a go.

Dragalia Lost has absolutely NO BUSINESS being this good of a game since it's just your typical mobile gatcha affair but for some reason I just can't get myself off the damn thing.  I have no idea what the story is since following a mobile story is like choosing to eat a bowl of shit but the game play is fun and the amount of stuff there is to do is just staggering.  The sheer amount of content is important considering the games recent release since usually newly released mobile games are a little thin on the ground at first and flesh out later but Dragalia is going all out right out of the gate.

The game itself is the same gatcha bullshit you see on the app store all the damn time.  Pull stuff, power up stuff, do dungeons to power up stuff even more rinse and repeat and grind grind grind ad nauseam.  There's two cool things about it though that set it apart from other games in the genre which is one, combat that's actually more interesting than just tapping until everything falls down and two, a level of polish that is rarely seen in the entirety of mobile gaming.  The combat has you using the touch screen to actually move characters and have them hack, slash and dodge through the environments.  When enemies attack the game will put these sort of markers on the floor, something I've seen done in other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 which means that paying attention to things like positioning is very important. 

There's a lot going on in Dragalia that would take far too much time to type out so instead I'll just recommend that you go download it and give it a whirl.  It's free so worst case scenario is that you'll just be unimpressed by yet another gatcha title and best case is that it drags you in and holds your attention as violently as it has mine.

Severed

So when I was on the plane to the USA for my summer holiday I decided to pick one of the random Vita games I got for free as part of PS+ and the first choice my finger went to was a game called Severed.  I didn't have any expectation for this game but what I got was actually really good. 

The first thing I noticed right off the bat was the art style.  I thought I'd seen it before somewhere and it wasn't until I got off the plane, hit Wi-Fi and was able to Google it that I discovered that Severed is made by a developer called Drinkbox Studios who also made another great game called Guacamelee! Just as an aside, if you haven't played that you should also go check it out because it's fantastic.

So the game starts out and you find yourself in the role of a young girl who's family has been taken away by monsters and your arm has been cut off.  You walk through her destroyed house and an evil thing in a mirror gives you a sword and then you go on an adventure to get them back.  The story is a bit bare bones but it's got everything you need to make you want to press on.  A missing family and a world full of weird monsters and places to kill and explore.

Game play wise the game plays sort of like Zelda had a baby with one of those weird first person horror dungeon crawlers on the Amiga or something.  You have to explore dungeons and each dungeon gives you a piece of gear that will not only solve the puzzles in that dungeon but open up extra bits of the world for you to go and find secrets and whatnot.  There are three "worlds" let say with one hub area that connects them and as you gain gear and skills you'll want to back track for heart pieces (for more health of course) and brain pieces (for mana)

It's the combat however where this game really shines.  You use the touch screen to swipe enemies with your sword and each enemy has different patterns that you have to work out in order to deal damage and to block their oncoming attacks.  At first you just work out how to kill them and then kill them but as you progress through the game it starts throwing multiple enemies at you which surround you.  This puts you in situations where your having to manage not only attacks and blocks but doling out the occasional smack to the enemy behind you or to your side so that their attack meter doesn't fill up and slaps a bunch of your life away.  If you deal out enough hits without being attacked or blocked you fill up a bonus meter and when the meter is full it allows you to....SEVER!....enemy body parts which you collect and use to power up your characters skills.

I have two complaints about this game, the first being that it felt a bit short.  I don't know if it's ACTUALLY short but I managed to finish it after spending only a couple hours on the plane and then a couple more on a bus tour ride but it could just be that I'm really good.  Also the upgrade system is broken and you can basically get all the upgrades you need even if you suck at the game.  Sometimes in pots and things you find "giblets" and one of the first skills you learn is how to transmute giblets into upgrade items.  Even if you somehow manage to go the entire game not being able to sever a single body part (impossible) you could still power up enough for the final boss to be a complete cakewalk.

Still, despite these complaints I had a great time with Severed, it's a fun game with a lot of personality.  I played the Vita version but apparently it's on mobile, Wii U and Switch so go check it out.

Mobile Games Need to Stop Lying

I don't hate mobile gaming as much as I used to.  Certain titles like Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 and Dragon Quest Rivals have changed my opinion on mobile gaming being a complete steaming pile of dogshit.  I'm not ashamed to admit now that sometimes in my downtime I'll go sniffing around the app store for a new RPG to have a go on or maybe find some kind of rhythm game that's just packed wall to wall with anime girls.

It's also not uncommon to see adverts for these games on social media.  Scroll through your Twitter or Facebook feeds and you're bound to see at least one advert for some kind of mobile game.  One thing I can't stand though is when these adverts flat out lie to you about the content of the game.  There was one I remember quite vividly for a game called Z Girls or something, some town building waifu game with zombies which in it's ads used a lot of images of Vocaloid characters.  It's not uncommon for some mobile RPGs to do vocaloid crossovers but these game was completely devoid of any of that.  It was just putting the characters on the ad to try and entice certain fans into thinking their shit game was worth playing.  The absolute worst offender was some Pay2Win menu based Romance of the Three Kingdoms strategy game that was using footage from some goddamn Dynasty Warriors game in its adverts.  How do they even get away with shit like that?!

Generally speaking if you see a game that has these kind of ads they are usually shit anyway and are trying to use the misinformation in the ad to at least get a download and bump themselves up a listing on the app store.  There are quite a few games however that don't lie to you and are actually pretty good such as Azur Lane and South Park Phone Destroyer.

Let's be honest though, if you really want some decent mobile gaming you're probably better off just buying a DS, Vita or Switch.

Fortnite

Every so often a game will come along that completely dominates the landscape for a while and Fortnite is one of those games.  Created by Epic Games and originally showcased WAY back in 2011, Fortnite is the current big-hitter in the now popular Battle Royale genre and it's basically impossible to have at least not heard of it given all the publicity it's been getting.

Fortnite is actually some kind of zombie survival game that I've ever played.  I think it involves a team of people scavenging and building a fort in order to survive against waves of zombies that get progressively harder.  I think it has characters that have unique abilities and you're supposed to work together to save the world, or at least that's what it says in the menu.

However following the popularity of Player Unknowns Battlegrounds they added a battle royale mode where 100 players skydive into an island to kill each other until there is only one player remaining.  You start the game with no gear save for a pick axe that you can use to gather materials and from there it's up to you to find guns and supplies in order to kill everyone else.  As you play there's a storm that encroaches on the play area every couple of minutes forcing the survivors to get closer and closer to each other as time goes on.

Games of Fortnite are very quick too despite how many people are involved in each match.  Landing in popular areas where all the sick loot is will get you murdered quickly and if you are lucky enough to survive then the deadly storm which shrinks on you every 2 minutes or so will ensure that you're in someones face sooner rather than later.  The quick nature of the game prevents it from being overly frustrating on a loss since you can pretty much instantly get into another game with very small amounts of downtime which means you can enjoy it in quick bursts or for extended periods depending on your mood and schedule which is rather nice.

The big gimmick that sets it apart from PUBG though is the building.  You can an interesting situation where when the circle starts to get really small players are forced to sort of just build upwards since a more horizontal approach to combat is out of the question.  I'm bad it at at time of writing but seeing the speed and skill with which players build these forts at each other to try and get the upper hand is absolutely mesmerizing and it gives quite an interesting spin on the late game combat.

It's also weirdly addicting, invoking that "just one more game" mentality that I've personally not experienced from a title since I used to play League of Legends back with my university buddies.  Not only that but there's a certain thrill that comes from being within the last 5-10 survivors on the map and then getting into a fire fight which could either mean victory or a painful reset to the lobby menu.

The game also has a ton of style with it's cartoony graphics and a "battle pass" feature, bought for about £10, which allows the player to unlock a metric fuckton of cosmetics.  I never usually drop money on a free game for something as inconsequential as cosmetic items but even I couldn't resist the allure of Fortnites battle pass.

If you're on the fence about it, I'd say give it a go.  It's free, it's fast and it's fun and even if it doesn't hook you like it completely hooked me you'll still have a good time with it.

Dx2 Shin Megami Tensei Liberation First Impressions

I never thought in my life I'd be impressed to the point of gushing HARD on a mobile game but it's finally happened and OF COURSE it's a fucking Shin Megami Tensei game that has me frothing at the mouth with excitement.

I've talked about it before but just in case I'll cover once again what Shin Megami Tensei is before I continue in case a new reader has stumbled across this post.  Shin Megami Tensei is a long running series of RPGs that has been going since the old NES days.  It has its roots in tile based dungeon crawling but as the series has progressed that style has dropped in and out.  The big gimmick of the series is the whole "demon negotiation" thing where you can convince your enemies to join your ranks and use their skills in order to reach the end.  The series has seen some massive success recently with it's spinoff series Persona and at some point a Shin Megami Tensei 5 has been cited for release on the Switch.  In a VERY basic way just think of it as sort of Grimdark Pokemon.

So I woke up on Sunday with a big fat hangover and grabbed my phone only to find that Dx2 SMT Liberation was on the front page of the Japanese app store and despite my pounding headache I did a little squee and downloaded it.  As far as mobile games go it's not all that different from any other RPG where you collect monsters and battle them but if you're a fan of the series, especially the mainline series, the look and feel of the game will have you hooked pretty quickly.  EVERYTHING you expect from a tried and true SMT game is present in this title just sort of simplified a little bit because it's on a phone now but presented in a way that makes it perfect for short burst plays on a train, bus or while you take a shit.

 I'm not going to go into too much detail about how it all works because there's A LOT going on and I've not levelled up enough to see it all but curiously the game has only 2 out of 5 stars on  the app store.  Addressing some of these complaints I've seen in the review section will help you to understand something about how the game works though so here I go.

The first big complaint I've seen is that they say (in Japanese) that the demons and the artwork look like crap.  The game has opted for the older SMT look as opposed to the more modern art direction that they have used in games like Persona so this is more of a taste thing.  I started the series with Lucifer's Call on PS2 when it was still using that sort of older look so it doesn't bother me really, this is just a taste thing but be aware the art style looks a bit "dated" which will be nostalgic for some and hard on the eyes for others.

The one thing I can't forgive though is people complaining about the fucking "gatcha".  If you don't play mobile games then a gatcha is the way most games give you new items or characters.  You pay a number of whatever currency it may be and the game randomly gives you a character.  If you're lucky you'll get a rare thing and if you're not lucky you won't, it's the main way these free to play RPGs make cash by making people pull lots of gatcha for mad rare shit.  These are usually a big part of mobile RPGs but in Liberations case it's not such a big thing.  The complaints state that the gatcha is too expensive and the rate of rare shit coming out is too low, which is fine I guess but that's not really how your supposed to expand your roster of demons.

As you play levels, occasionally a demon will offer to talk with you and you enter a negotiation.  If you complete the negotiation successfully the demon will join you, this is how SMT has worked basically since the beginning.  From there, you have you fuse the demons together to make new ones in order to strengthen your ranks and this is the main way that the player in Liberation gets rarer things.  For example today I took a 1* demon and a 2* demon and fused them into a 3* demon with some sick fire skills.  The gatcha does give you rare shit but the game wants you to focus on negotiation and fusion, you know, the thing where you actually have to understand how the game works, rather than just dumb luck.  While paying your way into the rarest demons is an option and probably how Sega plan to make profit, doing it the old fashioned way is preferable and series fans will probably enjoy this more than just "push button, receive demon".

I've never been this hooked by a mobile game before so if you're a SMT fan then absolutely try it out and if you've never played one before then this free outing into the mainline may be a good place to find your feet. 

Dragon Quest Rivals First Impressions

Japan loves its card games.  Very close to my house there are about 4 stores dedicated to the buying, selling and playing of trading cards of which there seem to be hundreds of different games but you can also just hit up a used book store to buy individual cards for games like Yu-gi-oh and whatnot.  As well as that there are a bunch of digital trading card games some of which are exclusive to the arcade.  But the arcades not only have digital based card games but also games that actually spit out physical cards for use in the game, it's crazy.  Japan LOVES card games.

Japan also loves a bit of Dragon Quest which is basically one of the big boss boys of the RPG genre.  So of course Dragon Quest, like Warcraft, The Witcher and DotA have come out with their own card based video game for mobile platforms.  I usually avoid all the other card games on the IOS since I'm balls deep into Shadowverse and the idea of playing two different card games at the same time seems a bit pointless but the gameplay in DQ Rivals seemed different enough from something like Hearth or 'Verse to at least give it a go.

It's not completely unique, there are a number of similarities to Hearth.  The way the cards looks is pretty much identical and the idea that the character that you pick have their own special ability and cards sets seems ripped straight from that model.  Also the ranking system is basically the same as Hearthstone and of course it has that thing where you can earn "dust" in order to create individual cards if you're trying to make a specific kind of deck.  Basically out of the actual card combat they are fucking identical.

But the card combat itself is where things get interesting.  Each player has 6 blocks on their side of the field where they can play monsters and the positioning of your monsters is pretty important when it comes to battle strategy.  So for example, in Hearthverse you can attack the enemy directly pretty much anytime unless they play a monster with a defender ability.  In DQ rivals, you have monsters with that kind of skill but you can also put all your monsters in a row which will create a wall in order to defend your character.  Then on top of that, if you have a monster with a cool ability you don't want getting murdered you can play another creature in front of them in order to defend.  It's a cool mechanic that means that you not only have to worry about what monsters you have but also where you put them on the board in any given situation.  Your hero also has an ability that they have to charge but I wont go into detail about that because it's pretty much the same as Hearthstone.

Right now I'm pretty sure its exclusive to Japan but it seems like there has been a decent amount of effort made to make a game that's familiar enough to fans of this mobile card  game genre so they don't have  to relearn a fuckton of new systems but different enough to make it worth playing past the tutorial.  If you can get hold of it, give it a go.  Shit is free so you have nothing to lose

Eggggg and Illi

Every week a paid app on the app store goes free for a while and I always take the chance to grab that shit because fuck paying money for app games.  However sometimes I download a title that makes me feel a little guilty for not directly supporting the creator and while I'm not about to go and pay for a game I already own, I want to highlight a couple of titles I got for free so many you can go and support the better side of the mobile game spectrum.

The first game is Egggg, I'm not sure exactly how many Gs are in there but it's more than usual.  Egggg is a two button platform game and the aim is just to get from one end of the stage to the other without dying.  The thing is though that once you press a direction button, you can't stop.  If you push the way you're running you jump and the other button will make you turn around.  While you're running from one end of the stage to the other there are things to collect and little hidden areas of each stage for you to explore which net you stars at the end.  Simply finishing a level isn't too much of a challenge but getting 3 stars on a stage will require some strategising.  The game also mixes things up every so often by giving you a stage specific mechanic or having you fight a boss but generally just reaching the end of the stage is your only worry.  Still, it's a nice, pure little platforming experience and it's the kind of thing you'd easily find on something like Steam for a few pounds but instead its phone exclusive.

EDIT: As soon as I posted this thing I googled Egg and found a Steam page for it and it's "coming soon", so worth buying there if you don't like playing games on a shitty phone screen.  Seriously, it's a goodun

The second game I want to talk about briefly is Illi.  It's a very simple, cute little platform puzzle game that will eat through your commutes like nothing else.  The game play is super simple with each stage being made up of a number of squares or rectangles and you must jump your way to the exit by tapping the screen.  Illy moves around each square by himself and which way he falls depends on which side of the cube you're on when you press jump.  So press jump on the top and you'll fall down but press it on the right hand side and you'll fall to the left.  Illi does not respect the laws of physics.  Each stage comes with a number of "quests" which involve collecting a thing, getting to the exit in a certain number of jumps or beating a stage in a certain time and finishing these quests unlocks more levels.

The good thing about Illi compared to other puzzle games I've played is that it's not bullshit difficult like other shitty iPhone games like Cut the Rope.  The solutions to certain levels in things like Cut the Rope where there's no way you'd figure that shit out without spending money on a solution fairy or whatever piss me off but Illi has that nice level of challenge sort of similar to Portal.  Things that look hard but if you take a moment to think about them carefully are actually quite simple.

I got these games for free but if it wasn't such a stingy piece of shit and someone had told me about them beforehand, I would have easily dropped a few pounds on these titles.  So go check them out because instead of complaining about the sorry state of mobile gaming we should be supporting the people who are actually at least TRYING to do a good job.

Back From Korea

At time of writing I have basically just come from my trip in South Korea and I just thought I'd say a couple of things about my trip before going to bed since I'm absolutely shattered from walking around in 35+ degree temperature for such a long time.

Usually I hate capital cities no matter what country they are in.  Tokyo, London, Paris, doesn't really matter I fucking hate them however I don't quite have the same levels of hatred for Seoul.  It's not exactly what I'd call the nicest place in the world to be but it's definitely the least "offensive" capital city I've ever been in for lack of a better word.

Anyway I did the usual touristy bullshit like visit temples and little historical villages and stuff.  The temples/palaces in South Korea are really weird because they all seem to be copy pasted.  All sort of arranged like dungeons from the original NES Zelda game with large expanses of nothing much going on.  Granted the palace I visited this time had a "secret garden" that I didn't get to see but that was extra money AND only available as a guided tour so fuck that.

The food in South Korea is really good though, especially if you're into spicy stuff.  We were taken by my friend to some kind of beef restaurant and they give you about 7000 different side dishes for you to construct your own meat-lettuce wraps with.  The following lunch time me and my wife went to a place where they served something called Galbi.  It was chicken and rice in a spicy sauce that was served on a sort of huge hotplate and they cook it for you at the table.  Fucking delicious.

As far as the gaming scene in concerned out there I didn't really see much of what was going on.  According to the friend that we stayed with the famous net cafes are of course super popular but I think everyone in the world knows about that shit since Korea is famous for Starcraft 2 and shit pop music above all else really.  Outside of that the big thing seems to be mobile gaming.  We spent an afternoon in a big shopping area and I didn't see a single game store but the subway had adverts for mobile game apps fucking EVERYWHERE.  Sort of similar to what I saw in Singapore with PC and Mobile markets being huge while console users are pretty few and far between.  I could be wrong about this of course since my total time spent in Korea is probably equal to about 3 days.

Don't know if I could recommend it for a long trip but if you're passing through or you already live in Asia and need a weekend destination then Korea is a good bet.

Pianista

Pianista is a game that just randomly came up in an advert while I was scrolling through Facebook one day.  Usually I steer clear of mobile rhythm games because despite their fairly decent quality they are almost always full of bullshit that makes me quit.  However the idea of a rhythm game based on classical music piqued my interest so I gave it a try 

So the bullshit that I'm talking about with other rhythm games usually involves the collection and leveling of characters.  You can play a song perfectly in games like Love Live but still end up with a shitty rank because your characters don't have enough levels to earn you the required points.  Luckily Pianista doesn't do that.  You just pick and song, play it and you're graded based on your actual skill rather than any money-grubbing character breeding system.

The game has I think about 50 songs at time of writing with new stuff getting added every so often and songs are played on something called Tour Mode and clearing them in this mode unlocks them for your collection where you can play them freely.  There are 3 difficulty levels of play which are normal, technical and master.  I've not tried master yet so I can't say just how challenging it gets but if you aren't really all that familiar with the genre there are certain songs on normal that may give you a hard time.

As you play songs you earn gold and you can use this gold to upgrade your piano which will get you different bonuses and such but apart from that you don't use the gold for anything else.  There's also a premium currency which I think lets you cut down the wait time on your plays recharging but considering this is something I'll do a song or two with on the train that's not really an issue.  The game also has leader boards so if you're the competetive type you can see how you stand up to the rest of the user base.

My only real complaint is that you get 5 song points to play songs with and then after that you have to wait before you can play any more.  1 song point regenerates every 30 minutes so if you're just fiddling with it it's not much of an issue but if you have a long journey and you were hoping to jam out to some Chopin you may have to start spending premium currency or just listening to him on a music player and live without the game part.

Either way, it's free to download on the app store, the game looks slick, plays really well and has a decent number of songs for you to enjoy.  So unless you hate classical music you should probably go and give it a try.

Picross

The last few weeks I've been depressingly busy with stuff and finding time for any real meaningful gaming sessions has been tough.  With what time I can squeeze in I've been playing Persona 5 which I can't share with you guys so I've had to horde that experience all to myself.  However, if I didn't find time to game at least a little bit in a 24 hour period I might go insane and that's when Picross came to the rescue.

I discovered Picross a few weeks ago in my local bar on a weekend.  That seems like a weird place to discover a video game but it's a video game bar where there are systems on the counter and games for days, it's a great place I'll do a post on it one day soon.  Anyway, I'm just sat having a drink but the dude next to me is playing Picross and usually I'm not drawn to puzzle games but for some reason I couldn't stop watching him play it.  Eventually I ask him to explain to me what's going on and after the evening was done I got curious and gave it a try myself the next day.  Well I was fucking hooked since it's incredibly easy to understand and yet still manages to be quite challenging.

The idea is simple, you get rows and columns of numbers and those numbers tell you how many filled in squares there are on that line.  If there are multiple numbers in the column it means that there is a space between the filled in areas and using nothing but these numbers you must uncover a picture on the grid.  The game on Gameboy and SNES has you trying to figure out these puzzles within 30 minutes and hitting an incorrect space causes you to lose time.  As you go on the grids get bigger and bigger which of course means the puzzles get harder and harder.

It's just an incredibly relaxing game to play and the challenge never really feels stressful.  Despite the timer going in the background as long as you take your time to work it out it's never really an issue but in the instances where mistakes are made and you really do end up battling the clock you get quite an intense experience. 


There are a pretty large number of Picross games.  There's the original game boy game and the sequel to that on the Super Nintendo.  There's also Picross 3D on the DS and a sequel to that on the 3DS which I'm told are very good and the extra dimension adds a good amount of extra challenge.  There's also a number of free Picross games on mobile too so if you wanted to give it a try then these might be a good place to start too.  There's even a fucking Final Fantasy Picross RPG for mobile called Pictologica where you solve small Picross puzzles in order to make your party of heroes attack stuff.

There's probably a bunch of other games I don't know about too but that should be enough to get you started.  Give it a try, it's fun, addictive and can be played in very small and quick bursts which means that even if your schedule is fucked you can squeeze in a quick puzzle here and there.

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.

Shadowverse First Impressions

A few months ago I was walking through a train station when I saw a big poster for a new mobile game called Shadowverse.  It looked like an exact clone of digital card collecting favorite Hearthstone so until the other day I ignored it.  However due to a friend starting to play I decided to jump on and give it a go and boy Im glad I did because this game is awesome .  

If you have played Hearthstone then you have basically played this.  At its core it's the same game but there have been a few tweaks to the systems which stop it from being an exact clone.  I'm going to start talking about the game assuming you have a basic knowledge of how Hearthstone works so if you don't I'm sorry if you feel a little lost.  

So you do the usual thing of playing monsters with a health and attack value and you use these in conjunction with spells in order to try and bring your opponents life from 20 to 0, just like Hearth.  However this time around the characters don't have active abilities and instead have passive effects that do various things to their decks.  For example there's one character who's cards get stronger depending on how many spells you cast while another who has various abilities depending on how many cards occupy her graveyard.  

Each character has a unique play style and you're bound to find one that matches how you like to play.  

The other big new thing here is the evolution system which allows you after 5 turns to start buffing your monsters for +2/+2 and an added effect if the card has one.  

This allows the monster to attack the turn its played (monsters only, mind you) and can quickly change the tide of a losing battle if you're clever with your evolution points which are limited to 2 for the starting player and 3 for the guy who goes second. 

There are other slight changes but these are the two huge things and everything else is sort of taken from Hearth from there.  Of course there is online play which comes in the form of standard ranked/unranked and 2 pick mode.  2 pick is almost identical to the Area in Hearth but you pick the cards 2 by 2 instead of one at a time.  Also you aren't kicked out of the mode for losing and your reward is based on how many out of 5 you win.  

One thing I really like about this game over Hearth though is just how easy it is to access the content and get cards.  The single play story modes are avaliable from the get go and the game gives you 20 boosters just for clearing the tutorial.  You can get cards by collecting an in game currency which is awarded to you for logging in each day.  I'm still playing the story modes so I'm unsure if online matches provide this currency but even if it doesn't getting cards still doesn't feel like a massive chore like it did in Hearth.

Shadowverse is a quality digital card game that people should give some time to.  This is especially true if you're the kind of person who played Hearth and wasn't happy with some of the direction it took.  I'm playing the Japanese version on my phone but I know there's an English version avaliable on Steam so give it a try!