TouchArcade forum member Wonderspark may be new around here (at least his account is new, anyway), but the guy is dropping quality threads on our forums like it’s going out of style. His original post touches on things he feels like are potentially missing from the world of mobile compared to growing up in the early days of PC and console games.
An excerpt from his post:
How many of you are older folks – say, 30+, who grew up with console games but now primarily play mobile games? If so, do you miss some of the things that you used to love about console games? If so, what?
For me, I grew up playing basically everything – PC games like Mechwarrior & the Bard’s Tale to the original Metroid/Mario/Sonic/whatever. I kept playing stuff – SNES, Dreamcast, and everything that came after right up until I had a kid. Then my time to play games basically ground to a halt. Now when I see something like Witcher 3 or Dragon Age, I think, “Geez, I’m just never gonna be able to make any headway on that."
But if I look at the current crop of mobile games, I find them generally unsatisfying. Sure, there are standouts (YMBAB, Hearthstone, Spellwood, Card Crawl, Vainglory, etc.) – but for the most part, most games just feel like “time killers". And I don’t want to *kill* time. I want to do something meaningful with it – something that feels like *gaming*, and not like “How do I get from now to five minutes in the future as quickly and mindlessly as possible?"
Is this something you feel, too? Something different? If you’re finding things that scratch that “real gamer" itch, what? I’m sure I’ve gotta be missing a bunch of stuff. If you do feel it, what kind of old school games do you miss the most?
The story is all too similar, and something that we hear a lot of. The old school gamer crowd is getting older, having kids, and those 80 hour RPG’s we all used to get excited to spend all weekend playing through just don’t fit into our lives anymore. RHess00 pretty much nailed it:
I grew up on video games too. Pretty much every console from Atari 2600 to Playstation 3. I only use my PS3 for movies now. I switched to mobile because I felt like gaming was taking too much time from my kids. I can play on mobile while the kids watch tv and still be involved in conversations because it’s so easy to pause and put the phone down and give my full attention.
He goes on to mention that he similarly misses those super blown out RPG’s like those of the Elder Scrolls series which aren’t really a thing in mobile because it’s just not really a platform built around the idea of dumping 100 hours into a playthrough of one game. However, as other forum members point out, there are a lot of experiences on the App Store that can go a long way to scratch these classic gamer itches… You’ve just got to search for them.
Do you agree? Disagree? Hop into our forums and join the discussion!
