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[Yoink]

Oh hey, I have Alphabear on my phone. Haven't played it much, but I seem to remember it being enjoyably cute. 


I've been playing a lot of Enyo lately. Brutal roguelite puzzler with a very unique style inspired by ancient Greek/Roman (I think?) mythology and art.
Actually the inspiration is probably from something else in that period, but point is it looks really damn cool. It's also fun to play and a good challenge, which is obviously important.

The free version has just one mode, so no daily/hard/story modes, but there's still plenty of gameplay to be had. Hell, apparently there are 10 floors to get through but I have so far only made it to 8.



I've also been playing various other mobile games, including a lot of utter trash like Sims Freeplay (I just had an itch to play The Sims, I wonder if my laptop could run the real deal) and some weird bootleg PuBG with zombies, crafting and a hilariously janky persistent base-building system.
Probably gonna drop that one as soon as someone rolls through and wrecks my horrible mess of a house.

[Folly]

Oh hey, I have Alphabear on my phone. Haven't played it much, but I seem to remember it being enjoyably cute.

There's a sequel out, for a while now.

[Aoi]

I've been playing a lot of Enyo lately. Brutal roguelite puzzler with a very unique style inspired by ancient Greek/Roman (I think?) mythology and art.
Actually the inspiration is probably from something else in that period, but point is it looks really damn cool. It's also fun to play and a good challenge, which is obviously important.

The free version has just one mode, so no daily/hard/story modes, but there's still plenty of gameplay to be had. Hell, apparently there are 10 floors to get through but I have so far only made it to 8.

The Golden Fleece is Greek, though the two get mishmashed so much nowadays that distinguishing between the two is largely impossible in general media. As I recall, there's nothing new introduced in 8-10; just more stuff on the map, so you're almost there!

It also reminds me of Into the Breach, where positioning is key, and enemies all move in very predictable ways. It's definitely worth a look if anybody's interested in more methodical games... especially this one is fairly light, and has no ads or IAP (other than full purchase, which isn't necessary for an already complete experience).

[Sime]

I see that Terraforming Mars is now on IOS.     I wonder if the AI is any good.

[Aoi]

UnCiv. It's good, and it's entirely free.

It's pretty much a complete portable Civilization experience. That can't quite decide exactly which (major) version of Civ it wants to be, but that's just quibbling.

If you already know your way around Civ, I'd recommend restarting immediately, as your first load drops you into a game immediately without letting you pick your own settings.

Governor AI is, as always, kind of dumb. I'm a generation ahead of everybody else on military tech, with literally twice as many cities as everybody else combined, and every city has a dedicated guard, plus random units wandering the map, left over from my last war. And it keeps wanting to pump out crossbowmen.

[n9103]

UnCiv. It's good, and it's entirely free.

It's pretty much a complete portable Civilization experience. That can't quite decide exactly which (major) version of Civ it wants to be, but that's just quibbling.

If you already know your way around Civ, I'd recommend restarting immediately, as your first load drops you into a game immediately without letting you pick your own settings.

Governor AI is, as always, kind of dumb. I'm a generation ahead of everybody else on military tech, with literally twice as many cities as everybody else combined, and every city has a dedicated guard, plus random units wandering the map, left over from my last war. And it keeps wanting to pump out crossbowmen.

QFT.
Also highly recommend.

[BigD145]

UnCiv. It's good, and it's entirely free.

It's pretty much a complete portable Civilization experience. That can't quite decide exactly which (major) version of Civ it wants to be, but that's just quibbling.

If you already know your way around Civ, I'd recommend restarting immediately, as your first load drops you into a game immediately without letting you pick your own settings.

Governor AI is, as always, kind of dumb. I'm a generation ahead of everybody else on military tech, with literally twice as many cities as everybody else combined, and every city has a dedicated guard, plus random units wandering the map, left over from my last war. And it keeps wanting to pump out crossbowmen.

It's basically Civ5. Works pretty well on a 6 inch device.

[AzyWng]

You can also get it on desktop, if its GitHub page is any indication.

Doesn't work on apple devices, however, unfortunately.

[BigD145]

Uciana is also pretty solid on the MoO front.

[sambojin]

Just started playing a bit of Global Defense Forces 2 Portable (ie Earth Defense Force Portable 2). It runs surprisingly smoothly on PPSSPP, even on my crappy old android phone,  and isn't too bad to control even with just touch controls instead of a gamepad.

There really is nothing else like EDF out there. It's made for grinding, it's made for killing swarms upon swarms of enemies (huge bugs and robots in this case) and it fits into the mobile genre pretty well. You lose a bit of the verticality of full EDF releases, mostly because it's hard to aim on a touchscreen (it'd be fine with a controller, and there is auto-aim for upsy-downsy aiming, kinda like Doom), and you only get two classes to play, but there's still all the city-wide destruction you could possibly hope for, all in gloriously janky 3D. Don't worry about the framerate, just keep firing. The wingdiver is nicely OP as well, so if you're worried about console touchscreen controls in a 3D shooter, you don't have to be. The wingdiver's basic weapons remove any problems such as precise aiming, etc, for you.

Anyway, I do recommend anyone that even remotely likes 3rd person shooters to give it a go. Or people that like killing huge bugs. Or giant robots. Or Kaiju. There's something for everyone. It's in Japanese, but it's such a simple game that this shouldn't really bother you (I don't read Japanese and I worked it out pretty easily). The weapon names are a bit of a mystery, but just try them out and see what works for you.

EDF!  EDF!

(this game will probably never leave my phone. It's more cathartic then nearly anything else in the playstore. I wish I realized that EDF had a PSP release earlier, because it runs way better than a PS2 emulator would)

(for the settings I'm using on an old Oppo F1s, for 20-30fps on the FPS counter (so, playable, but it feels more like 15-20fps with the frameskip) :
Autoframeskip:on (for proper janky 3d)
Rendering Resolution: 1xPSP (save the frames, your phone ain't big)
Display Resolution (HW Scaler): Auto (save the frames more, let it blit it directly to screen)
Lazy Texture Caching: ticked (oks, might be a problem)
Disable Slower Effects: ticked (expect not to see the deathray that killed you)
Spline/Bezier Curves Quality: Medium (probably just makes you fall through the map sometimes, and does nothing for +fps. But might be funny anyway)
Anistropic Filtering: Off (every bit of gpu filtering you can get rid of is +fps. If anything, it ruins textures that were specifically made to be viewed at exactly PSP resolution. This is gold)
There's some weird thing that you can try and overclock the PSP core in the System menu. I set it to +302. It's completely stable. It may or may not do anything. Seems to average about 1-3 fps though on the counter, so it is a thing to do.

I only did this on mission 8, but have tested a few more. Not saying that they won't screw up anything on other missions. But it certainly upped the FPS. It's probably mostly from turning anistropic filtering off and putting it to 1xPSP resolution though.
That's from what I remember that I changed from the defaults. It runs better, and no glitches so far, and actually looks better in some ways than the default options like this. Huzzah! Crappy graphics chip and octo-core win, even without gHz or ram to back it!)

^note: it's not that an F1s is a particularly good phone, it's because a PSP is an easy chipset to emulate in some ways. But the original release can only be pushed so far, even it had toppling fps in many areas. You may be able to get "better than orginal" graphics quite easily off other, more decent phones. And better FPS than the original PSP could provide. And then cast them to your smart television over Wi-Fi. And then play them on a decent Bluetooth controller. It's a wonderful world we live in. But it'll only ever be "a certain amount of good". It was still on a PSP. There's limits.

[sambojin]

After a fair bit of testing (as in, 5-10mins or so), none of the above options actually did anything other than turning it to 1xPSP mode, auto rendering it to that resolution, turning anistropic filtering off, and maybe the overclock could have possibly given an extra 1-3 FPS or so, it's hard to tell. It actually seems to work better on high splines, not ticked crappy texture buffering, and leaving slow effects on.


But on other "what random crap did Sam play recently?" news, Warriors Orochi 2 runs at full framerate on PPSSPP on an old phone, with no jankiness, on those sorts of settings. And I actually do own a copy of that, so I can feel legit af.

Sometimes mindless hack'n'slash is almost as good as mindless shooty-kaboomy Almost. Not quite. EDF Portable 2 is really satisfying. But if you want a bit of mindless rhythmic button mashing to slaughter heaps of enemies, grind or run through the game as you want, on many difficulty levels, but always slowly get occasional upgrades that will end up with you destroying entire groups of enemies and/or bosses in one-two combos, Muoso Orochi 2 is really good for that. Sort of satisfying after a couple of hours of play. And yes, Da Ji is the best character to play once you do her weapon up (and also historically, the evilest).

I'll probably play more "actual mobile games" soonish. Ish.


((in some ways, they're similar sorts of games. EDFp2 lets you customize your character with weapons and how you approach different missions with two very different movesets/weapon groupings. MOrochi2 lets you change characters (ie: weapons types/movesets, but they're all pretty similar in use each level) but also lets you tack on different attack effects from the levelling grind you're doing (EDFp2 really only lets you grind health and possibly missed weapon drops).
I wonder if there's a beautiful midway point in between all that? I wonder how hard it is to make/sponsor an EDF game? Or buy out a company? I mean, it can't be that hard, can it?))

[Frumple]

It's pretty easy if you have a few million USD to splash, sure. Maybe adds tens of (and/or ruthless exploitation of workers) to that if you want something super fancy. If you don't things get more difficult. Your bottom line for relatively easy is probably still six digits. Less than that involves crowd funding and/or great efforts to team build and whatnot, and stops being anything even resembling not hard.

[Iduno]

I see that Terraforming Mars is now on IOS.     I wonder if the AI is any good.

I have heard that it is awful.

[sambojin]

For another little PSP title that totally passed me by, Dungeons and Dragons Tactics is a somewhat faithful recreation of the 3.5 ruleset. It's not great, it takes a fair bit of time to take a turn (you'll be controlling up to 6 characters) and it's certainly not the *entire* ruleset (3.5 got a tiny bit bloated by the end), but it does a thing and does it OK'ish.

Runs pretty well on Android through ppsspp as well (45-60fps most of the time).

I'm not sure if it's better than just buying Baldur's Gate 1 or 2, Icewind Dale or NWN from the playstore, but if you're looking for a D&D fix on your phone, this does that pretty well. It's a bit slow and fiddly on the user interface, it really does show how crappy low level play can be in D&D (there ain't no unlimited cantrips here my boy-o, and missing happens a lot), but it's not bad. I'm only a couple of missions in, but I'm sure it will get better. I've got four casters in my party. It will get better.

((you probably do want to understand the ruleset fairly well to play this. I've migrated to 5e, so re-remembering just how 3.5 works is fun. The first thing you're asked to do is create 6 min/maxxed characters from an abbreviated races/classes/feats system (no, there is no spiked chain at the beginning, and enemies barely move, so don't worry about opportunity attacks). But there's most of the main classes, including Psions, which scale wonderfully in a CRPG. No wildshape for your druid though (AFAIK, I'm not at a decent level yet, and they're still pretty good anyway).
Expect spell descriptions to not exactly do what they say on the tin (try Entangle some time. It's "a little bit bigger than a 10 foot cube", to put it mildly), remember that Dex and Cha *aren't* godstats in 3.5 (it's so hard to unlearn 5e these days), and that your feat selection isn't ever going to be great. Still, it's OK'ish, and worth a look if you like D&D 3.5e. It's just a bunch of nice little missions strung together, rather than a huge all encompassing plotline like BG or NWN, so is somewhat easier to play in quickish bursts on a mobile. Lots of options on party makeup to try out, skills that you wouldn't think have a place in a combat orientated game still do (lore skills let you see enemy hit points, etc), and a half-orc fighter is actually kinda handy in the first couple of missions (dark vision and high strength is nice). So it is good for that kinda D&D.

Also, remember that this is a CRPG, and a casual'ish one at that. Things like potions of healing are handed out like candy and you can buy them in the dozens if needed. Party makeup is *very* flexible, because they give you a mini-magic-mart by mission 2. Party xp is always shared, so it doesn't matter who gets the kill. You'll be fine. It's just very front-loaded at the beginning on stats and equipment, so it feels like stuff matters way more than it actually does on a min/maxxing perspective. Worried you can't do something? Take a potion or a scroll for that. Because as we all know, drinking and reading solves all of life's problems...))

[Mephisto]

In a collection of words you've probably never heard combined thusly, I've been playing Arknights. It's a gacha tower defense where your towers are various furcritters in various states of furriness/scaliness, from human with animal ears to the anthro tiger lady literally named Waai Fu. I explained it as "revolutionary group is trying to exterminate the catgirl infection" because your animal people are mostly all infected and people are trying to kill them, but this was just the game explaining itself badly - the infection can infect anyone, the furries are just more susceptible to it.

In short, tower defense good, story bad.