S02E09 — SEP2020

My Favorite Mobile Games

Hello world and welcome to the twenty-first edition of this rather witchy newsletter.

Thanks for all the feedback on the previous issue. I never thought that such a weird topic would spark joy with so many of you.

The summer is over, this should be a quick one.

Ok, let’s do this.

✦

I don’t really know how young I was (4-5?) when I touched my first computer. It was in the super ‘80s style office of my cousin’s firm. I remember looking at the chunky keyboard and thinking about how complicated everything looked. All those Latin letters that I don’t even know to pronounce. He booted up “Prince of Persia” and showed me around. The game was very hard for me back then and I would kiss the spikes in a matter of seconds.

In the following years, we had Sega, Nintendo 64, and a PC at home. Even though I spent days (and nights) playing video games I never considered myself a gamer. There were always people around me who played more, knew more, and had a more specific taste.

My addictive personality ran so deep that I’d take a vacation from work just so I could finish up the latest GTA or Call of Duty in a 3-4 days nonstop marathons. But the concept of gaming changed for me with the availability of smartphones with bigger screens. Once again games became fun to play and I could play them whenever I had some downtime or felt frustrated. This is what’s called “hyper-casual gaming”.

Recently, while removing the last game from my phone, I took the walk down the memory lane in the App Store’s “purchased but not on this phone” section. The same way iMessage is a graveyard of my past romantic relationships, this is the graveyard of rather weirder emotions. 

In no particular order, I’ll try to enlist some of my favorite games and categorize them in a meaningful way. Some are long gone and discontinued, and I have no affiliation with any of them.

Retro Vibes

Downwell
Single-color, 8bit, pixel art, and on top of that add a tiny guy who shoots bullets from its boots. What else can a person ask for? This is an amazing game about, well, falling down the well.

Sky Force 2014
I remember playing this classic in the arcades, putting coin after a coin into the damn machine. Now redesigned for the modern screens and loaded with the same amount of fun. After hours of playing it in order to complete all tasks perfectly (I’m one of those people), I remember having flashing images imprinted when I’d close my eyes.

Tomb of The Mask
If you didn’t already figure it out, I’m a sucker for an 8bit aesthetic. With screaming colors and amazingly done motion design, this game is pushing you to think fast and move even faster in order to get out of labyrinths on time. So much fun.

Green the Planet 2
They call it “an eco-friendly space odyssey”. The goal of this game is to go to empty planets, shoot as many passing asteroids as you can, and wait for their fallouts to spread life. Besides remembering it as utterly static, it had nice graphics though.

Absolutely Pointless

Monsters Ate My Condo
By far one of the craziest pieces of human artifacts I had a chance to see in my life so far. Basically, you swipe left and right trying to feed monsters with the stack of unbalanced condos.

Corporate Salmon
The same way some species of salmon swim upstream, the corporate salmon needs to climb corporate ladders or better say escalator. Everything followed with some jazzy tunes of elevator music.

Kiwanuka
You are in the role of a space Jesus equivalent, using your followers as a live bridge between terrains.

I’m Ping Pong King
Stickman ping pong anime style.

Puzzles

Monument Valley
Every single frame from this game could be printed out and used as a piece of art. It’s that beautiful! Besides this, the storytelling, gameplay, and UI are amazing. I can’t recommend it more.

Kami 2
In this origami game, the main challenge is to “fold the colors” in the least possible moves. It’s trickier than it looks.

Little Broken Robots
Here you work in a repair shop fixing circuit boards of little broken robots. It’s so cute I’m gonna die.

Mini Metro
This is the masterpiece of interaction design. Minimal visual aesthetic, sound design, and gameplay, this little game will keep you amused and nerve-wracked at the same time.

Strategies

Plants vs. Zombies
In order to prevent zombies from entering your house, you need to strategically place plants in your garden. Even though different plants have different power moves, zombies have a couple of aces in their sleeves as well.

Bad North
This is the last meaningful game I played. I like the setup, minimalistic character/level design, and above all the humor. I had so much fun playing this game and I also wished it’s a bit longer.

Kingdom Rush 
This is a tasteless household name of the tower defense genre, but I think I played the whole franchise and was so hooked at the time.

Miscellaneous

Pokémon GO
I’ll just say that I spent the whole summer of 2016 luring and capturing Pokemons with the small kids in the park nearby.

Mushroom 11
This is a super-intelligent platformer, where you operate an ugly blob. It’s harder than it seems, but super fun nonetheless.

Agar
This is pure evil. The worst and the best game ever, and the last one I deleted from my phone. It’s more of a social experiment than a game. I’m sure someone will eventually write a scientific paper about this phenomenon.

That’s the list. Hopefully, you’ll discover something interesting to play if you haven’t already. Anyways let me know of your impressions and experiences and feel free to share some of your favorite mobile titles.