Hacker News Reader

Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo.

P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. Too many nasty or stupid sites out there.

View on HN

The Final Fantasy Tactics port to iOS is actually quite good. I played it on my iPad, and it seemed almost perfectly suited to a touch interface. The only issue was a slight interaction delay/misfire for when I would press on-screen buttons, but since it's not a twitch game, it's a minor thing.

There's an Android port as well, for $13. That's a great price to play a great game - although I'm not sure how well it plays on a phone.

For the most part, I do agree with your sentiment: the gaming experiences I have read about, seen and experienced on smartphones and tablets tend to not be what I'm looking for. For example, I started playing Bastion on my iPad, but eventually stopped because I really want a gamepad for that kind of game. Same with a lot of the other Square ports.

There are some. Civilization Revolution is available for iOS and Windows Phone. I'm not sure why they never did an Android version.

I played the Windows Phone version back when it was released. It was fairly decent. I'm not a civ aficionado though, so I don't know how well it stands up when compared to other editions.

The thing is though, if I'm going to play a decent game that takes time and thought, I sit down at my laptop or console. It's not really what I want from a phone. I want a game that I can play for 2 minutes while I wait for something else. It's not that I'm not prepared to spend £+ for a decent mobile game, it's that when I want to buy a decent complex game, I tend to choose a different platform to buy the game on.

Civ Rev 2 is on android.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.t2kgames.c...

You can do this now by running dosbox on your phone. A cursory search shows that somebody's selling "dosbox turbo" on google play for $2.50.

I tend to think the impoverished nature of phone games is related to the available controls. You see a lot of phone/tablet games that amount to "wait for something to become clickable, and then click on it". Maybe we need to provide an input method beyond "fat-finger your screen".

If that happens, though, the phone basically loses the portability that is its only advantage.

I agree that touch is a lousy input method, because it's imprecise and you can't see what you're touching. But phones have other input methods, like the accelerometer. Even early iPhones had a ball rolling game that you could play by tilting the phone. With a modern phone, a controller, and something like Google Cardboard, you could make a decent VR FPS game. And by making imaginative use of the camera and microphone (both movable), you could probably do even more.

Once upon a time handhelds had hardware buttons (some even had qwerty keyboards in addition to larger hardware buttons) but these have unfortunately been replaced with inaccurate touch screens.

You and me, both! I've been waiting so long that in the mean time I have started developing my mobile, civ-like game on https://nationsonline.net. But I'm not a professional game developer, and we're only two programmers, no artists. I'd much rather a big game developer with artists, game designers and the capacities to finish it in a reasonable time frame would create such a game. Civ Revolution was a big disappointment for me, unfortunately.

Battle for Wesnoth runs on phones iirc.

Yes, but only version that's any good is on IOS. all the android versions are sucky and outdated. If you want to make a good one, please do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com