Seems like a great port, which is no surprise for DotEmu. Smooth performance, great graphics, and MFi controller support are the norm for their games. There is one troubling aspect, however:
Shaun Musgrave says:
I’m not sure the reasons why, but DotEmu seems to have done a new translation for the game rather than use the one XSEED created for the PC and PSP versions. It’s quite poor all-around, the kind of rough work we used to see regularly in the old days. Names, locations, and terminology are inconsistent with previous versions, and the phrasing is frequently awkward and even somewhat nonsensical at times. Even worse, there are sometimes extra letters that somehow slipped in to text boxes, and a couple instances of the text not fitting in the dialogue box.
That’s sad news. There are too many RPGs out there for people to have to sit through a bad translation job. I have yet to play this game, and I’d probably want my first time to be with the best translation possible.
Mobile game sites, like every web site on the internet, are paid by advertisers looking to get their product in front of the eyes of the siteâs readers. We provide a platform with a targeted, often incredibly influential, audience and advertisers in turn offer us the monetary fuel to keep that platform running. Not too long ago every available ad spot was sold and the media side of the mobile gaming industry thrived. Sites expanded, added staff, and started investing in apps and other services to make their platform even better.
â¦Everything was great until studios shifted gears away from traditional advertising to directly acquiring users via CPI campaigns and similar services. This inevitably led to a steep drop in ad revenue which resulted in staff layoffs, less content, fewer page views, and well⦠Editorial mobile game sites large and small are in a real bad spot right now. Ad sales have tanked in the last couple years. The sites that still exist are publishing way less interesting content â all in a bid to up the page views and pay the bills. Many sites have folded and more inevitably will this year if this trend continues.
The whole piece is well worth a read, and paints a pretty grim picture of the future of ad-supported mobile gaming publications.
While this piece focuses entirely on the world of mobile gaming publications, I do think the problem goes further than that. There are two very important reasons why mobile gaming sites might not be getting advertisers, and they have nothing to do with anything inherent to the mobile gaming ecosystem:
Display ads do not work well on mobile devices.
Mobile gaming websites have a high percentage of visitors using mobile devices.
I feel like these two points are critically important to understand why all ad-supported websites, not just mobile gaming sites, are feeling the hit right now.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery recently addressed why display ads donât work well on mobile; Iâll quote his reasoning here:
Mobile display ads stink. Unlike a PC browser, which has a lot of space to display ads alongside content, content on mobile necessarily takes up the whole screen (and if it doesnât, the user experience degrades significantly, making quality a casualty once again). This results in mobile ad rates that are a fraction of desktop ad rates (and remember, desktop ad rates are already a fraction of print ad rates)
Second, on mobile, clicks are expensive from a user experience perspective. Not only do PCs typically have faster broadband connections to download assets and more powerful processors to render pages, they also have multiple windows and tabs. On a phone, on the other hand, clicking on a link means you can do nothing but wait for it to open, and open quite slowly at that. The cost of clicking a link, already quite high because of the deluge of crap content and particularly-annoying-on-mobile ads, is even higher because of the fundamental nature of the device.
Advertisers arenât stupid. They know all about these problems, and theyâre choosing to spend their ad budgets elsewhere. The same money that could be spent on a mobile ad banner is spent instead on Facebook, where ad-click experience is tightly managed, or on desktop, where mobile display ads actually have a chance of working.
Addressing the second point, itâs fairly self-evident: mobile gaming sites are about mobile games, and thus have a high percentage of visitors using mobile device. My site gets about 1/3 iPhone, 1/3 desktop, and 1/3 iPad (which has many of the negatives of mobile device ads for advertisers).
This makes mobile gaming publications a particularly bad target for spending your ad budget on.
This isnât going away. As mobile gains more and more prominence, more sites will start feeling the squeeze as they struggle to convert their existing monetization strategies to a more mobile audience. Mobile gaming sites happen to be at the forefront of this trend, but it isnât a problem exclusive to them.
Last week, an interesting new controller was announced: the Nes30 Pro controller from 8bitdo. Superficially, it seems like a well built, pocketable controller in the same vein as the Stratus, but with better analog buttons.
Of particular interest was the promised multi-platform support. Basically, with a flip of a switch, you can change the controller from Android, iOS, Windows, etc.
This feature sounds handy. So handy, in fact, that every other MFi controller manufacturer I’ve talked to about it would have implemented it themselves if it wasn’t expressly disallowed by Apple’s MFi licensing agreements.
So that brought me to the obvious conclusion that this isn’t an MFi controller, but is instead an android controller with some bolted-on icade support, much like a multitude of cheap Ipega controllers you can find on Amazon.
I was surprised when TouchArcade ran an article claiming this was an MFi controller. Let me set the record straight right now:
This is NOT an MFi controller. This doesn’t work with any of the almost 700 games with MFi controller support. This only works with a far, far more limited number of iOS games with support for something called icade, which is effectively a hackey controller solution that works by having the controllers emulate keyboard presses.
I wish it was. It seems like a really nice portable controller – sort of like a Stratus, but done right. But if the TouchArcade article got your hopes up, you’re going to have to keep looking.
iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, and iPod Touch owners, youâre probably going to want to jump on this deal: the Logitech PowerShell is now available for $9.99 – a pretty major discount, considering it launched at $99 last year!
This $9.99 sale is on refurbished controllers, but itâs also direct from Logitech, fulfilled by Amazon, and available with free shipping and a great return policy from Amazon Prime.
If youâd rather not get a refurbished model, well thereâs good news here as well: the regular version of the PowerShell is available for under $15 right now from third-party sellers, also with free Amazon Prime shipping and Amazon fulfillment. This is by far the lowest price yet on any MFi controller.
The PowerShell isnât a great controller – it isnât even a good controller, honestly – but this deal is too good to pass up. If you have an older iPhone or iPod Touch lying around, spend the $10 and turn it into a portable console. Thanks to controller forwarding, you can then turn around and use that combo with any other devices, including the latest iPads.
If youâre a developer looking to add controller support to your game, the PowerShell makes a perfectly good test device. Youâll make the $10 back in sales – MFi controller fans arenât afraid to buy games!
Platforming game fans, start your downloads: Leo’s Fortune is currently on sale for $0.99 right now – a full 80% its usual price!
I have no idea why this sale is going on, but please, if you like platforming games, you need to buy this game immediately. It’s one of the best platformers I’ve played in years, and it is well worthy of all the awards it’s received (such as Apple’s Game of the Year).
Great article on TouchArcade delving into some of the results of the recent 2015 Swrve Monetization Report delving into the finances of free-to-play games, and how these finances have changed.
The whole article (and linked report) are worth reading. The most important thing to take away from this report is that for free-to-play game developers, the most important people to target are not those who spend a few bucks on the game every now and then, but rather on the (relatively minuscule) number of people who spend hundreds of dollars. As this discrepancy grows, expect free-to-play game makers to tailor more and more of the design of their games towards collecting more money from fewer targets.
Emulator fans, start your downloads: Homebrew Indie Games brings a full multi-system emulator to The App Store. Well actually, don’t start your downloads yet, there are some pretty major caveats here for 8.3 users; read on…
This app is superficially a collection of 78 indie games, but behind the scenes, it’s actually a powerful, full-featured multi system emulator! The indie games included here are actually ROMs for the GBA, NES, SNES, Genesis, and the app plays these game ROMs back through emulating these systems.
Developers have been sneaking emulators on to The App Store for as long as The App Store has existed, and historically Apple has cracked down on these emulators very quickly.
Before you download this emulator, be aware of one important catch: you can’t add your own games to it if you’re on iOS 8.3. The only way to add your own ROMs to an app like this is using a third-party file system access tool like iExplorer or iFunBox, and Apple has blocked these programs from getting access to iOS in 8.3.
It’s unclear if a workaround for this restriction will be coming any time soon. Developers of iOS filesystem management software are hard at work on it, but Apple seems to be more committed to security than ever before.
If you’re on 8.2, and want a high-quality emulator with full MFi controller support, give this one a download immediately. If you’re on 8.3, and you’re willing to take the risk that a workaround for filesystem restrictions will never be discovered, you should download this one while you can; based on Apple’s history with this kind of thing, you might not be able to download it for long.
Longtime iOS and Mac developer Strange Flavor just released a new, free entry in the SlotZ Racer series. This new game is free due to the fact itâs sponsored by Zenos, and features slot racers modeled on Zenos race cars.
Also new to the SlotZ Racer series: MFi controller support! In fact, this game was supposed to feature full 4-player local multiplayer with multiple MFi controllers, which would put it in very exclusive company.
Unfortunately, thereâs currently a bug preventing multiple MFi controllers from working. A fix is coming soon, which is good, because this game is a lot of fun multiplayer.
Considering that this is a free download, thereâs no reason not to give it a shot. Itâs fun, and once the multi-controller bug is sorted out, itâll be an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a good party game.
The Verge1came to a conclusion that should already be obvious to regular Mac laptop users: Chrome is a battery hog. Especially compared to Safari.
It has always been mind-boggling to me that some people buy a Mac and then install Chrome or Firefox right away. Both browsers started off lean and mean, especially compared to Internet Explorer, but those days are long behind us. These days, Chrome and Firefox are the iTunes of web browers: bloated, ugly, and hobbled by cross-platform compatibility compromises.
Safari isnât bloatware – Safari is a reason to buy a Mac instead of a PC. Especially for iOS users; the cross-platform synchronization features are extremely useful and extremely stable.
If youâve been using Chrome or Firefox on the Mac, either out of habit or out of history, youâre missing out on one of the Macâs best apps.