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As of July, there are 1,300,000 games available on the Google Play store. An overwhelming majority of these games are microtransaction-ridden addiction simulators and bringing ad bars to your phone while you wait 20 minutes before you can play Casual Castle or Addiction Empire again. These games are a blight on the industry, and waste the potential of these incredible pocket computers we carry around every day. I want so badly to believe there are good games out there. I want to find the diamonds, resting in their resplendence at the bottom of the deepest trench in a sea of diarrhea.

Suggest some games! They don't have to be free. I'm willing to pay for quality.

Contre Jour is a good physics-based puzzler. It's sort of Angry Birds with more actions and abilities except that you're getting from point A to point B rather than breaking shit. It also has a pretty slick black-and-white art style akin to Limbo.

Flight Commander is a fun little time waster where you play as an air traffic controller trying to land more and more planes at an airport. It gets pretty hairy keeping them from crashing into each other once you've been playing for a while and there's a ton of planes on the screen.

FC Rocket is sequel to Flight Commander with a space theme and a little faster pacing.

Frozen Bubble is an open source game similar to Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move. There is a build available in F-Droid with no ads whatsoever, or you can disable them in the Google Play build (I don't know who gets the revenue from the ads in said build).

Oddly enough, DJ Max Technica Q was pretty good despite it's flaws.

I like Puzzle and Dragons.
It has microtransactions, but you can get away pretty easily with not using them. The core puzzle mechanics are a lot of fun and the game eventually introduces enough challenge for it to become a fun, party-management sort of deal. Gets a bit grindy later on, though.

Pokebis wrote:I like Puzzle and Dragons.
It has microtransactions, but you can get away pretty easily with not using them. The core puzzle mechanics are a lot of fun and the game eventually introduces enough challenge for it to become a fun, party-management sort of deal. Gets a bit grindy later on, though.

I played that for awhile but unless super late game unless you have very specific gods a lot of the bosses are nearly impossible to kill =(

Really interesting albeit long article on F2P games and the psychology behind them: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminSho ... Tricks.php

I always feel some combination of anger and disappointment after reading articles like these. F2P feels psychologically abusive and hurts game design, which is bad, but the fact that it rakes in so much god damn money is depressing. If that's what pays the bills, you're going to see more talented developers cash out instead of making quality products. Since we just talked about it, I'll throw Riot under the bus:

Riot is a billion times more likely to give money to Clash of Clans, which is doing its best to get into Riot's wallet using gameplay that's more addictive than it is fun, than to his favorite musical artists that are creating something interesting that he feels an honest-to-god emotional connection to. It's not his fault he's being taken advantage of, and I'm not even sure he's supposed to be responsible for the direction the industry takes, but when I see a smart, young, frugal, 9/10 good looking guy just giving it up...



I need to emotionally detach from vibeo games.

I played through Ridiculous Fishing recently. Not a bad little game. The soundtrack is pretty good too. Lots of charm.

6/10 game for $3. Not a bad deal, but I wouldn't say it's a must buy either.

I enjoyed the point the beginning of the article about how F2P games are akin to credit card companies in the sense that they are marketed to 18-25 year olds because of the legal protections that no longer apply to them and their inexperience with handling money and impulse control. It reminded me of all the "GET A FREE T-SHIRT SIGN UP FOR THIS CREDIT CARD" booths that I would see all over campus back in the IU days.

But I like Clash of Clans because I enjoy raiding other people's villages and doing wars and play with other RL friends. I still don't see how having fun for 200+ hours in a game and spending $25 is somehow worse or some vampiric cash-grab moreso than paying $3 for a 2 hour game.

Because these games don't take skill and are specifically designed at the cost of fun gameplay to give you an illusion of progress by spending money.

Riot wrote:I still don't see how having fun for 200+ hours in a game and spending $25 is somehow worse or some vampiric cash-grab moreso than paying $3 for a 2 hour game.

I agree with this 100%, but I would challenge the word 'fun.' I'm arguing that Candy Clash & Dragons isn't fun for 200+ hours. The game has been built from the ground up to feed an addiction/compulsion, then try to cash out on it. Ask yourself honestly, "am I having a good time playing this game, or do I feel like I need to be playing it?" Have you been bored of this game for a while now, but you're playing because you're so invested? It just seems evil to me to try to play mind games with people, especially when we know video games have potential to be some of the most fun stuff ever. Like it or not, you're making the problem worse by giving them money.

Ridiculous Fishing never:

- Asked me to follow, like, tweet, or give them a social networking tugjob.
- Asked me to pay for anything after having purchased the game.
- Showed me an advertisement for a giant breasted woman. (Although I kinda wish it had)
- Prevented me from playing the game for a set amount of time.

Well what if it's fun for me? I like the idea of leveling up a base and warring other people and killing theirs. It's also fun because friends play and we chat through it and smoosh other dudes (that sounds sexual). I admit that at super high levels it's kind of boring to grind for gold/elixir in game by attacking other bases all the time and waiting for troops to finish training (but I just leave my old phone on while they do so I don't get raided in the mean time), but I like having goals to look forward to. I do kind of feel like I'm playing because I've invested a lot of time, but I still enjoy it so I dunno. And CoC does not advertise with buxom babes that's its imposter game, nor does it do the other stuff. You can choose to pay for some stuff but it never makes it seem integral to progress at all.

Don't you feel shitty when someone crushes your little base because they gave Supercell $10?