Mobile crap - poor English

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

Not much to say here. Among the many bad-English apps, I only mention the most recent ones. Dungeon Hearts is sometimes Engrish, sometimes poor English with typos. It's odd because its single American developer seems able to speak proper English. Maybe something to do with the publisher? Puzzle and Dragons is half Engrish, half poor English. I expected a big company like Gung Ho to hire professional translators, but apparently not. The dialogs and the story in the Korean game Mother of Myth seem to have been written by a ten year-old kid. It's just terrible.

Most of the poor-English apps I have seen come from Asia. They have great graphics and art, but lack polish on their dialogs and menus, as mentioned in player reviews. It might be a good idea to invest in a copywriter for the ads, and a professional reviewer, or at least a native speaker, for the in-game content.

Mobile crap - upgrades

This series of articles is a rant about mobile game design. It may extend to console and PC gaming, but I only talk about what I experienced through most games featured on the iPad app store in the past year or so.

The upgrade mechanic is found in more and more iOS games. In Clash of Clans or Birzzle, the player spends coins to upgrade something. In Mother of Myths and Star Wars: Assault Team, the player must use a specific category of loot (e.g. spells for spells in MoM). In Plundernauts, the player must follow recipes using specific items previously looted in battle (e.g. 3 Poltergas for a Poltergas Tank). In Mutants, the player can breed two mutants of type A and B together to make a stronger mutant of type A and B. Finally, in Birzzle, owning more birds increases the play time, and the sum of the bird levels provides a score bonus. The only purpose of this mechanic is to make players buy birds with real money - not to make the game more interesting.

This kind of upgrades is not new, and not exclusive to mobile games: UO had crafting in 2000, Ragnarok Online gear could be upgraded up to ten times with materials in 2003, Diablo 3 has it nowadays with gems and enchanting, and some games in the Final Fantasy series must have had something close to it as well. It seems that iOS developers have just realized that they could use this decade-old mechanic everywhere they need players to grind - and therefore pay real money to skip the grind.