Image: Super Cricket 2
Having spent a lot of time playing Cricket 97 on my Surface laptop, I thought it’d be reasonable to get a replacement on my phone. So I loaded up a game from an Aussie developer. The gameplay was pretty good, the action was smooth.
But as hard as I tried, there was something that I simply couldn’t get past.
It’s a problem facing plenty of mobile games: Constant. Bloody. Ads.
The game in question – Super Cricket 2 – bombarded me with the buggers. There was an ad at the end of every over. I got ads trying to go into the settings screen. Sometimes my Chrome browser would pop-up after pressing a menu prompt and I’d get one of those horrific mobile pop-ups that everyone dreads seeing. I got one just looking at the menu screen.
I uninstalled the game, finished the tutorial, and my reward: an ad telling me my phone had been “selected to receive a FREE new iPhone X”.
That’s the kind of stuff that makes you want to fire an app into the sun.
But there are plenty of games, ones where certain mechanics or levels are too much, games with systems that act as a barrier to fun instead of a contributor.
Quake 3 was like that for me as a kid, although the problem was technological. Playing online games with a dialup connection was a tough gig. Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike were client-side focused games, so it was possible to enjoy those as a HPB. Quake 3? Not a chance.
Another example was Hearthstone. If I didn’t have mobile black spots on my train line, I’d probably play it a bit more. But the game has frequent disconnects to and from work, and as a result I eventually had to give it up. It’s a great card game. It plays great on mobile too. Unless you spend half your time reconnecting.
What games did you want to love, but couldn’t?
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