The new era of mobile gaming

Plus Nintendo World Championships, CoD on Game Pass and Retrotink 4K.

Hello there! I hope you’re settling in for some quiet gaming on this forthcoming rainy weekend. Or getting ready for the Olympics, if that’s your thing. This week we’re looking at the changing face of gaming on the go, getting some high scores in old NES favourites, and coming to grips with the complex nature of extremely expensive video gear.

I’m also pleased to say that Alice will be bringing her sparkling takes back to the newsletter from next week, after some much-deserved parental leave. Huge thanks once again to Jam and Anthony for filling in with some great writing in her absence, so you all weren’t subjected to two straight months of Sonic the Hedgehog discourse.

Phone games are just games now

By Tim

There was a time when mobile gaming meant Angry Birds or Candy Crush, time-wasters designed to sap your attention and money with dark patterns and microtransactions. And a lot of people thought that their ubiquity meant the end for more traditional console games. But as games in general have only become more popular, and several different technologies have exploded in a way few predicted, the opposite has kind of happened: consoles games are the new mobile games.

Obviously there’s still a place for lighter experiences, and that’s great. I love playing word games and little high score chasers on my phone. But right now Assassin’s Creed Mirage is also on my phone. And Resident Evil 4. And Death Stranding. And I know people scoff because they don’t think anyone is going to pay $40 or $60 for a game on mobile. But I think this is just the beginning.

These games run surprisingly well on a new iPhone with a Backbone controller attached, meaning within a year or two there could be a much bigger library that works on phones that aren’t brand new. And a bigger audience means more publishers putting their games on mobile at the same time as console. Ubisoft’s games already let you share saves between mobile and console, and many games are playable across multiple Apple devices with a single purchase. It won’t be long before subscription services have new games that run natively across consoles and phones.

But that’s not the only way console games are going mobile. Xbox game streaming is improving all the time, and when I’m on home Wi-Fi or 5G (in any situation other than a crowded train) the experience is legitimately great. As soon as Kunitsu-Gami hit the service I started playing it on my phone.

And then there’s obviously the rise of portable consoles, from Switch to Steam Deck, which aren’t going anywhere. I’ve been testing out the ROG Ally X recently and, while I hate using Windows on that thing, playing Kingdom Hearts or Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Baldur’s Gate on my commute sure beats Angry Birds.

What to play

• Call of Duty has arrived on Game Pass, with last year’s Modern Warfare III hitting the service this week. To be honest I’m not sure who’s interested in CoD and doesn’t already have the game, but I guess if you’ve never played one and are curious it’s a great way to find out ahead of Black Ops 6 in a month or so.

• It’s a bit of a light week, but July has been filled with great games you may have missed that you can go back and look at. On PC only is great metroidvania Gestalt and ridiculous FPS door-kicker Anger Foot. But on consoles I really enjoyed the cute shadow platforming of Schim, the flying bird noticing of Flock and the beautiful photography puzzles of The Star Named Eos. I haven’t had time yet to look at Arranger, which looks like the world turned into a sliding panel puzzle, but I think I’ll like that too.

NWC is great, but for how long?

By Tim

After decades of being ranked somewhere in the deep thousands in every video game leaderboard I’ve ever submitted a time to, I feel like my life has peaked. In the Super Mario Bros level 1-1 speedrun on Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, I ranked #363 of around 50,000, putting me in the top 0.8%. How many of those 50,000 were children playing Super Mario Bros for the first time? We’ll never know, but I’ll take the W.

Nintendo World Championships is an odd game, because I’ve really enjoyed my time with it over the first week, but I can’t help feeling it’s somehow not a very good value. It’s a $50 game that more or less requires a Nintendo Switch Online subscription (another $30 per year or so), and its main draw is a new way to play 13 ancient NES games that you already get as part of NSO anyway.

I blasted through the 150 challenges in a weekend, playing most multiple times to refine my runs and managing to score A or S ranks in all but two of them, and I refuse to return to the Legend-level Balloon Fight or Kid Icarus challenges to improve those two Bs. I also enjoyed showing the game to my kids and their friends. They all had a lot of fun, but I didn’t play with them because I now have a working knowledge of all the optimal strats. After seven days I think I’ve exhausted everything I want to do with the game, and I’m not sure I’ll remember to come back weekly for the championships.

But on the other hand, spending time refining that level 1-1 run until I felt it was absolutely as sharp as I could manage was a lot of fun. I bought a pair of those overpriced NSO NES controllers specifically for the occasion (the Joy-Cons are really tough to use for this game), and now I feel like I have a little bit of a better understanding of a game I’ve been playing almost literally all my life.

Could there be other moments like that, if I committed to training on one or two of the championship challenges each week? Possibly. The first level of Donkey Kong and getting all the bonus level coins in Super Mario aren’t doing it for me this week, but as soon as there’s a Mario 3 level all bets are off.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

I recently bought a Retrotink 4K, a video scaler that’s designed to sit between your old consoles and your new TV, giving you total control over the results. At around $1100 it’s a ludicrous luxury, and I knew going in that there would be a case of diminishing returns going from the $200 Retrotink 2X to the $500 5X (which is incredible) to this. But I guess I have a disease.

To be honest my first feeling on plugging it in, connected to a Gamecube, and then a Mega Drive, was a bit of a downer. The Retrotink did a great job of automatically turning the output of those consoles into clean 4K, but they didn’t look how I wanted them. The Wind Waker was oversharp and jaggy, Sonic was huge and blocky with pixels, and every single setting on this thing was gobbledygook to me.

You can save and load all the device settings at once using profiles, and the 4K comes with a whole bunch of them crafted by experts. Some are optimised for specific consoles, so for example you can get a perfect 10x scale on a Mega Drive with the aspect ratio and cropping adjusted for the console’s 320 pixel mode, while others emulate the look of certain old TVs, using the 4K resolution to incredible effect so if you look close it’s like seeing a CRT through a microscope. But nothing felt right.

In retrospect I think I was just feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of starting over, and figuring out “perfect” settings for the 20 or so consoles that I could potentially want to plug in, from endless granular options. Once I started actually playing some games, the power of the scaler became immediately apparent.

I put on Streets of Rage 2 with a CRT scanline filter and it just immediately looked amazing, filling the screen vertically and running silky smooth, with the image cut up enough to look like an animated scene rather than Lego blocks. I plugged a Dreamcast in and barely had to touch a single setting. And then a Wii.

At some point on my journey to get every console looking great on a modern OLED, I’ve started giving too much weight to achieving integer scales and proper aspect ratios. Which, to be fair, is probably because those things mattered more with previous equipment that isn’t as capable as the 4K. But it never mattered when these games were created.

When I feel like tinkering, I know the capability will be there for me to make hyper-specific profiles for my favourite games and consoles. But when I just feel like playing Diddy Kong Racing or Resident Evil 2, this machine makes it work without me doing anything, which is absolutely incredible.