It's a-me, microtransactions!

...so, universal garbage?

Sigh. So as I may have mentioned once or twice before, I have strong opinions about mobile games. Strong, possibly unfounded, but decidedly negative options. I think it's fair to say, and I've said this before: universal garbage and-ok, maybe that's a little unfair so let me walk that back a bit: in my personal and admittedly one-sided opinion, mobile gaming, like as a thing, is a cheap, exploitative sub-genre of video games.

Above: how medicine works.

(source: my understanding of 

it until well into adulthood)

Anyway, that's why the news that there's going to be a Dr. Mario mobile game is so upsetting. Dr. Mario, for those of you who spent your childhoods outside doing the sports or climbing trees or whatever instead of honing your hand-eye coordination skills in the sunlight-free basements of suburban tract houses, I'll explain. Dr. Mario was Mario-themed Tetris knock-off from 1990. In it, the titular Dr. Mario-huh? A plumber? Yeah, usually he's a plumber but here he's a doctor. He's whatever a particular game needs him to be. Don't think too hard about it. Anyway, Dr. Mario fights viruses in a jar by throwing pills at them and lining up the right colors, like a real doctor.

And to be clear, when I say Tetris knock-off, I don't mean that in a bad way. 1990 was lousy with 'Tetris but with ____' games. Everyone was trying to come up with the next Tetris and a lot of them were terrible. In fact, one of the worse was literally the next Tetris: Tetris 2. But Dr. Mario was probably the best Tetris knock-off in a sea of Tetris knock-offs and that's a big part of why this announcement sucks.

"How about this: Tetris, but instead of blocks,
 everything is hats. We'll call it Hatris!"

-Some game designer, circa 1990

shortly before clearing out their desk

Pictured: the worst possible
interface. Just...the worst.

Playing anything on a phone or tablet or whatever means playing with a touchscreen and games originally designed with physical controllers in mind always suffer in the translation. Instead of tight, responsive controls you have the ambiguity of fingerprint smeared frustration. As with a lot of mobile games, Dr. Mario World-(that's the title), will be free-to-play which usually means free to start, that is if you hand over your email address and let them advertise at you. But then comes what the announcement calls 'optional in-game purchases.' That is, you can buy things like in-game power-ups with real-world money.

Which in a Dr. Mario game would probably have to mean something like special pills that make it easier to win. So in a game about a doctor fighting diseases players can pay extra to have a better chance of making it to the next level.

In many ways, Dr. Mario World sounds like a fairly
accurate simulation of the American health care system.

(source: topical humor)

"It's-a me, Mario! Go ahead,
don't-a think, just-a buy it!" 

Free-to-play gets less free the more you play. Gross, right? Yeah but it's a practice that's been around for a while now, but it's only recently-like, 2016, that Nintendo's been dipping their toes into it. There're mobile versions of Super Mario, Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing and now Dr. Mario. And maybe (definitely) this is the snobbish fan in me, but it's just not a good look for Nintendo. Sure, as company they've done some shady shit over the years, price fixing, anti-competitive business practices, and that time they screwed over Sony but their games usually have more depth and polish than other developers. But if even Nintendo can be lured into making mediocre games by this super-lucrative, free-to-play, 'buy this to win' nonsense, it might seriously be the grim future of video games.

It might just make more business sense to exclusively do mobile games and (as business people say) leverage and monetize IP's to maximize returns (no one says that). And look, I get that it's a business, but feels like creativity and innovation are set aside in favor of milking fans. And I know Dr. Mario World isn't out yet and that I'm being entirely alarmist but I guess what I'm really saying is that sooner or later, business ruins everything. Everything.

"Hey, did you guys get Marth yet? He's awesome and only $4.99!"

-Some exploitable resource