Apparently the latest version of Dale Gribble’s Pocket Sand, which if that game actually existed would be way better, doesn’t work with my phone anymore for some reason. Probably because I’m not using one of those mainstream Kahn Superphones or whatever it is people use now that has 18 cameras pasted on the back. As if Nintendo didn’t already screw things up for the billionth time in a week again. Not that I really was enjoying that phone game anyway, I mainly see it as an avenue to get Nintendo points to possibly get “free” things that cost $5 to ship, or desktop and phone wallpapers I rarely use, but mainly codes to get a free week or so of online as I’ve been intermittently doing because I have a thing against paying for online services on consoles. I also just get annoyed at phones and their crappy apps often enough.
I still don’t see why I’d want to buy a new phone just to run certain phone games, because none of the phone games that need advanced hardware for arbitrary reasons that I could think of have really appealed to me. Even when I’d played Pokémon GO on and off, that started having some AR functionality that I couldn’t use because my phone was too cheap, and that made me bored of it faster since I couldn’t screw around in AR. Now Pocket Camp has followed suit and that somehow made the game completely inoperable on my current phone. Said phone has modern enough hardware to run things in general, but it’s almost 2 years old now, I think, and was a budget phone back at that time, because I was looking to cut costs by also changing providers. As long as the phone works overall, I don’t feel the need to upgrade. That is something I said with a functional flip phone at college before deciding to update to a smartphone for the sake of more easily keeping up to date on assignments, but I don’t see the technology jump yet in this case. It also has some pretty good battery life, which is a big deal to me. Also a headphone jack. I really don’t want to get a phone without a headphone jack, and I also don’t want to have a modern PC without a disc drive.
The weird thing is that the app still works on my old phone from the last carrier, which I’ve really only kept around for the few picross games that wouldn’t transfer to my current one as well as general testing of apps if I get motivated to put things I’ve made on phones outside of work. It’s only a matter of time until the app drops that phone as well, though, since it doesn’t support this fancy AR feature that seems to require very specific hardware. It also seems to somehow run worse on the old phone than the newer one, which is still considered acceptable by their standards that exclude the newer phone that ran it just fine. Whatever their plan of obsolescence is to eat up more RAM I guess. A bit like modern browsers.
This is also around the time of release of new consoles, also new and expensive hardware needed to run certain games that only release on that system, but currently most games that released with those have also been released for the previous consoles as well, so the motivation to switch over just isn’t there for me or whoever else is on a budget or has a lot of other games to get to anyway. I’m not the type to seek out the latest and greatest all the time, because my pursuits are all over the place. My latest console acquisitions have been secondhand, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, even as I feel like I’m nearly done with picking up consoles. The next one would probably be a recent Xbox, likely an Xbone, so I can play Rare Replay and… mainly Rare Replay, unless something specific to the Sexbox appeals to me somehow.
These are points coming from someone who is putting a fair bit of money into a fairly modern PC build capable of recent VR offerings, and even then it took me a while to bring myself to spend that much on something, even with cutting down costs as much as I could comparing part prices. And, yes, I did include a disc drive. Sometimes I think that maybe I’m just old and bitter at a lot of things at not even the midlife crisis age range, but who knows these days, maybe any day could be past midlife. And that’s part of why I’m just going for things when I feel like it, but still with a bit of thought behind it. Except I wait for games to go on sale most of the time. I focus on trying to keep a budget overall so I can find the opportunities to do something a bit more expensive. I’d consider travel if it wasn’t the riskiest venture ever at the moment, and for all I know it’s a long moment. After taking care of the necessities, that’s where fun comes in, and some degree of fun is a necessity to prevent people from going absolutely murder-happy. That sort of behavior should be confined to relevant games.
Long story short, if I didn’t keep my old phone around, I’d need a decent emulator on the PC to run a simple phone game correctly, or just wait until I get a newer budget phone. For a game as simple as Pocket Camp, it would be a bit weird to me to need to resort to PC hardware, even with phone games getting ports on consoles other than the Switch, which some publishers believe is just a phone anyway. There are some weirdly complex phone games, and for anything needing a virtual controller to play on the touchscreen, at that point just attach a controller and put it on the TV so it’ll control correctly. Maybe it’s a good thing to have waited until the Switch version of phone bootleg Skyrim to be disappointed at it, just because it needed some kind of hyper advanced space phone as far as I could tell. At least the Switch did get real Skyrim. There’s also whenever I tried Genshin Impact, which I played on the PS4 because I didn’t trust it on my phone or PC, and it turns out it won’t run on any phone I have.
I just feel like I have a commitment to make things I have last as long as possible, considering the possible impending total collapse of society and all the supply chains with it, including clothing which I’ve been gradually getting patched up as it wears out, perhaps to a point where it wouldn’t be reasonably repaired without replacing a bunch of the fabric. At least I’m getting some good skill built with sewing things together. I’m trying to be better about general survival skills over time, hopefully just in time if needed.