yeah it definitely is but most of the factors at work there are not much better on android which has the same problems around a centralized distribution method for software that doesn’t really care about game preservation and is happy to dump stuff permanently when it’s no longer maintained and is quite difficult to emulate faithfully, android just has fewer unique games and less aggressive deprecation of its runtime environment in the event that a good pirate archive did exist
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am i wrong in assuming android archivists have more options? aren’t there working emulators for android? and yeah, i tend to prioritize iOS because i think there’s a lot of unique & historically significant software on there compared to android, but i could definitely be wrong about that. both are very important to me
I have no idea how I’d go about playing this again if I wanted to:
(it controls with the gyro)
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Android has a bunch of preservation-friendly things surrounding it, like how most games are easily ported to PC, and the breadth of emulators. But yeah even with all that mobile is still a perpetually dying space. Doubly so since every company now operates on the GaaS model for their P2W city management sim whose design they copied from Civony.
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You can run android code on PC with the right app, can’t you? I mean you could years ago, but it’s been a while.
I used BlueStacks to play shit I didn’t want to use touch controls for
Oh LOL wow they really went all in on the gaming angle since I last checked
I’m the one who first brought up that phrase in this thread, and I was using it in the sense that iOS on an iPhone feels like it’s designed specifically to keep me from getting into the guts of my phone and doing anything beyond Apple’s relatively narrow window of intended use cases. Maybe there’s some arcane stuff you can do to get around that, but I’m not a software engineer.
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I think that effect is more perceived than anything else, though it is obviously intentional. Windows/Android have always had a lot more opportunities to go futz with levers in the back room compared to Apple platforms which ask you: “are you a developer? if so, great, here’s all this stuff you can do. if not, do not do this.”
the thing is, the levers on the other platforms are arguably just as arcane and considerably more arbitrary; the binary is quite reasonable when it’s well-handled, though people whose primary use of computers is playing games on limited budgets are absolutely the least likely to agree.
as a punter i appreciate the ‘walled garden’ in that it seems conducive to dominic cummings and joey incel not being able to read my messages but as a creative i wouldn’t touch the platform with a bargepole like
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The most memorable iOS game I ever played was Cave Rescue. I played through most of it in the dark after a hurricane caused an extended power outage in my city in 2012.
It’s not available officially anywhere anymore as far as I can tell. But fortunately there’s an Android version floating around.
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The only mobile game I really ever cared about was Cavesweeper, and that’s 32-bit :(. It’s sitting on my phone which only runs 64-bit apps. My old iPad would happily run it, but I have no way of transferring it to that.
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love the diplo post in that thread
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GOD I MISS ALL OF QUIMDUNGS GAME they were the one that made the starving donkey game and shit! shame on me for forgetting quimdung
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You can do that with itunes I thought?
I have certainly transfered apps through windows Itunes at least.
fuck, yeah those were great
A few of them are still available on Newgrounds including Bonkey Trek
Didn’t know they also made movies
A very Newgrounds review on that one.
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They removed that capability a few versions ago.
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a nice relaxing game of bonkey trek
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You should be able to pull it up via the Purchases list in the App Store, as things do not get delisted there unless it is incompatible with the current device or was pulled from the store due to a legal conflict. If you are on iOS 5 or later and on the final build of the OS supported on that device, trying to download something whose current version is no longer compatible with that device should cause a dialog to pop up informing you that it is downloading the last version of that app that works with the hardware you are using.
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