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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Half-OT:

Currently I'm playing Stardew Valley on my FireHD10, I never played a mobile port that had THAT good controls.

I also got Terraria and Minecraft and they are pretty bad to play with awkward on-screen controls.

Does anyone here know of games that have good mobile ports? Or even good mobile games to start with? Most "native" mobile games just were really basic, full of in-app purchases etc. so I was looking more into ports, but if you know something good, let me know :D

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Mindustry[1] is an open source game that works perfect on mobile, especially if you have a big screen. You can find it on app stores or download it manually.

It's like factorio but more tower-defense and round-based. Much more approachable while still being really fun.

[1] https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry

Factorio was a bit too much for me, but I'll look into Mindustry, thanks!

This game destroyed me. It works well even if you don't have a big screen (relatively speaking anyway. I played it on an iPhone 7. You can't really get screens smaller than 4.7 anymore).

Oh, in the open-source department, there's also Unciv which I'm keeping an eye on. It could be improved, but it's quite fun already. It's a civilization clone.

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

* Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a classic and fully playable on mobile device

* Star Traders Frontiers is a new old-school game that's also quite excellent

* There's a large number of old-school adventure games ported or created for mobile such as TimbleWeed park or Gemini Rue

* 80 Days is a beautifully written steampunk narrative travel adventure

* Out There and Out There Chronicles are modern classics

* Also & Oddysey are single-button games that are extremely simple but quite beautiful and peaceful

There's a bunch of cheap bluetooth mini game controllers you can pickup online that will make a lot of ports (and emulators) quite a bit more enjoyable. RPGs from the playstation days are my go to.

I had one and it didn't work, but this was 5-6 years ago.

Did the controller story for mobile get better?

The XBox controllers on desktop work like a charm, even with browser games.

On Android, if you are playing a game that supports a controller, you can just pair a ps4 controller via bluetooth with no fuss.

I guess Minecraft is so well known that this could work.

Are there any stats on how many Android games are playable with such a controller?

You can also look at mobile games that got a desktop port, as that should hint at good quality games. On the top of my head, I recall the Anomaly (Warzone: Earth) series, and Kingdom Rush.

Good idea, thanks!

Xenowerk is a lot of fun, as well as the Halo games for iOS, although I think they got pulled from the store.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xenowerk/id969447496

Someone has unofficially ported Battle for Wesnoth to Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.alessandrop...

The controls are actually not half-bad.

There's also A LOT of board game ports of varying quality.

I've been enjoying Through the Ages. Ticket to Ride is competent. Splendor, Race for the Galaxy, and Twilight Struggle also pretty great.

Max Payne is on Android (for some reason). It's a fantastic game, so it might be worth a try if you haven't played it yet.

The Monkey Island games work really well on mobile devices and they re-released them a few years back.

Aw man, why'd you tell me this? You just cost my company 1 productive-engineer-day.

"The Witness" hasn't been mentioned yet.

Morrowind runs really well on my modest android phone, with openmw, It even support mods,

Do you want a sick modpack? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4loGDYIJXw

Best roguelike : pixel dungeon

Even better imo? Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

It's a fork, but some nice quality of life upgrades and tweaks imo

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shatteredp...

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