You can check out whatever is available on F-Droid. I personally enjoy playing Freebloks once in a while, it’s a mobile version of the Blokus boardgame
An alternative is checking out itch.io, searching with the proper tags, like puzzle, might yield decent results for your tastes.
You can also get Cookie Clicker or play the web version
Steam Controller is of course an unbeatable classic, almost it’s own category with the weird but charming touchpads.
Of the more conventional controllers I’m a big fan of my current Gulikit KK3 Max. I was looking for a controller with Hall-effect joysticks, and this one looked like one of quality, so I decided why not eh. Feels like a good controller when I use it, so I’m content with it.
Gardenscapes is the original match 3 and build a mansion and is still my favorite. There are micro transactions to get additional power ups, but the fact that they are constantly updating with new seasonal events and you never run out of levels
I had a knockoff wavebird for the GameCube. Guzzled batteries, introduced lag, and sometimes your character just slowly rotated in a circle. It was cool to have a wireless controller though!
The directional pad is four separate buttons. Up down left right. I want them to be like the c buttons on the Nintendo 64 controller. Separate.
What ends up happening with me is that I’ll press down but not squarely down. There is a good chance I’ll press partially to the left or right while using smaller d pads. This causes extra inputs I didn’t intend to do happen. The ds made playing tetris much harder on me than it should have for me.
I really liked the wavebird for the gamecube, unfortunately mine went into the aether on my last move, got bluetooth adapters to pair modern controllers with it but the wavebird was really cool at the time, was really amazing to not have to be tethered to the console and it being first party, though at the time the madcatz stuff was decent.
For recent controllers, I’ve been using a knockoff 360 controller for moonlight recently and after a lot of back and forth I really think MS nailed the controller setup back then (OG Xbox being decent but not a preference, I hated the duke, s controller was solid though), I like the xbone controllers as well, but IMO they’re just iterations on the 360 controller, easily my preference as an all rounder controller layout.
I have a steam controller, used it for a while but it’s been some time now, had some really great ideas, I’d totally go for an updated steamdeck style layout on that, probably a second for me.
I’ve had so much drift issues with ds4s that I personally don’t reach for a ds4 or dualsense for non playstation games, I like being able to swap batteries and the Xbox/Steam controllers all seem to have way better battery life in general, I keep a stock of rechargeables around so not generating piles of waste.
Totally was, it didn’t have rumble for battery life reasons, but didn’t miss it much at the time, barely used the rumble pack on the n64, think I got mine at EB games to try out the OOT secret hint feature (it’d buzz the pack if you were near a hidden secret), feedback has come a LONG way since then in terms of immersion.
I liked egg inc for a while, if you’re looking for clicker type games.
Other than that I can recommend
Stardew Valley
Peglin
Sudoku
Nanograms
Dungeon Village 1 & 2
Multiple of these are paid, but I’m 100% on board with paying a small amount for an app rather than paying a multiple of that for in-game Battlepasses and whatevers.
It annoys me a lot to say this, but Netflix has some excellent games in their roster. So if you have a Netflix subscription, check those out. I personally very much enjoyed
Storyteller
Into the Breach
But they also have ports of some very good PC games like Spiritfarer, Terra Nil or World of Goo.
Any little casual simulators by Kairosoft, the pay to play “full versions” are pretty cheap. Manage a lil apartment building, manage a tiny sushi restaurant, manage a little Japanese village. 8 bit style, very soothing. The free versions are quite limited in scope and cut you off from further progression after a few levels, but no microtransaction reminders, either. The mention of “Dungeon Village” reminded me, is that Kairosoft?
Any gamepad without vibration feels lifeless to me. This was one of the first gamepads I bought for PC, the Thrustmaster Dual Analog 4. No vibration, L3/R3 require a lot of force to press, no analog movement on the triggers. I guess what you get is what you pay for but man I don’t wanna go back to cheapo controllers…
PS3 (that’s the Dualshock iirc?), Steam Controller, and the Wii U Pro Controller (I quite like the two analog sticks at the top). In that order probably.
Moving a joystick is fundamentally different to moving a mouse. With a joystick there is a spring constantly acting to center it - no equivalent force when using a mouse. So you need to get a feel for estimating that force and accurately counteracting it in various gameplay scenarios. That’s a completely different “muscle” to have a memory of vs. using a mouse I think
Also, modern controller joysticks generally are not great. Most have medium to large deadzones in the center by default. I’d recommend reducing them for more responsiveness. It comes with the tradeoff of being more susceptible to stick drift. But that isn’t something you should be afraid of. It’s a physical impossibility for their design to not wear over time. I’d recommend recalibrating and adjusting settings regularly. At the end of the day, replacing joystick modules only requires screws (no soldering) so it’s cheap and relatively easy.
If you’re really serious you could get some hall effect joystick modules. That way you wouldn’t need to recalibrate often and could keep a consistently small deadzone setting without encountering drift. i.e. default settings from like dualshock 2, when stick drift was just as apparent but people hadn’t gone crazy over it yet.
Minecraft would be fine for learning fps movement in a relaxed setting.
It can become surprisingly complicated with axial deadzone settings, but that’s not really important to understand. The simple concept is it’s the zone in which the stick is moved but no change in movement is registered in-game. The complication that is added is mostly related to more precise calculation of where that zone is
I’m using a Thrustmaster Eswap X Pro. The joystick and dpad modules are hot swappable and can be put in any orientation you prefer. They sell replacement joystick modules for $20, which is nice because you don’t have to replace the whole controller if one gets stick drift.
You need to make a bulleted list because your lists came out as jumbled paragraphs. At a minimum you need to put two spaces at the end of each line to preserve line breaks.
I’ll fix it since you put in all the effort to write that up.
One time purchase:
Peglin ✨
Luck be a landlord ✨
Forager
Dicey dungeons
Dead Cells (optional DLC)
Bloons Tower Defense 6 (out of the way IAP) ✨
Terraria
20 minutes till dawn (has a non premium option with some micro transactions)
Free:
Antimatter dimensions (long idle-ish game) ✨
Legends of Runeterra (just play the story modes) ✨
Team fight tactics (cosmetics only)
Plague inc (and probably rebel inc, but I haven’t played that yet) ✨
Super Auto Pets (cosmetics and extra optional sets) ✨
Star on the ones I’d specifically recommend for casual play
I reached Challenger on Teamfight Tactics in a couple seasons and I’ve gotta say it honestly gets a bit tiresome how often they change the game. Mortdog and Co do a great job on balance but you just can’t swap from set to set that often and expect things not to break. Plus they like to nerf the things I like the most, and that’s inexcusable.
I also didn’t really care for it as mobile game because you can’t hop in and out, you start a match you need to finish the match and they’re not short. Even the “quick” mode is like fifteen minutes long.
In other words? Great desktop game for people that don’t mind the meta changing entirely every six months. Great “mobile” game if you want to kill no less than thirty minutes.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne