The Apple Arcade1 exclusive, “Game of Thrones”-licensed blockbuster mobile game Tale of Crows has a fun mini-game in its settings screen called “Can you spot the close button?”. (It’s an x on the top right, in case you can’t tell.)
Left screenshot is when you normally enter the settings screen when using the game. The one on the right is when you enter back into the game after a while and it has to reload from memory, I suppose. In both cases it takes a few seconds before the Game Center2 banner animation is done and you can safely tap back out. If you try your luck and miss the target, you can spend another few seconds waiting for Game Center to load and then try your luck getting back out there.
This is the crème de la crème of Apple gaming. Top tier, hand selected. And yet…
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I briefly tried Apple Arcade for a few hours when it first became available a while back, but cancelled almost immediatelly due to no interesting games being available at launch (that I could not play on other platforms). I recently gave it another month and I was very disappointed to find that the promise of “No In-App purchases and no ads” is kind of a Monkey’s Paw thing. Almost every game that I tried was still either a Gacha game or otherwise specifically designed to maximize playtime instead of simply being a good game. Which makes perfect sense, because that way you keep subscribing to Tim’s services machine. Sure, the games certainly are of higher quality on average and you can argue that its less exploitative than games that sell you smurf berries for hundreds of dollars, but a polished turd is still a turd. ↩︎
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Did you know that Game Center still exists?! ↩︎