Mobile Games on Kotaku

Every day, like many of you, I go to Kotaku (among others) to read up on juicy game news and watch new vids. They rarely post anything about mobile games for reasons we probably all know: They don't make good movies, they don't involve famous game developers (except for Carmack) and the people who read Kotaku don't care about mobile games.

So imagine my surprise today when I saw two posts on the site for mobile games!

Under the promising headline An iPhone Game that Doesn't Completely Suck? an anonymous poster discusses an iPhone game called Finger Fracture - side scrolling skate boarding with the touchscreen as control. Then we learn that it's an advergame built by someone Vans hired. Then we learn that there's no release date. Then we learn that there's no indication that it's a game at all... This might just be a couple of Photoshop images thrown together by the Vans ad agency. In a final blow, there's an update that notes that the game images are pulled right out of Tony Hawk... so there's no way it's a real project. WTF Kotaku?!?!?

Hope rises eternal, though, as Kotaku posts something about a Gameloft Japan mobile game... But then hopes are crushed down again as we read the description of "Sexed Up Big Sister Flip Over" which turns out to be strip poker. At one point, Gameloft was the paragon of mobile game innovation. The very first title they launched in the US was an original puzzle game that combined twitch and Sokuban to great effect. Even as they increasingly moved towards branded games, their titles had top graphics and design panache. Now, it seems, they've sunken so low that their games can appear on Kotaku... Under the bi-line "Only in Japan" no less.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but I had hoped that by now, six years after mobile games became widely available worldwide, we would have earned better industry coverage than this.