Guides

Endless arcade games are the espresso shots of mobile gaming: one tap to start, no tutorial to sit through, and a score that only stops climbing when you slip. They've quietly become one of the most-played genres on phones precisely because they ask so little of you up…

Every arcade game hands you a number that goes up. The good ones make that number feel worth fighting for. The difference almost never comes down to the points themselves — it comes from the small systems layered on top that turn a score into a series of dares. Here's…

Hand a console game to a phone and the first thing that breaks is the controls. A thumbstick that felt precise under your thumb becomes a smudgy circle you can't feel, floating somewhere near the bottom-left of a screen your hand is also trying to see. Yet the…

Here's an uncomfortable truth about endless arcade games: most of your runs don't end because the game got too hard. They end because you stopped paying attention to how it was getting hard. Difficulty in these games is almost never random — it ramps on a schedule, and…

There's a specific frustration unique to arcade games: you know your high score is beatable — you set it, after all — but every run since has fallen just short, and the harder you try, the worse it gets. The good news is that beating your own best is less about talent…