Aladin & the Enchanted Lamp

Aladin & the Enchanted Lamp is a free mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a paid product. It's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The game is a simple Aladdin themed hidden object puzzle game with a lame, badly translated French adaptation of the story tacked onto the front. It's a lazy, broken mess. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The game only displays in a 4:3 aspect ratio, making me wonder what a terrible time mobile peasants must have had trying to play this on their iPhones. The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen properly. There's a fullscreen mode, but this doesn't work properly, it just seizes your screen and then displays the game in a small part of the top left of your monitor. It's evident no testing was done for this game on modern PCs, but then again, this is a mobile app, so what do we expect? Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. That's right, only 4. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason. Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $2 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile game just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend. Who do they think we are?