I have a kinda mid-range touch screen smartphone. I got emulators for several old consoles to try to hunt for games that are fun and play well. The main drawback to the retro-gaming orgy is the crap controls of the touchscreen. This limits my selection of games severely. So what have I found that works?
Turn based RPG's are probably the best place to go. Because they are menu based, the poor controls barely matter. There are a million to choose from.
...such as the Pokemon franchise. The core RPG's, I mean. You can sink 2 minutes or 2 hours into finding and leveling up your dudes. It's pretty mindless, but involves enough attention to strategy to keep you occupied. I'm not looking for blazing hot times here.
With my adult brain, I am now able to all kinds of things I couldn't as a lad. Such as easily get a megalopolis (500,000 citizens) in SimCity for the SNES. Some of the details are eye-strainingly tiny, but the charm is there.
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! for the NES. It's fun to punch around some guys for a while. I think at Soda Popinsky, the controls of the touchscreen start to fail in response to the speed of the sprites. Maybe I just suck.
I like Skate 3 and (to a much lesser extent) the Tony Hawk games. The halfpipe section in Skate or Die for NES kinda holds up. At least for small bursts of stoke on the go. I'm trying to get a tweaked alley-oop 540 of the channel. That would be sick.
