Last year, I tried my luck at being a professional esports player by joining the qualifiers for The Dota 2 Kuala Lumpur Major. After losing badly, I’ve come to terms that maybe Dota 2 isn’t the game for me.
I’ve moved on to the next mode of gaming—mobile gaming, and the closest thing to Dota 2 that I could find was Mobile Legends.
Since my friends and I are quite familiar with the basic controls of MOBA games, we started honing our skills in the hopes of joining the next esports tournament for Mobile Legends.
And that opportunity happened to be the Southeast Asian Games 2019.
FYI: Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) is a subgenre of strategy video games where a player controls a single character in a team who compete versus another team of players.
After talking about it with my friends, we decided to try our luck and potentially kickstart our new careers as “professional” esports players by joining the Malaysian esports team selection for the SEA Games 2019 that would be held in the Philippines.
We joined the Selangor qualifiers and with only a month to prepare, I wanted to make sure that all my training sessions would run smoothly. So I got one of the best smartphones currently on the market to bring to the qualifiers—the performance-focused Samsung Galaxy S10+.
Fighting Enemies On A Boss Screen
The S10+ is known as a great all-rounder, with impressive camera capabilities, amazing battery life, and so forth.
But not many people are talking about its gaming capabilities which, after personally using it for a few days, is one of the best out there.
Part of that comes from one of its most compelling features—the screen.
The Infinity-O Display lets the S10+ achieve a 88.9% screen-to-body ratio where the pixels now stretch from the top speaker down to the thin bottom chin, and spills over the curved edges to the left and right.
Alongside the almost bezel-less display, the S10+ also comes with a Dynamic AMOLED Display—being one of the first smartphones that supports HDR 10+ with Dynamic Tone Mapping.
What that means is that images and text appear more clear and detailed, which translates to 4K movies on Netflix as well as high-end games like Mobile Legends or PUBG Mobile.
Despite being laughed at by some of my peers, I generally like having the blue light filter turned on, so I can appreciate the S10+ automatically lowering blue light emissions from 12% to 7%, which makes it easier to stare at the screen for a longer period of time.
Bringing It Out For Another Challenge
Taking a bit of a break from practicing for the esports tournament, I used the S10+ for another game that I regularly play: Pokemon GO (yes, it’s still a thing).
There was an event held globally where all players had a higher chance of catching a super rare Pokemon called Bagon (and there was a higher chance of catching an ultra rare shiny version of it too!).
While we were walking around searching for this Pokemon under our beloved country’s hot and sunny weather, the display on the S10+ still stayed very bright and provided great visibility under the sunlight—thanks to its 1,200 nits peak luminance.
3 grueling hours and 7 shiny Bagons later, the S10+ left me impressed with its 4,100 mAh battery. When I started my Pokemon adventure that day, the phone was at a 100% battery capacity and by the end, it was at more than 50%.
Okay, Back To Training
The weeks leading up to the tournament, my friends and I would meet at mamak stalls after work for our Mobile Legends practice sessions.
We’d spend about 2 hours each night just purely battling with other players online, which would normally take a toll on a smartphone. Thankfully, the S10+ didn’t heat up all that much because of the Vapor chamber cooling system that automatically optimises the devices temperature based on the performance.
As we were playing in an outdoors setting, I enabled Dolby Atmos to make in-game sounds more noticable, and when combined with the AKG-branded earphones that comes with the Galaxy S10+, the audio became even more immersive which helped in getting me in the zone.
The device features a 7/8 nm application processor (do note that the processor version may vary by country) that significantly upgrades CPU and GPU performance—by 29% and 37%. The Galaxy S10+’s ceramic versions are also the first in the Galaxy series available with 12GB of RAM which allowed me to multitask flawlessly.
D-Day: The Start Of My Esports Career?
After using the S10+ for a few weeks, I was convinced that I had one of the best smartphones for gaming.
Along with my faith in my team’s skills, I was pretty confident walking into the qualifiers that we’d emerge as the representatives of Malaysia for the SEA Games 2019. We were above average in terms of our ranks in Mobile Legends and we had a winning streak during our practice runs so we thought it wouldn’t be a problem.
However, when we saw our first opponent for the tournament, we started doubting our chances.
Once the game began, we knew it was over. The opposing team thrashed us completely and we were all wiped out of the game in less than 10 minutes. We did manage to get 2 kills, but that doesn’t seem impressive when you compare it to the opposing team getting 25 kills.
After failing to win in two esport games, I’ve concluded that I should just continue with my day job and keep my dreams of being an esports player as what it is—a dream.
However, I did hear that there might be a PUBG Mobile tournament coming up, so who knows? Maybe I’ll get to bring the S10+ for another trial soon.
- The Galaxy S10+ now comes with 1TB storage at a retail price of RM5,999
- Buyers are entitled to a free Galaxy A9 worth RM 1,999 and Marvel’s superhero cover worth RM 159 upon purchase from participating Samsung Experience Stores and authorised merchants until the 5th of May.
- For more information on promotions for the Galaxy S10 series, you can click here.
This article is written in collaboration with Samsung.