Noyb

Android Games

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Picked up an Android-based phone last month with a service renewal. It's my first smartphone ever. Big touch screen. Tiny little nubbin that's not much use as a d-pad.

Played a bit of Angry Birds, which feels like Crush the Castle but dragged out ad nauseum. Also downloaded Nesoid Lite, an NES Emulator. Not going to be playing anything like Battletoads or Mega Man on it, but it works well enough for Bubble Bobble and The Adventures of Lolo so I'm happy. Looks like there's a port of Game Dev Story for $5, which I'll have to give a try.

Any game recommendations? Anyone know of any trustworthy Android game review blogs?

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Congratulations, I switched to Android myself a few months ago and I'm really happy.

I actually had an iPhone before that but I've never liked playing games on these touchscreens I'm afraid. I would keep my eye on Android and Me if you don't already. The site's awash with news of new phones right now, but it's normally a nice site for Android news and apps, and there's a games section on the site.

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Have to get back on this thread next week. Android phone should be arriving around tuesday/wednesday.

I don't like gaming on mobile phone that much, but lets see if that will change now that I'm soon over with the 13-14 years of using Nokia phones.

Propably the change of Symbian to Android will be a shock already.

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Played a four hour session of Game Dev Story. Dang, that's addictive, even when it starts to feel like most of the options are more for narrative than mechanical purposes. Lots of weird game logic, like being unable to make sequels to popular games unless they're also well-reviewed. (Why can't I pull a Bobby Kotick? I'm also disappointed that buying magazine ads doesn't grease the wheels when it comes to the reviews, but I digress.) Seemed a bit buggy in my favor, telling me that my staff pulled an annual salary of $X, but only deducting $X/5 or some such weirdness, which made it pretty trivial to survive to the GameCube era. Feels a bit empty in the endgame when you have a huge hit-pumping company, but I enjoyed the time I spent.

Gave the official Tetris a short whirl. Swipe controls performed pretty well at first, but I lost the tactile sensation as the game went faster.

Also tried the demo of Pac-Man Championship Edition. I kept missing turns left and right. Not sure if that's the game or my unfamiliarity with swipe controls.

I thought Reckless Racing was pretty fun.

Controls surprisingly well, but I've never been a fan of top-down racing games.

I would keep my eye on Android and Me if you don't already.

Nice! I'll have to trawl through the archives sometime.

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How easy is the Android Market to use and find stuff by the way? Not just games, but also other applications etc.?

Game Dev Story is one that I'll most likely get. You guys have been talking about it so much around here that I have to check it out.

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How easy is the Android Market to use and find stuff by the way? Not just games, but also other applications etc.?

Pretty dang terrible. Seems like you need to know exactly what you're looking for unless the most popular of the popular apps are to your taste.

There's a short list of cross-genre recommendations on the front screen. From there you optionally choose a genre, and then can only see recommendations (either carrier or Google, not sure), Top Paid, Top Free, or the firehose of Just In. The Top lists follow some hidden formula that may take into account both total sold and user rankings. Not sure how much recent popularity changes factor into it. There's also no way to see "Top Rated in the past 6 weeks" or anything sane like that. No recommendations based on your browsing/rating/downloading history either, apart from spam in the user comments.

The search is just a single text box with no explicit options. There are some options, but they're rather unusable to the average end user. For instance, you can search for all games by the developer of Game Dev Story with the search string pub:"Kairosoft Co., Ltd", but that requires you to know the exact text representing that developer on the marketplace. Searching for pub:"Kairosoft" yields no results. That specific search feature is only remotely usable if you go to an app page first, then click on the button to find other apps by that dev.

The app search is exactly the same as the game search.

I see recommendations for my carrier (T-Mobile) on the front of the marketplace, so it's possible that they provided me with a gimped version of the marketplace. :erm:

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Alright, sounds like it's as crappy as Nokia's Ovi Store.

I've heard stuff about some phones being slightly crippled in the store as not being able to see everything there is available based on what firmware is in the phone.

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So I've handled my Android 2.1 phone ZTE Blade soon for a month.

So far the only application I bought was Game Dev Story for about 1,99€ when there was a sale in January and I love that game. It's almost too simple when you know all the game mechanics and now I'm in year 13 and I'm raking in too much cash already and all my games are selling +5 million.

I hope you could buy the reviews like in real life and have more influence in things, but this game is still pretty sweet for a mobile phone game.

I have of course tried out several other games like Angry Birds and the AB Seasons which just actually yesterday received the Valentine's day update. The original AB stopped working during the weekend because I uninstalled 1.5 version and tried to get the new 1.5.1 version just to realize that it is "not available" for my phone in the market. Really weird especially considering this was supposed to be enhanced for lower processor phones with some graphics slider.

Two pretty nice games out there are EVAC and Radiant, both from the same company Hexage ltd. Graphics are really nicely done in a retro style but with modern effects. Radiant is a kind of homage to Space Invaders and EVAC is homage to Pacman.

I have also tested a little bit Spaghetti Marshmallows and Tank Hero, but more on those later.

I got to say that I'm loving the non-gaming apps, it's like a brave new world for me to have stuff like Team Coco, newsfeed like Ampparit for Finnish users, NHL Gamecenter, XE Currency, aText-TV, Enidroid (for seeing unknown caller details immediately) and Parcels (for incoming post package following).

It would really blow my mind if Daily Show and Colbert Report would make similar applications to how Team Coco works.

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I'll keep those in mind.

What I've been enjoying is Simon Tathams puzzles. It's not perfectly optimized for touchscreen controls, but it contains some fun puzzle variants.

I'm also completely hooked on Alchemy. You start with being able to summon fire, water earth and air. Then you combine them to get new elements, and then keep combining, to a total of 360.

At first I was like "This is fine, just trying and failing, I guess". Then I stumbled upon the element Life, and it was like "Oooh, wonder what I can do with this...". Cue several hours of branching paths of discovered combinations. I've put many many hours into this, and I still have under half of the elements.

(Both are free.)

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I haven't installed any new apps in a while because I am not a trusting person by nature and the permissions tend to scare the living hell out of me. It really feels like we're moving toward an age where developers and companies not only screw us out of privacy, but do so while telling us exactly what they're doing. :violin:

Simon Tatham's Puzzles:

read sensitive log data

Allows an application to read from the system's various log files. This allows it to discover general information about what you are doing with the device, potentially including personal or private information.

Alchemy:

read phone state and identity

Allows the application to access the phone features of the device. An application with this permission can determine the phone number and serial number of this phone, whether a call is active, the number that call is connected to and the like.

Edit: Apparently log data is used for debugging, but the app doesn't have internet access, so what's the point? Vestigial permission? The Alchemy permissions seem more disturbing, since it has access to your number (and anyone's number who calls you while the app is active), and the internet access to transfer it anywhere.

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Hmm yeah, the permissions are pretty freaky, I've seen quite many applications with questionable permission requests.

It's interesting that there are basically from now on only three choices Android, iOS and Windows Phone. All are pretty heavy on the "I'm watching you" front.

I found Giantbomb's application from the Android Market. This one is pretty awesome, I can see all bombcasts, videos and reviews with this app and it's quite fast also.

Camel Games have some pretty cool small physics based games, like Blow Up, Super Tumble and Space Physics.

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The Amazon Appstore is quite fucking lame.

Only available to US customers. Why even open the shop if you don't have it ready for the whole world?

This really makes me pissed off. All the regional bullshit that is still put in movies, games and these kinds of shops are really artificial, annoying and useless.

Even Nintendo dropped the bomb on their on feet with 3DS region locking and Valve's Steam with releasing games on different dates in US and Europe. :(

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Yup, regional variation in game releases is pretty frustrating. I'm sure this is bouncing around the forum somewhere, and it's not quite the same thing, but a nice read nonetheless.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/22/no-oceans-call-for-worldwide-release-dates/

Did Amazon Store come back online for Android? I was reading they had suspended it because of the Apple law suit.

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I was checking it more than once yesterday&today and it has been online all the time. They got the AB Rio offer going during the first day and I would've liked to test it, as it's a Finnish product after all. Not otherwise that interested in AB anymore.

I did hear about the lawsuit however, funny stuff these trademarks. How can you even trademark something like an appstore. It just feels like a normal word. Application store. Would it be ok if they called it an appshop? I bet technicality reasons would let it pass.

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Minecraft Android version is coming out on Thursday for other Android devices. It was already released earlier for Xperia Play.

Also Amazon App Store is apparently FINALLY working in Europe now also.

In other news my friend signed a real contract with Rovio now.

I have childhood friend who is now finally really doing what he was always meant to do. Video games.

So fucking awesome. :tup:

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Also Amazon App Store is apparently FINALLY working in Europe now also.

This is great news. Are they still giving away apps?

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Amazon is still giving away free apps daily in the US App store.

FWIW, some mobile developers have been pointing out some developer-unfriendly terms in Amazon's Free App practices: https://shiftyjelly.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to-the-core/

Some of the games I've been playing lately include:

Ancient Frog - puzzle game based around moving a frog limb-by-limb on a leaf, constrained by how its limbs can naturally rotate. Lovely graphics.

BlooKid - Solid single screen platformer.

Phone Story - Interesting conceptually: a mobile game that exposes inhumane treatment of workers involved in the manufacturing process of mobile phones. Very short and no replay value, so it's not particularly worth buying unless you support the cause or Molleindustria.

Shortyz - Good collection of daily crossword puzzles.

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Oh, I didn't even know that Phone Story was made now for Android after the iPhone Store controversy. Bought it now.

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I made the jump from an old iPhone 3G to a Galaxy S 2 a couple of months ago and haven't had one regret yet.

So far my main highlight has been installing Scummvm and working through classic adventures again. Outside of that I have mainly been playing Fruit Ninja, They Need to be Fed and Angry Birds Rio.

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So far my main highlight has been installing Scummvm and working through classic adventures again.

Fucking hell, this is the best idea ever. Is this easy/legal in the UK?

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Dammit, scummvm doesn't work on 2.0+. I was getting all excited :violin:

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Fucking hell, this is the best idea ever. Is this easy/legal in the UK?

I own all the games on cd if that counts? I'm running it on 2.3.3 (think that's the highest firmware out for the Galaxy s2), I think it' requires a later version as most games now use multi touch.

I had to visit the Scummvm homepage within the browser and download the package that way to get it work, I'm sure there's a release history on there that you might find an older version on?

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Oubliette (or anyone else), any chance you could expand on this for me? I can't figure out what it is I'm supposed to download and how, and what to do with it! The only package I found was a .zip file. Do I need an unzipping app to extract that within Android? Surely there's an easier way to get the right version onto my phone!

My firmware is 2.1 -update 1 and I'm on a G2 phone, if that helps...

EDIT: Never mind, I just noticed that ScummVM has shown up in my Market since last time, so I should be able to get it going no problem. Woo! I'll leave this up in case anyone else had the same issue previously.

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