Freebie Friday II

Late again with the Friday post...

On Sunday it'll be a whole month that I will have had my Android and I plan to write basically a summary of what I believe are the pros and cons of this device primarily compared to the iPhone (given that that was its primary competitor despite my Windows Pocket PC background), but for now let's take a look at some nice and not so nice free games for Android devices.

Armageddonoid is a Missile Command clone from Teleca Poland. It certainly is rough along the edges, but one thing I liked was the touch screen controls. Instead of letting me click to point I have to drag my finger to move the site and then click to fire which makes the game closer to the original from a control standpoint and more challenging. It also works with the trackball according to the authors and seems to play reasonably well for a freebie.

Android Invaders, from UKLooney, 'cheats' and isn't really a game, but rather a game emulator and in this case it emulates the old Space Invaders arcade game. The program itself actually searches the Internet for Space Invaders roms (which are illegal to have unless you own the original game). After that it plays just like the arcade game with the exception of the controls which aren't very good. For a start, given no multitouch only left, right, or fire can be used at a time if using the onscreen controls which seemed to work best. For me, I tried using the DPad and there seemed to be a delay in processing moves. The added haptic (vibration) feedback when you die also became annoying pretty fast.

Bloxx 3D is a 3D Tetris game where you are given the overview of a pit or well and block of different shapes fall down leaving you to sort them out so that they fit. Should you fill an entire level it disappears and you get points. I never could move my block left/right/up/down in the game, though, only being able to rotate it so this gets an "unplayable" rating in my book. I can only presume it works on some Android models and not on others.

Chess for Android, from Aart Blk is a nice, free Chess game with a simple 2D board and 5 skill levels which is more than enough to challenge a lousy chess player such as myself. Skill levels appear to be listed in terms of how long the computer has to make a move (from 0 to 30 seconds) vs. real chess rankings. Nonetheless, its free and plays just fine!

Millionaire is a card game in which you try and get rid of all of your cards first. The text is a bit messed up on the instructions for me, but I was able to work my way through to understanding the basics of the game. The game itself seems to play pretty nicely and touch selection of the cards works far better that I would have thought given the size of the cards. I've tried a few card games that claim to be popular overseas and usually it takes awhile to gain insight into the strategy behind the games once getting the rules down.

Milky Milky is a freebie from the esteemed Phil Symonds (creator of Abduction!: World Attack and Gem Miner: Dig Deeper) similar to those pipe games where you have to connect the pipe pieces by rotating them so that the water flows from the drain into the sewer. In this case you're moving milk from the cows into the milk truck as Phil apparently likes cow themed games. Well done, as usual with a tutorial and over 50,000 downloads in the 2 days he's released it. I have to wonder if he'd priced this at a dollar just how many downloads it would have or would people have been too cheap to pay a buck for it? I only hope Phil is financially rewarded over time for releasing 3 good games for Android devices.

Parachuter (which changes its name to Paratrooper when you've downloading/installed it) is just a pain to control. I can't help but feel that the goal of this game was to create a game where I'm clicking away blindly on the screen so that perhaps I accidentally click one of the ads at the bottom after I die vs creating an entertaining gaming experience. My Android's memory couldn't be big enough to warrant keeping this one installed.

Pinball, by Magma Mobile, is a pinball game featuring 5 different and interesting tables. One, for example, is Space Invader themed where you have to try and hit the aliens. While the ball physics is somewhat lacking... although not horrible either... this had some entertainment value for pinball players. I didn't start liking pinball until I hit age 35 or so thinking the game was just too simple and dare I say stupid as a kid/young adult. I've changed my stance and love the Pirates of the Caribbean pinball game at the local Chuck E Cheeses.

Press Your Luck, from Joe Sack, is a remake of the Parker Brother's board game called Can't Stop designed by the great Sid Sackson. I enjoy many board games and this is well enough done that it captures the feel of the original. The game isn't going to win any beauty contests as it's pretty plain looking, but it does the job. In this game you have columns from 2 - 12 and you roll 4 dice. You then pair up the dice any way you want to (i.e. a 3, 4, 5, 6 could be a 3+4=7 and a 5+6=11 or a 3+5=8 and a 4+6 = 10 or...) and advance your token along the corresponding numbered column. The trick it that you can only be advancing in 3 columns during a turn and if you roll such that you can't advance any of your tokens your lose all of your progress from that turn hence the name "Press Your Luck". Now, because 7 is more common that 2 when pairing 6 sided dice the 2 column only have 3 spots and the 7 column has 13 spots to make it to the top and the winner is the first to make it to the top of 3 of the columns. Make sense from my 4 line rules summary? Full rules from the Parker game are here. I'm biased towards this game as I already loved it. I was ecstatic to see an Android port that works well. It only have one level of AI and I can't be sure of how good that is yet, and this game isn't going to be fun unless you like the statistics and probability aspect of the game.[Update: I'm still undefeated in this game so I suspect the AI isn't that sharp, but it's still fun to play.]

Socobar 2.0 is a Sokoban clone from ConfettiMobile. Push the boxes on top of the dots to turn them red. Do so for all boxes and you've completed the level. I was a bit surprised at level 1's difficultly as I'm using to that being a teaser, but it took me far too long to get to puzzle 2 in a good sense. Nice little puzzle game!

Tightrope Hero is an innovative little game from Good Team Studio where you are a clown walking along a tightrope that somehow exists above the clouds (it was probably easier to do the graphics of clouds than a full cityscape). Tilt your Android back and forth to balance. But the pigeons love to land on your tightrope (and apparently love living above the clouds?) causing your center of gravity to change. Honest, I was pretty bored with this one pretty fast as progress seemed slow and there didn't seem to be much incentive to play on despite the title's very professional appearance

Rumble Cars

When I see a game in the Marketplace for $.99 that looks to have good graphics from the screenshots and provide some basic entertainment value I'm a bit of a sucker. After all, aren't we all suckers when it comes to a bargain... willing to say "it's only a buck" provided that the game tickles some sort of fancy within us. That's one reason I think Apple's marketplace has been so successful. In the early going there were lots of good $.99 games. That seems to be changing, though, as the newer games and the bigger names are finally starting to creep up in price. But I digress...

Rumble Cars is a simple game that uses the accelerometer to control a car driving down a continuously straight road. You're mission? For some reason you want to crash into and destroy the blinking, red cars. After bumping into them about 8 times they turn into regular cars and it's a race to the next one with each level consisting of having to do this a set number of times. Race?... well not a race, because this game doesn't seem to care how fast in which you complete your objective and that just seems odd in a racing game. Your car does have a limited health and running into other (friendly?) cars as well as driving off of the road does damage to you and I presume that gets more difficult as the game progresses, but boredom prevented me from finding that out.

That's about it. Observations?

• The help screen has abundant typos on it like "hitting the other cars except the targetd one" on it.
• It seems to take too long to find the next target car which contributed greatly to the boredom factor.
• Little reason to play on after level 0.
• Once I quit, I have to use an App Killer to play again... otherwise I get a black screen.

Ironically I can't help but feel that there's another, better game in here somehow, somewhere. I like the accelerometer control. In fact, the accelerometer control is the highlight of this game as it's kind of neat driving your car at first, but that alone does not make a game. This would be a better game if it was simply a racing game with, dare I ask for, curves/turns? Better yet shooting at the enemy cars (instead of bumper cars) and some power ups might actually make this a hit. Those features along with the existing game engine would be fun.

As is, avoid this one... even at $.99.

Gem Miner: Dig Deeper

I didn't notice this until just now, but Gem Miner: Dig Deeper is another title by Phil Symonds (author of Abduction! World Attack). Clearly he's building a name for himself as one of the better Android developers.

Like his previous effort, Gem Miner is a simple game that grows with you. The premise is simple... you are a miner and you're digging up wealth from the ground. Typically that wealth will come in the form of a coal (or iron...) deposit, but sometimes you'll get lucky and find other stuff like fossils, gems, and maps. When you dig deeper you need to make sure you have enough ladders to place to get back out of the mine. Likewise, some rocks are unstable such that when you release them your Android will begin to vibrate and you'll have a little time to place a support otherwise the rock will fall either closing off an area or worse; crushing and killing you.

The fun of the game comes from trying to get more and more stuff to sell and then buy the higher end tools and thus be able to "dig deeper" and get even more valuable stuff. While digging, however, you'll be limited by your own stamina on the green stamina meter at the top of the screen as well as your cart's storage limit of 10 items.

The game offers 3 difficulty levels and has a nice tutorial mode. The graphics are very sharp and the sound is simple, but appropriate. The game is controlled entirely by the touch screen so there shouldn't be any issues regardless of the type of Android device it is played on.

This is the type of game that I see a power gamer drooling over as there always seems to be something better to get as you "level up". The exploration factor isn't bad either, but is somewhat repetitive. Find the coal... drop it off for cash... buy stuff... find more coal... You do have tools such as the seismic analysis to get a picture of the mine area surrounding your miner which should help eliminate exploring sections with no value. And the tutorial indicates there's a "fabled giant amethyst" to uncover, but I have not yet succeeded at that.

While downloading the game I couldn't help wonder if the game would be a Boulder Dash type game, but it isn't. There's no real puzzle... just exploration and the occasional rush to drop a support. For under $3 this is a nice little game with a lot of polish on it. The game does offer a trial version in the marketplace as well called Gem Miner (i.e. no Dig Deeper tacked onto the name).

Space Physics

Space Physics from Camel Games (a publisher apparently without a website?) is a Crayon Physics knockoff for your Android device. Crayon Physics was an innovative game released several years ago that took advantage of touch screen devices such as tablet PCs by allowing you to draw on screen objects and have them "come to life". I think that was a bit blown out of proportion as demos showed cars driving and such whereas reality has the game recognizing simple shapes such as lines and circles and moving them based on their contact with other shapes.

The goal in these games is to gets your ball to move and touch the star on each level. You'll then draw things like more balls, hammers, blobs, platforms... etc that will push the main ball along until it reaches the star. You will also be timed so as you improve it becomes a race against the clock more so than whether or not you can complete the level. Later levels add things such as gears that you can draw things through and then have the gears spin... etc.

One thing Space Physics does right from a technical standpoint is it separates the level data from the game itself allowing you to install them on your SD card versus consuming your Android device's storage. This is a nice touch because device storage space is limited and for some reasons it was decided that by default all apps will install onto the device's memory. After you've installed the levels don't forget to delete that 'app' otherwise it'll continue to consume storage space.

I find these kinds of games to be enjoyable. I've only played through the first 10 or so of 80 levels and my only problem with the game is that of the touch control. I can't seem to make a simple diagonal line without some weird hooks at the end. For example, I've wanted to draw a piece to connect between two platforms with a flat part at each end to rest on the platforms and a diagonal slide for the ball to roll down. Every time I try it I get a hump at each end. Maybe it's my lack of a steady hand, but I just don't recall feeling the same with the original Crayon Physics game on the iPhone platform.

The game does offer a Lite trial version which is always appreciated and for $3 its definitely worth it. I think a level creator would be a nice touch... aside from that, more levels please.

Android Developer Challenge 2

Winners of the Google's annual Android Developer Challenge 2 are out. I won't duplicate the story when you can read all about it and the apps that won here: http://code.google.com/android/adc/gallery_winners.html. I look forward to checking out and reviewing some of these apps soon.