Android Roundup 1

Everyone wants in on the handheld market.  It makes sense why, it doesn't take a lot of observation to spot the humongous stacks of money Nintendo have made from the market.  Which is why it's so surprising that it was phones that ended up stealing the crown.


Maybe that's a little premature, but I think it's becoming pretty clear that the future of handheld gaming lies in phones as opposed to dedicated devices.  I mean, we can already see games consoles as a whole struggling to become do anything devices (count how many things your game console can do other than play games) and that's a path that mobile phones have been on for months now.

So I'm going to start doing this segment periodically and give some recommendation for great games I've been playing on my phone.  I'm an android boy (sorry Iphoners) so we're going to focus on that department, at least till someone decides to give me an iphone to compare.

Ingress: A fantastic, simple and fun little title, Ingress is one of those ties in with your GPS games.  Essentially, there are portals scattered around you.  You can hack them for items and use those items to claim them for your side or attack portals already claimed for the enemy.  Portals can be added to the game if you can find an appropriate landmark, which means if no one local plays yet the map can be depressingly sparse (Dundee suffers a little from this) but that's entirely within your power to fix.  Simply walk around your local area and add them.  Then hack, reinforce, level up.  It's really that simple, but surprisingly fun and a great way to start to learn your way around.

10000000: Combine a matching tile puzzler with a dungeon crawling rpg and you get 10000000.  Your character is a lowly adventurer who wakes up, sealed in the top layers of a dungeon, with a number of sealed off, upgradable workshops, a magic wand, a sword, a shield, armor and other such accoutrement's and an entrance to the monster holding lower levels.  Diving into the dungeon, you get a match 3 tile game, where some matches attack monsters in front of you, or defend, while others earn you resources used to upgrade your workshops.  This begins to feel fantastically intuitive almost instantly and you'll pump hours into it for weeks, till you hit that top score and freedom.

Elder Sign: A Call of Cthulhu puzzle game seems like a remarkably dumb idea and yet works fantastically here.  Your team of four investigators end up at a museum where one of numerous elder gods are attempting to break through into our reality.  Each turn an investigator must accomplish a task by using a progressively diminishing hand of tokens.  There are a wide range of investigators, each of whom have their own special abilities and using your team well can be important (investigators can hold onto tokens between drawings, with more tokens being held the more investigators that are at a certain location) but time is also a factor, with each night cycle making the challenges more dangerous and bringing the god closer to breaking through.  The drawing can be a touch unforgiving and the areas spawn randomly which can make it a little to chancy, but it's still a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Posted in: 10000000, Android, Arkham Horror, Call Of Cthulhu, Elder Sign, Game, Game Review, gaming, GPS, Ingress, Match 3, Portal