Android Games Catch-All

Katy wrote:
MonoCheli wrote:

Has anyone played Zenonia? http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.gamevil.zenonia

It looks like it has potential but I was wondering if anyone had a good time with it?

I played the iPhone version, but it got kind of grindy after a while, and I never finished it.

Bang on: although I did grind it out to the end. It's ok.

Thanks alot for the input. I think I may hold off and take a look at some of the olf ps1 games i haven't tackled yet.

Looks like there's a bevy of new chess apps. My favorite is still Chess by Mobialia, but DroidFish looks promising (port to Droid of a well-known "real" chess engine) and Chess Genius looks like it's worth a go.

I've been playing Radiant recently, it's a pretty polished shooter with a nice retro feel. Anything by Hexage is worth a look as they definitely have higher production values than many of the games on Android.

Angry Birds is up on Market, as "Angry Birds Lite Beta" -- as the name suggests, it's a beta version of the demo, which they're launching to widen their device testing before they release the full, paid version. Some reviews on Market are already reporting compatibility issues, but it's working beautifully for me on my 2.1 Desire. Here's the Appbrain link:

http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.rovi...

jonnydee wrote:

I've been playing Radiant recently, it's a pretty polished shooter with a nice retro feel. Anything by Hexage is worth a look as they definitely have higher production values than many of the games on Android.

It must just be me, or maybe people are using keyboards for control, but this is a control mess on my Evo. I even went and put a custom kernel on the phone to see if it was the fps/input lag.

Very hard to control for me.

MannishBoy wrote:

It must just be me, or maybe people are using keyboards for control, but this is a control mess on my Evo. I even went and put a custom kernel on the phone to see if it was the fps/input lag.

Very hard to control for me.

Nope not just you on screen touch controls stink for me too. I could see real keys being much better. There are rumors of Sony making an android phone with a game pad instead of a qwert keyboard.... I might be interested...

Cool, I hope it looks like a taco and is impossible to talk on.

I've spent that last week or so playing through every Chess app I could find, to cull the herd and find which ones are worth the time. There's some really good, and some really bad chess games out there. I'm not going to go through every sh*tty one because I just don't have the patience and don't want to waste too much breath on them.

Hot Dog, We Have a Weiner:
Chess by Mobialia
Do you like chess? Do you have an Android phone? If you answered yest to both, you should have this application. This application is worth every bit of 1.99 euro, which comes out to ~$2.50. This phone has the smoothest interface including the best implementation of drag n drop in a chess game that I've seen in Android. The AI is great and lets you set the difficulty by ELO rating. Board and piece options are all attractive and worth using. If you play on FICS servers you have access to online play; I've not used this feature as I play elsewhere (see below). My only, only, only gripe is that there's not a static list of captured pieces displayed on the screen. I suppose it's not terrible as it helps you develop a desirable ability to be able to look at the board and count up point values at a glance. Still, this is the most well-rounded, well-developed chess app I've seen so far. Here's a link to the free version, give it a spin before you buy:
IMAGE(http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=135x135&chl=market://details?id=com.alonsoruibal.chessdroid.lite)

Online Play:
I'm going to admit that I'm 100% biased on this one, but I know most GWJers play at Chess.com. If that is the case, there is no excuse for not having the Chess.com application for your phone. There are several apps that allow you to play at various online sites, but not many of them seem as fully featured as this application. It's the quintessential Android app in that it's not perfect, still has a few bugs, but shows a lot of promise.
IMAGE(http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=135x135&chl=market://details?id=com.chess)

Honorable Mentions:
DroidFish
DroidFish is an implementation of the popular StockFish chess engine. It's great to see some serious strength making its way to the Android platform, but unfortunately this one is short on features and controls. After emailing the dev I found that there really isn't a way to change the strength of the engine, and shortening the time controls simply shortens the game. Playing against a strong engine is fun, but playing StockFish at full strength all the time ceases to be fun after a while. Still, I would keep an eye on this to see how it develops.

Chess by jwtc
I put this one on the list because it's come a long way, baby. This is a very actively supported and free chess game that's gone from bare-bones-why-am-I-using-this to pretty fully featured. A great choice for a free game.

Chess Free
This one gets points for the effort put into the UI, but overall there are better, faster, more easy to use chess games out there. If you like pretty, though, go for it.

http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.ciplogic.knight.demoAndroidKnight 3D Chess
This is another entry for "good UI idea, not the best app for daily use". It uses OpenGL graphics to offer a rotatable, movable 3D board. Fun to look at, less than fun to move pieces/control.

Finally, I'm super excited to see Shredder Chess in the Android market. I haven't played it yet, but if you play chess then you know the Shredder engine. I shelled out the six bucks or so for my ipod touch (now on perma-loan to a friend), and I'm really, really close to picking this up for Android. It's ~$7.60 and just came out pretty recently.

EA to support Android Gaming

They've got some pretty good stuff on the iPhone (Battleship, Scrabble, Dragon's Lair, Madden, etc.) So I think this is a good thing. I still miss many of the games I had on my iPhone and several of those were EA games.

EvilHomer3k wrote:

EA to support Android Gaming

They've got some pretty expensive stuff on the iPhone (Battleship, Scrabble, Dragon's Lair, Madden, etc.) So I am not sure if this is a good thing.

FTFY.

I purchased Battleship, Scrabble, Dragon's Lair, and a couple others for $.99 on a sale. Plus, I don't find $5 or $6 games expensive.

Coming Soon

One of the developers shared this with the forum:

The game will be as deep and hard as one could expect from a Final Fantasy Tactics on mobile if it was existing, this is really a big RPG game packed with lot of graphics for a mere total of 1GB data so be sure to have some space left on your SDCARD

About the soundtrack, that is be cause it is not finished yet and it is missing the Sound Effect, at the end the balance will be different, the game has more than 50 original quality musics, so it will be anything but boring , we will have also cut-scene videos (not yet implemented on that preview).

Yes, the game has an extensive “synthetize” system for weapons and skills, and you can upgrade them along your journey, you can play also with different characters and even swap from 3 different armies on the main map, the game is very deep and packed with lot of drama & plot

Never got into FFT, but I love the hell out of Disgaea. Might be interesting.

1 gig? That's a lot for no speaky. Looks interesting though, wonder what the requirements will be, or if it'll run on some of the older phones. Doesn't look like it's packing a ton of 3D effects.

FFT is probably my favorite game of all time; this new development intrigues and excites me. It extrigues me.

I'm all over this, depending on how much they end up asking for it.

I just picked up MiniSquadron; really fun little 2D shooter, in the style of the old Amiga shareware game Biplanes.

http://www.appbrain.com/app/minisqua...

Fairly straightforward to run through all the levels, really challenging to get the scores needed to unlock everything.

That looks a lot like Altitude.

Michael wrote:

That looks a lot like Altitude.

My thoughts exactly

DanB wrote:

I just picked up MiniSquadron; really fun little 2D shooter, in the style of the old Amiga shareware game Biplanes.

http://www.appbrain.com/app/minisqua...

Fairly straightforward to run through all the levels, really challenging to get the scores needed to unlock everything.

I played the Lite version of this not long ago when it was on sale for $1, but didn't pick it up because there were some bugs on my Evo to where it wouldn't let me select planes out of the bottom row of unlocks.

Other that that, it seemed pretty good.

Citizen86 wrote:
Michael wrote:

That looks a lot like Altitude.

My thoughts exactly

Yeah I couldn't bring to mind what that was called, it's a little less complex than Altitude and a little more frenetic as the play area is smaller so that planes are kind of on top of one another.

Angry Birds is officially out on the Android Marketplace and totally free.

Oh cool, they got it on the market finally. I've been trying to get it from Getjar all day.

Ug, trying to get it from getjar with no luck. I'm not seeing it on the marketplace.

Yep, free and installed.

Verizon, Moto Droid, on the market.

Yoreel wrote:

Ug, trying to get it from getjar with no luck. I'm not seeing it on the marketplace.

You need to search for it, but it's there - I just installed it

Nightmare wrote:
Yoreel wrote:

Ug, trying to get it from getjar with no luck. I'm not seeing it on the marketplace.

You need to search for it, but it's there - I just installed it

Weird, I searched for angry birds adn got nothing, even used a bar code from app brain and got nothing

Edit: Finally got it from a mirror. Amazing game!

Why would they put it out for free? Not that I'm complaining or anything, just strange.

It's ad-supported. A pay version is supposed to be out soon.