Be Excellent To Each Other

Yeah, a lot of devs have mentioned it in the past and it's often used as a reason/excuse for the free to play nonsense. If you just Google "android piracy" you'll get a shitload of news stories and certainly it's a piece of piss to find installable APKs of pretty much everything if you look on Pirate Bay et al.

There's an API you can include in your app that phones home to the store to check the purchase status. Has that been cracked?

Wow, that's shocking. How much is the game and is it any good?

No idea. That whole thing's an enormous pain in the fucking arse though; I often can't play games I've paid for because I launch them during the blackspot of data reception during my commute so they won't play ball.

On one of my old phones I had to de-associate with the Play store and re-associate again if I ever wanted that to work. I've not seen it for ages though, so they either fixed that or took it away.

It's not something I've come across so far and I've installed some games multiple times on successive handsets and had the same game running on my tablet and phone at the same time so it's pretty seamless in my experience (as long as you've got a fucking data connection when you launch the game of course).

Get paid to use your phone. Interesting idea and as long as the ads really do disappear the instant you unlock your phone it's arguably money for nothing. It's not a lot of money obviously but on a device where you can get games and apps for 69p it seems to makes more sense.

Jack N' Jill is a one-button platformer which, like the best of the genre, is incredibly responsive and rarely makes you feel like death wasn't entirely your own fault. It's done with a Gameboy-esque retro aesthetic which suits the game because everything you can see is important and you're not distracted by visual noise. It's basically Rayman Jungle Run boiled down to it's purest form.

I've only played it for about fifteen minutes and up to halfway through the second level set it's still throwing new concepts at me to change things up a bit. Each one is introduced on it's own to let you get a feel for it before it takes things up a level. It could collapse under it's own weight if it keeps up that pace admittedly but it's incredibly good fun and free so what've you got to lose?

I prefer Skylar Rose's review on Google Play.



PERFRCT!

Mr Dave's keyboard is still selling well, it appears

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Fucking Bing, close enough.

I'm sorry Russ, but I don't think about you that way.

Having reminded myself this thread exists, the other thing I'm playing at the moment is Layton Brothers Mystery Room; a spin-off from the Professor Layton series where you instead follow the exploits of the professor's brother, a detective in Scotland Yard, as he and his assistant solve murders.

The presentation and dialogue is a lot like the Professor Layton games but the gameplay is much more like the Phoenix Wright series (or what little I've played of them anyway). You get the basic story of the crime, victim and suspects then you can investigate the murder scene recreated in the Mystery Room of the title. You move back and forth between that and the questioning of suspects until you've built a case then you go after your prime suspect and try to break them under questioning.

I've only done the first case but it's pretty good fun so far and is very well presented with lots of nice effects (e.g. your questions to the suspects show as accusatory arrows chipping away at an armoured heart which gets more nervous as you come closer to the truth). It's especially good fun for my commute as me and Mrs B can play it together, but that's specific to me I assume.

The first two or three cases are free then you need to pony up for the rest so you can give it a good shot without spending any money.

On Eurogamer's advice, I got Fist of Awesome. It's a side-scrolling beat-em-up where you fight bears.

It's rubbish. It starts out okay but you soon realise that you only have eight moves, you'll never learn and more and all the enemies have the same eight moves (with a couple of exceptions). It's basically walk, punch, walk, punch, get surrounded, die, retry, walk, punch, etc.

Avoid/10.

Is that the one with the appalling graphics?

It looked fairly unplayable if so.

I think the term is "retro".

Amiga PD style retro.

Nowt wrong with Amiga PD style!

Not in Amiga PD games, anyway.

To be fair your description of the mechanics there is pretty much what side-scrolling beat-em-ups are; it was always a genre that was defined by repetitiveness. I've seen reviews and chat about this game all over the place but most of the praise seems to boil down to, "You punch BEARS! In the FACE! It's all so wacky! And AWESOME! LOL!" which has done nothing to convince me of it's worth.

Sounds a lot like Streets of Rage, but with more moves.

Sounds a lot like Double Dragon, but with more moves.

Ooh, apparently Double Dragon had a predecessor called Renegade. So, erm, it sounds a lot like Renegade, but with more moves.

The new Double Dragon is, of course, fucking superb.

Double Dragon Neon? I don't even remember if I tried the demo, so I'll do that tonight, if I don't forget.

Yeah.

I have a weak spot for X-Men. The double screened 4 player cabinet was something to behold.

As it turns out, Double Dragon Neon was one of the first games I got "for free", courtesy of PS+. Win!

Cross-posting from the Wongawatch thread:

Just as a reminder, The Room Two is out for Android today and if it's anything like the original it'll be a fucking joy from start to finish. Probably recommended more for tablet than phone play.

Also, I've been playing a bit of cartoon-y stealth-em-up LEVEL 22 and it's very good fun so far. You've got to sneak through various office layouts using newspapers and Metal Gear style cardboard boxes to hide yourself while distracting security guards with strategically placed donuts and whatnot. There's a decent sense of humour behind it as well; one of the bonus objects I found in the first level (you're reclaiming all the stuff your friend left behind when he was fired) was a figure of mutant hero 'Clawverine'. I also took a wrong turn in some ducting and stumbled across a secret game development office with the weird looking staff doing a strange dance which I presume is a reference to something I didn't get. I'm only in the first set of levels at the moment so it could go to shit of course but it's good fun so far.

I have buyed Level 22. It better be good.

The fact that anyone else has gone ahead and paid money for an Android game I've expressed interest in is pretty much a guarantee you'll hate it.

/cartwheels with rage

Android owners jealous of Threes! might want to try out Fives

You git.

I like it.

Me too.

In app purchases? Bleurgh, bleurgh and thrice...bleurgh!

All it does is remove the ads, that's a pretty extreme reaction for something so innocuous.

BLEURGH!

Used Google Navigation this morning, and it offered me a faster route half way through my journey. Good work, Gaywood.

Pff, so did my TomTom.

You suck, Gaywood!

Threes is now out officially on Android for anyone wanting to know what all the fuss from our iOS brethren has been about. Although searching for that on Google Play to post it turned up about five clones so chances are you already know what it's all about.

I've got Fives (which I assume is practically the same thing), and find it most enjoyable.

Yeah, that was the clone I played as well. It's not my cup of tea but I can understand why other people like it.

In other Android game news, Shadow Blade is fucking brilliant. Tough ninja platform game with various different targets (time and collectibles) for each level. I've been playing it on and off for the last couple of weeks and it's excellent stuff. It does take a while to ramp up the difficulty and that can be variable (a couple of the time targets are brutal in the early level packs whereas some of the Hardcore levels can be knocked off in a single attempt) but it's generally a smooth progression.

I bought Threes. Got 23xx points in my first game. Felt completely random. The jury is out.

Whoop! Just scored 22983 points on this. I am getting better and better, so it can't be that random, although there is certainly luck involved.

Regardless, the game is an incredibly clever piece of game design, beautifully crafted and impossible to put down. Would be well worth it at ten times the price.

Season 1 of The Walking Dead (plus the DLC) has finally made it over from Amazon's nonsense to proper Google Play for anyone who's interested. The first chapter is free and the rest is unlockable via IAP. I've got the whole thing waiting to be played on the PC but I've installed it on my Nexus 10 just to see how it plays, and because I've got a half an hour train journey after work tonight that it'll be perfect for it.