Be Excellent To Each Other

Well thanks to this post I bought a cardboard viewer and gave it a go.

FUCK ME.

Everyone at work thinks it's some kind of magic.

I had mine down at my parents house last night so that they and some of their friends could spend an hour fighting over who's go it was next on the virtual roller coaster. They were all very impressed.

Wow yeah, that Titans Of Space is a fucking trip, man.

I'm currently hopelessly addicted to Brain Dots.

It's got a lot in common with Crayon Physics for anyone who's played that. Each level has a pink and blue dot which you need to get to touch to finish the level; gravity affects the dots themselves and the bits of furniture in each level. You interact with the world by drawing lines on screen which, as soon as you lift your finger, are instantly subject to the physics of the game like everything else.

Things start off pretty simple but the later levels can be a real brain-fuck (until you work out the solution at which point, in the best tradition of these things, it's obvious and simple). There's an utter fuck ton of levels and despite playing it for hours I'm still only about two thirds of the way through. There are YouTube videos available for the whole game so if you get completely stuck and want to kick yourself at how easy the level was the option is always there.

It's completely free so worth a shot, and the only downsides are some annoyingly random ads and the odd crash-out on my phone.

As noted elsewhere by Mimi, Amazon have a new Android app store called 'Amazon Underground' which includes a shedload of previously paid apps for free; including all available in-app purchases. Finding and then browsing the list on the new app itself is pretty horrible but hopefully this link gives you a view on their site of all the apps included:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_no ... ound&ajr=2

I only found one game in that list I was interested in but only because I've already played everything else I fancied. For the sake of trying to be helpful, here's a list of stuff on there that I've enjoyed in the past (or that I don't fancy but has been well spoken of by reviewers who like the genre it's in):

8bit Doves
Aftermath XHD
Aralon Sword and Shadow
Badland
Bruce Lee: Enter the Game
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse
Clash of Puppets
Colossatron: Massive World Threat
Cut the Rope 2
Cut the Rope HD
Dark Echo
Dark Incursion
Deep Loot
Doors & Rooms
Doors & Rooms 2
Final Cut: Encore (Full)
Fire Maple Games - Ultimate Adventure Collection
Fluid SE
Galaga Special Edition
Goat Simulator
God of Light
Gunbrick
Hook
Inferno+
Jetpack Joyride
Kiwanuka
Mines of Mars
Odd Bot Out
PAC-MAN +Tournaments
Pixel Boat Rush
Punch Quest
Quell
Raiden Legacy
Riptide GP2
R-Type II
Sector Strike
Shadow Blade
SHADOWGUN
Sonic CD
Sonic Dash
Sorcery!
Space Marshals
The Hidden World
The Lost City
The Secret of Grisly Manor
Threes!
Toy Story: Smash It!
Trial of the Clone
Trial Xtreme 2 Winter
Trial Xtreme 3
Twisty Hollow
Type:rider
Where's My Mickey?
Where's My Perry?
Where's My Water?

Also, Lara Croft GO, a sequel to the brilliant Hitman GO, is out today for Android and iOS.

NICE

Hyper Rift is another of these things that wants to emulate the game book experience but it's a lot more interactive than the recent and more straightforward Lifeline. While Lifeline had you just picking from a list of options and waiting to see what happened, Hyper Rift sees your amnesiac character freely exploring a spaceship room by room to find items and solve puzzles. The control system is easily picked up and the simple graphics give you all you need to know to get into the game.

I should mention that, although the game's been well received and all, my reason for mentioning it isn't entirely altruistic. I picked it up the other day (it's completely free by the way) and seem to have got utterly stuck embarrassingly close to the beginning. A quick Google hasn't thrown up anything useful so I assume I'm missing something incredibly obvious that no one else has got caught on; so if any Android or iOS folks fancy giving it a shot you might also be able to help me out. And point and laugh at me for being so dim.

Since starting the game I have:



Having done all that though I genuinely can't work out how to proceed. If you approach the lift you just get stabbed by the big alien so you can't get off the first deck of the ship and I can't find anything more on this first deck to meaningfully interact with. Help me Beex!

For anyone who bought the awesome Lara Croft: GO, they're just released a new set of 25 or so levels for free for both iOS and Android. And thankfully you can start playing the new levels straight away without having to unlock them if you'd previously uninstalled the game.

Nice, cheers.

I knew there was a reason I checked this thread other than fish-in-a-barrel level trolling.

I'm pretty sure you respond to my Android game related posts more than actual Android owners because I'm usually recommending stuff that's available on iOS as well.

Relatedly: The Room 3 was recently released for iOS (with the Android version to follow 'at some point') so you should be all over that.

I never really got on with the first one.

That's one of the wrongest things you've ever said. And this is you we're talking about.

I have just bought Hitman GO it is installing now.

'Free with in-app purchases' is perhaps the most evil phrase in the history of gaming.

After saying I wasn't really getting into SUMMONERS WAR over in the main Android thread, it's now managed to get its hooks into me somewhat, to the extent that my gaming PC has been effectively left idle for the last couple of evenings whilst I've been sat on a comfy armchair with my Nvidia Shield in hand. (Mrs Hearthly has also been casting her beady eyes over the game, and has installed it on her iPad as she likes the look of it.)

It's FREE TO PLAY WITH IN-APP PURCHASES which is usually enough to send me running for the hills, but I'm about ten hours in and I haven't felt gouged for cash yet, so even if you get that far with it for free it's arguably not done bad. (There are plenty of opportunities to spend cash but playing the game in a fairly normal manner has certainly circumvented any need to do so thusfar.)

In essence you build up a little base with various buildings, and recruit a team of monsters, and then send them off into Final Fantasy style turn-based combat (complete with quite nice 3D graphics). Your monsters level up, you can improve them with runes and suchlike, different monsters are better than others against different enemies, all that stuff. Every time you win a battle you get a reward of a rune or a monster and things like that, some monsters are crap so you can feed them to your better ones to level them up.

There are quests chains and zones to work through, arena combat and dungeons - all played out with PS1 era Final Fantasy style combat, which I happen to really like. (I've found the best way to do the combat is AUTOPLAY 3X SPEED, but to tap on the baddies in the fight in your order of priority as the AI isn't always super-smart.)

My mate who's been banging on about it FOR FUCKING EVER (about three months I think), is kind of maxed-out on the game and is waiting for the expansion at the start of 2016, and he's done so without spending a penny. (He is really, really, tight with money though, so that may be a mark of his dogged skinflint determination more than anything else.)

I'm liking it, definitely worth an install IMO, takes up about 1GB of space on your device. One of my more pleasing Android gaming experiences. I could have been sat in a comfy airmchair playing Hearthstone, but I was playing SUMMONERS WAR instead, so it's doing something right.

Summoners War is pretty much like all the other games of its type, they all follow the same structure I find. Dragonsoul is quite good, a bit more comical in tone.
I feel you would appreciate Heroes of the Alpha Arena though, it follows the same format as those other RPGs, but it has ripped off WoW for all its assets...



Not sure why he needed to record the progress bar for the first 90 seconds of that video though...

Hmmmm that Heroes Of The Alpha Arena is uncomfortably blatant in its Blizzard robbery for my taste TBH, plus the several spelling mistakes in that video alone were doing my nut in. Gameplay seemed slow too, whereas Summoners War on 3x autoplay really rips along.

I'll probably stick with Summoners War until I get bored with it and/or the requirement to spend cash to make progress becomes onerous. The silly thing is, if it does lob up any paywalls I'll just quit in disgust, whereas if they charged a tenner for a well-balanced, complete game from the off, I'd have cheerfully paid it.

If it had cost money right from the start you might never have given it a shot though, the fact it was free meant there was no risk in trying it out. I maintain that the best model is for the game to be free initially to let you see whether you like it then have a single payment to unlock the rest of it. So having a free 'demo' basically.

Sounds suspiciously like shareware to me.

What's 'suspicious' about it?

Like all of these games, as you level up you unlock 2x speed, auto play options etc...
One thing that put me off Summoners was how slow it was compared to Heroes!

Yeah that'd work better come to think about it. I've had about 10 hours play out of Summoners War thusfar, if it said '£9.99 to unlock the rest of the game, no further in-app purchases' - I'd go for that.

@Trooper - The 3x autoplay option is available right from the off in the game, and it proper rattles along in that mode.

I've heard quite a bit of chat about I have No Mouth, And I Must Scream over the years but is it actually worth playing? Or is it just notable for being weird?

ETA: for anyone who can't be arsed clicking on the link, it's just been released for Android and iOS hence my question here.

What is Amazon Underground? I downloaded Monument Valley from it, and now feel I shouldn't have .

It's just Amazon's Android app store. Due to presumably some kind of background payments to the devs they offer a lot of games for free, including Monument Valley. It's all perfectly legit like. While you're there you should also grab Hitman GO, Tomb Raider GO and Deus Ex GO because they're all excellent and free on Underground.

This seems as good a place as any.

What's new in the world on Android gaming, game fans? I have three games on the go at the moment, but 2 of them are hateful freemium cash grabs, with no actual game in them, just buttons to press to make you part with more money... Yet I still play them everyday. 1 game i'm playing is actually good though.

Good:
Motorsport Manager 3
I stayed up way too late last night, playing this. If you haven't played the previous couple of them, it's basically Game Dev Story but for car racing, if you haven't played Game Dev Story, it's Theme Park for games, if you haven't played Theme Park, it's Sim City for theme parks, if you haven't played Sim City, just fuck off.
Relatively simple to pick up, but with enough complexity for it to seem like your choices actually matter, i've moved up to the tier 3 races and have gone from winning everything, to being mid pack. However, some genius tyre management got me a race win during a part dry/part wet race, which was very satisfying. It works offline too, which is great for the patchy wifi on the commute.
£3.99,which ain't a bad price, but has extra money options to buy in game cash, which is a bit of a cheek. Haven't run out of money yet though, and don't feel like my progress is being blocked by not spending real cash. Let's see if that lasts.

Bad yet addictive:
Marvel Strike Force
Another Summoner's Tale "RPG" clone. Has a lot of polish, has loads of superheroes in it. Started off really well as it seemed to have learnt some lessons from Galaxy of Heroes, there was loads to do and loads of characters were viable.
Then the meta happened, and all the big teams were carbon copies, and then the devs started to fuck it up, loads of changes that just made the game worse to play and harder to achieve anything. Ridiculous pricing of characters if you were ever tempted to buy (£45 for one single character at the lowest level...) (I haven't put any money into this game, and won't). The reddit forum has gone from "this game is great" to every post being a complaint about how shit everything is. The forum is more fun than the game now. I don't know why I'm still playing, other than it only takes me 20 minutes to do everything I want to do, and i'm interested to see how it all turns out after the latest debacle...
Online only, which means I can't play it on the commute, as it is terribly programmed and assumes you are online at all times, or it just breaks.

Hustle Castle:
Same as the above, but a bit more fun and with a dev team that are a bit more generous. Kinda a cross between Summoner's tale and Fallout Shelter. Easy enough to play, pretty funny, and it's more of an idle game than an active game. I can drop in a couple of times during the day, join a clan war, fight some invasions, gear up my characters, and be on my way. I've actually paid these guys £4 to get a premium account, as they seem to know what they are doing and I don't mind support a game that I actually quite enjoy.


What are you guys playing right now, anything I should be checking out on my daily commute?

The Friday 13th puzzle game is fun.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... .f13puzzle

Played that for a bit, it was quite fun, not sure why I stopped?

The Motorsport Manager games are really good. The PC version has a lot of depth in particular.

If you look at my posts in the Finish 52 threads, anything that's presented as a link is an Android game linked to it's Google Play store page. This search link presents it in as convenient a format as I can manage:

https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... mit=Search

Recent good picks though would be:

Part Time UFO
Gorogoa
Unpuzzle
Faraway and it's two sequels

I'm liking legends of Skyrim card game. Similar to hearthstone, so if you don't like that I wouldn't bother.

I do like Hearthstone! Or I did, haven't played it for a while. I might give that a go, but I think i'm over card games now, all the ones that aren't Hearthstone seem to pride themselves on being more complex. I don't want more complex, i'm shit enough at Hearthstone as it is.

Ta, Unpuzzle looks like it might be my kinda thing, I have installed it.

It levels, you can add complexity, or not and you play by monthly tiers, the people you are planning are of a similarity level.

Obviously, also, you can get hearthstone!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... r&hl=en_GB

Hawk: Freedom Squadron

I've been playing this most of the afternoon. It's a bullet hell shooter, with the usual freemium 3-star levels and grinding to upgrade ships etc... With a pretty well done co-op mode, and enough people playing that you always get somebody jumping in to help out if you ask for it.
I'm enjoying it thoroughly so far, it'll be interesting to see how long it takes until the paywall hits...

I just went to install the old faithful ES File Explorer on my girlfriend's phone only to find that it had been dumped from the Play Store over some weird controversy that I can't be arsed digging into. So, what's the best Android file manager now? If you weird kids are even using such archaic things these days.

I use X-Plore, always worked well for me.

Awesome, cheers dude.