Good at beginnings, terrible at committment.

OK, so I kinda suck at keeping up with my projects. I'm sure eventually I'll be back with more, cuz there's just so much to look at in the world of Android gaming!

Try this now, if only for the music!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.amutus.DLT

Tics!

So since I have such a hard time committing to any project, I'm just going to do this however I feel like it at the moment, and at the moment I'd just like to quickly recommend this weird game. Enjoy!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.softyworks.TicsFREE

Noodlecake Studios Gives a Lesson in Customer Service

I've always enjoyed Noodlecake Studios' games. They're very good at making casual or quick-play games without sacrificing gameplay for gold. One of their games, called Wave Wave, successfully siphons off the style and challenge of games like Super Hexagon and turns it into something all its own. Imagine my surprise when I noticed today that its listing in the Play Store is now "Wave Wave Legacy".

I immediately had a suspicion of what happened, and I was right: they released a new Wave Wave but did it as a separate paid app. My initial reaction was ire. What the hell did I buy in the first place, then? A beta? Perhaps my reaction would've been different had the nomenclature been different. If this new app had been called Wave Wave 2, I probably would've had no reaction at all except to consider buying it. Instead, I fired off a snark-filled tantrum to the developer.

20 Points if you got that reference ;)

You never know what you're going to get when you email a developer. You may get nothing at all, dead air. You may get an automated response or a canned response from a customer service team. You may end up with just some guy in another part of the world who barely even knows how to speak your language. Then sometimes, you get a person or a company that just amazes you and forces you to turn that frown upside-down.

The developer emailed me back less than an hour after I emailed them and apologized. They also explained that they did this because they tried just releasing the new version as a replacement for the old one on iOS and had a fiasco on their hands because the two games are apparently more different than I had realized at first (again, why didn't they just call it Wave Wave 2?). Fans of the original were aggravated that their game was essentially replaced after buying it.

What the developer did next was something I never expected, and I think I actually muttered out loud to myself something like, "aww, that's so nice of them!" They offered to refund my purchase if I bought the new game. To be fair, that's exactly what I wanted them to do, and it instantly satisfied my irritation, though looking back, I almost feel guilty that I whined my way to a free game. The new one really is different enough to warrant sequel status, but sometimes a bad marketing decision can have a huge and often irreversible impact on perception.

As a consumer on the Play Store, I've always tried to take an active role in communicating with developers, and in many cases they have eagerly listened and even done what I asked. Smaller developers are especially thirsty for feedback because they don't have huge beta testing teams like Gameloft or other large companies. They can't know to fix something if you don't tell them it's broke, and they can't make something better if they don't know what the users want. It's this ability to connect users and developers that makes me yearn for a day when "Xbox" and "Playstation" are just the names of their respective companies' latest Android gaming consoles.

D-Touch by Beloko Games

I'll readily admit to anyone that I'm just not a first-person-shooter kind of guy. The last time I played Call of Duty, I morbidly embarrassed myself. Sadly, most FPS games these days are so driven by story and scripts that I think they forgot that just shooting stuff is fun. When I play a game, I want to play the game, not sit all day watching cutscenes, and I also don't want the game to have me playing through scripted events that take away the freedom of gaming from me. If I want to watch a movie, I know how to log into Netflix.

To me, Doom is the perfect FPS game. It always has been. I was right there when it first came out, shelling out a few bucks at a computer fair for a couple floppies containing the shareware version. My poor old 386 couldn't even run it at more than the size of an index card without looking like a slideshow, but I still loved it.

Fast-forward over 20 years, and thanks to id Software releasing the source code for the game's original engine, we now have many ways to enjoy Doom on modern hardware and often with significant improvements. iPhone users have been lucky enough to enjoy an official port of Doom for some time now, but there has never been an official release on Android, but thanks to the efforts of Beloko Games, we have something even better.

D-Touch is actually a port of three different modern Doom engines: Chocolate Doom, PrBoom, and GZDoom. They all have their own features, but GZDoom is by far the most advanced and customizable. Choc Doom provides an experience as close to the original as you can get without eschewing modern niceties like widescreen displays and higher resolutions. PrBoom offers both a hardware mode that runs at your device's native resolution and a software mode very similar to Choc Doom.

GZDoom is where all the real fun is. Not only are there a zillion mods for it, there are also a lot of great features, far too many to list, that make this the definitive engine to enjoy Doom on modern hardware. What really propels Doom into the modern FPS era is the ability to look up and down, something you could never do in the original game. It's actually completely unnecessary as the game still automatically aims vertically for you, but the psychological impact of playing Doom this way really does make it feel like a new game.

Beloko has done an amazing job of making his application accommodate just about everything you can think of. It'll download soundfonts automatically to make the music sound awesome. It'll download freeware WAD files if you don't have the official ones. It also has extremely robust control configuration, both for gamepads and onscreen controls. One particularly neat feature is being able to use pinch-to-zoom on the automap, a particularly nice mobile-only feature. The app also sees regular updates, and the developer has helped me on two occasions when I was having difficulties, so don't be afraid to spend the money on this app if you're worried you can't get it to work... Beloko can help!

D-Touch is quite possibly the best way to experience classic Doom on any platform. The controls are great, with or without a controller, and with three game engines to choose from, robust options, and an eager developer who continually improves his apps and is always happy to help, you'd have to try really hard to regret this purchase.

Random Sidenote: At the time of writing, the price of this app was $2.25... it's an absolute steal at the price and easily worth double! Beloko also has several other game engines available for similar games such as the Quake series, the Jedi Knight series, and even a free app for Wolfenstein!

Particle Shooter by Dianox Games

Ever since Geometry Wars single-handedly revived the twin-stick legacy of games like Robotron 2084, there have been many, many imitators. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you're a huge fan of the genre like myself. Sometimes even the slightest difference between one game and another can have a significant impact on gameplay. Take Particle Shooter for example.

If you've ever played Robotron, you know that the game is fast.  If you've ever played Geometry Wars, you know it's pretty damn fast too. What happens to the gameplay if you slow down your ship and its ammunition to about half the expected speed? You get this game, and it's kinda weird.

First off, as with most of these types of games, the graphics are exactly what you'd expect, nothing more and nothing less. The screen is filled with neon shapes and glowing trails, and the playfield gently eases around the screen as you move your ship, just like every other twin-stick shooter since Geometry Wars. The sound is rather average as well, and in particular I find the music to be underwhelming and perhaps even out of place (that menu music for example). The same can also be said about the gameplay... in fact, nearly everything about this particular twin-stick shooter is average, though again, to someone who loves the genre that's perfectly fine.


There are three different modes that help bring variety to the gameplay, including your standard mode, a pacifism mode where you can't shoot but instead destroy nearby enemies by passing through a white line, and a challenge mode where the random shapes are replaced with little ships that pose a much better challenge than the shapes moving at random. In Geometry Wars, the enemies seemed to come in groups or waves that were predetermined by the programmer, but this game seems to operate on total chaos theory, but with the slower speed, it's manageable... in fact, almost too manageable, which is why the Challenge mode is particularly welcome as it does provide an honest challenge. The game also features a high score tracker that shows the weekly and overall top ten scores for each mode.

The one thing that I particularly enjoy is that this game has controller support, something that every Android game should implement ASAP. It's surprising how many twin-stick shooters on the Play Store don't support controllers, a genre that is so perfectly suited to the dual-analog controllers of today and conversely can be frustrating to play with touch controls.



Particle Shooter channels the spirit of the great Geometry Wars but with a slower style all its own that makes for a different pace of gameplay. Along with controller support and a couple extra modes that extend the gameplay beyond the standard mode, this twin-stick shooter may be average, but it's average in all the right ways.

PS Navigation Controllers + Android = Robotron Heaven!

I've always enjoyed Williams' arcade classic Robotron 2084, even if it wasn't on my list of favorites, but recently after watching an interview with its creators, Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, I decided to look a little deeper, and ooooh boy, have I got a problem...

This game has gone from an acquaintance to an obsession.

Suddenly, I'm finding myself playing it constantly, and when I'm not playing it, I'm thinking about it. I'm cursing and yelling and screaming at my TV because I was this close to beating my high score. I'm hearing Robotron sounds in my head as if they were a song stuck in there. Then I start experimenting with all the weird and different ways I can experience Robotron.

I played it with several different controllers emulated on a 1st-gen Xbox. I played it on the PC with the keyboard. I played it with my arcade stick. I played the Atari 7800 version. This went on for a while until I loaded it up on my tablet and played it with a PS3 controller, and it was absolutely lovely. Then the flash of genius hit me -- "don't those navigation controllers also work with Android?"

Yes, yes they do. As soon as I realized this, I was in my car and on my way to GameStop to pick up a second navigation controller. I got everything all set up, and then I experienced what may be the single coolest way ever to play Robotron.

At the moment, my high score is 149,350 -- leave me a comment if you can beat it!