Light Racer 3D
In a nutshell, this is the Tron light-bike competition for Android. Apart from some simple but highly effective 3D graphics, what I like about Light Racer is the four-position player view that lets you race with either the riders' POV or see the action from one of three over-the-shoulder angles.
Changing the direction of your light bike is a simple matter of tapping the side of the screen or using the track ball. Delicacy is not an issue as you can only turn at right angles.
If the game has a drawback it's that the arena is just a little on the small side, preventing you from screaming off into the distance to avoid the light tanks that appear in certain levels.
The free demo will give enough of a taste to determine if its worth shelling out the $2.49 for the full version that comes with more gaming options and multi-player support so you can race against up to two other people over a Wi-Fi network.
Reg Rating 75%
Price $2.49 (£2)
More Info Battery Powered Games
Robo Defence
I wasn't a fan of tower defence games until I came across Robo Defence. Strewth, but it's addictive. The basic idea is that you buy automatic defence turrets to destroy an enemy who wants to cross an area of open ground. If enough make it across, you lose.
For each enemy killed you earn points, with which you can buy gun turrets, missile batteries and devices to slow the enemy down so allowing your turrets to pour on the fire for longer. The longer the game goes on the faster, tougher and more numerous the enemy becomes.
To succeed, you need to apply some serious thinking to the layout and mix of your defences and their upgrades - anti-aircraft missile batteries are great against choppers, less so against tanks - and issues such as weight of shot verses rounds fired per minute and effective range.
Robo Defence comes with 20 levels of difficulty and five map types of varying complexity so it should keep you occupied for hours on end. How good is it? While writing this I started playing at 11.30pm one night and was still going at it all guns blazing at 3am.
Reg Rating 95%
Price $2.99 (£2)
More Info Lupis Labs
COMMENTS
Marvin - ZX Spectrum Emulator
ZX Spectrum emulator - links directly to the World of Spectrum archives for instant access to over 9,400 Spectrum games.
Nice to see a couple of Apple fanbois taking time out from fingering their own prostates to come and troll these pages. Obviously the rise of Android is starting to worry you guys.
http://www.replicaisland.net/
Replica Island
Replica Island is a free, open-source game for Android.
Guide the Android robot through 40 action-packed platforming levels on a quest to discover a secret power source on a mysterious island. With an retro style and unique, challenging game play, Replica Island is a new take on the classic platformer genre.
http://www.androidtapp.com/air-control/
Air Control
A simple premise to control the aircraft heading for your airport can turn into hours of addictive time-wasting.
Just select an aircraft and draw a route for it to land at its designated zone. Sounds easy but as more aircraft enter the area, all with different speeds and all from different directions it becomes a strategic nightmare. Even getting 100 points seems impossible for some time.
The Ad supported version is free, the paid version is 60p.
Appbrain install: http://www.appbrain.com/app/dk.logisoft.aircontrol
Games!
For all fans of Abduction: World Attack it was a very close run thing between that and Zombie, Run! for the final place in the list.
Re. the hardware, I used my Hero simply because, well, its my phone and I had it to hand, and because there are a lot of them sloshing about in users hands.
Yes if I had taken screen grabs from a Nexus One or Xperia they would have been larger on the page and more impressive and colourful, but the essential game play would have been the same and that is what I was concerned with.
Please keep in mind those screen grabs are actual game play images taken with the Android SDK and have not been tarted up in any way.
As for the new 3D games from Gameloft I tried the only one available at the time of writing - Asphalt 5 - on a mate's Desire and was less than impressed by it. I also understand that none of the news crop of 3D games from Gameloft will run on Android 1.5 or 1.6.
In 12 months time I would expect this list to look very different as games developers take full advantage of larger, higher resolution screens and Snapdragon chippery but for the time being I stuck with games that are just fun to play even on an old G1.
Trap
Game involves trapping balls moving around the screen by drawing lines to separate the area into smaller areas. The goal is to capture 75% of the screen to clear a level.
Great free game but it gets hard quite quickly though, and I have only got to level 6 so far.
