back to article Ten Essential... Android Games

If there is one thing that iPhone owners can be smug about it's the number of quality games available from the iTunes App Store. But Android owners needn't feel too badly done by - the Android Market has a few choice gaming applications all of its own. This list is unapologetically personal, and several well regarded games …

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  1. MarkOne

    http://www.replicaisland.net/

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    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.

  2. cre@mstick360

    http://www.psym-mobile.com/abduction/abduction.html

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    Abduction World Attack!

    Well worth a recommendation.

  3. Ian Ferguson

    http://www.apple.com/uk/ipodtouch/

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    iPod Touch

    There's my suggestion :)

    (sorry)

  4. Richard 72

    www.barcodebeasties.com

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    Barcode Beasties

    1) I wrote it

    2) It's a great waste of time during shopping

    3) Kids love spending hours tearing apart your bookcase / kitchen / bathroom looking for the most powerful monster.

    4) I'm now updating it on a regular basis - multiplayer very soon now (honest).

  5. Daf L

    http://www.androidtapp.com/air-control/

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    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

  6. Daf L

    http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.androidemu.genslite

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    Wanna play Sonic or Earthworm Jim on your Android?

    Not a game in itself but Gensoid is a Sega Megadrive (Genesis - US) Emulator for Android. It allows you to load (legally obtained) Sega game ROMs and take you back to the early 90s.

    It works surprisingly well, but the limited number of controls affects game play for some games (it can map hardware buttons or provide on-screen touch controls). There are some bugs, especially with the sound, however playing the original Sonic, full screen, just tilting the phone to run left and right feels quite natural and is a great way of playing it.

    As the ROMs can be stored on the SD Card you can also build up a library of games without filling any internal storage.

    SNES, NES, Gameboy inc. Advance are also available from the same author. There are also PSX and N64 emulators from other sources.

    Its something that unlocked iPhone users will not be able to experience!

    Gensoid Lite is Free, Gensoid full is $3.49

  7. Rupert Stubbs

    Why do they all look so crap?

    Not being an Apple fanboi, but these all look pretty crude compared to the good iPhone apps.

    For example, Deep Green is a beautiful iPhone chess app. To me, it makes a difference playing with something that has had obvious love and care in the making.

    The ones you showed just don't have it.

  8. Madeye

    Abduction!

    How can you not include Abduction! in any list of top Android games?! I have personally witnessed it keep 3 children quiet for over two and a half hours ....

  9. Mr Brush

    http://www.pocket-play.com/

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    Pocket Empires

    A stupidly addictive Evony type game. Build your kingdom, fight monsters, forge alliances, etc,etc.

    All the work happens sever side, so you just pop in and check on your empire occasionally (or once every 10 minutes if you're addicted).

  10. Paul 185

    Pocket Empires

    Odd not to see any of the casual MMO's in this list - PE seeming the best of the bunch. Where most of the other casual mobile MMO's stick with a basic text interface (with the occasional pretty picture), Pocket Empires has a full on world map, complete with the ability to build new cities, attack monsters, and even customise the cities that you build.

    Support for up to a million players per server, and an extremely rapid developmental pace round up a very satisfying casual experience.

  11. Scaine

    Many more!

    Replica Island and Abduction have already been mentioned but there's also :

    * You've missed all of Camel's games (Shoot U!, SpacePhysics and SuperTumble).

    * SpeedX (tunnel racer)

    * Raging Thunder (car racing, incredible graphics)

    * Zenonia (expensive, but massive zelda-style RPG)

    And the recently released Newton (laser/mirror puzzler).

    These games have all the spit and polish of the more established iPhone games.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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.

  13. Nathan 13

    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.

  14. The Original Steve

    Gotta be joking..

    Why on earth are you reviewing on such old hardware / platform? 2.2 is just around the corner and whilst most people are using Hero's and the like the Desire is taking off a storm (2 week waiting list on Orange) and 1Ghz Snapdragon will be the defacto in 6 months time.

    Got my desire 2 weeks ago and if you think I'm likely to be installing any of that 1980's style crap on my handset you can think again. If I showed any of that off to my mates to show what the phone can do and why they need not install iTunes and get shafted by Mr Jobs I'd be laughed out of the pub.

    Agree with the earlier poster - this article just puts Android in poor light compared to the iPhone/Touch. I'd never get one, but this article doesn't exactly help anyone on the fence to opt for the OSS route...

    Any reviews in the pipeline that make use of the new hardware specs in the Desire?

  15. Andrew Pike

    XGalaxy Galaga clone

    old school arcade action. If you wondered what the physical trackball on your handset was for - this is it.

  16. Alistair 1

    RoboDefence

    Robo defence actually has as many levels as you want, everytime you get to level 20/30/40 it opens the next 10, and so on

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Defender

    Forgive me, its just a suggestion....

    Does anyone know if we'll ever get the insanely difficult Williams Defender onto Android?

    thanks

  18. pj3090

    http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.deckeleven.windsofsteel

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    Winds of Steel

    Nice WW II 3D fighter/bomber game. Intuitive accelerometer-based controls. There's a free demo version with limited levels.

  19. moylan

    gem miner and scrambled net

    2 games

    gem miner

    dig for minerals. sell them and upgrade your mining equipment to dig faster see further. great fun and it's trying to reach spots that are awkward. map is regenerated randomly every time. great fun,

    scrambled net

    simple game. connect all the computers to the network by rotating the tiles that contain the connections. settings from easy to very very hard.

  20. Scaine

    http://www.droidgamers.com/index.php/game-news/android-game-news/295-gamelofts-new-3d-games

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    Gameloft

    9 new 3D games all just released. GTA clones, Diablo clones, Halo clones, it's all there. The Reg must seriously hate the Android platform to put these games out under the moniker of "10 Essential Android Games". It's really misleading. Okay, apart from RoboDefence which rocks. :-)

  21. b166er

    http://forums.storm8.com/forumdisplay.php?f=12

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    World War

    One to keep ticking over in the background.

    I will achieve world domination :)

    Do you have the formulaic skills required?

  22. Al Taylor

    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.

  23. Jason Syn

    http://www.android.com/market/#app=com.requiem.armoredStrike

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    Armored Strike

    What are you guys 12? Connect 4, Air Hockey?

    Armored Strike is the best game for Android hands down, not in terms of graphics or 3D or any of that, but just a great addicting game that never gets old. It's worms for Android with tanks. You can play 4 person multi-player and it's an absolute blast to play! I highly recommend it!

  24. Registard

    http://www.androidapps.com/t/zen-table-tennis

    El Reg is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

    Zen Table Tennis

    From Reset Games (available cross platform), there's both lite and paid for versions of a simple yet classic game. It works reasonably well on a touchscreen phone but has its fair share of faults (read or watch the (video) review linked above) which I entirely agree with.

    There are other table tennis games for android but they are graphics heavy so will run very poorly on 1.5 type release devices without all the Snapdragonesqueryness of later 2.1+ phones. Worth a look though I'd love to see a proper bug update before paying for it.

    Chessdroid by Alberto Alonso Ruibal is well worth a butchers (as it's a lot more scalable in difficulty than many others - easy is proper easy etc). Makes you look smarter than you actually are when you're playing too, well worth the 99 (euro) cents. The free demo version only has one difficulty setting and that's clearly designed to humiliate the player as much as humanly possible. Clever way to get people to pay I guess...

    http://www.alonsoruibal.com/chessdroid_first_release/

  25. Anonymous Coward

    www.miniclip.com

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    Anonymous Coward

    MiniClip

    I've just installed Froyo on my Nexus - once that was done, Flash 10.1 (beta) magically appeared in MarketPlace - I'm sure there's still a place for gaming Apps, but it just got microscopic.

    Despite the FUD every game I've tried so far run as smoothly as on a desktop - better still double tapping puts the Flash content into fullscreen, thus loosing the surrounding chaff on the page.

    Not that there was any doubt really, but its sites like this, or flashgames247.com - take your pick, that killed Flash on iPad/iPhone.

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