Top 10 best Android games for smartphones and tablets [May 2015]
Mobile games.
They’re everywhere–on our smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and even invading our computers. While this certainly isn’t a bad thing, there’s more terrible games out there than great, and the bad titles tend to be what people see most.
However, there is an array of remarkable mobile games available where a lot of heart and soul has been put into them. If you’ve got a smartphone or tablet–iOS or Android–we’ve got a list of the top ten titles available right now.
Hearthstone
The World of Warcraft-themed collectible trading card game, now compatible with all types of devices, is a magical title that feeds on two characteristics: frustration and addiction. Decks are built with cards earned through gaining levels and buying packs. You can then pit them against your enemy, employ a lot of forethought, and pray your deck wins. Multiplayer is phenomenal, but Blizzard did a marvelous job at offering singleplayer challenges, where you pit yourself against the computer with some insane deck builds.
Monument Valley
Monument Valley isn’t difficult by any means, but through geometry, phenomenal music, and elegant graphics, it is an experience like no other. Many people throw those words around, but it rings true for ustwo’s Monument Valley. The only cons for the game are that it is too short and arguably not difficult enough. The game is short, but with its 4 1/2-star rating, the game is enjoyed by many, even Frank Underwood.
Clash of Clans
Supercell’s strategy and village builder, Clash of Clans is enjoyed by millions of players. The game is truly addicting, urging you to come back to it every few hours. You can expand your village, advance your kingdom, upgrade your warriors, and even join a clan to dominate rival clans, earning yourself majestic rewards. Don’t knock yourself down if you get angry over another clan destroying your village, Liam Neeson experiences the same feelings.
Kingdom Rush
Created by Ironhide Games, Kingdom Rush is a fascinating and engaging tower defense game. With 8 upgradeable towers, 18 abilities, and 9 heroes, you are challenged to fight against 50 waves of increasingly stronger enemies. Just make sure you’re prepared for the boss battles–they are like no other, intense and challenging.
Rymdkapsel
Grapefrukt Games’ minimalistic space strategy Rymdkapsel is a superb game, previously exclusive to Playstation Mobile devices. Your goal is to build and advance your space station while defending it from raiders and gathering resources you need to expand. It’s a longer game than most, but if anything, the graphics are Rymdkapsel’s strongest suit. Taking on a retro style and employing a lot of geometric graphics, the game is a wonderful piece of eye candy, at least for those who enjoy said style.
GoatZ
After the success of Goat Simulator, Coffee Stain Studio knew where they needed to head next: GoatZ, a zombie survival adaption of its predecessor. Explore a world ridden with zombies, fight them, and survive. One of the most humorous things in the game is watching zombies fly through the air having a seizure after you head butt them with your goat. The game certainly doesn’t take itself seriously by any means–it’s comedic gold.
Super Hexagon
Super Hexagon might be one of the most frustrating, yet brilliant games you’ll ever play. In Super Hexagon, you play as a triangle, attempting to avoid oncoming obstacles. You have to do this for 60 seconds in order to unlock harder difficulties, but good luck getting there, as its nigh impossible! However, you’ll insist on continuing playing because Super Hexagon makes the insanity enjoyable through its wonderfully constructed and alluring retro music.
Punch Quest
Noodlecake Studios’ Punch Quest is an addicting, yet amusing arcade-style fighting game. Using only your thumbs, you have to wade through enemies by punching and jabbing so you can make your way to the end. Just be careful, things tend to get a little out of hand when you finally get on a dinosaur that happens to shoot lasers out of its mouth.
Auralux
Auralux is a clever and strategic game where you command a single unit. Your mission is to capture all of the suns on the map by eliminating the enemy. It’s very strategic, so employing tactics like flanking is a must. It’s much more difficult than it sounds, and also quite addicting. Aside from gameplay, one of the games’ best aspect is its beautifully constructed ambient music.
The Room
While Monument Valley might have been an easy puzzle quest, The Room turns the difficulty quite a bit. Playing this game is like trying to figure out a difficult crossword puzzle as a child–it sucks up hours of your time and you really don’t make any headway. It requires a lot of critical thinking, and you have to take your time, otherwise, you might not be able to complete the puzzles. Luckily, there are clues available to guide you along. If you happen to finish the game, there’s a sequel, The Room 2, which is equally, if not more, challenging.
These are my favorite games to play right now. With so many games available, I am sure I missed a few. Let me know what you’re favorite games are in the comments.
Come comment on this article: Top 10 best Android games for smartphones and tablets [May 2015]
If ‘Rock Band’ is Coachella, ‘Loud on Planet X’ is CBGB
Loud on Planet X is the ultimate independent artist’s dream: It’s an indie game all about indie bands. The actual gameplay is a blend of two familiar mechanics, a Plants vs. Zombies-style tower-defense system and a rhythm game reminiscent of Patapon that has players making sweet, sweet music while they fend off streams of hostile, blobby aliens. The coolest part for music fans is that Loud lets you play as the indie bands that it features, including Tegan and Sara, Metric, Lights, METZ, Fucked Up, July Talk, Austra and Cadence Weapon. Loud is still a work in progress, but all of the bands have been great to work with so far, Pop Sandbox studio head Alex Jansen says: “The musicians we’re working with have been really incredible and genuinely excited to be involved. A lot of them are big gamers too, especially someone like Lights.”
Regardless of how cool the band members are individually, there’s still a fair bit of red tape involved in creating Loud, Jansen says. “We need to license both master and publishing rights for each song, plus likeness agreements with the bands themselves (since you’re playing as the actual band and not just playing their music); there can be multiple parties involved and usually five contracts for each artist. But the artists themselves have been super supportive and helping push through a lot of the deals directly.”
The crew at Pop Sandbox is full of huge music fans, Jansen says, and some of them even had a hand in creating Sound Shapes, a glorious little music game featuring songs from Deadmau5 and Beck, among other artists. The first band to jump onboard for Loud was Fucked Up, a beacon of Toronto’s punk scene. Fucked Up’s Mike Haliechuk and Jonah Falco did the music for Pop Sandbox’s mobile game Pipe Trouble, and they’re crafting an original score for Loud, too.
“What we’ve been aiming for is a cross-section of both favorite established and emerging artists, with the hope that people will discover amazing new music through the game,” Jansen says.
Pop Sandbox is based in Toronto and for Loud, it’s getting financial support from the Ontario Media Development Corporation, the Canadian government and FACTOR, a nonprofit dedicated to growing the independent Canadian music industry, Jansen explains. Still, in order to launch Loud on PlayStation 4, Vita, Steam, iOS and Android by the fall, the team needs a little more money. They’re trying their luck on Kickstarter, asking for CAD$50,000 by June 5th.
“Unfortunately we weren’t able to actually get in front of Sony in person until Indiecade East a couple months ago,” Jansen says when asked specifically about the potential of financial support from Sony. “They’ve been really supportive, but haven’t been able to come forward with actual financial help. We considered the possibility of an exclusive, but have opted to try and go for as many platforms as possible.”
If the Kickstarter takes off, Pop Sandbox wants to add support for Wii U and Xbox One, as well. So far the developers have committed to nine in-game artists and 18 tracks, though they want to hit 12 artists total.
“We’ve definitely got targets in mind for the next slots and are in the middle of some pretty exciting talks, and we’re hoping to lock things down and make at least one more announcement over the course of the Kickstarter,” Jansen says. “We also want to keep some surprises for launch.”
[Image credits: Pop Sandbox]
‘Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’ brings stealth action to Victorian London
Ubisoft’s last Assassin’s Creed title didn’t exactly get a warm reception, but the game developer is apparently bent on making amends: meet Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the next installment in Ubi’s historical stealth action series. The new game moves the setting forward to Victorian London, where the industrial revolution and social inequality are the hot-button issues of the day. However, the real centerpiece is the franchise’s first use of multiple main characters. You can take control of either Jacob Frye (a “brash and rebellious” character) or his sister Evie (a “master of stealth”) when you’re in open-world situations. You’re locked to playing one or the other in key story missions, but the move should otherwise add some variety to gameplay that has gradually become formulaic.
Notably, the studio is also backing away from its multiplayer efforts in Unity. Syndicate is strictly a single-player game — Ubisoft says it wants to “focus on creating the biggest world” yet in Assassin’s Creed (30 percent larger than in Unity), which encompasses six key London boroughs. That’s undoubtedly important, although the move should also help the company polish Syndicate‘s experience and avoid the glitches that plagued its 2014 ancestor. You’ll know how well Ubi fared when it ships Syndicate on October 23rd for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and later in the fall for PC gamers.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Ubisoft
VR game ‘SMS Racing’ trivializes texting while driving
Texting while driving is against the law and it can put you and other people on the road in serious danger. That can’t be understated. However, when it’s your main objective when playing a virtual reality racing game, it can also be seriously good fun. That’s the premise of SMS Racing, a diminutive game from Turbo Button that pits you against other racers as you drive, text and ultimately smash your way to victory.
When you first start off, you’ll notice you have just the one hand on the wheel with your other ready to operate a Samsung smartphone. The product placement is no coincidence, the game has been optimized for Samsung’s Gear VR, which will track head movement as you look down to reply to your friends’ messages using a randomized keyboard. You’ll traverse rural or city tracks and battle four AI drivers to place on the public leaderboard — just make sure you don’t demonstrate that behaviour on your early morning commute.
Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Mobile
Via: Polygon
Source: SMS Racing
Experience dysentery on an Arduino-powered Gameboy
The handheld gaming world has been on the retreat since smartphones replaced the Gameboys in our pockets. But, when you mix nostalgia, an Arduino, virtual dysentery and a low price point, you get the credit-card sized Arduboy. The 8-bit gaming rig fits in your pocket, sports a black-and-white 1.3-inch OLED screen, two piezo speakers, and an eight-hour battery life. Created by Kevin Bates, his first version that he posted on YouTube garnered enough interest that Bates quit his job and started working on Arduboy full time and now you can preorder one of these full little devices.
After a year in development – that included Bates moving to China – the production model that’s on Kickstarter and was presented at the HAX demo day today has a polycarbonate front and metal back. It’s tiny, light and feels like you could drop it without it shattering. Pretty much everything you want in a handheld gamer. While the $29 early bird pledge versions are gone, the $39 version is still available.
To make sure there are apps when it hits backers’ mailboxes, Bates has seeded 100 developer versions of the device and said that 100 games will be available for download at launch including Cascade Path (Oregon Trail clone), Flappy Ball (Flappy Bird clone) and Ardumon (Pokemon clone). All the games will be free, open source and editable. And because it is open source, Arduino-based and can emulate a keyboard or mouse, the Arduboy could prove to more than just a fun gaming device in your pocket. During a presentation video a synth app and an Arduboy controlling a quadcopter were shown.
“In the long run, I want to sell it for $10,” Bates said.”It’ll be the same price point as a thumb drive and can be handed out at conventions by companies with their information on it. Then you can take it home and play games.” If that happens, conventions just got a bit more fun.
Source: Arduboy
Seven Sega Saturn oddities you never played
It was 20 years ago today that Sega released the Sega Saturn, the US video game industry’s first and only surprise console release. Tom Kalinske, Sega of America’s CEO at the time, walked out onstage at E3 and announced to a theater full of game publishers, journalists and store owners that its new console was available right now for a whopping $400. If that seems like an insane business plan, it was; Saturn was so rushed to market that its scant few games didn’t even have titles printed on their case’s spines. Expensive and difficult to developer for, it was quickly buried by the popularity of Sony’s PlayStation. The sad truth is that while the Saturn wasn’t a hit here in the US, it actually enjoyed a healthy following in Japan thanks to an abundance of excellent games that only made it out in that region. Here are seven curios for Sega’s maligned machine that make it a must for fans of the obscure.
Elevator Action Returns – Taito (1997)
Elevator Action Returns encapsulates what the Sega Saturn did best in Japan: bringing weird-as-hell. arcade-style 2D action into the home. A sequel to Taito’s ’80s B-list arcade game, Elevator Action Returns turned the series into a zany cross between Starsky & Hutch and G.I. Joe. You pick one of three hair metal-ready heroes with guns to run through colorful stages full of elevators and strange terrorists.
Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari – Enix (1997)
Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari was born of Enix’s tradition for publishing deeply odd games that bucked genre conventions. Mixing the puzzle-solving adventure motifs of ’80s PC games like King’s Quest with the side-scrolling exploration of console games like Castlevania, Monogatari was like nothing else on any machine at the time. You play as a pudgy, bipedal dragon exploring a series of islands full of freaky old monsters and magic seeds. Monogatari is unusually peaceful and relaxed, a world of beautiful sights largely free of violence typical in other adventures.
Keio Flying Squadron 2 – Victor Entertainment (1996)
Games where you run from left to right, bopping on enemies, have been ubiquitous since Mario rescued Princess Peach, but there was a brief moment in the ’90s when they fell out of vogue in favor of 3D games. The Sega Saturn hosted a few truly bizarre side-scrollers like Keio Flying Squadron 2 during that drought. It is the only game to let you run around as an off-brand Playboy bunny collecting gold, hitting monsters with a giant hammer and hanging out with an adorable dragon.
Final Fight Revenge – Capcom (2000)
One of the very last games released for Sega Saturn, Final Fight Revenge is a heartbreaker. The much-loved brawling arcade series hadn’t had a proper entry since Final Fight 3 on Super Nintendo, but when it finally showed up on Saturn it was as a one-on-one fighting game. It also happened to be terrible. Final Fight Revenge‘s awfulness isn’t without its pleasures, though. The ridiculous polygonal models of awesome characters like wrestling mayor Mike Haggar and Poison, one of gaming’s first (purportedly) trans characters, make the game a lovable failure.
Dungeons & Dragons Collection – Capcom (1999)
For years, this anthology was the only way to play Capcom’s lushly animated arcade games based on the famous role-playing game series. While painstakingly accurate ports of those originals were finally brought to PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Wii U in 2013, the Sega Saturn collection remains impressive for how it translates those arcade games to a markedly less powerful machine. Plus: Playing them with the Saturn controller feels oh so right.
Princess Crown – Atlus (1997)
Vanillaware is the studio responsible for some of the most gorgeous, hand-drawn games made in the past 10 years including Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown. Princess Crown on Sega Saturn is the game that launched the studio, though: a gorgeous role-playing game with enormous, vivid sprite characters conceived by George Kamitani. Many of the ideas in those more recent games — including an obsession with building character stats with food — were born in this lovely game.
Bubble Symphony – Taito (1997)
Congratulations: You are now singing the Bubble Bobble theme song in your head. Made famous by the hallucinatory NES game about bubble-spitting dinosaurs destroying 99 stages of bulbous, tiny wizards and flying, purple whales, the Bubble Bobble series never got the sequel it deserved in the US. (The extremely rare Bubble Bobble 2 on NES and Rainbow Islands don’t count.) In Japan, there was Bubble Symphony. A prettier spin on the original’s action, Symphony is even more aggressively strange. How strange? The final boss is named Hyper Drunk. Seriously.
‘No Pineapple Left Behind’ and the politics of American education
Seth Alter was a teacher for all of six months before quitting his job and going indie to make video games full-time. No Pineapple Left Behind, his second PC title, is more or less the story of why he left his students at a Boston charter school. As a special education math teacher, his sixth graders were expected to meet the same behavioral standards and educational expectations as their mainstreamed counterparts thanks to 2001’s controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which ties school funding to standardized test scores. Alter says that teacher evaluations are drawn from those scores as well. And because most charter schools are non-union, they can fire teachers for almost any reason, including low test scores from special-needs students who should have been held to modified standards in the first place. It doesn’t take a genius to realize just how flawed that logic is: It’s a system built to fail.
“A month before I quit, I was talking to a friend about my job and how it was getting me down,” Alter says. “I said that the main problem is that the school assumes that all of my [special education] kids are statistics. If I treat them as statistics, everything’s fine. But as soon as I start thinking about them as people, all of a sudden there’s a problem and I don’t have sufficient resources.”
By dehumanizing kids and turning them into pineapples, higher test scores are easier because pineapples excel at testing and nothing else.
In Pineapple, you play the role of a principal in charge of a school and your ultimate goal is to earn as much funding as possible. To do that, you need to ensure it produces the highest standardized test scores throughout a dozen different scenarios. By dehumanizing kids and turning them into pineapples (read: statistics) that makes it easier because “pineapples,” as they exist here, excel at testing and nothing else. Children are a bit more complicated: They each have their own individual learning styles and interests.
“There’s just no management sims I’m aware of that consider the human implications of treating the workers as moneymaking tools,” he says.
Alter says that the biggest message he wants to send is that what he’s showing isn’t exaggerated or that it isn’t how the education system might be in a few years — it’s how it is right now. Each of the game’s scenarios draw from situations he’s witnessed either firsthand or through stories he’s heard from friends and colleagues. The busses are always late; classes are overcrowded — those sorts of things.
Or consider this scenario that’s going to ship with the open alpha this summer: A student named David is wearing makeup, but he can’t be bullied for an entire week. Your options as the school administrator are as follows: Establish a comprehensive anti-bullying policy (which Alter describes as doable, but finicky and annoying) or turn him into a pineapple. “Pineapples don’t wear makeup and they don’t get bullied,” Alter reasons.
A video showing off the teachers’ spell-casting ability.
If this all sounds very serious, well, it really isn’t; Alter’s tongue is firmly planted in his cheek. Those aforementioned tardy busses? They travel via hyperspace gates and the local bus drivers union installed hyperspace inhibitor fields to ensure the kid-carriers would be late and so everyone in a class would fail.
Remember, these “statistics” are one of the most delicious fruits available, too. Alter’s original plan was to have a much more realistic and allegorical school, but to have one difference: that there are pineapples in the school. That didn’t last long.
“At some point I said that I should have everything weird, or one thing weird,” Alter says. “I can’t do anything in between or it wouldn’t be as funny.”
Naturally, he opted for the former — hence magic spells subbing in for lesson plans, and lasers for, well, you’ll just have to see for yourself. Alter says that in his experience, teachers have an incredibly dark sense of humor behind closed doors as a coping mechanism, and you’ll see that throughout the game. For example, he put the “fire” button right next to teacher salaries in the interface.
But why pineapples when maybe cherries or watermelons would do the trick? Two reasons. Alter says pineapples are “maybe impossible” to anthropomorphize and it’s a jab at a standardized test question (PDF) in New York that involved talking pineapples. Seriously: A talking pineapple apparently challenges a hare to a race, loses and the rabbit and his pals eat the pineapple. Dark! The whole video below about standardized testing is incredible and you should watch all of it, but if you’re short on time, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver breaks the ridiculousness of the pineapple question down at around the 12:20 mark.
It’s this type of humor that Alter’s most comfortable with. Throughout our conversation, he’s jovial and quick to laugh. Even when talking about the lasting implications of charter schools and NCLB, he has a smile on his face while we talk over Skype. He uses humor to reach an audience and teach them. That could be partly why the teacher’s he’s told about the game are excited to play it.
“I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback across the board saying, ‘You’ve described my job. You haven’t described the game yet,’” Alter says. “Every teacher that I’ve talked to wants to play this.”
Despite what seems like a consensus on the damage standardized testing is doing, Alter doesn’t see NCLB going away anytime soon. “It’s made a series of lasting institutional changes that are going to be difficult or near impossible to undo,” he says. For starters, he notes that NCLB’s given rise to charter schools, which exist as a measure of destroying collective bargaining rights.
He says that there’s no future in going back into education, even if video games don’t work out for him. And even though he might not be standing in front of a chalkboard anymore, Alter still has a desire to teach and he’d rather do it as a game developer than work under what NCLB would force him to. There’s no going back for Alter even if he fails.
“If I were to teach, I’d be back in the school that I’m depicting,” he says. “Hell no!”
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
‘Castlevania’ creator just funded a ‘Symphony’ successor
In case that two-hour commentary video featuring Castlevania: Symphony of the Night from over the weekend stoked a new fire in you for another side-scrolling dungeon romp, boy have I got some good news. Co-designer Koji Igarashi’s taken to Kickstarter for help funding his new game Bloodline: Ritual of the Night, that, by all appearances, looks like the Symphony sequel we’ve been waiting for for 18 years. You play as a girl exploring gothic castle and uncovering its secrets while a curse changes your skin from flesh to crystal. Gameplay focuses on exploration with role-playing and crafting elements sprinkled in for good measure. Sounds pretty familiar, yeah? Unsurprisingly it’s proving wildly popular so far. The funding goal is $500,000 and as of this writing it’s already hit $510,032.
At this rate, the stretch goals like a second playable character, “nightmare” mode and Metal Gear voice actor David Hayter providing his talents ($850,000) don’t seem like that much of a stretch. For $28 you get a digital copy of the game for PC, PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, $60 nets you a physical version and from there the trinkets and prices go up accordingly. Igarashi says he’s rallied Michiru Yamane (Symphony‘s composer) and Japanese development team Inti Creates (of Mega Man Zero and Mighty No. 9 fame) to help with the game as well.
By now, you might be wondering what’s missing. I hate to break it to you, but that’d be Nintendo platforms and Dracula. For the former, the campaign page says that rather than sacrificing the full vision of what Igarashi had in mind versus having a game that’d play on everything, he opted for the former. There’s a coy tease about it showing up elsewhere, however. Oh, and good old Drac? This is a separate game from Castlevania and that allows for new opportunities and freedoms, but a selection of new demons and B-movie monsters are “still in the tarot cards.” If you’re so unclined, head on over to the Kickstarter page to make it all happen.
The image above is concept art
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Source: Kickstarter
Hunt dinosaurs and craft tools while stranded naked on ‘ARK’ island
ARK: Survival Evolved begins with a simple premise: You’re stranded on an island, naked, cold and hungry, and you must survive. Also, there are dinosaurs. And other survivors. And… dragons? (Maybe it’s not so simple after all). ARK is an open-world, first-person survival game, where players roam around an island occupied by dinosaurs and other legendary creatures, building tools out of natural resources, growing crops, researching technology and hunting for food — or for sport. Every creature in the game is able to be “tamed” and the first screenshots show people riding around on the backs of dinosaurs. Awesome. Once it launches, play with friends in the same room or with hundreds of people online on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 (with full Morpheus VR support!) or Steam — ARK goes live on Steam Early Access on June 2. Check out the game’s announcement trailer below.
Source: ARK
Turn on your Xbox One from an app with the latest update
Ever wanted to turn on your Xbox One before you’ve even reached the living room? If so, it’s time to upgrade your console. Microsoft has released the Xbox One’s promised May update, and you now have the option of turning the system on (or off) from the SmartGlass app — your system will be ready by the time you sit down to play. The refresh also brings voice messages to the One, and it enables dedicated party chat servers (rolling out over the weeks ahead) to make sure a finicky router won’t get in the way of your conversations. It’s not a gigantic update, but it’s a big deal if you’re either impatient or hate typing with a gamepad.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft
Source: Xbox Wire
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