Android is ready to play

One of the core ideals I've had when starting up this blog was to bring attention to the lesser known things in gaming. One such topic is cellphone gaming. Specifically _good_ cellphone gaming. And even more specifically good, Japanese, cellphone gaming. On top of that my platform of choice, Google's Android, has been the underdog in all things entertainment, despite its rapid growth, for years. There may finally be a light at the end of that tunnel, with Sony's recent announcement of the Sony Suite, which will bring original PSX as well as officially approved "Playstation certified" experiences to the platform. I've been in the Android scene long enough to know that that whole thing is still years away. Nothing happens fast in Android world. So, in the mean time, we need to make due with what we're given. Thankfully things have slowly picked up in this space, mostly due to iOS ports. The Academy-Of-Arts-And-Sciences-Game-Of-the-Year-2010-nominated Angry Birds leads the charge, Fruit Ninja is right behind, and Words With Friends even brought the oft-talked about, rarely implemented cross-platform multiplayer allowing Android and iOS gamers to do whatever it is that game allows them to do to each other. None of those games are for me, so I don't count them. Up my alley are things like Kairo Soft's Game Dev Story, another iOS transplant (which itself was an up-port from dumbphones), and what may be a foretelling of things to come, for good or ill, in HyperDevBox's and Idea Factory's Spectral Souls PSP-to-Android port. Those games are all fine and good, but none of them has been an original property, or very polished given their non-native nature. Which is why the biggest and most pleasant surprise to date has been YourGames' Retriod Shooting. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first Android game worth a damn. At its core it's a Space Invaders clone, but mixes up the formula enough to be unique, by design (Space Invaders is pretty boring these days), and by necessity (perhaps the developer wasn't skilled enough to implement a control method as precise as Cave has managed in their iOS offerings).

The game is a simple vertical shooter, where increasingly complex waves of enemies rain down onto the planet earth, and it's the players job to fend them off by swiping a finger over the row of android dudes at the bottom of the screen that serve as defensive turrets. Successive hits earn combo points, which result in health restoration to the planet, or special attacks which clear the screen. The game may or may not be an endless score chase, since I haven't lived long enough to find the kill screen, but the time spent blowing up raining robot dudes has been one of the most genuinely fun gaming experiences on the platform so far. I'd put this one up against any of Cave's games any day. It features that same core fun that made arcade games popular in the 80's. It also has a nice 16-bit style to the graphics, which unfortunately only consist of a generic space background and colorful robot dudes. There is also a single music track, which is a catchy chiptune. For the price of a single play in a dedicated arcade machine, you really can't complain about getting this game on your phone for life. This is exactly the experience I've been waiting for out of Japan, and I'm glad it's finally here, even though it's a couple years late. The game did have compatibility issues at first, which prevented it from running on my high-end handset, but the steady stream of updates eventually resolved the issue. The latest even added an extra selectable character, opening up the door to future content updates. I'd consider this an exclusive, since I believe the little green android mascot character is a registered trademark of Google, and is only given to Android application developers for branding purposes. The iOS port would therefore need to replace all the character sprite graphics with colourful fruit or some such. Well worth your ¥100.

Related: Since Google has finally made a decent Internet portal for browsing the Market, I went back to my original game rundown post and updated it with links to the games. Why did we have to wait two years for this functionality? And look, half of G-Mode's stuff is down. Some things never change.