The Humble Bundle with Android 5
humblebundle.com
humblebundle.com
I was more than happy to pay a pretty decent amount of money to put my dollars towards encouraging this. Although I'll admit I was confused by the title thinking that this was in celebration of the launch of Android 5 Key Lime Pie...
Some time ago I purchased The Binding of Isaac which is an amazing game, but it suffered from slowdowns on my computer. I guessed that it was Flash and this was indeed the case. It’s ridiculous that a game of that style does not run properly on a modern computer. These and similar incidents have left me very wary of Wine wrappers and Flash.
http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/8612/P15/#260851
The Kindle Fire HD, for example, only supports the Amazon App Store and bare ipa installation.
This is not entirely the Fire's fault. Play is no mere standalone app; it needs some hooks built into the OS itself. Installing it on the Fire is possible, but involves deeper magic than even the average developer can be expected to know.
You can blame Amazon for not including that support (and I do), but you can also blame Google for requiring it (and I do).
You mean APK?
Since you can install a 3rd-party app store on Android simply using an APK (e.g. Amazon Appstore on non-Kindle devices), I don't see how Amazon could allow apps but not app stores.
But I agree, and I also expect to see much nicer games when mobile hardware has gotten a bit more powerful, and most of it supports OpenGL ES 3.0, and developers can just make the same OpenGL ES 3.0 game across Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac.
This is by design. Console software is made to be exclusive by default, what would be their selling point if the soft would run on anything else ? They have no interest whatsoever to define a unique standard for home consoles.
“Like what we're doing? Click here to increase your order amount!”
That said this is a great deal if you do end up liking the game because Trendy seems to be making most of their money by releasing dlc for dungeon defenders, and I think there is around $50 worth of dlc in the bundle. I have 25 dlcs listed for the game in my steam library, and I haven't spent any money on the game besides the purchase of the base game and the humble bundle.
I doubt raising it as an issue would mean anything, sadly. People like me must be rarer than colour-blind linux users running xmonad.
Dungeon Defenders is perfect if you have friends to play with. It's like a tower defense mixed with a 3rd person shooter and a hacknslash.
It actually uses Flash under the hood!
(Source: A friend asked me to have a quick look at it given my Flash reversing background ( https://github.com/CyberShadow/RABCDAsm ))
This is the "The Humble Bundle with Android" 5
not "The Hundle Bundle" with "Android 5"
Also, I tend to have the most time for gaming while on the bus or the like, playing on my phone. Any of these particularly good or particularly bad in a mobile form factor?
Relevant plug - I recorded some gameplay footage from the PC version a while back, in case you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq36XXqg9iI&list=PLpDx3aC...
Super Hexagon: http://gamewoof.com/game-reviews/super-hexagon-pure-gaming/
Beat Hazard: http://gamewoof.com/game-reviews/review-beat-hazard-ultra/
Simply flying around as an asteroid is alright, but the real fun starts once you've smashed into enough rocks to become a planet. Then you can collect a whole swarm of asteroid, orbiting around you. Colliding with asteroids now reduces your mass instead of growing you; you have to swallow the rocks in orbit to do so. Once you become a star, collecting whole planets (with their own orbiting asteroids) is even neater. Along the way, the inhabitants of planets will build little ships and planetary shields to defend themselves against rival systems... until you swallow their homeworld, anyways. I've yet to build a multi-stellar system before becoming a black hole and gobbling up my orbitals, but that's my next goal.
If nothing else, I'm glad HBA5 introduced me to this game I'd somehow overlooked.
Then there were some action or action platformers.
Then there were some puzzle games like World of Goo or Osmos which are very much not "some guy walking around", but more abstract puzzle type games, and fairly creative.
There was Aquaria, where you had a female mermaid swimming around an action-adventure world.
There was "Gratuitous Space Battles", which is what it sounds like.
So, yeah, while the puzzle platformer is something that's fairly popular in the indie community, it's by no means all of the games. About the only things that there weren't were 3D shooters (which I think indies avoid because they're done to death by major studios with bigger budgets), and straight up abstract arcade games, which this one provides with Super Hexagon. What else do you think is missing, that an indie shop could do well and which isn't already crowded out by the big companies?
>The EFF has a great statement[2] on BitCoin that closely follows our feelings toward BitCoin
But someone from EFF said, allegedly, that they will reconsider accepting bitcoin because: "It is possible that the legal and/or technical landscape has changed enough in the last couple of years for us to reassess our stance on taking BitCoin donations." [3]
Mind you, didn't stop me from buying the bundle, though :)
That tells me enough to know I wouldn't enjoy any of those games.
Unless these games are completely different on each platform, I doubt they would impress me. Granted, it can be done – Super Monkey Ball is a great example – but obviously, it's extremely expensive to do so.
As for the other kind of portage. I'm trying Dungeon Defenders right now on a Nexus 7 to see how they managed it.
Games (at least the good ones) are designed with emotions in mind - in fact, the ideal game immerses the player to such an extent that control differences become immaterial.
Arcade games that recreate the classic joystick and buttons on touch devices are often less than immersive. Games made for accelerometer or gyroscope input don't make much sense on a desktop computer. Games like Tetris aren't fun to use with a mouse. Etc etc.
No, but dismissing games because they're multiplatform does. Just because you have open source friends, doesn't mean you're not racist.
(Maybe you meant that you'd play them on your Mac and if they were designed for Android, then you're not interested because good touch controls rarely translate to good mouse controls. That's perfectly reasonable: The lead platform is usually the best place to play and not all developers put the effort into making good ports. But if you actually cared, you would have asked if these games have good mouse controls instead of being dismissive.)
The desktop version gives you an avatar to walk around with using the arrow keys, while the mobile version lets you slide across the map to view the level. Because of this, on the desktop version you walk over powerups to pick them up, and on the mobile version you tap powerups. And an enemy unit that just makes your own troops attack you on the desktop version both saps health and disables attacks on the mobile version. The experiences of walking around with your troops and watching from above are significantly different, but both are fun.
There are other differences. The mobile version has completely different levels from the desktop version. They also have very different stories – all the stories share is the events before the game. As a smaller detail, on the desktop version, you reorder units in steps with the arrow keys, but on the mobile version, you can just drag them.
Basically, Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a great example of how to do an Android port right. I don’t know if there’s a game in this bundle that is as well-ported, but if there is, then this bundle is worth getting.