Aliens Invasion is a classic 2D sidescroller shootem-up with flash style graphics and gameplay. The gameplay is very primitive: move left or right and either fire your projectile weapon or melee with your club weapon. That’s it! There is no jumping, ducking, climbing, sprinting or any of the usual movements seen in today’s side scrollers. So what makes this game so fun? Perhaps it’s simplicity. That’s right, it’s easy to play…as in pick up and play for a few minutes then go back to your day to day business. Alien Invasion offers a very smooth framerate, nice animations, upgradable weapons, and increasing difficulty each successive level. You move from start point A to end point B in each level fighting hordes of aliens. You can go inside of homes to pick up extra money and ammo. This money is used to buy new weapons ranging from a trio of melee weapons, pistols, rifles, shotguns, and ray guns. Every 10 levels there is a boss battle where you defeat a big monster foot that also throws rocks at you. I give this game high marks for its fun gameplay and simplicity. Pick it up today on the Android Marketplace.

Overall Rating: 9/10

The Impossible Game would have never landed on my device if it were not for the Amazon App Store offering a free game/app of the day….and I’m glad they made this game was part of the offer. Addicting, frustrating, and fun would be words to describe the IG (Impossible Game). The graphics are basic, you the player is a plain jane box whose job is to jump over triangles and other boxes. The gameplay itself is even more simple consisting of tapping the screen to jump and that’s it. Your box scrolls to the right at a constant pace and you jump over stuff to get to the finish line. Seems simple enough right? Not quite, the IG requires memorizing various parts of the map where you have to go thru a rather hefty sequence of taps. The potential downfall of the IG is that the level does not progress from easy to hard, it goes from two to three simple jumps straight to hard and then next to impossible. Perhaps the developer planned his game this way, hence the title…The Impossible Game.

OVERALL RATING: 8/10

Impossible Game

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.flukedude.impossiblegame&feature=search_result

I recently purchased an Acer Iconia A500 Android Honeycomb tablet and wanted to see what it’s Tegra 2 processor can do. Looking thru the few Tegra optimized THD games, I decided to buy Samurai II THD which was also developed using Unity3d which made me a little biased compared to the other THD games. First off, this game looks great…stunning even. These are the best looking graphics I’ve seen on an Android game yet. The framerate is smooth and the controls are simple. The object of the game is to make your way to some demon lord and destroy him. On your journey you’ll spend plenty of time kiling various samurai and archers. Save your karma points and buy new powerful and deadly combos. You will also have to meander thru puzzles that are various renditions of giant blade pendulums. On the down side of things, this game suffers from repetitive gameplay…hack and slash gameplay that is. There are about 5 different types of enemies that you will have to fight over and over and over again using the same two slash buttons. You don’t have the option to block, instead you roll out of the way. There is no jumping either. What saves the monotony is random slicing of opponents from split down the middle to cut in half to chopping off a limb or head. So yes, the gore factor is great, however I would like to see more parts flying around the screen. Despite these flaws, I give Samurai II: Vengeance a 9/10 rating.

OVERALL RATING – 9/10

Samurai2

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.madfingergames.SamuraiII&feature=search_result

1. Night of the Living Dead (original)
2. Night of the Living Dead (remake 90’s)
3. Dawn of the Dead (2004)
4. Dawn of the Dead (original)
5. Day of the Dead (original)
6. Day of the Dead (remake)
7. Return of the Living Dead
8. 28 Weeks Later
9. 28 Days Later
10. Diary of the Dead
11. Survival of the Dead
12. Zombies of Mass Destruction
13. Zombieland
14. Land of the Dead
15. Wild Zero
16. BioZombie
17. Night of the Creeps (…well it’s zombie-ish)
18. Cemetery Man
19. Dead Alive
20. Dance of the Dead
21. Planet Terror
22. Fido
23. Dead Girl (…what a freakshow)
24. Shaun of the Dead
25. Resident Evil

If there are any Unity3d developers out there, the latest edition 3.1 is now available. Check it out at http://www.unity3d.com

A few days ago I release my second app “Bench Press Workout” based of of Muscle Media’s popular “Add 50 lbs To Your Bench Press” routine. Check it out on the Android Marketplace.

Having purchased the Unity3D professional edition game engine with the Android plugin I decided that I needed to get up to speed rather quick by developing an Android application using Eclipse and the Android SDK. You can find it on the MarketPlace titled “Bench Press Calculator”.

So I have using the Alienware M15x laptop, TactX mouse, and TactX headset for enough time to provide a quick update on how everything is holding up.
-The M15x laptop is working flawlessly. I have no complaints except the very short battery life…maybe 1 hour while playing Dawn of War II.
-The TactX mouse works as expected. It could benefit from a few more buttons, but otherwise a great mouse.
-The TactX headset on the other hand is having some problems. I hear a lot of crackling with the sound turned up…it sounds like a blown car stereo speaker. I plan on retiring this headset in a few months or less and might try something from Bose.

That’s all for now!!!

tactxmouse

For the past 6 months I’ve been using either the Alienware laptop mousepad or a wireless Logitech travel mouse (travel as in mini sized).  I felt these two options where inadequate for gaming and decided to try out the Alienware TactX Gaming Mouse.  I’ve only been using it for about 5 days, but so far I have been pleased.  The mouse is comfortable in your hand and the buttons have a nice soft clicking feel to them.  I really like the mousewheel, it’s slightly wider than the wheels I’ve used in the past and has a good feel when you roll it.  There are plus and minus buttons which allow you to adjust the sensitivity.  There are also two thumb buttons on the side which default to web browser page forward and page back .  My only complaint would be the page forward button is a little too far in front and I have to adjust my hand a bit to use it.  If I had to complain more, this mouse boasts 9 customizable buttons but it’s really more like 5 buttons…left button, right button, middle wheel button, and both side thumb buttons.  They get the other 4 by counting wheel forward, wheel back, plus, and minus.  The lighting supports the Alienware zone theme that you can set from the Command Center that comes with your Alienware computer.  You can also setup macros which I have not messed with.   As you can see from the pictures this is a USB wired mouse so it’s not for everyone and the price is fair when on sale at $69 (normal price is $99).

I have been waiting for this game FOREVER! Having purchased almost every Aliens game from the Apple II to the Atari Jaguar I’ve been following the hype for a year now. I was a huge fan of both AvP games for the PC from 7+ years ago and have high hopes for this game made by the same developers (Rebellion) of the well reviewed Atari Jaguar version. I purchased this game via Steam and have been downloading it for the past 2 hours. The reviews I’ve read thus far have been mediocre. I will give my thoughts after a few days of game play.

–Quick update–
The game finally finished downloading so I anxiously booted it up, checked all my settings, and started up the marine campaign. That’s when things started going downhill. About 30 seconds into the intro movie the screen began to flicker and the game locks up. I figured, ok fine I’ll just re-boot and give it another try. I re-booted then started up the game and thought to myself maybe I should check the Nvidia graphics setting first and clicked “Quit Application”. Nothing is happening here…clicked a few more times before coming to the conclusion that the developers forgot to test something as trivial as exiting the game. Forced to give it another go, I start up the marine campaign only to watch the same flickering and screen lockup 30 seconds into the game. I repeated the above scenario a few more times before I gave up. I guess Rebellion thought nobody would buy this game for the PC anyway…I hope the console versions are not experiencing the same issues.

–Update 2/18/2010–
Rebellion released a quick patch that surprisingly fixed all the problems mentioned above. The game is now playable on my Alienware laptop with a great framerate and no more crashing. So far I would have to say that it’s a good game, but it’s far from anything great…and far from anything innovative. I am about an hour or so into the marine campaign and the atmosphere evokes plenty of nerve racking tension, but fails to deliver any surprises when the alien jumps out at you. This is mainly because the aliens don’t jump out at you. They generally pop thru the floor at a safe distance from the marine and move at a leisure pace unlike in the movies where they are jumping off walls at you giving you little time to think. In a Bioshock and Doom3 like manner there are numerous voice recordings found thru out the levels which reveal the story. The voice acting is poor and the content adds zero value to the game…