Android App Review - Diversion

At first glance you'd be forgiven for immediately dismissing Diversion as a poor game. Ezone.com's free app has very silly and camp graphics and looks like a simple run and jump clone, however there's more about this game than meets the eye. If you can ignore the crazy colours and costumes, then there's a rather addictive puzzle game for you to get engaged with here. Although the format is repetitive, running and jumping to the end of a course of platforms, with the odd mini boss thrown in for good luck, Ezone.com include enough variation and challenges to keep things interesting. For example, some levels require your character to swim, use zip lines, fly, climb and teleport across the 3D environment. Yes the characters and costumes look ridiculous, but it's relatively easy to find something for your character to wear that isn't too embarrassing. 

Also, with over 100 levels for a free download it's definitely value for money.

Good:

Free

Hundreds of levels

Creative and challenging

Bad:

Terrible character design and costumes

Some people will find it repetitive

Large 16mb download, but installs onto the SD

Via: Android Market

Mobile games dominate app stores

We knew this all already, but here's further evidence from Nielsen that mobile games dominate the app space. Users are more likely to download a game app over any other and are also more likely to pay for them.

Source: Mashable

Popcap survey reveals smartphone owners are avid gamers

PopCap games, the Seattle based developer of infuriatingly addictive games like Peggle and Bejweled, have published survey results which demonstrate just how much impact smartphones are having on how consumers game. In a nutshell, if you have a smartphone you're a downloading and playing a lot of game apps. Here are some interesting observations that I pulled from Popcap's survey.

Smartphone owners are avid gamers
The Popcap survey revealed that 84% of mobile phone gamers who own a smartphone have played a game in the last week, which apparently qualifies you as an avid gamer. Smartphone owners also admitted to playing more games than last year, with 63% having increased their gaming in 2010. In fact, 68% of smartphone owners claimed that gaming was now part of their daily lives.


Consoles are no longer the gaming platform of choice
Some scary results for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft here. When asked which gaming device they play games on most often, 44% of those surveyed said their phones, compared with 21% for consoles and 30% for computers. Smartphone owners were even more likely to pick up their iOS or Android device to game than their consoles, with 55% of them playing games on their phones as a first preference.

Personally, I think that the results for consoles should be tempered by two points. Firstly, the survey only included mobile gamers, so they of course would be more likely to play games on their phones as a first choice. Secondly, I'd like to have more information on the amount of time people where spending on gaming on their phones. Instinctively, feel that smartphone gaming is still all about short bursts of entertainment where console gamers will spend many more hours on these devices, playing much deeper and challenging games, with friends online. I can't imagine that we're all going to throw out our consoles anytime soon.

Smartphone owners are converting from free to paid
As an app publisher, I was excited by the news that smartphone owners are converting from free apps to paid content. In total, 49% of smartphone gamers said that they'd upgraded a free trial game to the full paid version in the last year. In addition, 34% of smartphone gamers said that they had paid for additional content for an originally free game in the past year.

For any developer or publisher considering a freemium model for their app these results are especially encouraging. You would expect freemium to paid content conversion to be a lot higher for games, but 34% is more than I expected.  

Sources: Popcap Survey PDF & Popcap Survey press release

id's John Carmack reveals Rage HD app coming to Android soon

id's Rage HD app for iOS is one hell of a great game and a demonstration that mobile gaming has a serious future, it's not just going to be all about casual games. The good news for Android fans is that id's John Carmack has revealed that they're working on Rage HD for Android as well.

What's the hold-up? Well, it seems that fragmentation is proving to be the little green robot's metal Achilles's heal once more. In Carmack's own words, "there's a lot of things with how the distribution platform works and the diversity of the platforms that you have to target, where things are still much, much nicer on the iOS world."

It will be interesting to see just how long it takes id to overcome the fragmentation issues on Android and what monetisation strategy they employ with Rage HD in the Android Market. Surely, there's no way they'd go down the Angry Bird's free with ads route. I'd guess id will maintain exactly the same pricing policy and two app strategy on Android as on iOS.

Personally, I've chosen to embrace Android fragmentation and ignore the critics. The benefits - lots of brilliant devices for consumers to choose from - clearly outweigh the negatives - pain for developers. I can't wait to play Rage HD on Android. I'll pay for it and promote it as much as possible to other users.

Source: Engadget

3D gaming coming to Android

Scaleform, a user interface developer for videogames, have created a prototype no glasses 3D gaming engine for Android. This video does a much better job of explaining things than I ever could, so get watching...



It's incredible to see this kind of technology already making its way to smartphone devices. I'd been planning to purchase a Nintendo 3DS, but with Scaleform saying that 3D Android devices will be available from mid-2011, I might just put that on hold.

Via pocketgamer.com

Super Mega Worm

When you're house bound, suffering from Johnny Utah knee, mobile games become your friend. After getting bored with the ubiquitous Angry Birds Lite for Android, I decided to look around for others. Glad I did because I discovered the insane Super Mega Worm, for the iPhone.



From the trailer, I've deciphered that the game's plot revolves around a mega worm that's trying to eat the world to safety. Mega Shark seems to be an influence here. I love mega animals. Hope this comes to Android soon.