If you’re like me and you love your android device with a passion then you’re probably also a little lost when it comes to finding the best games on the platform, with over 80,000 applications on the market it can be difficult to find a game let alone discover a gem for yourself. I’ve been scouring the market and internet for the best Android games I can fit in my pocket. I’ve tried to separate the wheat from the chaff and to bring you the very best (in my opinion) but if you have any games to add please feel free to comment.

These picks are based mainly on my own personal choice but I have tried to pick out what I think are the best in all categories based on presentation, enjoyment and longevity. In general I am recommending games that look good, play well and suit the mobile phone format, in particular I like to point out games that make use of tilt controls or make good use of touch screen. Also note the lack of 3D games, there may be some good 3D games out there but personally I’m not impressed with a lot of the 3D games as if I wanted 3D gaming I would use my PSP, I think android is best suited to 2D, for now. So read on for my top Android picks. Read more…

If you have ever played Pictionary you’ll be familiar with the concept of What the Doodle. You are dropped in a room with four other people and you each get two turns drawing a phrase. Hilarity ensues when you have no idea what’s being drawn or no idea how to draw a phrase.

So how does it work on Android? Well obviously it’s online and connects straight away to the other people playing, most people are using the free (lite) version which only supports easy difficulty but more and more people seem to be playing every day. Needless to say I have never had a problem getting into a game on easy mode. Could do with some more people to buy the full version, currently only £1 meaning there’s a few more modes to play for everyone. Buying also lets you draw your own avatar which people will see in the game.

Drawing with the touch screen on my G1 was great, my finger wasn’t the most precise of drawing implements but it did the job perfectly well and I was surprised how easily people guessed some of my worse doodles. There are a few problems of course, with people writing when they can’t be bothered but there’s a system in place to boot players who cheat or who do not play in the spirit of the game. There’s also great stat tracking with details on your games played and overall points.

The whole experience works smoothly and effortlessly even on my piddly G1, there are a few problems with other handsets and virtual keyboards as obviously it takes up some of the screen. I’ve never had a force close and can’t really fault the experience I’ve had. Connection wise it even seemed to work pretty well over 3G and never seemed to drop from a game at all.

All in all it’s a great app and one of the most fun I’ve ever played on Android. With the free version having enough fun for most people and the paid version being a meager £1 I can only see more people playing and buying in the future. Hopefully I’ll contribute to that and get some people to play some of the advanced game types. QR code for lite version in the comments below.

I have been with Dreamhost now for over a year and I thought I would share my experiences. I first signed up on a special deal for a completely unlimited package with all the disk space and bandwidth I can use for $10 a month (£6.50 to me). Obviously pretty cheap when I had previously been paying around £20 a month for a few gigs of space and a hundred or so gigs of bandwidth.

So the first instinct was the old oversubscribing argument that for hosting so cheap they must be oversubscribed and hence slow speeds and crappy underpowered servers. However my experience has been quite the opposite. The first thing I have to congratulate them on is the excellent bandwidth and server stability. I’ve had less problems with Dreamhost than with any host I’ve used. There has been the occasional minute of downtime, but I’m hardly a multimillion dollar e-commerce site and these occurrences have been rare. Not to mention that as a continuing customer I still continue to get free rewards like a year’s free domain payment. Read more…

I ask only because as a person who loves to grab the latest gadgets and games I really have a hard time justifying Blu-Ray, in fact I have a hard time even considering shelling out ~£100 for a player. The format is treading familiar territory alright, optical discs from CDs to DVDs have been massive around the world, one would think that a format offering unparalleled storage space, fantastic video and sound would be lapped up by the general public, especially since Sony made the move of incorporating Blu-Ray into the PS3, a similar an identical strategy to when they backed DVD with the PS2. Read on for a more in depth look at the follies of Blu-Ray.

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Perfect Dark was one of my favourite games on the Nintendo 64, still one of my favourite consoles ever. It expanded on the formula from Goldeneye and added as many features as Rare could manage to squeeze in, it also allowed them to create their own universe, characters and plot. Simply put Perfect Dark was one of Rare’s crowing achievements on the Nintendo 64, sadly it came a little late to the party for it to be a adopted widespread.

I was a bit dubious when I first heard Perfect Dark was coming to XBLA, I figured it would be some re-hashed mess probably only single player and minimal multiplayer, the usual kind of hack-job. 4J Studios have however done a fantastic job of porting this masterpiece to the 360 and have included everything from the original game and more, who can groan at 1080p resolution and remastered textures. Read on for a lot more nostalgia and some actual opinions on the 360 version.
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I’ve been a fan of Battlefield games since the original, from playing Desert Combat to 2142 on the PC. They have always been a staple of my gaming time and none more so than Bad Company on the 360. I poured days upon days into it’s fantastic gold rush mode with terrain destruction, advanced technology and massive open play fields. There were always things missing and there were problems with knifing and artillery glitching.

Thankfully though Bad Company 2 is by no means a perfect sequel it expands on the Bad Company name in a number of great ways, so read on and bear with me through my first real “review” for some insight into this MW2 destroyer.

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As you may or may not have noticed I have reverted back to the theme I originally used for the site, got sick of the mystique skin just being too big. One day I’ll have to design my own skin! Until then I have updated this one with lots of little icons. As you may notice to the top right of this post there are now 6 social bookmarking icons so hopefully people might use them a little more to submit posts to social networks.

I have also added the ability to have an icon at the top left of the posts, using the WordPress ‘custom fields’ feature I can now put whatever little icon I want at the top of my posts, I’ve gone with a few standard ones and will be updating all of my old posts with icons in the near future, but for now all the most recent ones have been updated. What do you think, is this design better?

And finally I think I’ve actually finished fiddling with the X-COM UFOpedia, I just had to keep on adding and adding to it’s features, I added a search function and also optimized the URIs so that instead of /ufopedia/ufo.php?u=000 they new read /ufopedia/skyranger.html 😀 The question is, can I be arsed porting these features to the other UFOpedias?

Edit: Also finally figured out how to add little icons to the widgets on the right, I even wrote a little guide.

So after completing the other X-COM games’ UFOpedias I finally found the images to make the X-COM Apocalypse UFOPEDIA, probably the most important because there doesn’t actually appear to be another one online anywhere. Yet again I used more PHP to achieve relative page links by using elseif statements, much easier yet again than crafting each page by hand. Is there anything that PHP can’t do?

Whilst I was coding the new UFOpedia I also came across a strange problem with the USOpedia in which some of the PNG menu images were brighter than others even though they looked the same in my image editors. I tracked the problem down to an apparent core issue with PNGs and browsers, apparently the gamma information that is saved within PNG files is interpreted differently by different browsers, I headed along to this page and righted all the wrongs.

Love the repetition and insanity, If I were to craft the world this is what it would look like, everywhere, every day.

By Cyriak

Love this advert, almost makes me want to buy a Final Fantasy game, but then I realise I could never endure all the random turn based battle “arenas”. Airing in the UK and some of Europe this advert features music from Leona Lewis.