Top 5 Free Android Games

If you're willing to risk the malware epidemic on the Android Market there's an astonishing range of video games available there, and no reason such a rich catalogue deserves to be overshadowed by the iPhone's. Corporate and indie developers churn out dozens of offerings at an impressive rate, and speaking of rates, many of the brightest and best handheld games are free. And here are five of the choicest, exhaustivelly checked and rated for your approval. Good luck getting anything done in the next few weeks.

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5. Beats
The design concept of music and rhythm games is perfectly attuned to gaming on the move. You can jump in, play one song, then get back to whatever it is you weren't doing in the first place. Beats doesn't do anything ambitious with the tried and tested formula of hitting on-screen promts with the right timing, but then again, why would it? It comes with a selection of thumping, unlicensed techno but you can download and use songs of your choice, and a greater degree of customisation allows you to set your ideal difficulty - lessening the risk of vulgar outbursts of failure on the bus. Slightly.

4. NinJump
Surivial platformers like Copter, Fruit Roll & Zombie Dash hit on a great idea, forcing players to navigate obstacles without control of the pace their avatar is moving at, through a single level that throws new challenges up at every turn, until their concentration runs dry. No checkpoints, no continues, your only goal is getting as far as possible before inevitable failure.

NinJump is a gaming press mainstay along the same (although vertical) lines. You'll scale a never-ending building side by leaping between two walls, avoiding or taking out obstacles for brief bursts of invulnerability and an intuitive leader board makes getting slightly further next time an attractive prospect for weeks.

3. Slice It!
Slice It! approaches puzzle gameplay in a traditional manner for handheld or indie projects, by taking a simple concept and stretching it to brain-warping extremes. You'll be tasked with dividing a vast stockpile of shapes into a designated number of equally-sized portions, within a designated number of moves.

No amount of remedial geometry will prepare you for the mystifying visual trickery you'll be contending with, but there are hints available for the more defeatist players, strategically offered to reward perfectionists going for flawless stages. Not that those two personality traits often coincide. A pleasing maths-textbook art style really completes the classroom feel.

2. Inotia III: Children of Carnia
If there's one game design paradigm that's seemingly least suited to playing on a mobile, it's got to be the RPG. The best role-playing-games demand forethought, persistence and personal involvement, and that's not something developers are lining up to provide to people who'd probably only be playing on public transport, or in lectures or lunch breaks. It's surprising then, that Com2Us made three.

Inotia III fits most of the archetypal tenets of RPG-dom: Players are offered a generous six choices for the protagonist's class, including the typical Warrior, Mage and Rogue models. Play is driven by plot, which follows said protagonist, Lucio, on a quest that will see him tangle with political eruption and a shadowy organisation. It's a banal concept and a colorful cast of characters that drop in and out of your party as well as the story might have kept things interesting until the end, but its undermined by cheap attempts to spin the yarn out longer. Still, even the most vaguely coherent story is a rare occurrence on this platform.

There's a lot of depth in the gameplay too, which is fast-paced and chaotic, and if you're happy to jab wildly at the attack button on your touch-screen to bring down a boss, this could be the most fun you've had on your phone since sexting.

1. Robotek
A perfectly designed mobile game aims to do just one thing - addict you. Coming back to one repeatedly for brief bursts of play requires adaptive gameplay and a solid central concept that isn't going to get stale over time. You could say the same for gaming on any platform, but when there is so much on offer out there for zero investment or commitment, a truly great mobile game has to truly amaze despite immense competition and the limitations of the hardware its running on.

But that's exactly what Robotek does. By combining head-scratching turn-based strategy with the thrill of slot-machine gambling, developers Hexage created a blissful distraction from real life. Robotek's beauty lies in its simplicity, (although it certainly helps that it visually pops at every stroke with bright luminescent colours and appropriately binary team designs, which are as disparate as Wall-E and Eve). You're given just one directive - conquer the world, one vibrant, laser-filled battle at a time. And you'll do so by directing a gigantic commanding android, selecting one of three methods of attack each round: a single, directly damaging assault; constructing smaller machines to defend yourself; or information warfare - hacking your enemy's robots to fight for you, or generating shields or energy drains.

The gambling element comes in the form of a slot machine, which will generate three randomised methods of attack from your desired paradigm and then execute them all at once. Getting three of the same moves in one roll will maximise its effect, and the whole system produces genuine strategic conundrums; and the A.I. controlled opponent makes great use of the exact same roster of moves in a way that lets you learn from your inevitable defeats.

Its simplicity could still have been its downfall, as you progress you unlock four special moves that you can then use in battle after a certain number of rounds, as well as perks that increase the odds of temporary stat and effect boosts, but that's it. Otherwise, over the game's hundred plus stages, you'll be fighting the same battle dozens of times. In the end, Robotek hinges on its gambling element, which is pervasive enough that a lucky roll can save or doom you, but subtle enough that you'll rarely be completely reliant on it. And that is Robotek's greatest victory - after dozens of near-identical battles over a course of weeks, every victory is still your own.

A Gentlemen's Guide To The Art Of Incivility - With All Your Favourite Celebrities!

2012 is here and if you're anything like me, as the clock ticked over to midnight and the fireworks erupted behind a building two miles from where you thought they would, you drunkenly resolved to dish out more insults to those special people in your life that so richly deserve them. The thing is, statistically speaking, you're not, luckily, anything like me. You may have made the decision to spend this new year of your rapidly depleting mortal life being more of an insufferable bastard, but you definitely lack the linguistic elegance to do so. Moreover, any charitable attempt by me to try to remedy that is futile, except this one. I'm well aware you couldn't isolate the operative verb in this sentence, but if there's one thing an idiot knows about, it's celebrities. So here they are, the five archetypes you're trying to offend in 2012, named for the great and the good that most accurately represent them. 

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1. The Susan Boyle

Judging someone chiefly for their appearance is shallow, intellectually flimsy, and hilarious. But not to the subject's face. An ugly person's self-esteem (especially if it's a woman) is intrinsically fragile and the wrong comment at the wrong time can completely destabilise their meaningless lives. But a Susan Boyle is such a boner-annihilating, freakish homunculus that it just demands to be vilified, if only just in the hope that your jibes will offend the Twisted God that allowed this abomination to be conceived. That way, maybe It will think twice next time before giving Cúchulainn, The Blight and Cthulhu the keys to the Champagne Room.

Attack Method: Narrative invective works great against the Susan Boyle, because its always a critical point to consider how this thing came to be, so making up an offensive story that explains it, can be a good laugh. Don't bother with the why, some people are just too horrific to justify without getting to exceedingly depressing conclusions about the nature of God.

Example: Mary Poppins! What is that?! It looks like George Lucas lost interest halfway through shaving an Ewok and decided he'd rather beat it with a leper's loofer.


2. The John Terry

A John Terry is the kind of insensitive imbecile that isn't actually aware of the unreasoned, bigoted opinions they're happy to hold and to share with anyone that will listen, or of the volatility of these opinions until they are way, way too fucked. Essentially, if you're taking any notice of this, this one is you. But handing out a little invective to another should hopefully divert a little attention from yourself. And here's how.

Attack Method: The John Terry is especially vulnerable to doses of their own medicine. If they hate Jews, Blacks, Guatemalans and so on, insinuate that they don't. Nothing pisses these people off more than claims that they're actually tolerant, because they're impossibly proud of their 'call a spade a dirty, fucking spade' attitudes. Plus, they'll doubtlessly have been forced against their will to make some kind of rudimentary public apology. And that's just embarrassing.

Example: Hey Mel, I could have sworn I saw you at that Portuguese restaurant last night. How did the Filipino transsexual you were sitting with like the lobster?

3. The Stephen Fry

Everyone uses social networking to stalk other humans, but slightly fewer use it as an outlet for an incessant stream of consciousness that barely registers as thought. The Stephen Fry has never been so fucking excited to tell the whole world about their latest epiphany - no matter what it is. There's no such thing as an innocuous idea, but these people get pretty goddamn close, approaching their most recent bowel movement or their cat's most recent 'shenanigan' in the same way as someone who just cracked the Voynich Manuscript.

Attack Method: The weak-willed gentleman might just defriend or unfollow such a person. But the most effective way to upset a Stephen Fry is to challenge every single thing they say. Pointing out their every spelling or grammatical error (of which there are bound to be many), is laborious, but the rewards can be startling.

Example:

Textbook.

4. The Kim Jong-Il

Simply being slightly famous and dead is enough to get the mighty force of the internet united against you. But it's pretty unlikely you know someone in both of those uniquely undesirable positions, and if you did, I get the feeling you wouldn't need my help to abuse their memory. No, a Kim Jong-Il is what it is. A maniacally Draconian dick-bag with far less authority over you (as your manager, boss, sex-mistress) than they think. They're only happy throwing their weight around, and if making your life less convenient is a result then so be it.

Attack Method: Dealing with a Kim Jong-Il is easier than it seems. They say power corrupts, but not as absolutely as a half brick in a sock collapses the windpipe. Be sure to write something vulgar on their forehead in permanent marker while they're unconscious.

Example: Will, I asked for those forms yesterday an- What are you doing with that piece of plywood with a nail stuck through it? Is it a nail? Sure looks lik- KERSPLUNCH!!


5. The Entire Cast of TOWIE

Let me be frank. If you even watch the scripted, faux-reality/nightmare program The Only Way Is Essex, affectionately known as TOWIE, then I hate you. That should put in perspective the kind of broiling, catatonic hatred I have and you should for every foundation-coated excuse for a human being involved in it. If you started to explain the plot of an episode to me and I punched you in the face, I'd have inadvertently spoiled the ending for myself. Therefore, you're safe in assuming that any target that ranks as a TOWIE, is pretty awful. And you'd be right. They are the absolute worst of everyone you know - they're narcissistic, braindead attention whores that would suck off a horse if the farmer promised to tell the local village newspaper about it.

Attack Method: Don't even bother. These people are delusional, wiping anything that anyone says that isn't metaphorically kissing their arses from their tiny, avian brains. The worst you can conceivably do is ignore them. Ensuring that their asinine word vomit is heard by as many adoring ears as possible is all these sociopathic wax sculptures can do to achieve orgasm, other than gently nudging their genitalia against one of their own kind until the cameraman is too revolted to continue.

Example: ... oh... oh my god. You are... just the worst. There aren't words. The English language doesn't contain a word remotely strong enough to describe what you are. Not even... you know, that one.