Glorious time wasters: Fruit Roll

If you're into old video games, you'll find yourself right at home in this side scrolling platform game for Android devices.  This free game offers a very simple scenario -- you start out the game as a yellow fruit (which changes as you encounter other things) and the goal is to bounce and squish and roll as you grab stars (points) and weapons (fruit) through different levels.  The weapons (fruit choices) appear on the left hand side of the screen as you collect them; tapping on them allows you to change your character to get that fruit's powers.  But choose your fruit weapons wisely, because if you hit the enemy with the wrong fruit, you're going to lose the encounter.  Tapping (single, double, triple) give you different jump heights.  Time them carefully, because like any physics based game it's easy to misjudge distance.  I prefer the "feel" of this on my 7 inch Android tablet, though it's quite playable on my Android phone as well.

Certain fruits change the size of your character or the game speed and affects the gameplay in a drastic fashion as you hit the higher levels.
 Yellow fruits slow your character down, red speeds it up, purple makes it smaller, brown makes it larger.  At a higher level on a small screen Android device, controlling a tiny and fast-moving character in a game can be a real adrenaline rush -- so I always save back a brown fruit (if I can) and a yellow one to make the character larger and just a tiny bit slower.  If you can collect three of the same kinds of fruits in a row, you can turn into a huge version of that fruit that kills everything in its path for awhile. 

It's quick and easy to play (although the opening screen "mystery meat navigation" is something I don't care for.)  There's no game saves, so you always start back at level 1 with each new character.  The only real annoyance is that it's easy to tap on the ads sometimes.

Other than that, it's mindless fun and kid-friendly (and made a couple of "top Android games" lists that I've seen around.) You can try it for yourself at this "Google top free games" link.