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.

Glorious Time Wasters: Glu's Bonsai Blast Android Game

Initial review:  Five stars -- Nice little twist on a target shooting game
Game category:  Physics games
Game type: Arcade
Recommended device size:  any device
Who'd enjoy it?  For everyone, really.
http://www.glu.com/game/bonsai-blast

It's hard to come up with new concepts in a "shoot the target" game, but Glu has managed to create a very pleasant, simple, and playable game for all Android devices.  You're presented a screen with a path and a little "snake" of marbles that start moving along the path to another hole.  The object is to add colored marbles to a section until you match three of the same color, and that section of the line explodes and the marble "snake" shrinks.  Once you've mastered the basics of this game, you can start to get fancy by ricocheting your marbles off walls, using chutes to guide marbles, and swapping from one shooting spot to the next with a touch of your finger.  Each level brings some extra bonuses and treasures.

The game graphics are beautiful, and the play is smooth.  Although this doesn't involve chess-like strategy, it does require some quick thinking to place the marbles properly.  Best of all, for those with poorer eyesight, you touch the part of the marble snake where you want your next marble to land and it goes there -- no wild blasting all over the screen trying to get the game under control.

Great fun, great quick time waster, great stress buster.