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: Magma Mobile's "Galaxy"

Glorious Time Wasters:  Galaxy


Initial review:  Five stars -- deceptively easy for the first rounds.

Game category:  Puzzle games

Game type: Puzzle and timed puzzle

Recommended device size:  any device

Who'd enjoy it?  For everyone, really.

My tablet chimed softly as the game screen loaded.  My husband eyed the first screen:  run your finger over three lines to connect 3 stars in a triangle.  "Tough, huh?" he joked.  I gritted my teeth.  "I'm reviewing Android games for kids.  Parents always like to have recommendations for little free Android games suitable for children so that they can keep the young ones amused while they're waiting somewhere," I said as the screen flashed "good job." 

A four sided figure appeared.  "It's a Mom thing," I said.

He looked at me, amused. 

"It's supposed to be easy," I swooshed through the figure in two seconds.  "Good job!" the screen read.

More stars appeared, connected by lines.  The next diagram was no problem for an adult but might be challenging for a four year old learning to play connect the dots games.  However, by the time the game had gotten up to level 8, the difficulty level had crept up.  There were some "one way" connections and if you tried to go over a line a second time, it would erase the line.   By the time I hit level 13, it was taking longer than 3 seconds to get through and I was having to think about which moves would work best. 

That's typical of a lot of the Magma Mobile games.

Glorious time wasters -- "Clouds & Sheep" for Android

Android Game Review:  "Clouds and Sheep" -- another glorious waste of time!

Initial review:  Four stars -- amusing but slightly sadistic
Game category:  Vikings type game
Game type: Arcade
Recommended device size:  any device
Who'd enjoy it?  Anyone not troubled by some mildly sadistic acts like sheep tossing.

This is another game from Handy Games and as usual features rather charming graphics and an easy to use interface.   The object is to keep your sheep happy and finish a series of very amusing quests -- like do the sheep toss.   PETA would not approve of the sheep treatment, but they seem to like it.

The designers also allow you to save games so that you could either start at the level you left, restart an earlier version, or begin a new game and take the "best" scores.  One of the biggest tips for this would be "don't have too many sheep."  They breed like... well... sheep, I guess.  It's hard to keep them all occupied.

So there you are, planting flowers to make sheep amorous and planting grass to feed them and handing them refreshing cool drinks or coffee -- and you also get to control the weather.  Piled up clouds make a nice rainstorm -- and combined rainstorms make a nice thundercloud.  "Sheep coffee" costs stars, but a lovely thunderbolt is free and wakes the sheep up just as effectively (so does bouncing them, but the thunderbolt's a lot of fun, frankly.)

A good time-waster, quick to learn, quick to play, easy to set down and pick back up again.