02
Nov
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[New Game Review] Age Of Defenders Easily Overshadows Existing Tower Defense Games With A Polished, Thoughtful, Unique Approach

Posted by in Game Reviews, Games
Last Updated: November 4th, 2011

About a month after CUKETA got us excited about Age of Defenders, their unique new take on tower defense has hit the Android Market. Of course I had to get a copy and check it out for myself. I wasn't disappointed.

At A Glance

First of all, Age of Defenders is gorgeous. The menus, loading screens, and of course the gameplay environments are all extremely polished and look great. Besides its aesthetic appeal, Defenders offers a lot in the way of functionality. What's unique about this game is that it's a hybrid between tower defense and strategy, making you both the defender and attacker at once, while competing against other players online.

02
Nov
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Age Of Defenders Hits The Android Market At Last, Successfully Marrying Tower Defense And Strategy Genres

Posted by in Games, News

Those of us who have been anxiously awaiting the release of Age of Defenders for Android can finally exhale - CUKETA has released their beautiful, unique creation to the Android Market.

The game deftly combines the tower defense and strategy genres, pitting you against other players in an online setting, and even allowing for live chat during matches. The game essentially gives you the dual roles of defender and attacker. The player must build a defense surrounding their own tower, while simultaneously planning various attacks against the opponent.

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Add to that the stunning graphics and environments we've been excited about since October, and you've got an amazing, dynamic game.

15
Oct
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Device Frame Generator Allows You To Drop Screenshots Into Actual Android Device Frames, Giving Beautiful, Polished Results

Posted by in News, Tips & Tutorials

Roman Nurik, an Android engineer, recently gave the Android Asset Studio an awesome new tool that allows users to create gorgeous, high-res PNG images of any screenshot framed by actual press asset photos of Android devices.

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The resulting images are, well, pretty. Gone are the days when developers or designers have to spend time in Photoshop layering up images and fabricating gloss, just to get an appealing graphic to show an app in action. Heck, even if you aren't a developer, this tool is still fun to play around with. 

At the moment the selection of device frames is limited to the Nexus One, Nexus S, and Motorola Xoom, but it sounds as though more devices will be coming soon.

07
Aug
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[Designer Spotlight] Android vs Apple, Through The Eyes Of RougeCrown, A Digital Art Extraordinaire

Posted by in Off-Topic

Sorting through the multitude of great submissions to our 404 page design contest, I ran into the following excellent entry by someone named RougeCrown, also known as ~aoisora9x at Deviant Art:

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Intrigued by his skills, I clicked through to his Deviant Art profile and found a stunning collection of 3D renders of Android and Apple, fighting to the death. I felt that being buried somewhere in the depths of the Deviant Art abyss was no proper way for these pictures to exist - they needed to be seen. By us. Now. So, without further ado, here they are (and you bet we'll be asking RougeCrown to come do some work for us here at AP!):

(click to zoom in)

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Bravo, sir RougeCrown.

23
May
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[New App] Chainfire3D Hits The Android Market, Tweaks Your Graphics To Improve Performance And Battery Life

Posted by in Applications, News

Android app developer Chainfire released an interesting app into the Market recently called Chainfire3D - "an intermediary OpenGL driver." Basically, this app sits between your app and the proprietary graphics driver on your device and can manipulate the commands between the two.

This enables you do some pretty rad things with your device in order to increase efficacy, battery life, performance, etc. For example, you can use Chainfire3D to enable night-mode, which basically only powers the red pixels on your device in order to save battery life (yes, it makes everything look red - see below).

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Other features of Chainfire3D includes a multitude of texture manipulations, including the ability to reduce texture sizes and quality (for faster gaming) and unroll textures, which converts non-32 bit textures into 32 bit.

21
Feb
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A Must-Have New Game: AirAttack HD. It's Not Your Dream Game, It's The One After That

Posted by in Games, News, Videos

So, as you can see, I'm quite excited about AirAttack HD. Now multiply it by 10, and you'll get to the level of my fascination about how polished everything is in this game. Created by Art In Games, AirAttack HD came to Android a few days ago without much fanfare, but didn't have any trouble reserving a spot in our weekly roundup.

However, it wasn't until an hour ago that I finally got to try it out, and let me tell you, every single little thing about this game is top notch. Cream of the crop. Perhaps it's the relatively low expectations that Android games have been setting in the past, but I am here to tell you that the bar has been raised and set firmly so high that I am prepared to call AirAttack HD the overall best Android game created to date.

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