You can play a few maps of each level of Auralux 2 without buying it. I recently recommended it and got confirmation that it’s available on Android. Better than nothing.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a roguelike, well suited to the touch interface and small screen. Offline. Constantly expanded. Free, open source, and on F-Droid.
Developer also appears to have a presence on the Threadiverse, think he came over when Reddit went to hell. Lemme find the community.
Unciv is a reimplementation of Civilization V for Android. Obviously, less-elaborate graphics, but same gameplay. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Catacalysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open-world roguelike. The good news is that it is deep, has ridiculous amounts of functionality. Very free-form – you can build camps with NPCs, mutate your character, acquire bionic implants, construct buildings and vehicles, etc. Some extensive mods to do things like add fantasy content. The bad news is that it also has a very steep learning curve – think Dwarf Fortress, say. The UI was also designed for a PC, and while the Android port dev did a reasonable job of adapting it for a touchscreen, it’s still awkward compared to a keyboard – not like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. If you’re willing to carry a keyboard – you say that you’re okay with a controller, so I assume that you’re okay lugging some kind of gear bag – then it becomes a very good option. There are some folding keyboards aimed at phone use that can be pretty small, certainly smaller than a game controller, if you don’t want a more-traditional keyboard. CPU-intensive, though – in heavily-monster-infested areas, it can load down a PC, and it’s probably less-gentle on less-powerful Android devices. Offline. Free, open-source, but nobody has packaged it for F-Droid.
Download links for both the stable and experimental builds here:
There’s an essentially-inactive community on the Threadiverse at !cataclysmdda
There is a whole genre of older text-based interactive fiction games that are free and offline for simple virtual machines; the major ones here are glulx, TADS, and Inform/z5. Android has such virtual machine ports; it looks like https://f-droid.org/packages/io.davidar.fabularium/ in F-Droid can run them. These involve a lot of typing, as they were designed for the PC, and IMHO are not well-suited to a virtual keyboard, but if you’re willing to take a physical keyboard, they can be pretty good. You’ll need to learn the (English-like) syntax that the game engines understand. I personally enjoyed https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=z5xgyw0jbt9r3ah1 and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7. Two sites that have large collections of free games made by volunteers for download:
I’ll be honest, though – when I first got an Android device, I was pretty disappointed with the game situation. This is greatly-exacerbated by the fact that I’m not willing to get a Google account and let Google more-readily monitor me, which rules out most commercial games…but I wasn’t blown away by even commercial game availability in the Google Play Store, and the open-source situation is kind of sparse compared to Linux, what I’m normally on. Linux is IMHO generally a preferable gaming platform, unless one specifically wants to do touch-based games (which can be important).
I was also kind of disappointed by the lack of choose-your-own-adventure/gamebook-style games on Android. These would avoid the typing in interactive fiction by just having a few choices to select from, which I thought would be a good fit for a touchscreen. There’s the large collection of text-based mostly-commercial games at Choice of Games – you can get their client on itch.io; Android has an itch.io package manager on F-Droid in the form of Mitch that can download it. Heh, though that’s downloading a package manager with a package manager to get a package manager. If I had to recommend a few, I’d try Tin Star, maybe Choice of Robots, and the Heroes trilogy; those are commercial, though they have a few free games, and IIRC their client keeps a few normally-commercial games for temporary free play.
While I like the Choice of Games writing, I find that a lot of the gameplay in the games fall flat, more-or-less trying to optimize for playing one character “type” or another; I feel like they’re written by novel authors and could benefit a lot from more game elements, and that new authors kind of copied the existing style.
There’s a once-commercial series of gamebooks, Lone Wolf, which I can’t really call a fantastic example of a gamebook and doesn’t have the most-amazing artwork, but which was a real 1980s/1990s series whose author said “go ahead and freely distribute them”, so various open-source and commercial projects have gone and done up clients to play the books, do stuff like the dice-rolling and hit-point tracking and so forth. I haven’t used Android clients, but they exist. One such project.
I still don’t have an open-source solitaire implementation that I’m blown away by, which seems like another surprising limitation. My guess is that you can probably find something non-open-source – though probably spyware – on the Google Play Store. PySolFC is on F-Droid. It…works, and it gets me my Eight Off fix (a particular solitaire game that I like but isn’t as widely-played as Klondike or Freecell) but it was really designed for desktop computer, and the Android adaptation could be better, IMHO. Small cards and such.
There’s a choose-your-own-adventure engine called Twine; games written in various languages – the most sophisticated such language is SugarCube – can be converted to Web-based games. That seems like it’d be ideal for Android, and the games are playable on Android, but authors don’t always create games that work well on the small screens of many Android devices. I don’t know of a single Twine-oriented game archive in the sense that the Interactive Fiction archive and the Interactive Fiction Database serve for interactive fiction games. However, many people who have made Twine games seem to distribute them in packaged form on itch.io. There doesn’t seem to be much of an open-source culture around these, unfortunately, so I don’t see people doing a lot by creating patches and such. I rarely play these on Android, mostly use the PC. Here’s a list of Twine games on itch.io packaged for Android:
There’s also a pretty extensive number of adult games for this platform, if that’s your cup of tea.
There are emulators for various old game systems for Android. I’ve used Retroarch on Linux, and it looks like they also have an Android build on F-Droid. I’ve never spent time using these on Android, because I just always would prefer to play on a desktop platform, but I’d imagine that if what you have is an Android device and using that is a constraint, they’re probably fine. That might be the more action-oriented sort of game you’re looking for, given that you’re talking about a controller. Not much by way of legitimately-free stuff there, though obviously piracy of old console games is widespread, and some people – such as myself – will sometimes just buy the game on another platform and conscience assuaged, go pirate it on the platform that we want to play it on. I think my favorite emulated games were probably the most-popular 2D ones on the Super Nintendo, stuff like Super Metroid or and Legend of Zelda 3. Oh, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PS1. I imagine that a current Android device would have no trouble with any of those, if you’ve a controller.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a traditional roguelike that has a build for Android on F-Droid. This, again, is designed for a PC and is gonna be better-played with a keyboard. It’s not beautiful, nor as well-suited to the Android platform as the designed-for-the-platform Shattered Pixel Dungeon. But it has a game that is famous for being refined, with the developer constantly going back and cutting out cruft and grind/busywork, resulting in a very polished game from a gameplay sense. The author, Linley Henzel, has some famous quote about how any action that the player has to make in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t, it should be removed from the game.
If you really want a timesink and have a keyboard and you don’t mind online play except insofar as you don’t want some commercial company trying to data-mine your activity, there are a bunch of MUDs out there; these are run by volunteers who wanted to create and run their own worlds, and they’re always looking for more players. These are text-based, usually-but-not-always fantasy games. It looks like there are Android clients. I can’t specifically recommend any of the clients, as I haven’t tried them. Many combat-oriented MUDs allow one to configure a character to essentially fight on its own, so if your concern is being constrained to needing to be glued to a screen in a multi-user world, it does provide some ability to get up and leave.
I’m going to place the big caveat there that I haven’t played these in ages, and I don’t know if the gameplay has advanced much over the years – they tend to be grindy. But they are free, and there’s a lot of stuff out there, if you’re looking to spend time exploring. MUD clients tend to have features to help alleviate latency, like having a local buffer for editing the current line one is typing, but I don’t know how annoying a cell link with poor reception might be. They don’t send all that much data, but it is a real-time world, not turn-based. And they aren’t gonna impose ads on you, or have software that runs on your system, or data-mine you, or try to figure out how to sell you anything; they’re games where the people who make them just like playing them enough to set them up for their own enjoyment.
Battle for Wesnoth is a good turn-based hex wargame with a number of campaigns…think, oh, the kinds of games in the “Tactics” genre, if you’re familiar with those. However…it was designed for the PC. It’s definitely playable on Android, but the UI clearly wasn’t designed for Android; it benefits from some kind of pointing device. If you’re willing to haul a pointing device of some sort with you, I’d recommend it without reservation. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Re: The MUD situation, I know from personal experience that Iron Realms has still been cranking out a few of them in the last few years. I was a big fan of Starmourn but that one just got demoted to Legacy recently, I guess because of lack of players. Shame because it was really neat and polished. But they’ve got a triumvirate of Lusternia, Achaea (my personal favorite) and Aetolia as active MUD worlds.
Now granted Iron Realms is a whole ass company, not just some nerd hosting a game off his basement server rack strictly out of love for the game, and open source self-hosting enthusiasts may not be super jazzed about that. But as far as I can tell they’re about as harmless as a company can be and do seem to still be in business more as a labor of love than anything else. At least as far as I’ve ever been able to find out. They mostly exist on donations so far as I know, I’ve never had to buy anything from them or been served an ad. And I do really, really like their Nexus client, the interface is really slick and it adds a lot of features and conveniences that I found lacking in other older MUD clients (though, granted, the only non-Iron Realms MUD I ever put any significant amount of time into was Aardwolf and I think I had to use a third party client for that).
All that said, MUD is a dying genre and any influx of new users would help revitalize many of these worlds. If it sounds interesting to you don’t hesitate to go check it out. Veteran users have always been universally helpful in my experience, unless they have an actual lore appropriate reason to be hostile to you - then, watch out! Although even most of those guys won’t stomp on a brand new noob without warning. Players who enjoy social roleplay will find themselves at home in a MUD. Players who enjoy social roleplay and have, or gain, a little bit of scripting knowledge will find themselves especially at home in a MUD. Give one a shot, they’re free and fun and it’ll raise your typing speed a lot.
Been playing a new farm in Stardew Valley after the 1.6 update. I hadn’t played much since back before 1.5, so there is a lot of new content! Also still grooving on Cyberpunk 2077, getting some of the main quest done.
Has to be either free or have a free way to get it
There are good games out there, but outside of a few exceptions you can’t get a good mobile game for free. If you have netflix, the netflix games selection has some good games, I’d especially recommend Into the Breach. If you have google play pass, there are a lot of good games there was well. As far as truly free good games go, Shattered Pixel Dungeon and Hoplite are the only ones that comes to mind.
If you’re willing to spend some money to get something worth your time, I’d recommend Slice & Dice (has a free demo), Reventure, Super Hexagon, VVVVV, Dicey Dungeons, Dead Cells (plays surprisingly well on mobile, play pass includes all DLC), Krumit’s Tale, King of Dragon’s Pass, and Star Traders Frontiers.
The android version is free with optional benefits for watching ads. If you buy any of the paid DLC (~$2 per DLC?) you are given a menu option to disable the “watch an ad for free shit?” prompts, but they’re hardly in the way if you don’t want to pay a cent. Playable offline, controller supported and is tbh a massive game.
These all sound like emulator-ideal criteria to me!
There’s a lot of non-free versions of that which are super reasonable and meet all of your other criteria nicely. Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire. Games that are full games for a one time low cost.
I believe there are a few games on F-Droid, I haven’t tried any of them tho. Other than that, I believe the best games for you would be Wii games or an older console. Possibly also switch (with yuzu if you find an apk), but that requires a beefy phone.
There are comparatively few worthwhile native games. Emulation is the ticket. I would focus on portable consoles - from GameBoy (mostly GBA) to PSP - since the design of titles for these systems is better suited to smaller screens and shorter play sessions.
The PSP is not a great platform for first person shooters in particular due to the lack of a second analog stick. There are a handful of quality third person titles though, chief among them the two GTA Stories spin-offs set in Liberty City and Vice City. These are proper classic 3D GTAs, just as sophisticated as San Andreas, but set in modified versions of the cities from the two predecessors. Both assume that you have played and completed GTA 3 and Vice City. These spin-offs were also available for PS2, but the PSP versions should run better and can be made to support a second analog stick in PPSSPP:
While you’re at it, you should also check out the isometric GTA Chinatown Wars, a unique and extremely well made title that straddles the line between 2D and 3D GTAs, but with game design that is as modern as GTA IV’s (but far more arcadey). It has been ported to Android, however, the PSP version is superior, having better graphics, more features (including multiplayer) and more missions.
One genre that truly excelled on Sony’s little system was racing games. Here’s a list of highly recommended titles of all subgenres, from arcade to simulation, that I compiled a while ago: beehaw.org/comment/2784912
Scarface: The World is Yours. Perhaps the best clone of classic GTAs, to the point that it’s the superior game in many respects. From the developers of The Simpsons Hit & Run, but decidedly less family-friendly. Brilliant graphics for the platform, outstanding voice acting, writing and direction. Watch the movie first, if you haven’t already! This very late licensed title boasts a fantastic combat system that is all about targeting specific body parts with perhaps the single best lock-on system in gaming history while hitting a button for swearing in order to fill up your “balls” meter, which, once full, allows you to switch to a first person mode with invulnerability and unlimited ammo. Combat is mad, bloody, unhinged fun. It’s not just presentation, narration and combat that are good in this game: There’s are really well made empire building mechanic, a negotiation minigame that somehow never gets old, some clever risk/reward incentives for players that remind me of roguelikes, a good (if not quite as good as GTA) open world, a catchy '80s soundtrack. Lots to love about this game.
Black: Criterion (otherwise known for the Burnout series) tried their luck with a first person shooter. It shouldn’t have worked, but they somehow pulled it off - and it’s just as wild and explosive as the racing game series. Every single weapon, from the lowliest pistol, is loud, punchy, powerful and sends the hapless enemies flying. There’s a marvelous destruction system that feels like black magic on hardware as old as the PS2. The story is nothing special, level design and scripting are average (but levels are at least fairly large and quite open at times), it’s not particularly long nor deep and there are difficulty spikes, but overall, this is still one of the most enjoyable first person shooters on the system and one that holds up remarkably well.
XIII: Based on a popular Belgian series of graphic novels, this highly stylized first person shooter has become a cult classic over the years. If you like conspiracy stories, cell-shaded graphics and a seamless blend of stealth and explosive action, then you will enjoy this game. Best feature: The kill cam, which consists of comic book style freeze frame inserts. So satisfying! Check out the comic book as well, while you’re at it. Just keep in mind that it’s far less stylized and far more adult than the game.
Timesplitters: I haven’t personally played this series yet, but since it’s by former Rare developers, the same people responsible for Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and extremely highly regarded, you should probably not pass it up. Note that the second and third game are also on Gamecube and will likely run better in Dolphin than the PS2 versions do in AetherSX2.
Deus Ex: The classic immersive sim does qualify as a shooter if you choose to play it that way, but you’re far better off playing it slowly and meticulously as a stealth title. The PS2 port is very interesting. In some ways, it’s compromised, with slightly simplified graphics and levels having been broken up into smaller chunks due to memory constraints, but on the other hand, there is added detail to the environments and animations received a motion capture overhaul. There’s also a completely different UI. If you haven’t played this absolutely legendary title with sheer endless depth, complexity and replayability, then definitely give it a go.
Gamecube/Wii:
Metroid Prime Trilogy: Sci-fi 3D Metroid goodness. I have to admit that I haven’t found the time and patience to really sink my teeth into these games yet, having only perfunctory experience with them, but there’s no denying that these are outstanding games, with strong, inventive mechanics, complex level design and excellent presentation.
Resident Evil 4: The best console version of the original classic. The PS2 port was severely compromised, as was the original PC port. Note that on PC, you can install the RE4HD project, which is perhaps the most impressive fan remaster of all time. The developers of this mod even traveled to the locations that the original developers used for reference photos in order to capture material for enhanced textures and geometry. There are texture packs for Dolphin, which are however, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere near as in-depth. Still a decent way of experiencing this title though.
Gun: Neversoft’s attempt at a third person open world Western game. A solid effort. Compared to Red Dead Redemption on Xbox 360 / PS3, it feels like amateur hour, but it’s still fine, with good combat, limited exploration and a solid story. The open world is unfortunately not very open, hampered by invisible walls and fairly bland design.
James Bond: From Russia With Love: An unusual licensed title, based on 1960s James Bond with Sean Connery, dripping with atmosphere, charm and spectacle. There isn’t much depth here, but it looks great, plays fluently and is solid fun all around. If you like the idea of racing a classic Aston Martin through dense European streets in one level and fighting bad guys while being suspended from a jet pack in another as Sean Connery does his best to charm some hapless bond girl, then check this game out.
I decided to look into Vice City Stories again and discovered that the PS2 version has more side missions, which I was previously unaware of, so if you want the full experience, emulate that version instead of the PSP original, provided your device can handle it. It also looks slightly better.
I’m assuming you’re referring to black bars left and right? Many PS2 games were 4:3, although over the course of the system’s lifespan, more and more did support 16:9 natively and the system could be set to widescreen from the start.
You can set the aspect ratio of the PS2 emulator on this system to widescreen in the options. This should cover most if not all games, including those that never officially did support widescreen.
Huh, that’s odd. I haven’t seen this in videos of the system emulating PS2. This might be done for performance reasons (1x PS2 resolution, no upscaling - something like that), but even if that’s the case, you should be able to set the emulator to fill the entire screen, with an upscaled image if necessary. Experiment with settings, but keep in mind that different PS2 games have vastly different hardware requirements in an emulator. Shadow of the Colossus will always run far worse than e.g. a simple licensed game like Ratatouille, so on limited hardware like yours, there’s no way around per-game settings for at least some titles.
Back in 2010, I tried my luck with PS2 emulation for the first time. Shadow of the Colossus ran so poorly on my PC at the time that I bought one of the last brand new PS2s (for 100 bucks, I believe), almost entirely for this game (and then I paid full price for the game, because it sold so poorly that even used copies went for 60 bucks). This game pushed the little console to its absolute limits, running at single digit frame rates in the most intense screens and forcing the fan to spin at its highest speed, so it’s not just the fault of your little handheld emulation system - it wasn’t very fluent on original hardware either, although still far better than on my PC. Most people played the original’s faithful remaster on PS3 (different from the PS4 remake), which runs far better.
The first time I tried the system, I was shocked by the terrible image quality of the Composite cable that came with its, so I spent a rather substantial amount of money on a Component cable, which did make a noticeable difference.
Back to your emulation console: You should be able to upscale native resolution to the full screen size at least. Might look a bit blurry, but there’s no performance penalty (since the same number of pixels are being rendered - they are just stretched, which even the weakest modern GPUs can do with ease) and your eyes will thank you.
By the way, there are a few Monster Hunter games for PSP, which are very easy to emulate. I’ve played Monster Hunter Freedom Unite both on original hardware and in PPSSPP. It looks astonishingly good and plays very well. There’s also Monster Hunter Freedom, the predecessor, which I haven’t played and didn’t review as well. Japan got an exclusive Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, of which there’s a fan-made translation, including the PS3 enhancements, that runs in PPSSPP. No idea if the enhancements work on your system, so try both the standard fan translation and the fan translation that includes PS3 assets. There’s a further texture enhancement mod for the latter, but this might be pushing it (doesn’t hurt to try though): github.com/…/MonsterHunterPortable3rdHDRemake
Then again, any halfway decent Android phone will run PSP games at a higher resolution than the Vita (and you can use a controller cradle), so it’s not that great of a deal anymore.
@DdCno1 yeah that's helps... adrenaline can normally map face buttons to the sticks without special modifications. I do it with syphon Filter Dark Mirror and there is no Fl0w mod for it.
Stardew Valley! but…extremely modded SDV. I’m playing multiplayer with my partner and we have almost 60 mods going. quite a few of them are aesthetic but we have some area expansions and stuff like that as well. I really like tweaking the game so that it’s more difficult, I’ve played it so much (over 300 hours!) that it’s more appealing to me that way.
I’m late because I just started watching Shogun, but Shadow Tactics - Blades of the Shogun is really good in the real time tactics genre, it was the first title released by Mimi who went on to make the acclaimed Desperados 3 and Shadow Gambit - The Cursed Crew
My only complaints are the inability to buy back something you sold to a vendor (not realistic) coupled with the limited carrying capacity. I didn’t have enough space to carry around a bunch of copper, silver, and iron ore at the same time, so I sold off the iron. Now I need the iron ore to upgrade a weapon but can’t find any and can’t buy it back. I know I can go online and find where nodes are or whatever, but if we’re going by the rule of “it’s not realistic to fight and run like normal if you are carrying around a really heavy pack” and “it’s not realistic to fast travel everywhere” then we should be able to buy back what we sold at an inflated price.
Yeah I feel you there are a lot of features that I feel they could and the game still be “realistic” like they claim. I’m not sure if you know though, you can store items at inns and with the weight limit being what it is, it has forced me to be less of a loot goblin and not just picking everything up in a square mile. Buying back from vendors would be cool, but it’s also a pretty common mechanic to be missing from games too.
I dont know if you know, but at the inn you can put items in a storage that you can access at every inn and some other places. Just put everything except quest stuff and healing potions in it :)
Honestly? Put most of your healing stuff there too. You are going to get a LOT more resources than you need in the early/mid game and are going to be glad it is there in the late/endgame.
Dragon’s Dogma is very much about the long journey to a vaguely known destination. Your personal inventory is very much a balance between traveling light enough to make good time and pick up items with having enough resources to survive whatever encounters you meet along the way.
What do you mean it doesn’t happen in real life? Think about the times you’ve sold something to a company. Doesn’t happen very often, right? It is likely only selling a car to a dealer or maybe going into a pawn shop or baseball card store or used clothing store. Every one of those places will let you buy it back at an inflated price if they haven’t sold it yet.
You can buy back a lot of stuff, but only from the scrap merchant in the border town. The new black cat guy. Valuable things that you sell will end up in his shop sometimes, though I don’t know when or why yet.
Performance issues are definitely present in the console versions of the game, albeit not 4-5s stutters and whether you notice framerate drops or they bother you or not is a different thing entirely I suppose.
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