I’ve had my Droid X for nearly a year now, and I’ve found quite a lot of decent games for the device. I haven’t yet discussed the crossword games on Lungfishopolis, and now that Scrabble has made its Android debut, it seems time.

 I first tried Words With Friends (pictured far left) when a friend with an iPhone recommended it to me. I loved the fact that it was cross-platform, so I jumped on board. But despite holding my own with some very tough opponents, I soon grew a bit weary of Words With Friends. It seemed that so often, games would degenerate to small, tightly-packed clusters of two and three letter words. I blame this largely on the score tile placements.

 So I tried an alternative: Wordfeud. (pictured center) I’ve found the score tile placement in Wordfeud to be far better than in Words With Friends, and the word-clumping problem is far less pronounced. There’s also a “random” score tile layout, pictured above, but I don’t use that. While Wordfeud doesn’t look nearly as nice as Words With Friends, it runs faster and with fewer connection-related bugs. But the real win for me was that it notified me when friends played a word, even when I didn’t have the app running on my phone. Maybe Words With Friends does something like this on the iPhone, but not on Android. It really makes a huge difference. Playing the iOS version, my wife thinks that the game timeout is far too short, but that’s one of our only complaints about Wordfeud.

And then Scrabble came out. (pictured far right) Actual Scrabble-branded Scrabble for Android. I’d seen it on iOS before, but the Android version is relatively new. I downloaded it immediately. The App is slow. It’s tragically slow. It’s gastropodically slow, and I don’t care if that’s not a word. Running Scrabble on my Droid X feels like running Netscape Navigator on a 286. It does have the best score tile layout of the three games, and it’s nice that it tracks your highest-scoring words, but it’s slow. And the advertising is far more obtrusive than either Wordfeud or Words With Friends. And the notification doesn’t work on my phone. It says that it requires an active Google account, but I have one and I get no notifications. The settings contain no hints as to why. And it’s slow.

So, in summary, here are the three apps and their individual plusses and minuses.

Words With Friends

• Shake to shuffle letter tiles is a nice feature
• When you try to play an invalid word, it tells you exactly which word(s) are invalid.
• Has a terrible score tile layout
• Crashes a lot when connection is poor
• No notifications
  

Wordfeud

• Avatars are a nice feature
• Good score tile layout
• Has notifications that work!
• Quick and lightweight
• Inferior graphics; zoom is clunky
  

Scrabble

• Shows points as you’re making words, which is nice feature
• Uses a Facebook or Origin account to log in
• Has the best score tile layout
• Tracks your highest scoring words
• Slow as hell
• Way too many ads
• Notifications do not work

They’re all good apps, each with features that the others don’t have, but I’ll be staying with Wordfeud. I’m sure that each of the three apps will continue to add features, and maybe the Scrabble app will somehow manage to slim down, but it’s EA-branded so I hold little hope for that behemoth altering development with any agility.

So often, I’ll have fifteen minutes at the end of an evening, and I don’t want to start playing Bioshock 2 or Metroid Prime. It might take half of the time I’ve got just to start playing one of those. So what casual games am I currently digging?

Chime Super Deluxe (Playstation 3)

After the Playstation Network came back up following the crash, I grabbed a Playstation points card so that I wouldn’t have to store my credit card info on Sony’s servers. While my main intent was to use it for Beyond Good and Evil HD, I tried the demo for Chime Super Deluxe and found that I really enjoyed the game. And it’s got multiplayer, which I know that my wife and I will enjoy, even if she does kick my ass at the game.

Chime Super Deluxe is a musical block placement game. The blocks don’t fall like Tetris – instead you’re given an irregularly-shaped game board and charged with filling as close to 100% of the board as possible within the alotted time. The music plays, and a vertical line (“the beat line”) moves slowly from left to right. As it passes over the blocks you’ve placed, completed square groupings (“quads”) of blocks are registered in the grid in time with pleasant musical cues, and each quad adds to your completion percentage. Create enough quads between passes of the beat line and you get a bonus.

It’s a very zen gameplay experience, and the music is enjoyable. I hear that there’s even a PC version of the game somewhere out there that includes Jonathan Coulton’s Still Alive as one of its songs.

Plants vs Zombies (Android)

I’ve played Plants vs Zombies a lot. I played it when it came out on Steam and got 100% achievements over the course of two playthroughs. Then they added additional achievements and I played through the game again to get all of them. Recently, they released an Android version of the game, and Amazon’s Android app store gave the game away free for one day, so I snagged it. I’m currently midway into my second playthrough, and I haven’t yet begun to put much of a dent in the game’s achievements.

In the unlikely event that you’re totally unfamiliar with Plant versus Zombies, it’s a tower defense game in which the zombies shuffle from right to left, heading towards your house in five lanes. You plant sunflowers to produce sun, the resource you spend to create more plants. Peashooters and cabbage-pults attack oncoming zombies, wall-nuts block them, and squash do as their name would imply. There are dozens more plants, and many types of zombies. Nighttime fogs obscure the field, the backyard’s pool requires that you place plants on lillypads to stop scuba zombies, and defending on the slanted roof prevents direct-fire attacks. The game’s got more complexity than you might think.

I had some issues with PvZ for a while, but I was able to fix them by backing out updates for Google Maps on my phone. It’s a ridiculous and insane solution since using my phone as a GPS is far more useful than playing Plants vs Zombies, but I’ve written to Popcap about the situaton. What can I say? I like the game.

Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe (PSP)

I have a confession to make. I have an unnatural zeal for Pixeljunk Monsters. After having a slightly above-average reaction to the demo in 2007, I purchased PS3 game, and then the expansion. I played with Linda. I played alone. four years later, I was still playing. I completed every level of the game with Linda. I got 100% of the game’s trophies separately in single-player. Then I found the PSP game, which included an additional dozen or so levels and a game that included extra enemy types and new towers. I’m playing Pixeljunk Monsters on the PSP a lot, and I love the game. My obsession has grown, and it’s nearly the only thing I ever do with my PSP. I do own more games for the device, I just don’t play them.

Hoard (PS3)

Hoard is a fun game, and I still play it, even if I don’t play it as frequently as I once did. I’ve gotten gold medals on all of the Princess Rush levels and on all but two of the Treasure levels. The Hoard levels are all insanely dificult – staying alive for five minutes is a challenge I haven’t yet completed. But with levels that top out at ten minutes, it’s fun to play when I’ve got a few minutes to kill.

WordFeud (Android)

I’d been playing Words with Friends on my phone for a while, but I switched to WordFeud. I like the bonus tile layout better, and having an avatar image is nice. I only wish that they’d disallow you from trying words an infinite number of times until you find one that works. Games with more than two players would be nice as well.

What casual games do you play?

So many Android games just don’t work. Graphics-intensive games like Dungeon Defenders chug on a Droid X’s 1gHz processor. But there’s a huge wealth of games from older systems that would run beautifully on an Android phone. Here’s my wishlist for Android game ports from other systems.

Dungeon Keeper
I’ve replayed Dungeon Keeper a number of times, and despite the antiquated graphics, the game is still a lot of fun. Given the low-res graphics, I’m sure that it would translate wonderfully to a mobile platform. Selecting squares for imps to dig would be easy, as would picking up monsters. And zooming in and out could be accomplished via multi-touch gestures. Although it might be best to do away with the bottom menu for more screen space, the side menus could remain, with the option of collapsing them. Dungeon Keeper would be a kick-ass phone game.

Starcraft
I recently heard that Blizzard released iPhone and Android versions of World of Warcraft. If they can do that, why not the original Starcraft? The immediate reason that comes to mind is that they couldn’t charge for mobile Starcraft on a monthly basis like they do with WoW. Still, I think Starcraft portable would be fantastic, especially in Korea.

7th Guest
The 7th Guest was one of my favorite PC games back in the days when CD-ROM was new and cutting edge. A point-and-click adventure game with many puzzles that were loosely tied to the story, lots and lots of poorly-acted FMV, and horribly annoying voice-overs that would repeat ad nauseum as you worked on the puzzles. There’s already an iOS version of the game. Why not an Android version too?

Wasteland
You may have never heard of Fallout’s progenitor. Back in the days of the Commodore 64, Wasteland took the top-down gameplay of the Ultima series and the enemy portraits and scrolling text battles of the Bards Tale series and combined them into a gameplay experience that managed to perfectly blend the two, resulting in a gameplay experience better than either. And on top of that, it allowed you to split your party so that the melee characters could rush forward while your machine gunners could stay in place and spray lead into the enemies. If Android had a native version of Wasteland, or at least a DOS emulator, I’d definitely give the game another playthrough.

2D Zelda Titles
Ocarina of Time is on my list of shame. People talk about how it was the bestest game evar, but I’ve never played. And I started playing Link to the Past once as well, but never got far. I actually own Ocarina of Time on the Wii Virtual Console. I think I’d be much more likely to play these games if I had them with me at all times on my phone. Nintendo isn’t very likely to release their first-party franchises on a non-Nintendo handheld, but I can always dream.

Popcap Games
Popcap just released Chuzzle for the Android platform, and Plants versus Zombies is due out in a matter of days. When will we see Peggle? Why not Word Worm? And a Zuma release would kill the second-rate clones out there on the Android marketplace.

Elite Beat Agents
And here’s my number one pick. It’s likely to never happen, but Elite Beat Agents could be absolutely huge on a mobile platform if the right people got ahold of the license. It could be the Rock Band of phones. The Nintendo DS original title was one of my favorite DS games. The licensed music was great and very catchy, and the little stories that accompanied each were a lot of fun. You’d tap small circles and draw along lines in time with musical cues from the song. At each stage – usually one per verse – you’d see the story’s character succeed or fail at a sub-task along the way depending on how well you’d done. Fail too many and you fail the song. The DS game had Canned Heat, Sk8er Boi, Y.M.C.A., and Let’s Dance. An Android Elite Beat Agents game could sell individual songs like Rock Band does, and I’d eat them up.

Gem Miner: Dig Deeper ($2.14, demo free)

My favorite Android game is likely Gem Miner: Dig Deeper. It lets you explore and mine out a huge cavern, digging your own tunnels and shafts, placing your own ladders and elevators, trying hard not to fall to your death down a chute that’s hidden in the dark. You’ll need to mine coal, copper, silver, and many other precious metals to earn the money to buy better lanterns, better pickaxes, more ladders, and bigger backpacks. Buy expensive elevators to go really deep and get at the better ores. I had a ton of fun with this game. After finishing the game, I played through on hard, and then played through all the individual challenges. Not bad for $2.14.

Shopper’s Paradise ($2.99, demo free)

Shopper’s Paradise is a management game wherein you build and upgrade various stores in a mall and watch as shoppers pour in. You can buy your competitor’s stores, and in hard mode they can buy you out as well. It’s got enough complexity that I still haven’t figured out how to win the later levels on anything but easy difficulty. I do spend quite a bit of time with this game.
Air Control ($2.88, demo free)

One of the first games I spent tons of time with on my phone was Air Control. It’s a simple premise: give an ever-increasing number of airplanes, jets, and helicopters a safe route to the runway on which they must land. But as the game progresses and you’ve landed over 100 aircraft successfully, gameplay gets very hectic and you just can’t keep track of all the aircraft on screen any longer.

Dungeon Scroll ($1.98, no demo)

The latest game I’ve purchased for my phone is Dungeon Scroll. When I read that it took inspiration from Word Worm Adventures, I was immediately interested. The premise: write words to kill monsters as you advance through a dungeon. There’s no real exploration and no real character stats, so it’s not at all a RPG, but it’s got a decent amount of complexity as you can see by the screenshot.

Trap! (Free)

One of the first games I got on my phone is Trap!, a very simple game which draws its inspiration from an old arcade game called Qix. The premise: section off as much of the game board as you can. While you’re drawing a line, you need to be careful not to let any of the bouncing balls hit it. Once the line is complete, you’re safe. Fill 75% of the screen to complete the level. It’s harder than you think.

Tower Raiders ($5, demo free)

I’m always on the hunt for a decent tower defense game, and Tower Raiders is the best I’ve yet found on Android. Lots of people will tell you that Robo Defense is better, but I like Tower Raiders. Other than that, it’s a straight-up tower defense game, very much like Defense Grid: The Awakening.

Bonsai Blast ($1.99, demo free)

Bonsai Blast is a well-made Zuma clone. If you like Zuma, you’ll most likely enjoy playing Bonsai Blast on your phone. Many of the levels are quite annoying, most notably the ones in which you need to shoot balls through tubes to reach their targets, but overall the game is a lot of fun. I’m playing the demo and I can’t tell what more I’d get were I to buy the $1.99 full version – I have yet to make it through all the demo levels.
Scrambled Net (free)

Scrambled Net is a free game, and a fairly basic puzzle. Spin the circuit units to make sure that all terminals are connected to the power source. Fun little app, and it’s free.

Game Dev Story ($2.53)

The last game on my list is the only one I’ve not yet tried, but it may be the next game I buy for my Android phone, as it seems to have been reviewed well. The premise: you’re an executive working at a video game company, and you’ve got to make all the right business decisions to keep your company afloat. Sounds a lot like Shopper’s Paradise.