1. Angry Birds
The amazingly popular iOS game moved to Android , earning over two million downloads during its first weekend of availability.
The Android version is free, unlike the Apple release, with maker Rovio opting to stick a few adverts on it rather than charge an upfront fee. The result is a massive and very challenging physics puzzler thats incredibly polished and professional. For free. It defies all the laws of modern retail.
2. Bebbled
Bebbled is your standard gem-shuffling thing, only presented in a professional style you wouldnt be surprised to see running on something featuring a Nintendo badge with an asking price of £19.99.
You only drop gems on other gems to nuke larger groups of the same colour, but with ever-tightening demands for score combos and scenes that require you to rotate your phone to flip the play field on its head, Bebbled soon morphs into an incredibly complex challenge.
3. Red Stone
Theres an awful lot of square-shuffling games on Android and Red Stone is one of the best. And one of the hardest. You start off with a big fat King square thats four times of the normal pawn squares, then set about shuffling things so the fat King can get through to an exit at the top of the screen.
Its hard to accurately describe a puzzle game in the written word, but seriously, its a good game.
4. Newton
Released a few months back in beta form, Newton is a maths/physics challenge that has you lining up shots at a target - but having to contend with the laws of nature, in the form of pushers, pullers, benders (no laughing), mirrors and traps, all deflecting your shot from its target.
The developer is still adding levels to it at the moment, so one day Newtonmight be finished and might cost money. But for now its free and a great indie creation.
5. Sketch Online
Surprisingly free of crude representations of the male genitalia, Sketch Onlineis a sociable guessing game where users do little drawings then battle to correctly guess whats being drawn first. Its like Mavis Beacon for the Bebo generation. The version labelled "Beta" is free, and if you like it theres the option to pay for an ad-free copy. But Google cant make you. Yet.
6. Drop
Some might call Drop a game, others might classify it as a tech demo that illustrates the accuracy of the Android platforms accelerometer, thanks to how playing it simply involves tilting your phone while making a little bouncy ball falls between gaps in the platforms. Either way itll amuse you for a while and inform you of the accuracy of your accelerometer - a win-win situation.
7. Frozen Bubble
Another key theme of the independent Android gaming scene is (ports of) clones of popular titles. Like Frozen Bubble, which is based around the ancient and many-times-copied concept of firing gems up a screen to make little groups of similarly coloured clusters. Thats what you do. Youve probably done it a million times before, so if its your thing get this downloaded.
8. Replica Island
Replica Island is an extremely polished platform game that pulls off the shock result of being very playable on an Android trackball. The heavy momentum of the character means youre only switching direction with the ball or d-pad, letting you whizz about the levels with ease. Then theres jumping, bottom-bouncing, collecting and all the other usual platform formalities.
9. Gem Miner
In Gem Miner you are a sort of mole character that likes to dig things out of the ground. But thats not important. The game itself has you micro-managing the raw materials you find, upgrading your digging powers and buying bigger and better tools and maps. Looks great, plays well on Androids limited button array. Go on, suck the very life out of the planet.
10. ConnecToo
Another coloured-square-based puzzle game, only ConnecToo has you joining them up. Link red to red, then blue to blue - then see if youve left a pathway through to link yellow to yellow. You probably havent, so delete it all and try again.
A brilliantly simple concept. ConnecToo used to be a paid-for game, but was recently switched to an ad-supported model - meaning it now costs you £0.00.
11. Titres
Once youre successfully rewired your brains 25 years of playing Tetris in a certain way with certain buttons and got used to tapping the screen to rotate your blocks, its... Tetris.
It hinges on how much you enjoy placing things with your phones trackball or pad. If youre good at it, its a superb Tetris clone. Lets hope it doesnt get sued out of existence.
UPDATE: While Titres seems to have been removed from the Market, theres now an official Tetris app available to download.
12. Trap!
Not the best-looking game youll ever play, with its shabby brown backgrounds and rudimentary text making it look like something youd find running on a PC in the year 1985. But Trap! is good.
You draw lines to box in moving spheres, gaining points for cordoning off chunks of the screen. That sounds rubbish, so please invest two minutes of your time having a go on it so you dont think were talking nonsense.
13. Jewels
Coloured gems again, and this time your job is to switch pairs to make larger groups which then disappear. That might also sound quite familiar. The good thing about Jewels is its size and presentation, managing to look professional while packing in more levels than should really be given away for free.
14. OpenSudoku
We had to put one Sudoku game in here, so well go with OpenSudoku - which lives up to its open tag thanks to letting users install packs of new puzzles generated by Sudoku makers. Its entirely possible you could use this to play new Sudoku puzzles for the rest of your life, if thats not too terrifying a thought.
15. Abduction!
Abduction! is a sweet little platform jumping game, presented in a similarly quirky and hand-drawn style as the super-fashionable Doodle Jump. You cant argue with cute cows and penguins with parachutes, or a game thats easy to play with one hand thanks to its super accessible accelerometer controls.
16. The Great Land Grab
A cross between a map tool and Foursquare, The Great Land Grab sorts your local area into small rectangular packets of land - which you take ownership of by travelling through them in real-time and buying them up.
Then someone else nicks them off you the next day, a bit like real-world Risk. A great idea, as long as you dont mind nuking your battery by leaving your phone sitting there on the train with its GPS radio on.
17. Brain Genius Deluxe
Our basic legal training tells us its better to use the word "homage" than to label something a "rip-off", so well recommend this as a simple "homage" to the famed Nintendo Brain Training franchise.
Clearly Brain Genius Deluxe is not going to be as slick, but theres enough content in here to keep you "brain training" (yes, it even uses that phrase) until your battery dies. The presentations painfully slow, but then again that might be the game teaching you patience.
18. Coloroid
Coloroid is aery, very simple and has the look of the aftermath of an explosion in a Tetris factory, but it works. All you do is expand coloured areas, trying to fill them in with colours in as few moves as possible - like using Photoshops fill tool at a competitive level.
19. Cestos
Cestos is sort of a futuristic recreation of curling, where players chuck marbles at each other to try and smash everyone elses balls/gems down the drain and out of the zone. The best part is this all happens online against real humans, so as long as theres a few other bored people out there at the same time youll have a real, devious, cheating, quitting person to play against. Great.
20. Air Control
One of the other common themes on the Android gaming scene is clones of games based around pretending to be an air traffic controller, where you guide planes to landing strips with a swish of your finger. There are loads of them, all pretty much the same thing - weve chosen Air Control as its an ad-supported release, so is technically free.
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