Gameloft games need a lot of work before the official release of Ice Cream Sandwich for the Xperia Play

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Published on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 12:58

Attention gamers! Summer is approaching and the temperature is rising. It will soon be time to chill on the beach with your favorite games and a nice cold ice cream sandwich.... Good thing there's still time for Xperia Play owners as a number of Gameloft titles require a lot of work.

Now this may seem a little like a rant but I'm actually trying to help. Gameloft, I hope you're reading. Here's what I found. Over the past week I have been trying out the official Ice Cream Sandwich beta for the Xperia Play which overall was quite stable but unfortunately it doesn't seem ready for games. Either that or games aren't quite ready for it.

From the selection of games I did try, some worked quite well but a lot had a few bugs, problems with controls or just plain didn't work. Unfortunately out of the 9 Gameloft titles I tried, only 2 worked flawlessly. The others... Well that's why I'm here. Let's go over the games and point out some of the faults I found, maybe even offer some help. All of us here at DroidGamers love to test a beta. So here we go.

First of all, 9mm. One of the only games that seemed to be working fine. It was a little slow occasionally but it was definitely playable without much difficulty.

Backstab next, and again it was a little slow in places and occasionally froze for a few seconds, but ultimately working fine

Dungeon Hunter 3 is a strange one because while the game played very well, there were a few occasions after finishing a level the whole phone would reboot completely. I'm not 100% sure if the game is at fault or the beta software. It could have been the phone itself as it was more common while the phone was on charge and after playing for extended periods of time.

Eternal Legacy showed some graphics errors from the beginning replacing the main title screen with a few large red triangles, and some smaller ones where a loading ring would be in the upper left corner. Once past that point the game seemed ok, but battle sequences made the game unplayable as there were more red triangles in place of the UI. Also at times the direction indicator would go completely mental and stretch across the whole screen blocking the view. Quite annoying.

Rainbow Six had problems with the touch pads. There are 2 control methods available with the touch pads and neither worked well. The default settings failed to work at all, while the other option only partially worked when you were pressing both pads in the same direction you wanted to turn. Not easy trying to move and look around with the d-pad and both touchpads simultaneously.

Sacred Odyssey featured more control related problems. Touching either pad only once would lock your character into one direction never to return. Any attempt to correct the movement would result in the game simply closing without any warning or error messages.

Shadow Guardian confused me. Everything was looking good, no graphical problems at all, no obvious problems with the controls... Then I pressed "new game" and after a short buzzing noise, the game simply closed, again without any error messages.

Spiderman just plain failed to open. I couldn't even download the game data as it took less than 3 seconds to close. No error messages to speak of... Gameloft needs to add some.

The final game I tried was Starfront Collision. As much as I love this game, the graphic errors made it entirely unplayable. It had red triangles in ace of the game UI and the units were stretched along the whole screen.

While it may seem I'm picking on gameloft a bit, really I'm not. There are plenty of other games out there that performed badly on the ICS beta such as Shadowgun. I chose Gameloft as the target for the article as it's multiple games from the same publisher. I hope Gameloft read this and understand I want to help.

This is a list of all the problems I found, and I'm more than happy to help test other titles for similar problems or even check new updates to see if the problem has been resolved. The only thing I do ask is please, fix these problems before the official release of Ice Cream Sandwich for Xperia Play.

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