[GDC 2011] Hands-on with the awesome Desert Winds demo by Southend Interactive.

About a week and a half ago, just before the start of GDC 2011, we posted about a game called Desert Winds by Southend Interactive which was being demoed on the upcoming Qualcomm chipset featuring the new Adreno 220 GPU. This game looks like a mesh between Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider with awesome graphics.

Gameplay is similar to the old school arcade game Dragon's Lair (if you have ever played it, you already know what I'm talking about) in which you do actions half the time as they appear on the screen. The other half of the time, such as with most combat situations, you have your usual controls for attacking and things like that. They do mesh together which means you could be attacking then half to hit a button that appears on the screen in the middle of that which you will see in our hands-on video below. In the video you'll also see it flip to the games menu a few times during gameplay, that is how early of a version this is of Desert Winds.

We got to play Desert Winds on a prototype Android phone, through an HDMI cable to a big screen HDTV, at the Qualcomm event during GDC 2011. While the footage is the same as the demo video we posted a week and a half ago, this was more just to show that it is an actual playable demo. Desert Winds is currently in development with no solid release time having been announced as of yet.

Have no fear everyone, if you don't own a dual-core Android device just yet, you won't be left behind when it comes to great games!

Developer Website: Southend Interactive