Adventure Gamers - Forums

I’m shopping for a new phone, which is going to be my first smartphone. Mired in indecision at the moment, but to give me some more data and something to look forward to, what are some good adventure games available for Android and iPhones?

I know iOS has that cool looking Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP thing plus a port of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. The Android app store has a port of Broken Sword. What else is out there, adventurewise, on either platform?

(For the record, what games I can play won’t the ONLY factor deciding my choice of phone platform, but it’ll still be handy information to have!    )

I’ve got a cheap and cheerful android phone, the ZTE Blade (running android 2.2) and a cheap and cheerful generic android tablet (running android 4.0) and both work really well with the android ScummVM app which allows you to install a number of older PC adventure games if you have the disks. The tablet is better though, purely because of the size of the onscreen cursor on a 7” screen, but it’s certainly usable on a 3.5” phone. I think there’s also an iOS version. Right now, I’ve got loaded (on an microSD card)

Broken Sword I
Broken Sword II
Beneath A Steel Sky
Curse Of Monkey Island
Day Of The Tentacle
Sam And Max Hit The Road
Full Throttle
The Dig

Controls are usually simple, move cursor with the touchscreen, short press=left-click, long press=right click, double-tap=inventory etc. It brings a new lease of life to games that look rubbish on a modern 1080p monitor.

This should help you on the iPhone side:
http://flexlists.com/view.php?list_id=17866#d::251

Note, there are couple of pages, you can filter by platform (universal and iPhone in your case) and specific adventure genre.

A couple more iPhone options I know of…

Besides Ghost Trick, there’s also Phoenix Wright on iPhone. Currently there’s just the first game.

You may or may not want to wait, though, because they’re supposed to be coming out with the Phoenix Wright trilogy in HD “this fall” (although it must have been delayed, since this fall is basically over). The redrawn graphics for the HD version are a little ugly, in my personal opinion, at least in the screenshots we’ve been shown. But the Phoenix Wright games themselves are pretty awesome, and the first game that is currently on the App Store has the original graphics if you’d rather buy that.

Since Ghost Trick and Phoenix Wright were both ported from the Nintendo DS versions, they both play very well on a touchscreen.

The Secret of Chateau de Moreau is a pretty neat iPhone/iPad exclusive that feels like it could have been a DS game.

Here’s some other iPhone adventure game recommendations from AdventureGamers. Bear in mind that big games like Telltale’s Tales of Monkey Island, both in terms of hard drive space and in terms of screen size, will probably be a better experience on the iPad than on the iPhone, so you may not want to count those in the list, but that’s up to you to decide.

If you’re more interested in retro gaming, the Android will have the edge, because it’s an open software community so you can do things like put ScummVM on it as mentioned above. Unless you jailbreak your iPhone, you’re limited to what was put on the App Store. There are some good retro games ported to the App Store (Monkey Island 1 & 2, Simon the Sorceror 1 & 2, Inherit the Earth), but in my opinion they don’t always play well on a smartphone’s touchscreen because the bits you’re trying to interact with are rather small. I assume there can be similar mild frustrations running ScummVM games on an Android smartphone, but since I don’t have an Android phone, I won’t speak to that.

Really can recommend Hector, badge of carnage. I played episode 1 on my iPhone and really liked it.
However, you do must enjoy the humor. It’s a bit 16+ rated.

You’re potentially in for a really cool treat if you havnt played phoenix wright before. Just make sure you start with the first game.

You can also buy Yesterday on iPhone, iPad and Android. And as far as I know, a porting of The Next Big Thing will be released this month with another name, Hollywood Monsters.

YESTERDAY for iPad and iPhone

YESTERDAY for Android

HOLLYWOOD MONSTERS video

Looks like Hollywood Monsters is finally available, and it comes with pretty good reviews.

HOLLYWOOD MONSTERS

There are several good adventure games for Android. Look for the Cryptic games they will keep you busy for a bit. Here is an FYI if you like the games from AGS they have made an Android app that they are planning on releasing their adventure games thru. It only has one game right now, a space quest game, but there should be alot of content when they finally finish it.

JBHypno