now playing: "Radiant (HD)"

So among the apps I have acquired recently for Mr. Dandroid's amusement, I have found Radiant HD (Hexage, 2009) And while I originally acquired it as the "free app of the day" a la Amazon, if I knew in advance of its witty arcade value, I would not hesitate to give two dollars toward this undoubtedly worthy cause. Save the starving pixels in the Grid, and acquire for your Androidian device a volume of Radiant for all your mobile transcended goodness. (There is a free version also for all of us broke college students.)

WHY RADIANT IS RATHER RAD(IANT):

1). Satirical play on the Atari 2600 cartridge manuals' text. Describing worlds and characters far too complex to be rendered in 8-bit form back in the day, those precious stories off-screen are brought back thematically in Radiant's dialogue boxes: "It's so ridiculous it should have been in the '80s" is actually more or less stated by the player-character protagonist.

2). The soundtrack is a hyper-active, daftly punk'd-out* keyboard. And just like its narrative, the sound effects are taken straight from the glorious beeps and boops of the decade ago.

3). There's an upgrades store for weapons with names like "Vulcan Cannon" (not really sure if the Vulcans would approve of cannons, but we'll go with it because it sounds epic). And whereas on a desktop model changing ammunition usually involves attempting to remember that shift = lasers and space = bullets and tab+alt+C+H+U+C+K+N+O+R+R+I+S = hydrogen bomb (only 2 available though!), on the touchscreen of a handheld device, simply tap on your ship to select your (infinite) equipment--automatically pausing play as well. What does this mean in a sentence? An intuitive improvement on the retro arcade formula.

With thanks to Android APT for providing a screenshot I could never have taken by myself. But in all truthiness, this is how most of my games turn out: with me in a corner grasping the phone on both ends exclaiming what-the-faulkner I can't take this anymore.

4). Just when the action starts getting a little monotonous, there's Blinky and Inky ghosts escaped from their WASD-grounded labyrinths. There's aliens raining down in snaky paths a la Centipede. There's a planet-eater with two arms that vomit meatballs of death right on top of your ship no matter where you try to fit on the screen. There are these random fields of asteroids that are so ridiculously hard to take down that you end up just bouncing all over the screen half the time without even having to shoot anything. In short, Radiant mashes up ALL THE THINGS into a Neapolitan 3-layer cupcake of neon deliciousness.**

5). SHOOT ALL THE THINGS. Enough said. There aren't too many cool action games out there for handheld platforms (at least so far as I've perused the markets). Radiant radiantly*** defies the exception.

*Oh yes, you did see what I did there.
**I don't always use the best metaphors.
***Wishlist: a thesaurus.