Games

Where are the real games?

You can play pretty much any Android game with the Shield's touchscreen, as awkward as it might be, but that’s not the point of the system. If you’re buying a Shield, you want to play games with controller support… and on Android, there simply aren’t a lot of great controller games.

For instance, you might suppose that Minecraft: Pocket Edition would be fantastic fun with a gamepad, but that's not how it works – even though you can download Minecraft on an actual Xbox 360, the Android version doesn't include controller support. It’s a problem for every Android game system with physical controls, but worse, even those games that do support game controllers don’t all play nice with the Shield's joysticks and buttons. Take Crazy Taxi, which just debuted on Android a few weeks ago: it supports the Xperia Play and PowerA’s Moga controllers, but not the Shield. To be fair, it's not Nvidia's fault that developers don’t have their ducks in a row, but it's a stumbling block for the Shield either way. At this point it might require a critical mass of Shield sales or a real push from Google to make things better. There’s one thing Google could improve right away: there's no way to tell whether games support the Android game controller standard at the time you buy them in Google Play.

Update: Some of these issues have been reduced now that you can build your own controls, part of a major software update. Crazy Taxi has also added Shield support.

Thankfully, Android isn't entirely bereft of excellent controller games. Dead Trigger works well, and a demo of its sequel Dead Trigger 2 has better graphics than any game I’ve seen running on mobile before, battling waves of zombies in a highly detailed environment with pools of water that reflect the entire world. ShadowGun: DeadZone is a perfectly playable online shooter, if not a particularly deep one. Grand Theft Auto III, and better yet Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, play wonderfully on the Shield at high resolution, looking far better than they did on the PlayStation 2.

There are some good android games in the mix

PC classic Max Payne shows just how easy it can be to pull off headshots with the Shield's thumbsticks in slow motion, although it’s a shame Rockstar nerfed the difficulty level. Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic CD, and Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II are not only guaranteed to trigger nostalgia, they're great fun. The Conduit is a capable port of the Wii title, though there's something wrong with the thumbstick deadzone settings that makes aiming difficult. And Epic Citadel, while not actually a game, is a tantalizing tease of the titles the Android library could include if the many Unreal Engine developers ported their games to the platform.

There are more, but generally speaking you'll find that classic titles which originated on Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation 2, and classic PC titles are the most likely to have good controller support. Even then it's not a given, though: Ubisoft's just-released Prince of Persia 2 remake doesn't work with the Shield's controls.

Old console games tend to have the best controller support

Even if there were lots of good Android games, though, you might have trouble installing them on the Shield as of today. Big Android games can take up a couple of gigabytes, and the Shield ships with less than 12GB of usable storage. If you think you’d just use the SD card slot, think again: you can't install apps to the card. Nvidia promises me that installing apps to SD will get fixed in the very first update after launch, a la Samsung’s update for the Galaxy S4, but it could be troublesome for now. (Update: This was fixed as of an October 28th software update.) It's also worth noting that if you have an SD card over 32GB in size, you'll need to format it with the NTFS filesystem using a Windows PC.

One place you can get great controller games: classic console emulators. I'm not going to get into how you might, ahem, creatively acquire copies of games like Star Fox 64 and Metal Gear Solid, but they certainly work. The Shield's Tegra 4 is plenty powerful enough to run Nintendo 64 and original PlayStation titles, with a few glitches here and there. The shoulder buttons and triggers can be a bit finicky, though: when Peppy asked me to do a barrel roll, I accidentally did several.