Yes, there goes another post writing about my flashed Kindle Fire. If you’re bored just skip it.
When I had Amazon’s operating system I tried quite a number of games, mostly “Free apps of the day” from Amazon’s appstore, or a few free (ad-supported) games — even though I did buy Rovio’s Amazing Alex as I liked the demo quite a bit. The only game that was really unplayable on the device was Jetpack Joyride (which is free). Even the Google Play version, with CyanogenMod, stutters enough that I don’t want to play it there, while on the other hand it works perfectly fine on my iPad and iPod Touch.
Since I haven’t even tried installing the Amazon App Store after flashing CyanogenMod on the device, I haven’t played Amazing Alex in a long time. On the other hand I played Fieldrunners HD (link goes to Amazon) which I bought on Google Play instead, and played on the Desire HD before. This worked like a perfect charm (and if you like tower defense games, this is a terrific game, and you should give it a try!).
The first games I bought on the newly flashed Kindle Fire were Eve of Genesis and Dark Gate (latter link goes to Google Play), thanks to Caster’s suggestion. These are classic Japanese RPGs, likely re-made from older 8- and 16-bit systems to Android and iOS, exactly what I like for the few moments I spend playing on it. They play quite nicely, even if sometimes they do stutter as well.
But the problem starts with the most recent (at the time of writing) Humble Bundle with Android 5 which I bought in the hope to play Dungeon Defenders on the tablet at least, since my Dell laptop does not play it smoothly on Windows, and my Zenbook has an HD4000 “videocard” and with that card, there’s a bug that was not fixed yet, as far as I can tell. Ryan would know better.
Unfortunately, trying to get Dungeon Defenders to play on that tablet is a bad idea, in particular the moment when you have to load the input method to type your name, it crashes completely. Other games in the bundle are not better. Splice crashes just after loading, for instance, and so did Solar 2. While Crayon Physics works, it will complain if even a single other application is running that it doesn’t have enough memory, and it’s probably correct in that.
Among the games that works, Crayon Physics is definitely worth it — I’m going to try Sword & Sworcery EP and see if that one works as well. Dynamite Jack is not my cup of tea but works great (and it shows that it was well designed and written by the way it was faster to start up that most apps).
Of course these are only some examples, but it shows two main problems: the first is that it really is necessary to put requirements on software, and try to spare as much memory as possible without making the application unusable, if you want to be compatible; the other that if you want to create a gateway app, like Humble Bundle did, you need to make sure you check the requirements before allowing the user to install the games. In this case, the tablet is obviously not supported, as I flashed an experimental, unofficial ROM myself, but I’m pretty sure that most of the Chinese tablets that I’ll find at the local Mediaworld (Italian brand for Mediamarkt) will have even less memory than the Fire.
Oh well, hopefully I’ll soon be able top lay these games on a real gaming PC, be it with Linux or Windows, thanks to Steam, and then it won’t matter that the Fire is not that powerful.
