It’s here!

A nice little update here since the article written about the nice lazy way to waste your life can be nicely summed up as follows;

Hearthstone is now available on Android Tablets.

Having first came out to the nations of Australia, Canada (who probably said sorry to everyone about it, just like we do), and New Zealand (I can only presume there was a massive demand on the set of the Hobbit), it very quickly spread worldwide to the cries of nerds and people who spend far too much time on the toilet. 

Ladies and Gentleman, the hearthstone throne is now a reality. Oh dear god, the reality of playing in bed too and not even moving much. The horror, the deliciously geeky horror. Of course shiny shiny IPad owners have had this joy for quite some time and this is one of the best things to happen on the Android platform, however you still will wonder what is different to what you see on fully fledged systems.

Well on first glance, not a lot really.

You are prompted to sign in with the usual battle.net credentials, given the launcher they chucked in with all their games on PC and Mac is not present. but after the game has spent a few minutes unpacking files for the first time of installation (be wary gentle reader, for if thy device has less than 1.8GB free on the internal storage, ye be having a bad time) you then see the exact same layout as you would on the main game, which of course makes perfect sense. It’s cross-platform and therefore they’ve got to get it as close as possible.

One of the only real differences aside from no performance changing options, is the battery indicator in the lower left side of the screen, which given that gaming on a mobile device destroys battery life, it’s  good thing to keep an eye on without you having to check via other means.

Hooray, a game with a battery indicator!

The other major change is how badly it runs.

It’s Hearthstone on an Android device, which in itself is a major achievement and trust me, Blizzard has earned a lot of thanks for the work. However for the first release, it is not smooth.

Far from it, it runs like a dog most of the time, where there will be a very noticeable delay in what you do and what happens on screen.

Frame rates appear to be variable depending on what aspect of the game you’re in, with the worst area to suffer is the part where you are looking at your deck and you try and turn the page to look at more cards. Only time will tell if they will be able to improve the experience by smoothing out any lag present.

Given the variety of devices on the market, that will be quite hard to do, but certainly not impossible given how many other developers have worked miracles with what little the hardware has in terms of power. But it is playable for sure, so don’t be too disheartened just yet.

Perhaps one of the things to add is something to tweak the visual options ala the big PC/Mac version where you can tune down some options on a basic level to allow it to run faster. You are also stuck to the resolution of the tablet screen, therefore those on HD displays will be working more to display the better images and perhaps a selection of settings there too may help.

For now not everyone will get in on the hot mobile card action (cue waa waa music for sex time, YEAH!), it will be limited to big (oh baby) tablets with screens bigger than 6 inches, 1GB RAM and Android 4.0 and at some point, the phone versions will appear for both IOS and Android. Given the limited real estate on the standard phone screen most of the time, they will need to do some real work to the interface for that to truly work in a realistic way. I suspect the real way this will be played will still be on larger devices.

As it stands, it really is the normal desktop version that has had one or two minor little tweaks here and there to respond to your various pokes and finger dragging. Which is preciously what you wanted.

Here ends the infomercial for something you probably didn’t care about.

Hey, there may be something in this……If anyone would like to pay me ridiculous amounts of money for talking about their stuff, please email. I am a loyal corporate whore for the right price!