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SAN FRANCISCO — Search behemoth Google buttered up the game development community at the Game Developers Conference Wednesday by handing out free mobile phones.

At the tail end of the panel “Bring Your Games to Android” presented by Jack Palevich — the programmer who recently ported Quake to the Android platform — representatives from the company gifted a Motorola Droid to every developer who listened in on Palevich’s pitch session.

Google launched the Android operating system for mobile phones in 2008. Now that several carriers have started providing hardware that runs Android Google is using the Game Developers Conference to court developers to create games for phone’s Android Market — a software clearing house similar to Apple’s App Store. Google suffered a minor PR setback last year when Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said publicly that his company had “significantly cut our investment in Android platform.”

The generous swag hand-out might just work. An enthusiastic young developer in the audience for Palevich’s talk proclaimed “holy crap!” when he discovered that the phone he nabbed at a Google panel the day before came with twelve months of free service.

Photo: James Merithew/Wired.com

See Also:

• Android Army Pumped for All-Out Attack on iphone
• Android's Rapid Growth Has Some Developers Worried
• Android Phone Grows Up, Becomes Brain for Real Robot
• AT&T Plans 5 Android Smartphones in 2010
• Strapped to Android, HTC Takes a Dizzying Ride to the Top

You might have heard that Square Enix recently shipped a new entry in the all-but-forgotten Lufia series of role-playing games in Japan. Or maybe you didn’t. Called Estpolis: The Land Cursed by the Gods in Japan, the game shipped in late February to little fanfare and meager sales (it didn’t even make the top 10). So it’s definitely a B-game. But it’s not bad, if you’re looking for an action RPG. A few of my scattered thoughts follow.

Although the game’s plot is loosely based on the 1995 Super NES game Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, in most other respects it’s a completely different game, a 3-D action RPG instead of a 2-D turn-based one. The playable characters from the first game are there, but instead of controlling them all in your party, you swap between them as you make your way through the game’s levels, since they all have special abilities that you need to use on the battlefield.

For example, main character Maxim can launch himself horizontally to cross wide gaps. His love interest Tia can get across even wider gaps by throwing out her hookshot onto special poles in the environment. Big burly Guy can use his massive hammer to break apart big rocks and crystals in your path. You swap between the characters by tapping their faces on the touch screen –like Square Enix’s Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles games on the DS, you use the D-pad and buttons to play, occasionally thumbing the lower screen for special functions.

Estpolis seems to use the same 3-D engine as many of Square Enix’s other DS projects, except instead of being a bunch of cute little big-headed munchkins all of the characters are more realistically proportioned. This doesn’t look so great on the small screen with such low polygon counts. Combine that with the fact that the visual design in general isn’t so hot and you have a game that often looks, not to be too subtle about it, butt ass ugly. It seems to realize it, and often splashes the entire screen with high-res portraits of the characters so you don’t have to cut your eyes on the geometry during the story scenes.

From what I’ve played (the first few hours) there’s not much story — what’s there is very lighthearted and, well, 16-bit. Here is pretty much the whole setup:

Some Woman: You must go on a world-spanning adventure and kill some dudes.

Maxim: lol k

Although you do a fair amount of talking in the towns between the dungeons, Estpolis is mostly about fighting and solving environment-based puzzles. While you can use special attacks and charged blows to pummel enemies, I found that just wailing away on them with the attack button often did the trick. After an enemy falls to the ground dead but before it disappears, you can beat up its lifeless corpse for extra EXP and gold, which is cool — the game rewards flipping out and killing shit with impunity, which I enjoy.

The puzzles mostly involve pushing bricks, picking things up and putting them in other places, etc. You can screw up the puzzles, which requires you to either use the Reset feature, which bumps you back to the last checkpoint without the EXP and items that you earned, or just exit the dungeon and fight your way back to where you were. The first option can be a bitter pill to swallow, especially if you’ve picked up a random item drop. So I usually ended up just exiting the whole dungeon, keeping all my loot.

And that’s the new Lufia in a nutshell: Not the best game out there by a mile, but a solid, workmanlike experience in a neglected genre (and better than Legends of Exidia). Don’t know if Square Enix will give it a Western release, but it’s pretty import-friendly for an RPG.

Images courtesy Square Enix

Portal 2 is real, and coming this Christmas, Valve said Friday. And it looks like Mac owners might get to share the love.

The Seattle gamemaker announced that it would release the sequel to Portal, its space-time-bending, hilarious 2007 sleeper hit later this year. If you want to know more, you’ll have to pick up the next issue of Game Informer magazine. And Valve’s not done making waves: A slate of teaser images released this week that the company is bringing its games, and Steam direct Download service, to the Mac platform.

Portal 2 also had its share of teases: On Monday, an update to the original game brought with it a pile of hidden clues that suggested a sequel was inbound.

Right after leading fans down the Portal rabbit hole, Valve started teasing the notion of Steam for Mac. A series of ad parodies that mash Valve’s characters into retro Apple ads more than suggests that the company will be launching their game marketplace and social network for Mac computers in the near future.

We’ll make sure Valve gets us the official news when it’s ready to stop being such teases.

Image courtesy Valve

See Also:

• Geeky Clues Suggest Portal Sequel Is Coming
• In 'Portal,' Violating Physics Proves Weirdly Satisfying
• Portal Prodigy Vacates Valve
• Valve Says Downloads Picked Up Steam in 2009
• Valve's Newell: Next Console War to Be Decided by Steam-Like Services