CrossFire

This is a Bluetooth-enabled, multiplayer, dogfight type of game. The game settings & controls are very similar to my “Magic Eyes in Motion” series, except now with Bluetooth enabled for many players to fly and fight in space.

Bluetooth-paired devices will connect faster! So try to pair with each others before entering the game.

Bluetooth usability can vary significantly across the devices available on the market. I have tried on 4 phones playing at the same time before publishing. These are two HTC Legend, one Samsung Galaxy Tab P1010, and one Viewsonic ViewPad 7e.

Depending on the device hardware, the Bluetooth connections may break when players firing too many missiles and/or dropping too many bombs. However, the game will always try to connect back to each other, even after been interrupted by incoming phone calls.

How to play:

Start the game, hold your device in landscape orientation like holding the steering wheel and observe the note on the screen. If, and only if, the scene spins horizontally like crazy, then you need to long-hold touch the screen for 1 second so that the game will know the device has implemented its accelerometers differently (against android API specification). The ViewPad 7e is one of such devices.

Then tap the screen to start flying. Your ship will automatically cruise forward. All you need to do is rotate the device clockwise to turn right and counterclockwise to turn left, much like driving a car. Flip the screen with the top edge outward to head down, and the top edge inward to head up.

When another player is connected, one Bluetooth icon will be added to the right edge of the screen. So for example, if 3 players (including yourself) are connected, each one will see two Bluetooth icons. Other players’ ship appears on the screen as a colored simple cube.

To fire missile (which is in orange color), long-hold touch the screen. The battery-shape indicator at the top-left edge of the screen shows how many missiles are ready to launch.

You can also drop bombs (which is in blue color) by tapping the screen. The bombs are dropped behind you to protect yourself from been fired upon when you are tailed by other players. The battery-shape indicator at the bottom-left edge of the screen shows how many bombs are ready to deploy. The bombs are timed to explode if not been hit by players.

The green battery is your life indicator; starts out full and decreases by each missile or bomb hit. When you are dead, you will start over again immediately, emerging from some other location in space.

The center-bottom indicator is your device’s processing speed. When the speed is low (too many missiles for example), you will experience minor to significant lag due to lower frame rate.