Tegra-only game Dark Meadow hits Google Play
A game that has been out for iOS for a while has now hit Android, though only for Tegra equipped devices. Dark Meadow: The Pact is an Unreal Engine powered game where you essentially move around an old hospital, slaying monsters and exploring the place. It’s designed to be visually stunning, and in being so it’s essentially a promotion for Tegra devices, which the $free price point helps sell.
By “Tegra-only”, that technically means Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 devices. People are reporting heaps of issues even with those devices though, with devices that are allowed to use the game by Google Play experiencing issues with actually running the game, and other devices showing as incompatible despite being Tegra powered. For instance it doesn’t seem to be compatible with the Transformer TF300, which is almost identical to the TF200, the Transformer Prime. This is just another example of the ridiculously flawed Google Play compatibility system that I’ve talked about before, and it is leaving a lot of Tegra users less than happy to say the least.
The fact that this is Tegra only is also not going over too well. There are devices out there that are way faster than the Tegra 2 chip, yet can’t use this game because it isn’t optimized for those. While optimizing for chips is a good idea in theory, the fact that there are so many different chips that it creates yet another type of fragmentation for Android is very bad. This year is proceeding like last year, with Tegra first releasing a “revolutionary” chip, and other manufacturers like Samsung then releasing their own chips later on which leaves the Tegra offerings in the dust – but in some cases only on paper due to chip optimization like this. As much as I like the idea of games like Borderlands 2 on Tegra 3, I hate to see the already app-weak Android be divided into even smaller, less capable pieces and forcing consumers to deal with terms like “made for Tegra”.
[Google Play via Droid-life]
