One of my sons recently got me invested in Ice Cold Muffin‘s ICE, a game in which you try to take over bases in a simple directed graph. It’s a lot of fun, despite the extreme simplicity – maybe other game makers could benefit from noticing how simple games can be fun.
Anyway, while it’s fun to play on my phone, it’s a little small – most of the ICE ships end up being barely perceptible. That’s probably okay, really, because you don’t win bases with single ships – you overwhelm them with fleets. But it’d still be nice to have it on the Surface, because… well, just because.
Running Android games on Windows is possible, of course, because Android has a development kit for Windows. But you wouldn’t want to run the Android emulator as an actual runtime environment.
After noticing BlueStacks and reading some reviews about it, I decided to give AMI’s DuOS-M a try; it seemed to get rave reviews and looked very clean.
Sure enough, DuOS-M worked, and worked very well; it’s trivial to install Google Apps (it comes with the Amazon Store by default, but after initial installation it directs you to a page through which you can install the Play Store as well). From there, it felt like an actual (and giant) Android installation; it was fast and convenient.
It occurs to me that with DuOS might allow me to read all of my uploaded Amazon content on the Surface, via Android. I suppose I could use it as a way to migrate away from Amazon.
At any rate, DuOS-M is well done, from what I can tell so far; I’m glad I found it. ICE is also a great game, if you’re interested in such things, written by a kid who’s only 17 – well worth supporting, in my opinion.