Humble Bundle – DRM free games for Linux and Android and eBooks
I have bought many games and Ebooks through Humble Bundle. I don’t blog about them very often as the bundles are usually available for about a week and by the time I get around to writing the blog then that time is nearly over. I wanted to blog about this bundle though because it includes one of my favourite Android games (which I also know of a potential fix to get it running) and as a reminder about what Humble Bundle is all about.
What is Humble Bundle?
Humble Bundle is best known for it’s games bundles. Most games are available for Linux, OS X and Windows. Some bundles are also available for Android. When purchasing the games you are able to set your own price based upon how much the games are worth to you. You can also get to choose where the money goes distributed between the game creators, charities and a tip to Humble Bundle.
It is worth bearing in mind that some games (generally the better games) are only available when paying over a certain amount, based on either the average amount paid or a fixed amount. Although the buyer can still choose whatever percentage of that goes to charity.
There are also some eBook bundles which sell DRM free ebooks which can be read on any browser. Again you choose the amount to pay (with minimum payment for certain books) and the payments also support charity. It is in ebooks that I think that having the books available DRM free is more important. See: The problem with DRM restricted ebook formats
Fieldrunners 2
One of my favourite Android games has been Fieldrunners HD, which I first bought as part of an earlier Humble Bundle. Field runners is a tower defence game. The current bundle “PC and Android Bundle 10”. Fieldrunners 2 has better graphics, more towers and new more complex levels. It does have one thing though – in app game purchases which I am not in favour of. It does appear that you can play the game without any additional purchases as long as you have a reasonable amount of patience.
Fix for running Fieldrunners 2 on Nexus 4 with Android KitKat
When I first tried running Fieldrunners 2 on my Nexus 4 it didn’t get past the start splash screen before crashing. A search on the Internet showed that others were having the same problems, but didn’t have any sign of a fix. I then remembered that some time ago I’d enabled the new Art virtual machine on my Nexus. This is the first time I’ve had a problem with art which is why I’d forgotten I’d even made the change. I changed back to the Dalvik JIT virtual machine which fixed the problem. This has a performance impact on Android, but is worth it to be able to run Fieldrunners 2.
If you don’t understand this and you’re running KitKat then chances are you don’t need to worry about it. It may be a problem for future versions of Android when art becomes the default.