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Will Southend and Qualcomm's ultra high end Desert Winds be Infinity Blade for Android?

Chip company wants to accelerate the market

Will Southend and Qualcomm's ultra high end Desert Winds be Infinity Blade for Android?
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| Desert Winds

First shown at Mobile World Congress 2011 as a technology demo for hardware using its Adreno 220 graphics chip, Qualcomm has revealed more about the game now known as Desert Winds.

Developed by Swedish outfit Southend, which also made ilomilo, Qualcomm has commissioned a three level version, which it plans to give away to OEMs and operators who want to pre-install it on their devices.

Southend has the rights to make and sell additional content, based on the technology and using the name.

Shiny, shiny

As you'd expect for an experience that started life as a tech demo, Desert Winds features very high-end graphics, including dense geometry, lots of shader special effects, and a smoothly animated main female character, whose costume consists of the flowing cloth that takes a lot of clock cycles to process.

Labelled as 'our Infinity Blade' and 'Prince of Persia meets God of War' by Qualcomm insiders, the gameplay is akin to Epic's title but uses more traditional controls and progression.

As you explore each level, with direct touch controlling your movement, you discover boss characters. Once a fight is triggered, the controls change, with the introduction of individual block and attack buttons, and left and right move arrows.

"We decided not to do swipes so you can see the action better," was one reason cited.

Chips for the job

Of course, you'll need a fairly high-end device to experience the game - the original minimum spec was a 1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon with Adreno 220 - although it will be coming to Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play, despite this using a lower powered Adreno 205 GPU.

There's a suggestion it might head to Windows Phone devices at some point in the future too.

In terms of Android deployment however, Desert Winds is expected to become available at some point during the summer.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.