View multiplayer invites, see who is playing what, and discover fun new games
Google has pushed out a sizable update for Google Play Games today (yay, Wednesday!) and the changes finally make the app worth using. There are three major changes, and they are ones that I think everyone is going to like.
- See invitations for multiplayer games
- See who’s playing a game
- Search for something fun to play in Find Games
There are a few other minor changes to the applications user interface, most noticable of which is putting the settings into the side menu, just as we’ve seen in Google Music. Those are always welcome, but the three bullet-point changes are what has our attention.
Multiplayer invites works as expected. Now instead of only being able to join multiplayer games, you can see your invites. This puts everything in one place, making things easy to act on. The active players list gives you a look at who is currently playing each game, though it’s not real-time. It is a good way to see who has your favorite game installed so you can invite them, challenge them, then beat them mercilessly until they call you uncle. The “Find Games” section gives you a list of games that Google thinks you’ll find interesting. I looked through, and some of them actually were interesting. Nice work, Google.
Of course, this is a typical Google #trollout release. You can wait patiently for it to be your turn, hammer the button and refresh things at Google Play to try and break Google’s trollout Enigma machine, or dig around on the Internet to find a version optimized for your processor. Getting the update is almost a game in itself, and deserves to have leaderboards. Good luck, and see you in the players list, player.