While utilising the undoubted power and sophistication of a console machine, such as a PlayStation 5, appeals to most of the gaming population, there are others who prefer the portability and casual offering of a mobile game or two. There are a variety of games to sample using a modern-day smartphone, too, with people able to download titles on both iOS and Android. These downloadable products are supplemented by a variety of browser games also, from playing Spin a Win Live, which is similar to Wheel of Fortune, to the endless array of social media games through platforms like Facebook, with many opting for Zynga Poker or FarmVille. These games, and more, accompany the more sophisticated titles on offer, such as the array of console-quality games that are making the transition over to mobile. As such, mobile gamers have never had as many options as they do today.

Mobile gaming’s rise up the entertainment ranks is perhaps best summed up by its future projections. For example, according to Statista, the mobile gaming market could reach a staggering $173.4 billion by 2026. Some for the more popular games have contributed to this dramatic growth, with many bringing in massive revenues. As is the same in the movie and music charts, there are certainly more popular games than others. These titles, and others, have helped elevate mobile gaming’s package. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the top mobile games around at the moment based on monthly active users.

Pokémon Go

Since its release in 2016, Pokemon Go has grown impressively. Thanks to its innovative augmented reality feature, Niantic has been able to continually tempt gamers in to its overall offering. There has been an evident decline in the number of users playing the game in 2022, though. When it was first made available to both iOS and Android users, it peaked at 232 million active users. Now, in 2022, the game is said to have around 81.2 million monthly active users, according to Activeplayer.io. Despite this, Pokemon Go is still one of the biggest and best mobile games around.

Minecraft: Pocket Edition

The most iconic of sandbox survival games is now on mobile and it has certainly done well. With over 173.5 million active average monthly users, alongside the 16 million daily active gamers, Minecraft is easily one of the most popular mobile games around, particularly with younger audiences. Given the freedom gamers have in the game, Minecraft’s success is showing no signs of slowing down either.

Candy Crush

You’ve heard of Candy Crush, right? The mobile gaming phenomenon is still going strong in 2022, particularly among female gamers, with the game’s player base being made up of 54% females. Candy Crush Saga has 260 million active monthly players overall, though, and it appears to be a game that will simply never lose its appeal.

PUBG Mobile

The undisputed king of mobile games at this moment in time, PUBG Mobile boasts 511.6 million active monthly players on average, with 42.6 million daily active players. In terms of the battle royale genre, it’s the obvious choice for the vast majority of smartphone gamers. Given it’s all-action package, PUBG Mobile deserves to take the top spot. Overall, it’s a great game.

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Solitaire

Solitaire has been on the Window XP for a long time, so almost every gamer has played it at one point or the other. To play this game, you’ll need to arrange seven cards on the first pile, with the first cards facing up and the remaining six cards facing down. Next, you’ll start the next pile from the second card on the first pile.

Ensure to expose the first card on the pile just like you did in the initial step, and keep the others facing down. This exact procedure continues until you get to expose a card on the last stack. This game aims to match numbers in sequence from king to ace while alternating the colors. Solitaire is available on all Windows, Android, iOS devices, as well as handhelds and consoles.  

Poker

When it comes to playing Poker, it takes a combination of skill and luck to ace the game, but whether you’re a good player or not, one thing is sure; you must have some addictive fun while at it.

Playing Poker is also a great way to stimulate your brain because it is mentally challenging, and the more you play, the more you learn. Poker comes in different variations. It is available on Android, iOS and windows app stores, and it has also been adapted into popular casino games like Hold’em Poker, which can be played in live and virtual formats online.

Rolling Stone

Rolling stone is another fun card game that everyone should learn to play. Like other card games, it may be pretty frustrating at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes an exciting way to unwind with friends. The game starts with everyone around the table getting eight cards, and then one card is opened in the center of the table. Each player will place a similar card of the same suit on top of the card placed on the table until you run out of cards of that particular suit. Rolling stone is also available on mobile app stores.

Crazy Eight

If you’re looking for card games to teach your kids, then Crazy eight is an excellent choice. The game is played in groups, and whoever finishes their card first becomes the winner. It is an entertaining way to introduce your kids to competitive gaming, and it’s a great way to have fun with your family. You can also play the game online or download it on your mobile device.

Blackjack

Blackjack is another popular game that has been around for a long time. Though marred with many misconceptions, it is an easy and fun game to play with friends. Blackjack is also called 21. While each player starts with only two cards, the aim is to get close to 21without bursting and beating the dealer while at it. Getting the ace and king automatically gives you 11 and 10, respectively, making you win the game with ease.

For rules on hundreds of traditional cards that can be played, see https://www.pagat.com/alpha/.

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Playing the Guns N’ Roses online slot game is definitely not like attending a live concert of the legendary band, but it is not that far from it. It is a slot game full of music, concert animations and special bonus rounds. It is not a game that is available in many online casinos, but by picking the right one, players can get generous bonus offers to play Guns N’ Roses online in South Africa. That amount will be more than enough for players to really enjoy the game and potentially trigger all its bonus rounds.

Here are a few facts for those who are not fully aware of the significance of Guns N’ Roses in the world of rock music. The band was formed in 1985 and released its first album two years later. Songs like Paradise City and Sweet Child o’ Mine, instantly turned Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradling and Duff McKagan into music legends and millions of the album’s copies were sold all over the world. Over the last thirty years, their music has been heard in movie soundtracks, in sporting events like the SuperBowl, and even in political campaigns.

After becoming globally recognised, Guns N’ Roses suddenly disbanded in 1993, disappointing millions of fans everywhere. November Rain and Don’t Cry earned their place among the most popular songs of the 90s. More than 20 years later, Axl Rose and the rest of the GNR reunited and performed live at Coachella. Ever since, the band started touring all over the world and thousands of music fans of all ages fill venues in every continent, in order to see their favourite band members up close.

Guns N’ Roses is a video slot with five reels and twenty pay lines. The game offers bonus rounds, wild and scatter symbols, free spins and multipliers. During the game, players listen to some of the band’s most popular songs, in a similar quality to the one spectators and TV viewers experienced in Miami in February 2020. That was a memorable moment as the band paid homage to basketball superstar Kobe Bryant by singing Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. In a way, the online slot game is a tribute to the band’s 35 years in the music industry. The game’s six bonus features can keep players entertained for hours.

Although Guns N’ Roses is an amazing slot game, it is not the only one a player can try. Together with this game, the members of the online casino can try games based on movies, like Planet of the Apes or Rocky and TV shows like the X Files or Game of Thrones. They can also find slot games based on mythology and history or even on popular traditions like Oktoberfest. Finally, for those who have given slots a try and who want to try something different, there are always games like Roulette and Blackjack. All that is needed, is to navigate through the casino and to go to each casino table game’s section.

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Senet is reportedly one of the oldest board games, dating to around 3,100 B.C. It was a two-player-only game played on a board of 30 squares arranged in three rows of 10 squares. The board was typically made out of wood, faience, ivory, or a combination of those materials. It had such a significance to the pharaoh Tutankhamun that he had four Senet boards buried in his tomb, the most lavish being an ebony and ivory board that had a drawer to store the counters and sat on ornate legs carved in the shape of animal feet.

While a fixed set of rules has not been found, historians says that each player had five pawns and the object of the game was for the player to move their pawns, and eventually get them off the board. By all accounts, a seemingly abstract strategy game with no theme. However, with the afterlife being a significant facet of Egyptian life, their texts over time began to describe the religious importance of the game. The New York Post reports that a Senet board found in the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, California continues that line of thinking.

Archaeologist Walter Crist writes an article about the new find in the The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, saying that the game is a reflection of the ba – the person’s life force that is separated from its physical body at death – as it passes through Duat, the realm of the dead in ancient Egyptian mythology. The squares on the board are meant to represent the different stages along the journey. Crist also talks about the meaning of the word Senet and its connection to the afterlife.

The word senet in Egyptian means ‘passing,’ and may refer either to the game’s religious connotation of the ba passing through the duat or to the mechanics of gameplay, where playing pieces passed each other on the board.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0307513319896288

A fascinating breakdown of the board orientations and decoration, and an investigation of the Rosicrucian Museum’s Senet board is provided in Wrist’s article, which you can read further if you like: Passing from the Middle to the New Kingdom: A Senet Board in the Rosicrucian Museum.

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COOPER ISLAND

Cooper Island by is designed by Andreas “ode.” Odendahl and is a heavy worker (and tile) placement and resource management game that plays between 90 and 120 minutes if you know what’re you’re doing.

In the age of exploration the players arrive at a new home far away from their homeland. They try to settle the big island and each player tries to explore one part of it by placing landscape tiles. Landscape tiles grant resources and those are used to erect buildings with special abilities. Barriers on the island have to be removed in order to explore the island even further. Players build valuable statues and supply ships get them the supplies from the old world they need to be a successful settler on Cooper Island.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/269511/cooper-island

While the games sits at a modest 7.7 rating on BGG, the game has been hailed by some as one of the highlights of the year. Paul Grogan from Gaming Rules! summarizes the mechanics and gives his opinions:

The game does have a solo mode, but it is not included in the base box. Currently it can only be purchased on the Frosted Games’ website.

MARACAIBO

Alexander Pfister is a board game designer of some repute. While the likes of Isle of Skye, Mombasa, and OMG! are noteworthy, his 2016 opus, Great Western Trail is considered by some to be his best work. His newest title Maracaibo blends the mechanics seen in his previous games to produce a seafaring adventure that has the player circumnavigating the Caribbean during the 17th century.

The players sail on a round course through the Caribbean. E.g., you have city tiles where you are able to perform various actions or deliver goods to. One special feature is an implemented quest mode over more and various tiles, which tells the player, who chase after it, a little story.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/276025/maracaibo

Maracaibo has a rating of 8.3 on BGG and has been met with critical reception. Paul Grogan from Gaming Rules! once again provides a good summary and review of the game, its mechanics, and the rule book. It’s reportedly in his top games of 2019.

The does include a solo mode where the player goes up against an AI opponent. The game comes with a campaign mode, by accounts a basic story, which can work in both multiplayer and solo mode.

PIPELINE

Laying pipe has never looked so beautiful than in Ryan Courtney’s debut (hurrah!) game, Pipeline. The relatively complex economic strategy game includes elements of tile placement, network/route building, and resource conversion.

… in Pipeline you start a company in the oil business. You will focus on building a much more efficient pipeline network in your refinery, hiring experts that provide valuable benefits over your competitors, and managing the logistics of purchasing and selling your refined oil in the various markets. You will need more than strong economic skills – carefully crafting an interweaving network of pipelines just might ensure your victory!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/256730/pipeline

With its limited turns and tight economy, a round of inefficiency against experienced players can be disastrous. Some people are turned away by this, while others relish it. The folks over at No Pun Included loved it so much, it was their game of the year for 2019.

There is no official solo mode for the game, but fan-made variants are available on BGG.

IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING

Burnt Island Games’ nautically themed Endeavor: Age of Sail is an acclaimed title from 2018, and it seems their 2019 effort may have similar appeal. In the Hall of the Mountain King has the player putting together a workforce to do hard labour in the bowels of a mountain.

Play as trolls rebuilding your abandoned kingdom under the mountain in In the Hall of the Mountain King. With muscle and magic, you’ll unearth riches, dig out collapsed tunnels, and carve out great halls as you raise the toppled statues of your ancestors to their places of honor at the heart of the mountain. Gameplay is driven by the innovative cascading production system. Timing and tactics are key as you work to restore your home to its former glory and win the crown!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/265402/hall-mountain-king

Reviews for the game are thin at the moment but Dice Tower’s Tom Vasel bashes the gavel to give the game a silver seal of approval. Note that in the video he has the Kickstarter components, the retail version will come with cheaper tokens as was the case with Endeavor: Age of Sail.

Solo and coop modes aren’t in the base game and appear to be available in a separate expansion, Cursed Mountain.

SUCCULENT

Designer J. Alex Kevern has had more misses than hits with his two recent titles, ArtSee and Passing Through Petra. 2020 sees the release of Succulent, which certainly has one of the most beautiful box covers. If like me, your experience with the propagation and growing of succulents has been fraught with disaster, you may find more success in playing a game about it.

Your succulent garden is amazing! Through thoughtful selection, delicate pruning, and tireless care, you’ve earned a reputation as a master horticulturist. In Succulent, you compete against your peers for lucrative and prestigious projects that will cement your place as the community’s premier succulent gardener.

The game is played over a series of turns during which players collect succulent cuttings from their gardens along with water crystals and use them to complete projects which grant various benefits, including earning points. Most victory points at the end of the game wins!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/299372/succulent

There are currently no reviews or even a rule book available. It seems the game may be slated for release in May of this year.

That’s it for this small, subjective list. It is subset of the pre-orders that are currently available from Solarpop. The full list is available here: http://www.solarpop.co.za/Pre-Order/

If you have any comments, drop them below. 

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Once a particular genre gets famous a lot of similar games flood the market because they sell easily. But what if someone wants to develop a simple and short game, play it safe, will it fail to compete with the graphic-intensive games from big studios?

No shortage of hit games

The last ten years proved to be instrumental in putting an end to the stronghold pop culture had on the game industry. Labels such as GTA, Uncharted, and Metal Gear Solid have compelled the industry to move towards creating cinematic experiences.

Game design took a more structured form in that different studios started associating themselves with a certain genre. This gave them the liberty to focus on any one aspect of game design. Creating a good plot became some developers’ priority while others focused more on gameplay.

These high end games in the triple A category gained instant success despite being super expensive. The market kept growing and games with fantastic visuals and heavy price kept coming in. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the perfect example of one such game.

This does not mean there is no space for the indie industry to grow. Not all the gamers look for graphics and a lengthy plot.

Can Indie titles survive against the triple A wave

Even if the triple A titles try to distinguish themselves from competitors either aesthetically or by changing gameplay there isn’t really much of a difference between the content of the game. There have been phases in the evolution of triple A games for example genres like mascot platformer, survival horrors, etc dominated for a specific period of time. So the games during a particular era end up being all similar.

So it falls to the indie titles to bring in new content. Now the focus of indie titles always has been ingenuity. They want to provide their customers a unique experience. The technological advancements have made it possible for the indie developers to rival the big studios in terms of production and create games of equal quality.

But what about the small indie titles that are falling too short of the quality triple A offers. In the same year as Super Mario Odyssey, a really good game Yooka-Laylee went unnoticed.

And that is the real challenge before the small indie titles. They must find a balance between the graphic quality and the story, which must not be too short.

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The facts in the story of Detective Pikachu are thus: one Tim Goodman, our doughty protagonist, is new to Ryme City, looking for his missing father, Harry Goodman. Instead of finding what he seeks, Tim runs into Detective Pikachu, a genius, problem-solving pokémon, and together they set out to solve the mystery of what happened to Harry, and perhaps solve a few other crimes along the way. Tim finds that he’s the only person who can hear Detective Pikachu’s voice, so there’s a whole mystery THERE that needs solving.

Detective Pikachu is unlike any other game in the Pokémon franchise. It plays far more like a “point and click” adventure than anything else, and there are no random battles to be had, nor “‘em all’s” to “gotta catch”. It’s just you, Detective Pikachu, your inventory, and cool deduction skills.

Two things spring out at you very plainly when you start playing Detective Pikachu: one, the animation and character design are absolutely beautiful, almost Pixar-like; and two, the voice acting is totally on point. So much characterization comes through in the voice of Detective Pikachu alone! You can hear he’s a grumpy old fart, and he has this gravelly, noir-gumshoe tone that is so out of line with the usual “pika pika!” we’re so used to hearing that it’s comical. I understand that there’s a Detective Pikachu film in the works, and that the titular character is to be voiced by Ryan Reynolds, so that’s something else to look forward to.

The gameplay itself is heavy on the “collect evidence and put the story together” kind of gameplay, with the odd QTE built in for the sake of a little action. Thankfully, it’s not the pixel-hunt I’ve seen in other adventure games, so most of what you’d need is right there on the screen. The lower screen holds the case files and maps and so on, as well as a way to talk to Detective Pikachu if he finds anything interesting or if he needs to get your attention somehow.

What I loved about this game is that it presents a completely different face of the Pokémon world, one that isn’t built on the one-on-one battles of the main game in the series, and the whole pokémon universe is a good deal richer for seeing other aspects of life that don’t involve Pokémon centres, intense eye-watering battles, and villainous teams. It’s also nice to have a story that is very personal, and not at all centred on saving the world in one way or another.

On the downside, there is a fair amount of repetition in terms of the game’s play-cycle. You explore the area, gather clues, and then fit the clues into the narrative to solve the case. What stops the game from being a boring grind is just how varied the locations are, how entertaining the story is, and the character interactions between Tim and Detective Pikachu. The game is also a little on the simple side, and until you’ve gathered the requisite clues and shown you’ve understood the case, you aren’t allowed to jump the gun here.

Detective Pikachu one of the most refreshing Pokémon games to come to us, and it’s a pure delight to play, even with the slower sections in the middle. Thankfully, the slow bits don’t last more than a chapter or so, and the game picks up again quite quickly. The character of Detective Pikachu is the best thing to come out of the Pokémon universe to the 3DS in ages, and while the game only clocks in at around twelve hours, it’s an enjoyable ride.

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Life is hard. You know it, I know it. Sometimes we need a little help with our money, whether it be for a fanciful thing that we impulsively want or a long term family plan, or anything in between. If you want a thing but don’t necessarily have the money for that thing, you’re going to have to borrow that money.

There are multiple banks available to lend you money, and today I’d like to talk to you about one of those banks that I have a personal experience with — FNB. Full disclosure, this is a paid for promotion, however that doesn’t affect the opinions expressed here.

Before we delve into that, let me take a moment remind you that all of the features discussed below are available from FNB’s fantastic mobile App that is available on both iOS and Android. I use it for practically everything, and accessing the variety of features via the App is by far and away the most convenient approach.

One of FNB’s tenets is relevant and responsible borrowing solutions and their message of “The future of help is to help people, help themselves” can be seen in the different options available to their customers. Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

Getting a credit card is as inevitable as death and taxes. Even though I had a credit card with my previous bank, I avoided using it for the longest time. However with FNB, almost all of my spend is on the credit card — that’s mainly got to do with the synergy it has with FNB’s excellent rewards system (eBucks) but I’ll get into that a little later. Based on your income, FNB offers different classes of credit card, each with benefits that are tied to that class. The higher the income, the higher the class of card and benefits that you’re able to access, however the standard features you’ve come to expect from a credit card are available across the board including personalized interest rates, 55 days interest free on purchases, a handy budget facility, and convenient fire-and-forget automatic payment options.

One of the best things about FNB’s credit card is the eBucks. It’s certainly the best reward system that I have ever used. Essentially, your use of FNB’s range of banking products determines your eBucks reward level, and the number of eBucks you receive is based on that level. Whether it be online or in-store shopping, the reward rate when using the credit card is the highest. For example, the reward rate for paying for online purchases with the FNB premier credit card is 4%, whereas the reward rate for the same online purchase via a cheque card is 0.5%. That’s basically a 700% increase in the eBucks you receive for using your credit card for online purchases. To get a better idea of eBucks you may receive based on you banking habits, have a look at the useful calculator. And then visit the eBucks store to see all the things you could buy with your sweet, sweet eBucks. You’re welcome ;)

While I don’t have a home loan, if I was ever in need of one, I’d go with FNB. Why? eBucks (I’m addicted to the stuff). By using FNB’s home loan facility, you can add substantial target points towards raising your eBucks reward level to the maximum. While I might have a singular focus on eBucks, FNB provides a multitude of home loan options depending on your needs whether you’re in the position to either build a house of my own house or buy a domicile, or if you have a home but want to transfer your existing loan for another bank. Want to finance your home the Islamic way? FNB got you covered.

As with the credit card product, flexibility and choice are the available in the repayment options. While you never want to be in such a position, should you be struggling to pay the loan back, FNB provides options that may help mitigate that, including ‘promise to pay’ agreements and debt counselling.

Note that home loans has its own dedicate space in the FNB banking app (nav >> Home) where you’ll find a wealth of dedicated tools. Should you have questions and I’m sure they can get complex when it comes to large sums of home loan money, I’d suggest using the “Secure Chat” feature on the FNB banking app. It’s the most convenient, cost-effective way I find.

Before considering a personal loan, you should have a clear idea of what exactly you want it for. It’ll help you to apply for the relevant amount. If you don’t over-extend yourself, you should be able to make your repayments on time; skipping payments is something to be avoided.

If you can avoid it, great but if you’re in situation where you just need a personal loan, you should probably do it with FNB. Why? You should probably have figured it out by now — being part of an ecosystem like FNB’s, the more you use their features, the more rewards you may be entitled to. Similar to credit cards and home loans, personal loans are linked to eBucks and count valuable target points towards getting to the hallowed reward level of 5 (where all the best discounts are and the most eBucks are doled out).

As always you can apply for one via multiple channels, including my preferred option, the FNB banking App.

Sometimes your train takes an unscheduled trip to Unexpected-ville, and I hope you packed your overnight overdraft bag. Seriously though, when you’re going into your overdraft, you’re getting into debt and it should be managed accordingly. Overdrafts should be reserved only for short-term borrowing or emergencies that arise.

FNB provides an authorized overdraft facility that allows you to overdraw (or borrow) up to an agreed limit, at a set rate of interest based on your credit profile. Banks typically charge for it in different ways, FNB charges for it only when you use it, with a monthly fee the moment you use at least R200 of your allowed limit.

That’s all, folks. A lot of things have been simplified for brevity but I hope the tidbits presented here have been helpful enough for you to find out more information for yourself. It’s all available in the “For Me > Borrow” section on the FNB’s home page. The more knowledge you’re armed with, the better your decision making should become. Good luck, and borrow responsibly.

[Hat tip: “Lend Money” icon courtesy of Yu luck from Noun Project]

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Made by messieurs Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo, the robot uses several motors and two PlayStation Eye cameras. The researchers say with further debugging they hope to improve the time. See their development blog for info on the machine, including outtakes when things went awry.

[via Mashable]

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If you’ve found this page, you likely have an interest in board games, puns, or museums. Luckily for you, I have two of the three things covered in this post. Be warned though, none of this commentary comes from an experienced board gamer; far from it. My history with modern board games started in August. This year.

As someone who has recently got into modern board games, the library of board games out there is staggeringly huge, in a multitude of types, categories, and involved mechanisms. I’m always on the look out for games that are easy to understand and will attract multiple plays. In our household, it’s either laying down trains across America in Ticket to Ride, scrambling to gold in The Quest for El Dorado, or building the best habits in Barenpark. From all that I’ve seen of this following game, I think it might check all the boxes of a fantastic gateway game.

Museum by Holy Grail Games has you playing a curator at the golden age of the museum, collecting and putting on displays of relics from all over the world.

Naturally, Museum plays as a set collection game where you’re aiming to collect and display artifacts from specific civilizations and domains in the hopes of pleasing your patrons, and in turn gaining the most prestige. You’ll need to recruit personnel to aid you in securing antiquities, adapt to changing world events, and react to public opinions that may result in bad publicity for your museum.

And my golly, does it looks beautiful. Vincent Dutrait lends his arty talents to the project, penning the 180 objects displayed on the cards.

Museum is on Kickstarter at the moment, with a little over 11 days to go. It’s 238% funded and expected to be released in June 2018. The rule book is available to peruse, and a number of people in the board gaming community have given their first impressions, including Rahdo — have a look.

I’m quite excited by the prospect of Museum and have backed it. Kickstarter isn’t a store, so your investment might be at risk. I’ve asked Holy Grail Games and they assure me that the game will be available in stores next year with an RRP of 55 Euro. The retail release will, however, not feature the Kickstarter exclusives, such as solo mode and the two expansions, Cthulhu Relics and Crystal Skulls.

For more details, click on over to Musem’s page on Kickstarter.

And that’s it for this starter post of Roll, Player. Please do come back for more in the very near future. Let us know if you want to see more posts like this. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated!

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In New Style Boutique 3, you take the role of a young lady who inherits a fashion boutique from her uncle Tim. Your talent, naturally, runs towards finding the right style for people who enter your boutique. It is not just up to you to recommend fashions, though, you have to keep your shop well-stocked with clothing in various styles. On the way, you’ll meet three ladies who aspire to be singers, all in different ways. And naturally, the fashions you choose for these ladies will determine the kind of star they become.

I was slightly worried going into New Style Boutique 3 that as someone of the male persuasion, I knew next to nothing about women’s fashions. The other thought that went through my mind was “how much fun can this really be?” I needn’t have worried too much, though, because the game comes with a fairly comprehensive encyclopedia called “Fashion 101”. In it, you can find definitions of just about everything you’ll encounter, whether it be the different fashion styles (lively, bold, Gothic, boho-chic, and about a dozen more), different articles of clothing (inners, jackets, skirts, shoes, hats and more), and accessories and makeup and hair. It’s a crazy amount of detail, massing up to over 10,000 individual items.

Here’s how the game works in practice. You get to your shop in the morning (or whenever you’ve condescended to check in on things, because if you’re away, your assistant will handle things that don’t include actually selling clothing), and find customers waiting. The first customer will tell you a story about how she broke a heel while wandering around, and now needs new shoes in a stiletto style. The second customer is feeling particularly rebellious and wants an entire outfit in a Gothic style. The last customer says she needs a jacket that matches her lipstick. You can check your stock to determine whether you actually have the items they’re asking for, then make a suggestion and see if they go with it. You have two options when suggesting an outfit or an article of clothing: you can give give a tentative “Take a look”, which gives your customer three chances to back out if they don’t like what you’ve chosen, or the more emphatic “Try it on!”, which is an all-or-nothing go. You better be sure the customer will like what you’ve chosen here, because if they don’t, they might not spend money at your store. Each customer also has a rough budget of how much she’d like to spend, so staying within that budget can be just as much of a challenge as finding the right item, so having a wide range of items is key to satisfying everyone.

Actually choosing the clothing for your client isn’t as hard as I initially thought, though, because the clothing selection screen has a search function, so you can drill down quite finely to what she wants. If your customer is looking for a rock-style tank-top inner in yellow with black stripes, you’ll have no problem figuring out whether you have the item or not. If you have it, that’s awesome. Item sold, unless it costs much more than she was budgeting for. If you don’t have stock, then you’re going to have to tell her to wait while you stock up, and this is where you run over to the exhibition hall, where you can grab items from the brand stores to stock in your boutique. Need something bold or lively? You’re going to need to pick those items up at AZ-USA. Need something more feminine? Chorale is your baby. Not all of the stores are available to start with, though. These get unlocked as the game progresses and your style level increases, so if you require Gothic clothing from Raven Candle near the start of the game, you’re fresh out of luck, unless you can convince your client that the black, buckle-up corset from Rock Diva is essentially the same thing.

Failure isn’t as hard and dramatic in New Style Boutique 3 as more male-oriented games, though. The clients are all usually very nice to you (Ed: so it’s not very true to life, is it?), and if you don’t recommend something they’ll absolutely love, if it’s close enough and you say “Try it on!”, they’ll either usually take it anyhow, or you’ll be given the chance the convince them to buy it. If you recommend something completely out of left field, or something totally not in the style they’re after (giving a muted, feminine item to someone who wanted a bold, rocking outfit, for example), they’ll usually tell you it’s not what they wanted, leave, but be back within the next day or two to ask you again, up to three times. As the game progresses, the requests will start getting harder, meaning you’ll be looking for a very, very specific item of clothing or accessory.

Furthermore, as your style level increases and your make more customers happy, some new stores will open in town, different to the supplier shops in the exhibition hall. The first one you’ll get is a hair salon, where your customers will ask you to give hair style recommendations. You’ll work together with the hair stylist to create that look. It could be as simple as “I just want blue hair”, to “I need something in the same color as before, but in a boyish style with long bangs”. Once again, as long as you’re close enough, you’ll be fine. You don’t earn any money for doing hair salon work, but successful looks will increase your fashion score, giving you access to more clothing, more clients, and more hairstyles. Later on, you’ll get to do the same thing with makeup. I understand that a men’s fashion boutique also opens up later in the game, but as of my playtime (in excess of 15 hours) I’ve yet to unlock this feature.

I must say that New Style Boutique 3 is the ultimate fashion creative’s game. You get to make a lot of choices here. Not only can you choose the layout of your shop, you also can choose the layout of your apartment, and later on, even design your own clothing, storefront window, storefront mannequin, and so on. Not only that, you can also trade designs with others online. At the time of writing, though, the servers weren’t available, so I couldn’t test the feature.

One thing I will say about New Style Boutique 3 is that, possibly because it’s aimed at girls, it’s not very colorblind friendly. I know the percentage of colorblind girls out there is much smaller than boys, but they are there. So going back to the example of the lady who wanted an item of clothing to match her lipstick, I saw pink lipstick, but chose a blue item because it looked pink to me. Naturally, she went off in a huff because what she actually wanted was something purple. In cases like this, explicitly mentioning the actual color would have made a huge difference.

The rest of the issues I have with New Style Boutique 3 are more in the “nice to have” category. For example, when checking stock to see if you have an item being requested, you have to back right out of the inventory, say you have the item, and then find it again. It would have been nice to be able to make the recommendation from the “check stock” screen. The other issue I had was getting stock from suppliers at the exhibition hall in a particular style: there’s no way to search for a particular style in a given supplier’s shop. So if you’re looking for an item in a girly style, your best bet is to hit up April Bon-Bon, but you’re just as likely to find an item in the same style at Basic U for cheaper, and this can be a sticky issue if you’re a bad enough saleswoman and you’re low on cash to restock. Later on in the game, you’ll get a cellphone app that allows you to restock quickly with styles that you’ve bought before, and you CAN search for styles in this app, but if you’re after new fashions you still have to hit up the exhibition hall.

So after these 15-odd hours of playing New Style Boutique 3, what’s my impression? I enjoyed it, and even though I’m not precisely the target demographic, the fact that I had a good time with the game indicates just how much fun it is. There’s something definitely satisfying about giving people the right outfit, even if some of the animations are a bit over the top and narmy.

That all being said, I think it best to finish with an anecdote. I was at the mall over the weekend, and because I’d been so immersed in the game, my head was full of fashion, in the same way that you see ways of fitting things together after hours of Tetris. I found myself in front of the display window of a large fashion outlet (not going to mention any names except to say that it rhymes with “blue firths”). My first thought when looking at the display mannequin? “The person who put this outfit on the dummy used the wrong fashion combination”.

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Super Mario Odyssey starts starts in media res, with Princess Peach having been kidnapped once again by Bowser, that red-haired turtle dragon. Somehow, Bowser has also kidnapped a sentient tiara named…Tiara. Mario is brutally and woefully defeated in his effort to defeat Bowser and retrieve the kidnapped princess, and his iconic red cap is shredded. Cappy, a sentient top hat and the beloved of Tiara, rescues Mario, and takes the place of his red cap. The pair start their adventure across the various kingdoms to save Peach and Tiara, and restore peace in the wake of Bowser’s wedding preparations.

From the trailers, it was beginning to look as if Super Mario Odyssey was an open-world Mario game, in a similar vein to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but in practice this is not quite the case. Certainly, Super Mario Odyssey is less single-mindedly goal oriented than the previous games, and there’s no single flagpole or Super Star to reach at the end of each stage. Nor are there the sequential platform levels to be run through, either. Instead, what you’re given is a grand Kingdom across which is scattered a whole bunch of Power Moons. In the main story, your objective is to obtain a specified number of Power Moons before you can proceed to the next Kingdom. These moons are at the same time everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes they’re just lying about, there for the taking, and at other times you have to jump through literal hoops to figure out how to get them.

To aid with this, Cappy has one singularly useful skill: the ability to allow Mario to possess other creatures across the kingdoms (this is called “cap-turing”, get it?), and use their skills. For instance, in the first world, the Cap Kingdom, you’re able to possess a frog and use its ability to jump higher than normal. Or you can capture a Paragooma and use its ability to fly around. Larger creatures, such as the T-Rex, have a time limit on how long they can be captured for. It was fun trying to figure out what can and can’t be caught, and then what to do with something once you had captured it.

The game itself is a fairly standard platformer in the style of Mario games, but with a more free-roaming, open-ended gameplay. More Super Mario Sunshine and less Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario 3D World, even though Super Mario Odyssey espouses features of all of these. In fact, if you’d played a recent Super Mario platformer in a 3D style, you’ll be right at home, since the control mechanisms are almost identical. That being said, you’ll also feel right at home in certain sections of the game if you’re a veteran of the 2D platformer games, since there are large sections of the game that are played in an 8-bit, 2D style on a standard 3D surface. These sections are usually used to get from a low region to a high one, but often contain many secrets in the 3D expressions of the 2D world. One of my favourites is the pillar you have to ascend in the desert kingdom, Tostarena. The entire pillar is a 2D Mario course, but naturally you have to work your way around it to get up the pillar. It’s so crazy that it actually works.

The Kingdoms themselves are an imaginative mix of things, ranging from the Jurassic-style setting of the Cascade Kingdom, to the cityscape of New Donk City in the Metro Kingdom, to a setting that would look more at home in a Final Fantasy game. Each region looks so vastly different to the next that it’s easy to tell where you are just by looking. What I personally love about how the world and Kingdoms here work is that it goes a long way toward unifying the world of Super Mario, and explains how he could have been Jumpman more than 30 years ago, amongst other things. The Kingdoms also vary in size and content by quite a bit. Cloud Kingdom, for example, is simply a place for a boss battle when you first encounter it (although there is more stuff to do here later on), while the Desert Kingdom is absolutely massive, and so full of stuff that you can spend literal hours here just poking around.

The graphical style is absolutely gorgeous, but I personally found this weird mix of graphical styles a bit…unsettling? I mean, Mario himself is freakishly proportioned to start with, but putting him next to realistically-proportioned people just emphasises how freakish his stature actually is. Still, it’s a beautiful game, no matter which Kingdom you’re in, and the little details in the most unexpected of places is where the delight comes in. In fact, it’s the same “little things” design ethos that delighted us in Breath of the Wild that comes through in Super Mario Odyssey. It’s that, and the sheer number of things to do and see, whether it be finding secret paintings hidden around the Kingdoms, or racing around Tostarena on a Jaxi, or participating in a free-run from the top of Cap Kingdom to the bottom, or just hunting down those hidden doors and regions where you can gather more Moons.

Speaking of the Hat Doors (a door emblazoned with a hat symbol, which you open by throwing Cappy), the regions that these doors lead to are more reminiscent of those crazy standalone levels in Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario 3D Land than anything else, but are just as much fun to play and explore in as the outside Kingdom. The goal in these rooms is far clearer: get the one or two Power Moons at the end. The design aesthetic here is as wondrous as always, and often as frustrating and puzzling as before. I felt right at home.

We need to talk about controls for a bit. Super Mario Odyssey can be controlled in a number of ways, although the game recommends detached Joy-Cons. I tried all the methods, and found I actually did prefer the detached Joy-Con mode, simply because some of the attacks are impossible to pull off without waggling the controllers around. There’s nothing wrong with it, of course, and as a Super Mario Galaxy native, I was quite at home with the motion controls. Most of the attacks and moves can also be done with the Joy-Cons in the dock, but it’s far harder to pull off.

Nintendo, being Nintendo, added a two player mode as well, and I have to say it’s miles and away better than the paltry offering we had in Super Mario Galaxy, but also inferior to the multiplayer mode in Super Mario 3D World. Player two takes control of Cappy independently from Mario, and this has several ramifications. The first is that you have to be continually communicating with each other about where you’re going and what you’re aiming for. The second is that the camera naturally follows Mario around, not Cappy. I played this mode with a number of people to see how they accommodated it, and I played as both Mario and Cappy. It’s actually great fun both ways, and you don’t feel like you’re relegated to just an attachment. For what it’s worth, Nintendo got it right within the bounds of the game, and the ability to simply hand one Joy-Con to the other player makes it even better (although two sets of Joy-Cons is even betterer).

You’ll likely blaze through the story in Super Mario Odyssey, but funnily enough, the meat of the game is actually after the story is complete. I won’t spoil it more than that, but just know that “The End” is far from the end. While the story itself is Paper-Mario thin, the gameplay is about as solid as it’s ever going to be. Mario, Peach, and Bowser are archetypes; they do what they do, no matter what hat they’re wearing. If you want character depth, you’re better off looking at Mario’s brother, Luigi. On the other hand, although the main story might be short, it doesn’t have to be–you can take as much time as you like in each Kingdom.

As it stands, though, Super Mario Odyssey is easily the Nintendo Switch’s best platforming title, and the first serious Mario title for the console. I love that with a Mario game, you are never really out of your depth, and you know almost exactly what to expect: a heck of a lot of fun in a small, red package.

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The story in Marvel vs Capcom infinite is a little twisty, so stick with me here. Ultron Prime is busy trying to gather the Infinity Stones, which will grant him Powers Cosmic! and help him defeat his enemies: a collection of Marvel superheroes and various characters from Capcom games. The good guys plan? Steal a highly dangerous prisoner from Ultron Prime and use him to help locate the remaining Infinity Stones and in so doing, use them to defeat Ultron. The plan doesn’t quite go as …err…planned, because Ultron has at his command a virus that gives him mind control over anyone infected with it. It just gets hairier from here on in, and any further details are tantamount to spoilers.

Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is, when you boil away the story, a 2D fighting game. I shouldn’t have to go into the details of what makes a fighting game a fighting game, because they’ve been with us since at least the late 1970s, and was codified by games such as Street Fighter since the 1990s. Tag-team-based fighters have been with us since before Dead or Alive. The gimmick for Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is the Infinity Stone mechanic, which can drastically change the fighting landscape depending on the stone you choose.

In many ways, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is a textbook fighting game. 2D plane? Check. Health bars? Check. Roster of fighters with various movesets that have to be memorized? Check. Large-breasted women? Check. Large-breasted men? Double-check, and then some extra for Mike Haggar. The game is the epitome of something that would do pleasurably well in a traditional video arcade, minus all the cutscenes, of course. Still, pitting your skill against the AI is one thing. Going head to head with another player? That’s where all the fun is.

The game’s controls were, I found, accurate enough to get me to to pull off the combos and maneuvers that such a game requires. The tutorial (which is, bizarrely, found under “Mission Mode”) does a lot to get you the point of being a competent fighter. Button mashing is not going to cut it here. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not going to make much headway. I like that this is the approach, because games that allow you to win by button mashing never feel fair. Each character also has a diverse enough range of powers and weights, so it seldom feels like you’re playing a reskin of the same character. I liked some of the secondary attacks, for example when Rocket Raccoon summons Groot for a quick “I AM GROOT!” and a good thwacking of your opponent. It all feels satisfyingly visceral.

Graphically, the game is about what you’d expect, although some of the characters, when given a level of realism that they weren’t intended for, can get uncanny valley scary. For a great example, we need look no further than Arthur, the ghost-killing and goblin-slaying knight. His over-large eyes and tiny stature would look comical next to the more realistically proportioned Marvel heroes if it weren’t on the wrong side of freaky.

Overall, I found the game to be a capable fighting experience. The Infinity Stone mechanic added an interesting switch up, especially since each stone does something different. I still feel unconvinced by the crossover but I can understand how other people would enjoy seeing their favourite characters battle it out against those from a different universe. Is it the best fighting game out there? Not in my opinion, but it’s still a fairly decent one.

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In Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, you take the role of a young girl or boy who wants to prove to an overbearing parent that you can make it in life as a farmer. Yes, this is really how it starts, and before you start the game you’re treated to almost 15 minutes of cutscene and dialog to rationalize why you’re out in the sticks. In any event, you’re sent to live in pastoral bliss with your uncle Frank, who bequeaths to you a piece of land that you can grow and develop as you wish. Initially, you’ll be able to visit the main town of the game, but as you progress through the game, the other two towns will open, each one with its own character and culture.

Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns is, at heart, a farming life sim with a romanticized idea of what farming is actually about. You’re free to do any number of things throughout the day, within limits. Those limits are usually “time”, “energy”, and “money”. So it’s like real life in that respect. You can regenerate the second by eating food, but money must be made by growing and selling stuff, foraging or fishing, or by doing odd jobs around town. The jobs can range anywhere from brushing cows to weeding grass to delivering parcels for others, shipping certain types of goods, or even being a guinea pig for the local doctor. Yes, I’m completely serious about this. You can elect, in exchange for money, to take part in drug trials at your own peril. I’m not sure whether the doctor has a license to experiment on the villagers, but it certainly adds a dark undertone to what is otherwise a very happy, chirpy game.

Farm life sims like this are difficult to categorize in terms of fun, because the pace isn’t going to drive gameplay. This is a game about long-term rewards, which is what farming is. It will take ages to build enough capital to even start making the most basic of changes to your farm. That being said, there are plenty of opportunities to make a quick buck if you’re willing to forage between periods where your crops are still growing.

The three towns in the game have their own character, and it’s not a case of “one is much like the other”. It isn’t, and it’s clear from the graphical style, the inhabitants, and the range of goods sold that they’re all their own separate places. For example, the first place you have access to from the start, Westown, is very much a wild-west styled place; by contrast, the second place, Lulukoko, is like a Hawaiian village. You’ll have to traipse back and forth between the three locations to be able to accomplish all you need to.

Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns has its share of annoyances, though, and the biggest one is that you can’t skip or speed up dialog or cutscenes. And given how much of the early game is just you passively waiting for things to get started, it can get a bit much for the impatient. Thankfully, once things get started, you’ll seldom encounter ridiculous quantities of dialog. Most other minor annoyances work themselves out once you start upgrading everything. It’s just getting the cash and resources to do so that can make things a bit of a grind.

The game is certainly a different kind of beast to Harvest Moon. I like that looking after crops and livestock is less effort, and that there’s an entire community already in place. The place feels lived in and vivid, and not some plot of virtual land that you just happen across. However, I do feel that by reducing everything to a skill-less “press A to look after cows!” sort of formula, you lose something. A little challenge here and there would have been appreciated. As it is, though, the challenge is in fulfilling obligations to people and obtaining the maximum reward for the least effort. So, once again, a lot like life. Are we all REALLY sure we’re not living in a sim?

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Everybody’s Golf is a golf game that, like on its Nintendo counterparts, keeps the focus on accessibility and fun. There is no story to be had here; you choose a course, choose your kit, and play. If you’ve played a golf video game before, you’ll be fairly familiar with the way that Everybody’s Golf lays things out. You’re handed a stack of clubs, some balls, and set loose on a golf course. The object, of course, is to knock the ball into the hole in the fewest number of shots. Doing well will earn you points and coins.

The new Everybody’s Golf favours levelling the clubs themselves instead of your character, and the more you use and perform different spins with the club, the better it will start doing. This applies on a per-golf-club basis, though, so if you use side spin on your number 3 wood, this won’t have any effect on any of the other clubs. This ends up being a good thing, because you’ll want to have excellent distance with your driver, but more control with some of the other clubs. Oh, and new to the PS4 version of Everybody’s Golf is a Tornado Cup that sucks in nearby slow-moving passing balls. It’s especially useful for beginner players.

New also to this version of the game is a home area that you can roam about freely. Initially it is devoid of life but for yourself, but the more you play the more your home area will start filling up with people you can you talk to, with looks you can copy for a price. There is also a shop where you can buy new outfits and equipment, an old man who will quiz you in exchange for prizes, and also the entrance to the online arena. As you play, you’ll also eventually unlock extra activities such as fishing and driving around in the golf cart, making the home area less boring to be in.

But before even all of that, you have to go through the character creation. Normally I breeze through these portions of the game and accept whatever default character the game comes with. I haven’t had so much fun designing a character as I had in Everybody’s Golf. The options are nuts, and the levels you can go to exaggerate a feature is insanely funny. I must have spent over an hour just playing with these settings and howling with laughter over making a cyclops, or a character with an upside-down face. We all get our kicks in different ways, though, so if you don’t find it entertaining, just accept one of the random looks and move on.

If you’ve played Everybody’s Golf before, the interface and mechanics will be familiar enough that you’ll need little ramping up. If you haven’t, the game eases you in gently enough, although I found that the explanations for spin was a bit lacking in the early parts of the game. It also doesn’t work in exactly the same way as on the Ps Vita version, so muscle memory betrayed me a bit here. Still, the nice thing is that the loading screen gives you the chance to practise and perfect that muscle memory.

I mentioned that the game has both single player and multiplayer sections, but to get to everything, you have to play a ridiculous amount of the solo campaign. Initially you’ll have access to the inner nine holes of the first course, slowly opening access to the back nine as well. Every round you play earns you XP toward a “boss battle” of sorts: the usual one-on-one games against a series of increasingly skilled and powerful opponents. However, for every one you defeat, you need to amass more XP to get to the next one. And it’s not linear, either. To give you an idea, to begin with you need to defeat two opponents to unlock the back nine, but that means about three to four rounds of nine-hole golf per opponent. When you unlock level two, you now need to defeat three opponents, with a similar amount of rounds in between each player. Only at this point will you have unlocked the first nine of the second course. Provided you beat each opponent, of course. One majorly messed up hole could ruin your run entirely.

The online multiplayer section of the game is insane fun, but you don’t get access to most of it if you haven’t unlocked the courses in solo mode. There are several aspects to online modes: the daily tournament, regular stroke play against the entire global population of Everybody’s Golf players (most of whom, by the looks of it, are Japanese), and a mode called Turf War. The daily tournament is just that, a daily game to see how well you rank against others. Unlike the regular, solo mode, you’re allowed to wander around the golf course at will, and attack any hole you like to try and register a record on it. The other online mode is turf war, where you are sorted into either a red or a blue team, and the object is to score more points than the other team. I couldn’t find enough players to get a game going, so this feels like an underused portion of Everybody’s Golf. You can also gather a group of friends and play a round together, online and offline. I found this mode a lot more fun than solo mode, but that’s to be expected.

Overall, Everybody’s Golf is about as much fun as I’d expected, although the work curve in unlocking everything is heavy, especially considering you can’t use the later courses online if you haven’t unlocked them. This is the only really major dent in what is otherwise a solid game with a really great pedigree behind it. Everybody’s Golf is something I’ve played a lot before, and this trend looks set to continue for a long time yet. And if you’re ever online, look me up and we’ll play a few rounds.

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Ark: Survival Evolved falls squarely into the category of hardcore survival. There’s no other way you can classify this game. And knowing that means that you should be prepared for what is going to come. I was not. Firing up my PS4 and loading Ark was an exercise in excitement and impatience, tempered by the knowledge that I was soon going to be dominating a landscape populated with epic dinosaurs and grand, majestic structures that I’d meticulously crafted.

I opted for a single player game, not being up to the challenge of PVP quite yet. The character creation screen is fulsome and detailed and you’re free to make yourself look exactly as you’d like. I opted for extremely pale, tall and emaciated with a teeny, tiny head on top of ultra-broad shoulders. Because this is the pinnacle of the ideal human physique.

Finally ready, confident of my place at the top of the food chain, I launched myself into the mysterious world of Ark. It was naturally something of a surprise, then, when I died in the first 60 seconds of gameplay. I did mention that this was a hardcore survival game, didn’t I? For a first-time player, it’s easy to be confused about your role in life. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why do I have a strange, apparently itchy stone embedded in my arm? These are the kinds of philosophical questions that keep us all up at night, I’m certain that Descartes had something to say about it somewhere in Principia philosophiae, but for the life of me I can’t find the exact passage.

I abandoned this line of existentialist wondering and went wandering instead. Feeling particularly brave, I ambled into the sparse woods for about 100 meters before being mobbed by a group of compys (compsognathus). They may look like the chickens of the dinosaur world, but in a pack they’re basically land-borne piranhas, and they soon dispatched me to the respawn screen.

Feeling brave again (Ed: Some people just don’t learn, do they?), I headed in the opposite direction of the compy horde and, after literally punching some trees down to gather their wood, crossed the tiny river to find shelter and was promptly eaten by a mega piranha, also known as compys of the water.

So as not to dwell on my failures as an apex predator for too long, I’ll just point out that the list of creatures just waiting to eat your face is extremely long and you’ll find yourself exploring death at the jaws of everything from Megalodon to Giganotosaurus and everything in between.

You would imagine that this would be discouraging but, if anything, it simply forces you to survive longer and breeds a healthy fear of anything that isn’t a little straw hut. Unless it’s a dread gazebo in which case you should run like hell.

Knowing that most things are deadly means instead of striding out into the tundra to dominate the world, you skulk and scurry, gathering berries in the grass before quickly killing a dodo to drag back to your huddling spot.

When the game warns you that you’re too cold, you take it seriously. When it tells you that you’re starving, there’s no temptation to simply wait it out – you will eat those dodgy looking berries for just a few more seconds of life while you find something more substantial. You’re a nothing in this world and you’ll remain so—that is, until you discover the magic of crafting.

Gameplay

Ark drops you off in the middle of a beautiful island, surrounded by palm trees, waving grass and water, you are given no information and no equipment besides the wholly inadequate underwear you first see when creating your character.

While Ark: Survival Evolved has been modified to work with the PS4, there are still some niggling irritations about the controls. Using and crafting items can be less than intuitive because of the limitations of a controller vs keyboard and mouse but there are no deal breakers; it simply takes a bit more time to get used to it.

World

The Ark world is incredibly diverse, and like other survival sandbox games, runs along the lines of “Biomes”. In Ark, these include beach, canyon, river, grassland, swamp, jungle, redwood forest, mountain, snow, ocean, and lava. If you’re a Minecraft fan, there’s no mushroom biome. Sorry. On the other hand, it feels highly organic. Each biome has its own distinct characteristics, dangers, and rewards for exploring. Some of the richest resources can be found at the bottom of the ocean.

The beach, where the game starts, is the safest and lowest-resourced area, with the lava biome only being available as a DLC: The Center purchase. You’re free, however, to build whatever you like wherever you like, but we’ll get into those details in a bit, as soon as I’ve saddled up.

Taming

Not satisfied with simply building a gigantic steel structure to lord it over the landscape? Tame some dinosaurs and ride (or fly!) them in a majestic display of your mastery.

While taming is something of a grind, it’s ultimately worth it for the benefits. Each dinosaur has unique properties that make it useful for anything from farming to combat, traveling and just looking awesome riding on the back of a triceratops. And who hasn’t wanted to ride a triceratops?

Crafting

Crafting is one of the most diverse and engaging activities in Ark, and it’s easy to get lost in the detail and the glory of it all. After spending ages taking down trees with bloodied knuckles, there’s a very real sense of achievement at making your first flint axe and finally gathering enough to make a fire, a grass platform and glimpse the freedom this will all give you in time.

The list of items that can be crafted is exhaustive and, since Ark has been around for a while, the list is readily available on any number of Wikis and guides. There’s even a companion app that gives you some excellent advantages. No true survivalist would resort to such banal and easy methods of surviving this game, though.

As you scale up through the tech tree, you’ll notice that it takes more and more effort to craft items. Once you start hitting the ammo stages of the game, it’s possible to spend an entire gaming session just farming enough items to craft ammo. Not exactly glamorous, but that’s where both cheats and tribes come in. Not that I cheated. Not that you can prove.

Tribes

Playing Ark: Survival Evolved as a single player game is certainly possible and, if you’re like me, enjoyable. I don’t go in for the chaos of PVP servers and prefer exploration to mutual destruction. However, even I saw the need for tribes once I’d played Ark for more than 24 hours.

Sure, it’s possible to craft all the way up to steel structures by yourself (note: NOT in 24 hours), but then that’s also missing the point of the whole Ark experience.

A tribe lends you strength, enables you to combines resources, and helps you collectively achieve bigger goals. With shared structures, items, dinosaurs, taming, and bonus XP, it’s hard to justify not belonging to a tribe, certainly not if you want to reach your full potential. With the new patches, PVE tribes can even declare war on each other just to mix things up a bit. Because clearly dinosaurs aren’t enough of a survival challenge here.

Cheats

If your main goal is to explore and see everything you can see, Ark comes with a fully explored and accessible list of cheats that give you full command over the environment, including creating and destroying items, creatures, and supply crates. Instant taming means you can quickly go for a little aerial sortie with your pet pteranodon, or throw up a building with the same kind of ease as being eaten by piranhas, whether the land kind or the water kind.

Verdict

Ark: Survival Evolved is a complex game, and it has its issues, but they are far outweighed by the sheer exuberance of pure survival in a hostile world where almost everything is stronger, faster, deadlier, and hungrier than you. It is filled to the brim with exotic creatures (see the screenshot above: A FREAKIN’ DRAGON) and every possible crafted item, it’s a work in progress that can only get better and better. If you have the patience to explore this game (I am still less than an hundred hours in), you will reap the rewards. Quick fix junkies will need to seek elsewhere: if you pick this up, you’re in for a long, glorious haul.

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I’m going to work from the assumption that you’ve not played a Layton game yet; although, if you have, feel free to skip this expository paragraph. Professor Herschel Layton is the hero of the six aforementioned prior games. He’s a gentleman and a scholar, and travels around with his young companion, Luke Triton, solving puzzles and mysteries. Following the grand tradition set out in Star Wars, the first three games in the series take place after the second three before following on with a seventh title. The confusion will be short-lived, I assure you.

So of course, it’s only fitting that the new seventh game in the series, Layton’s Mystery Journey, has very little to do with the Professor himself. The game instead stars his daughter, Katrielle–also known as Kat–in the role of the detective. She is helped by her handy assistant, Ernest, and a talking dog called Sherl, which is short for Sherlock. Well, I say “talking dog”, but it appears that only Kat and Ernest are able to hear him at all, which is very handy from a narrative point of view. The story itself concerns various vignettes featuring the “Seven Dragons”, the seven richest, most influential people in London.

The game itself is a series of brain-teaser style puzzles strung together by bits of story and dialog, all charmingly voiced and animated in the grand style of prior Professor Layton games. For fans of the prior games, I can say that the quality of the puzzles have, by and large, dropped significantly. Far too many of them are what I’d call trolling–the puzzle designer trying to be too darned clever for their own good and coming off as a smug little know-it-all. It’s difficult to give an example without giving away the answers to puzzles, but there are too many where tricky wordplay and hypercontextual answers makes the answer itself meaningless and frustratingly daft. There were too many answers that involved doing absolutely nothing. I was a little concerned about all this, and then I recalled reading that the original puzzle designer, Akira Tago, passed away in the middle of last year. I’m sad to say that the series replacement, Kuniaki Iwanami, has a lot to learn about creating puzzles that please the player and not the designer.

Kat herself is a bubbly personality that seems to show little regard for where her parents had gotten to. The question of Professor’s whereabouts are barely touched on, and Katrielle is either repressing her emotions about it in a really big way (and using food as her outlet), or is so ditsy that it seldom crosses her mind. She’s a passable detective, but the cases she works on are not Sherlock Holmesian level of clever in the least, and all the deduction and cleverness are Katrielle’s, not yours. You’re just here for the puzzles, apparently. Ernest and Sherl are pure narrative devices, to prevent Katrielle from talking to herself.

That all being said, many of the familiar series aspects return in Layton’s Mystery Journey, and you’ll still earn picarats for solving puzzles, still find hint coins hidden in each screen (and this game is particularly generous with hint coins!), and still have to solve the occasional mandatory puzzle in exchange for moving the story forward, and usually this will be given by one character or another. The cast of eccentric characters that dot London are delightful to experience, and the localization team have done a brilliant job as usual at translating Layton’s Mystery Journey from Japanese to English.

It’s been stated that the Layton series has a larger female gaming demographic than male, and it shows with the new direction that Layton’s Mystery Journey takes, and also with a number of the activities and minigames. You’re able to choose new outfits and looks for Kat, as well as change the decor in her parlor, and while I personally don’t understand these additions, I can’t fault the variety you’re given.

Overall, though, I did enjoy the game, despite the lower quality puzzles. The animated sections are beautiful, although the game lacks any 3D on the 3DS (possibly as a holdover from its initial iOS release). If it’s your first time playing a Layton game, you’ll have a grand time with it. But then the best thing about starting here is that there are a whole slew of older Layton games out there, with far superior puzzles to experience for the first time. I do envy you that!

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Before I continue, I’d like to point out that this is essentially the same game as Bony Spirits and Fleshy Souls, with Yo-Kai from both titles available to you now, as well as several other Yo-Kai that I’ll get to in a moment. I’ll discuss later whether the upgrade is worth your hard-earned cash. There is also some extra content, and I’ll be discussing that as well, but first, a relook at the basic idea and story around Yo-Kai Watch 2.

Yo-Kai Watch 2 starts with two evil spirits, Kin and Gin, removing the Yo-Kai watch from existence while Nate (or Katie, if that’s who you’ve chosen, but I’m going to assume you chose Nate here, because it’s easier to write the review on this basis) is sleeping. The following day, Nate is happily going out with his parents, having forgotten the watch. It’s school vacation time, and the day after that, he finds himself in front of a strange antique store which sells him the Yo-Kai Watch and gives him a coin for the capsule machine outside, where Nate becomes reacquainted with Whisper, his Yo-Kai butler. Their quest to figure out who would want the watch gone takes them further afield than they’ve been before, and even takes them into the past to confront the maker of the original Yo-Kai Watch. All of this is wrapped in a metafiction battle between two factions of Yo-Kai, Fleshies and Bonies.

If you’ve played the first Yo-Kai Watch, you’ll be in very familiar territory, because the game plays almost exactly the same as the first. You go around the area fighting and befriending Yo-Kai (various spirits and creatures of Japanese lore), using them to help you catch other Yo-Kai, or using them to help fulfill requests from the residents of Springdale.

You can also experience a slightly updated Terror Time, where you’re presented with a new Oni Crank-A-Kai capsule machine at the end for collecting a Oni tokens. The feed-food-to-Yo-Kai-to-befriend-them mechanic returns to this game again, but this time it’s a little easier to know what they want because the target pin actually shows you what works on them. To complicate things, though, there’s a couple of new food types that can be difficult to obtain, such as Udon noodles which is only sold by one itinerant vendor somewhere in Springdale. The Springdale you know and love is the same town with the same shops, but with a number of expanded locations and some new shops to visit.

Yo-Kai Watch 2 expands on the geography of the place by adding some new areas for you to explore, including Nate’s grandparents’ place in Harrisville and the seaside resort town of San Fantastico. In addition to the new regions introduced in Fleshy Souls and Bony Spirits, Yo-Kai Watch 2: Psychic Spectres introduces the mystical Hexpress train to a new region called the Gera Gera resort, which contains bunches of new quests and minigames for you to enjoy.

I mentioned earlier that there were some other new features, and one of them is the ability to capture and befriend Yo-Kai from a special tribe called Wicked. This may be a bigger draw for some than others, depending on how big a completionist you are. There are also game-exclusive bosses to fight, so in some places you’ll be getting a different experience.

Beyond this, Yo-Kai Watch 2: Psychic Spectres features expanded battle mode with more bosses and abilities, more story missions and even some backstories to some of your favourite Yo-Kai. It also has another great feature: the ability to port your save game from either Fleshy Souls or Bony Spirits. This means that you can continue your saved game from before (provided you haven’t deleted it, of course).

On the downside, it’s almost precisely the same game and story as before. My personal feeling is that this should have probably been released as a DLC title add-on to Bony and Fleshy, instead of a full game again, but you might have a different opinion on this one.

Is it worth buying again? Once again, it depends on how much of a completionist and a fan you are. If you want to catch as many Yo-Kai as possible, you’ll want to grab this game in addition to the one you already have. If you haven’t already purchased Yo-Kai Watch 2, however, you’ll be in for a whimsical treat with Yo-Kai Watch 2: Psychic Spectres, especially if you follow the Yo-Kai Watch TV show (which, I believe, is currently available on Netflix). It’s a lot of fun and can be genuinely funny in places. It may not have the same popularity and backing as Pokémon, but I’ll say this much…it’s definitely trying to get there!

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Knack II’s story starts in media res, with Knack (and a Knack-buddy if you’re playing co-op) ranging through the capital city of Newhaven, defeating robots who have started rampaging around and causing work for people who need to clean up afterwards. From there, the story jumps back to six months prior, giving you the full, wart-and-all opportunity to see how things can go from delightful to catastrophic in just a few months. You know, in much the same way that global politics has gone recently. Knack (helped in absolutely no way by his useless human handler) has the unenviable task of saving the day as he careens through around fifteen chapters worth of what amounts to a lot of goblin butt being kicked.

Sony apparently wanted Knack to be the Crash Bandicoot of the PS4 age (until they actually just relented and released a remaster of the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy and made Crash Bandicoot the Crash Bandicoot of the PS4 age). It’s a fair aim: a game that isn’t a hard-core first-person shooter that looks good and plays good. Knack II, like its predecessor, is a brawler game with platforming elements, more in line with God Of War or Devil May Cry than Crash, to be frank. Knack himself is a colourful enough character, but he lacks that spark of personalization that brings the character to life. Which is ironic, really, considering that he’s supposed to be something brought to life by a spark.

The game is presented as a series of screens with no camera control (don’t worry—you get used to it), and Knack must kick and punch his way around each of the levels whenever he’s not solving puzzles. The key part of Knack’s identity and abilities is that Knack’s core persona is a three-foot-tall animated being, and as he finds more of the things that make up his form (called “relics”), he grows taller. However, he’s able to quickly lose all the accumulated relics and drop down to his twee three-foot version again, and recombine into whatever sized beast you had previously.

I found the use of Knack’s height as a measure of health a novel take on the mechanism. A 16-foot Knack is a powerful, lumbering thing, able to destroy whole villages with a single, mighty footstep. Three-foot Knack? He’s a one hit wonder, although he’s a speedy little blighter. The more hits you take from various foes will temporarily knock relics off your body, causing you to shrink and also become less powerful. It’s the price you pay for playing badly.

In some parts of Knack II, Knack has access to relics that alter his attacks, gives him extra powers, and in general functions as a puzzle device. For example, one of the first ones you’ll encounter are iron relics, that make Knack hit harder and allow him the use of an iron whip. The whip is then reused later on to swing from beams and hooks, the only caveat being that if you take too much damage and lose the extra material, you can’t use that power anymore. These other parts also remain separate if you disassemble and reassemble Knack, leaving a Knack-shaped statue in place. Naturally, this is used for holding down pressure plates and suchlike. As I said, a puzzle element.

As Knack lumbers through the levels killing things, he’ll earn enough upgrade points to power him up, and you select these powers on a skill tree. They add more finesse and options to you combat combos, so that by the end of the game, you’re a far more effective fighting machine than you were when you started. It’s fun to eventually deal out the hurt more than you take it. Some skills will be freebies, given to you via the Glorious Gift of the Cut Scene, and what usually follows is an obstacle course built solely on getting you used to the new power. And then to top it off, there are extra powers and abilities that are hidden across stages, and that you must assemble as you find the well-cachéd chests. Many of them are insanely well hidden, too, and only accessible as mini-Knack. What I liked about these chests is that way that social gaming has been included. You will pull something random from the chest, but if you don’t want it, you can see what your friends have pulled as well, and choose that instead. This helps to more quickly build those useful items that the chests eventually provide.

If it weren’t clear that this game were a homage to traditional-style action platformers like God of War, the quick-time events will hammer that point home. Thankfully, they’re not a core mechanic of Knack II, and only occur during what amounts to glorified cut scenes when Knack is doing Something Clever such as using a wrecking ball to defeat several robots. They’re not annoying, not essential, but they’re there.

I encountered some odd glitches during my time playing Knack II, one of which teleported Knack across the screen at inconvenient times. You can tell it was a glitch because Knack would be doing something, like pushing a boulder around, and suddenly he’s across on the other side of the screen, running into a wall. This didn’t happen often, but it did occur enough times to annoy me, especially if it occurred at a point where I’d be climbing a wall and then find myself mysteriously at the bottom again.

Graphically, the game is pretty. The characters have a look similar to what you’d find in a Pixar or Dreamworks film. I think the intention was to get a point where you feel you’re playing a film, but the fixed camera ruins the effect somewhat. The levels are distinct enough across each of the chapters that you know roughly where you are, but it doesn’t hide the similarities of the layout. Once you’ve figure out the way it works, it’s fairly consistent. There are very few novel takes on an existing puzzle once you’ve encountered it.

Overall, I enjoyed Knack II. It’s a fun platformer, and the drop-in-drop-out co-op gameplay meant that I was able to summon aid in the form of my son; what was more likely to happen was that he was able to call me to assist with some of the harder fights. Knack II has an okay, if clichéd story, but the game doesn’t feel like it outstays its welcome.

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When I first got my copy of Agents of Mayhem, I was understandably excited, given that I was a big fan of Saints Row and even of Volition’s first release in 1998, Descent: Freespace.

Starting up, I felt the same sense of excitement and a palpable joy at the snappy art style and immediate irreverent humour. Let’s not pretend: this game is a visual spectacular and so appealing that I spent a good two hours wandering around the futuristic city of Seoul, South Korea just exploring buildings and getting as high up as I could for a bird’s eye view. That’s part of the problem though. I found the buildings and surrounding terrain in the relatively open world to be far more engaging than the levels I was forced to slog through to defeat the next in a line of cookie cutter super villains and their faceless, changeless crew of thugs/ninjas/jumping thugs.

Agents of Mayhem takes a really big page out of the massively over-the-top cartoons we all know and love from our childhoods (think G.I. Joe, Rambo, etc). However, it keeps the adult humour at the forefront so you never feel like the game is being condescending. If you were ever a fan of the 80s and 90s cartoons, you’re going to find a lot to tickle your nostalgia funnybone in one way or another.

Plots-a-plenty

Evil mastermind conglomerate, the League of Evil Gentleman Intent on Obliterating Nations, or LEGION for short (Ed: I have never before seen such a ridiculously contrived acronym), has struck a coordinated blow against the nations of the world and all that stands between them is the Multinational Agency Hunting Evil Masterminds, or MAYHEM (Ed: I stand corrected about the acronym thing), and their one key ability to shoot everyone and everything in sight(s).

The nefarious Dr Babylon leads LEGION while MAYHEM is under the steely gaze of ex-LEGION lieutenant Persephone Brimstone (who appears in the Saints Row: Gat out of Hell end scene — check out our review here) . MAYHEM is desperately trying to stop the next stage of LEGION’s plans and the current eye of the storm is sparkly, glittering Seoul.

Combat

Where Agents of Mayhem really comes out of its shell is the combat system. It’s quick, focused and can be made as complex or simple as you’d like. Throughout the course of the game, you’re introduced to all the various agents. Each agent has their own quirks, preferred weapon and super powers so you can stay with one team, or do as I did and switch between a few teams of three each with complementary abilities. Each agent has their own distinct personality and various catchphrases, almost all of them irreverent and rude which is a huge plus.

Switching between players is done using an instant “teleport” so that you can effectively chain together abilities. Add to that the upgrades, schematics for vehicles and new tech gleaned from battles and the combat stays relatively fresh.

Unfortunately, most of that beautiful combat system is geared towards killing off the same model guards time and time again as you run through identical dungeons to eventually battle a boss. Finished that boss and unlocked another agent? Great! Now go do it again. It’s like someone at Volition had run out of time to create new enemies and pressed Ctrl+C Ctrl+V three, four, or a hundred and two times.

Boss Battles and side stories

The evil masterminds seem content to very slowly take over the world setpiece by setpiece. While some of them have pretty engaging battles, there’s nothing much to keep you occupied so you’ll tend to wander off to explore the city or drive around in some of the futuristic vehicles available.

The baked-in Operations are nicely supplemented by agent specific “Special Investigations” which are definitely worth a play. At times funny, irreverent, emotional or even a little depressing, they give a pretty effective counterpoint to the normal over-the-top humour in the rest of the game.

Environment

As I said, the city of Seoul is beautifully rendered. It’s not terribly far-fetched to imagine that it could really look like this sometime in the not-too-distant future so it appealed to my explorer’s soul immediately. I was disappointed at the size of the city; it’s nowhere near as large and filled out as it could have been and if you’re hoping for something on the scale of GTA, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed.

NPCs are also barely moving sprites: they don’t have anything interesting to say and, although you can interact with them (think car and squish), there’s not much more after that.

I did spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out which combination of agents would best help me to leap to the top of the tallest buildings and go gallivanting off across the rooftops to find energy crystals and loot crates but I eventually had to go back and finish some missions at the insistence of the MAYHEM bosses hovering above the city.

Verdict

Agents of Mayhem gets points for style and quirkiness and with fifteen difficulty levels (15!) you’re definitely going to find aspects of this game challenging and although it’s repetitive, you’ll have fun doing it. If I can ever slog it out with real humans either at my side or at the end of my agent’s gun barrel I’ll be the first to form a league and play it every day.

With no multiplayer or co-op ability though, Agents of Mayhem is relegated to a game I’ll play once or twice, getting a breath of life each time there’s DLC. I’d love to give this game a spectacular rating as it can be genuinely fun and has a lot of heart but there’s simply not enough to it to be more than a quick fling.

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