Here’s three quickies I did not finish, for various reasons. Yes I’ve played games other than Zelda in the past month! A bit.

OlliOlli seemed stylish and fun, so I got it on sale. Turns out I couldn’t get on with the controls at all, so while it seems promising I didn’t want to invest the time to git gud, and failures are punished too much in the name of getting a perfect run.

I played Shift on iOS and it was a nice puzzle platformer with a cool gimmick of inverting the play space. This port is a bit sloppy but playing with buttons felt good, although the smartphone version’s control scheme was innovative and worked well too. You unlock colour schemes and new characters in this version, including guest characters from other indie games; I appreciate this. But the difficulty curve was absurd. The first 100 levels were straightforward, with usually one path, and sometimes I even managed to skip the intended actions. But level 101 promises the beginning of the real challenge, and yep, hard brick wall. There could have been more of a gradual ramp up is what I’m saying.

Mini-Mario & Friends is the latest in a long line of Mario vs Donkey Kong games that NST has been shackled to for years. It’s a well-designed puzzle game where you flip things around to adjust a course that an auto-walking clockwork cutie blunders through. Previous games have you dealing with a lemming-load of minis, but here there’s only one at a time which feels manageable. It’s a great game and looks fantastic, but it’s severely hamstrung by it being a promotional tool for amiibo. I only own three supported figures, and I really want to play more but cannot—not without tracking down what are at this point overpriced and out-of-stock dust collectors of characters I don’t care for. I hoped the Sports Superstars cards would fulfil the long-ago-teased “alternative to figures” role, but alas. The rest of this clever and cute game is locked behind a plasticwall, forever out of reach.