Download Games Roundup
Dodo! Sneezies! Edge! Rush! Miasma!
Sneezies
- WiiWare - 500 WiiWare points (£3.50)
- Also available on iPhone (£0.59) and iPad (£2.99)
Just one pop, and you can't stop. No, this isn't another unstoppable voyage to the bottom of a Pringles pipe, but a hapless re-acquaintance with one of the most inexplicably addictive games of recent years.
If you never encountered Retro Dreamer's iOS hit a couple of years back, here's the deal. Faced with a screen full of serenely floating sneezies trapped inside bubbles, it's your lot in life to set off chain reactions by carefully dispensing handfuls of sneezing powder. Judge it correctly and a gaggle of bubbles will pop in a nose-tickling shower, causing anyone in range to follow suit and blast their neighbours with a cloud of face germs.
As you'll soon find out, meeting the strict targets is easier said than done, and it's as much luck as judgement as to whether you'll be able to find the sweet spot that causes an effective chain reaction.
And yet even when you know that you've done well or badly because of the luck of the draw, you'll still convince yourself that you'll be able to spot the patterns anyway. There you are, hours later, still clicking away, trying to get that perfect chain reaction. People will shout incredulously that "it's not even a game," and you'll ignore them, achooing your way to insanity.
7/10
Edge
- PSN Minis - £3.99
- Also available on iPhone and iPad - £1.79
Ding dong! The witch is dead! Now seems as good a time as any to do the Tim Langdell dance gleefully around the burning pyre of bogus Edge patents. As a fitting bookend to the ongoing saga, Mobigame has gotten around to retrofitting its justifiably popular iOS puzzler to the oft-derided world of Minis.
Now available under its original 'Edge' name, this cube-shifting affair proves to be even more enjoyable in its new home on PS3 or PSP.
As usual, the goal is to move your cube around 46 minimalistic isometric 3D environments and reach the exit in the quickest possible time. En route, you have to negotiate the various obstacles, with the optional task of going for grade-based glory and scooping up all the coloured cubes you see scattered around.
What was considered one of the best mobile games around works a charm, with the more traditional control system affording you the kind of quick, confident precision that wasn't quite there on a touch screen.
And for once, the simple visual style scales up rather nicely, making it one of the rare Minis titles that doesn't induce projectile vomiting the minute you play it on your big screen telly. The only downside is having to pay more than twice the price than the iOS version, but hey, they've got to cover their unjust legal costs somehow. Ding dong! The witch is dead!
8/10