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★★★☆☆

Capsule Review: A Bird Story

A well told and emotionally engaging short (an hour or so) story about a boy and a bird, wrapped in the language and logic of dreams and memories (and told with no dialog). But the sections where the player has control present such limited options and are over so quickly, it’s not often clear why the game bothers with them at all - this might have been better served as a non-interactive experience.

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★★★★★

Capsule Review: To the Moon

An interactive story wrapped in the style and presentation of a SNES RPG. For folks with the right nostalgia, this is a very effective format and I personally would love to see more like it. The premise is compelling - you play as a pair of technicians who can rewrite the memories of the dying to grant them their life’s wish.

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★★☆☆☆

Capsule Review: Crypt of the NecroDancer

A rhythm-based roguelike where you maintain a multiplier by keeping your actions on the beat. This structure encourages you to rely on instinct and act quickly and is quite effective at creating flow - at least, it is when you know what you’re doing. To keep your multiplier, you have to make split-second decisions accounting for a decent amount of complexity and variety in monster movement and attack patterns.

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★★★★☆

Capsule Review: A Dark Room

A text-based idle game from before those were everywhere, and for my money it’s still the best one. Unusually for an idle game, it has an actual story with an actual ending. It presents a very coherent experience - the sparse visuals and writing, the mechanics that make sense on the surface but are really dark if you think through their implications, and the environmental storytelling of the post-apocalyptic setting that you explore in roguelike sections that spice up the gameplay all come together to create a compelling atmosphere.

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★☆☆☆☆

Capsule Review: Galactic Arms Race

A 2D space sim featuring procedurally generated weapons. It’s a neat idea, but it doesn’t really deliver - most guns have very pretty effects but are not actually useful in combat. Dodging enemy fire and leading targets in frenetic space battles is always fun, but here it’s wrapped in a generic quest system of the “Kill ten space pirates” variety and an overly complicated yet still shallow upgrade system.

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★★★☆☆

Capsule Review: 10,000,000

A match-3 game with endless runner and RPG elements - obstacles and enemies must be overcome by matching the right kinds of tiles, and other tiles grant resources that can be used to purchase upgrades between runs. The game’s best moments are when everything flows smoothly - you’re chaining tile matches, blasting through obstacles, and racking up huge point bonuses.

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Why People Pirate Amiibo and What Nintendo Can Do About It

Amiiqo disc

The Amiiqo is a recently announced device that can be used with an Android phone or tablet to back up and restore data from Amiibo figures. This data can easily be shared online, which means that the Amiiqo also effectively enables piracy of Amiibo.

Amiibo have only been around since November 2014. They aren’t the first major toys to life franchise - Skylanders came out in October 2011 and Disney Infinity launched in August 2013. (U.B. Funkeys in 2007 was a bit before its time, and I’m not sure when Hero Portal started because it’s not even on Wikipedia.) They all use similar technology (Amiibo uses NFC while others use RFID) and can thus all be backed up and pirated in roughly the same way. While the Amiiqo is not the first toys to life backup device to be announced (see, for example, MaxLander) it’s the first targeted specifically toward Amiibo and is getting more attention.

Why would Amiibo piracy be so much more interesting than Skylanders or Disney Infinity figure piracy? While Amiibo are in many ways similar to those franchises, there are several key differences that encourage piracy.

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