Enlarge / Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in. (credit: Goblinz Studio)

You can't buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free "Prologue" demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It's not quite like any other city builder I've played.

Mini Settlers is "mini" like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit ). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don't have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don't get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they'll come back if you fix what's wrong.

Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no "money" to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.

Baby Luigi represents the reaction of sandbagging racers in this artistic rendering. (credit: Nintendo)

Since Mario Kart 8 's launch on the Wii U, one of the game's most successful and controversial strategies has involved intentionally hanging out at the back of the pack to amass and abuse the game's best items. Now, over nine years since the game's initial release , Nintendo has taken steps to eliminate the controversial "bagging" strategy in the latest update to the Switch's Mario Kart 8 Deluxe .

Mario Kart 8 players who made use of "bagging" (short for "sandbagging" and sometimes also called "item smuggling") in online races would briefly retreat to last place to sit on a regenerating item box, waiting to acquire some of the game's most powerful items (which are much more likely to appear when you are far away from first place ). The bagging player could then use one of those items (say, a Golden Mushroom and/or Starman) to quickly catch up with the pack before using the other amassed item (say, a Bullet Bill) to build up a dominant lead. The strategy can be especially effective on tracks like "Cheese Land," where using a Bullet Bill in very specific locations can extend how long the powerful item lasts .

Not “cheating,” but not exactly “racing”?

Despite bagging's controversial reputation among many players, the strategy isn't really comparable to outright cheating—baggers play an unmodified version of the game as it was designed, after all. And for years , many Mario Kart 8 players have argued that it's a perfectly fair strategy that requires actual skill to use effectively. "Sandbagging is a risk vs reward kind of thing," GameFAQs user RydeonHD wrote in 2016 . "There have been many times where it can just plain out backfire (in those cases, it would've just been better to strive for first)."

Enlarge (credit: THQ Nordic)

The first Jagged Alliance game was published nine months after X-COM: UFO Defense , despite being developed at nearly the same time, in the same genre, with neither knowing about the other. X-COM took the throne as the progenitor of turn-based tactics games . Jagged Alliance sold okay and became a minor cult classic but is not mentioned in even a fraction of as many histories or ranked lists.

Jagged Alliance 2 was a richer, cruder, funnier, far better game. The sequel more fully meshed '80s action movie tropes and stereotypes with the peculiar fun of micromanaging a jungle gunfight, while also managing a cast of real characters. Like Soldier of Fortune magazine, or dozens of VHS box covers from the "Action" section, it's only realistic at a glance. As Darius Kazemi puts it in his wonderful book on the game : "No matter what a war-themed video game claims to do, it inevitably simulates the cultural fantasy of war and never war itself."

Like its predecessor, Jagged Alliance 2 had exponentially more developer cred than sales. It racked up editors' awards and high review scores, but its most notable nod was a nomination for " Best Game Nobody Played " in 1999. Nobody expected a true sequel 24 years later. But here we are, with a Jagged Alliance 3 that feels very direct in its sequel-dom.

The official Mastodon instance! With EU Video (a #peertube instance), it is part of an alternative social media pilot program proposed, and provided by the European Data Protection Supervisor (#EDPS). The pilot program contributes to the European Union’s #strategy for data and digital #sovereignty that aims to foster Europe’s independence in the digital world.

Press release (PDF) : https://edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2022/edps-launches-pilot-phase-two-social-media_en