When it comes to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, there are plenty of perfectly acceptable control methods. Using just a Wii Nunchuk is absolutely not one of them.

We’re a funny bunch here at Nintendo Life, so once the idea of using a single Nunchuk to play the game popped into our simple little heads, there was absolutely no going back. Why settle for using a Pro Controller or even the classic GameCube controller when you can do this? And why not jump online to try it out, even though it was almost inevitable that we’d lose spectacularly?

Our video overlord and all round nice chap Alex decided to do the honours, hooking up a standard Wii Remote Nunchuk accessory to the Switch using 8BitDo’s GBros. Adapter. You can see the shenanigans take place in the video above – we’re actually pretty impressed with how he managed to get on.

Already watched it? Then let us know your thoughts in the comments.

I’ve never been more completely and utterly done with a video game then I was by the end of Weappy’s This is the Police. It’s exhausting to watch a game with so much contempt for society and any attempt to do the right thing. Even our most jaded modern media allows for an acknowledgement of right and wrong, maybe even a few characters here and there to re-enforce it. The noir films that Police invokes with it’s smoky lounge jazz soundtrack and ‘complicated protagonist’ knows that the path towards right is always the goal. Even if your main character, in this case Police Chief Jack Boyd, doesn’t take the one of least resistance. It tirelessly feels dirty knowing Boyd doesn’t even want to attempt towards that direction at all.

Plenty of games put you in the shoes of bad guys who only want to do bad. Tommy Vercetti was unashamed about his one true goal, being the drug kingpin of 1980’s Vice City. But Grand Theft Auto didn’t pretend to offer you a choice in the matter, the player is Tommy, and you do what Tommy wants to do. After an investigation turns the Freeburg Police Department upside down, Jack Boyd is given 180 days to not make any waves, and coast his way to retirement – and a half a million dollar severance. Every single choice you make in his position is one that’s morally wrong, financially wrong, or both.

They don’t have to be ‘right’ mind you. If Weappy wants to make Jack the ultimate screw up that can’t seem to get it right ever, that’s their prerogative. The problem becomes the way it poisons the very concept of choice.

Take, for example, the very first big choice you make in the game: deciding whether or not to fire all of your black police officers. A racist gang is threatening to assassinate all of Freeburg’s black civil servants in a few days time, and City Hall has decided that the best course of action is to fire them all for their own safety. Since that is a completely stupid request, I ignored it. The deadline comes around and nothing happens. The headlines of the local papers mention the gang, but there’s nothing the manifests for me to do, operationally. For all intents and purposes, it was a false alarm.

Which didn’t stop City Hall from being ‘disappointed with my efficiency’ and cutting my staff. I learned quickly that not doing what City Hall wants garners no tangible benefits, except that warm fuzzy feeling you get for standing up to The Man. The same lesson is learned often when the local mob bosses want to use the PD as their own personal militia. Resist if you want, but in the end, they always win.

This cynical message is ‘the point’. The job is hard, life isn’t fair, etc. But abstaining from the shadier elements of political and criminal influence can turn playing this game into such an annoyance that I’d rather just turn it off, than decide to be a flunky. That could be the design philosophy here, but it feels more like a lazy interpretation of crime stories, than a good one on it’s own merit.

Also, the actual story of Jack’s final days as Police Chief feel entirely separate to the actual, day-to-day act of running the police force. In his private life, Jack is getting pictures of his butchered friend’s family being sent to him from the mob. His wife left him for a younger man. The Mayor has him under pressure. The ramifications of the character work happening in the comic book strip cinematics are almost non-existent anywhere else in the game. I never feel like Jack’s problems are mine. He’s popping pills and drinking his life away at a strip club. I’m micro managing police shifts.

It should be said that, at a top level glance, the actual act of playing Police is interesting. You control the rosters of officers and detectives across two shifts, and send them out to spontaneous calls in the city. There’s no way to know who the best officers are to send out to particular calls outside of their “professionalism” number. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the higher the chance to succeed at solving the problem out in the field.

But this isn’t a very consistent system. Sometimes, you can send a high number officer to a call and it works well. Sometimes, the offender gets away. There’s no real transparency over how any of this works. This becomes a bigger problem when you need more officers for more dangerous situations. I’ve had days where on literally every call, an officer died. There was no explanation or way to know that this could be the outcome before hand. You just send them out and roll the dice.

This only helps to exacerbate the need to rely on corruption to fill the gaps. Or at least it’s supposed to. Instead, it serves to make it feel as hopeless as the rest of the game. Amid the crimes that pop up will be special assignments to help some criminal elements, do some petty favors for locals, or be a police lackey for the Mayor. Sometimes they’ll reward you with cash, or maybe the deed will go a long way towards getting your next request for a raise approved. Or not. Everything feels so cloudy that you can’t help but feel just as disillusioned with this as everything else.

It at least looks good. The menus are clean, and the minimalist art matches the dour landscape of the writing and design. Technically the writing is fine, if not seemingly full of it’s own tropey cliches’. The voice acting is completely off, though. Jack Boyd, played by Duke Nukem’s John St. John, sounds way more like a tv announcer than a weary old cop. If Police should have lifted anything from their cop drama inspirations, it could have been the voice direction.

Instead, This is the Police just meanders in the swamp of dirty cop fiction. It gets wet and muddy, but doesn’t seem to even attempt to find any of the treasures that the better versions of these stories often do.

It’s almost exactly a year to the day since Mom Hid My Game! launched on Switch and Nintendo 3DS, and celebrating its anniversary in style, the game is now on sale for a limited time on both systems.

If you haven’t heard of this one before, Mom Hid My Game! is described as “an easy-going and funny escape game” in which your in-game mom rather literally hides your favourite games console. The absolute cheek of it.

We found that it had both good and bad points in our review last year; while its admittedly lower production mobile origins leave a lot to be desired, it has its own quirky charm to it reminiscent of games like WarioWare. It’s definitely an interesting one at the very least.

You’d usually expect to find the game available for $4.99 / £4.49, but this 30% sale takes that price down to $3.49 / £3.19 – the sale lasts until 9th January. If you’re after something rather different, and very silly, you might want to consider giving this one a chance.

Have you played the game before on either Switch or 3DS? Share your thoughts on the game with the rest of the community in the comments below.

The Steam Community has spoken, and we are proud to announce the finalists for The Steam Awards 2018 — but we still need your help choosing the winners!

Voting will open on December 20th, at the start of the 12th annual Steam Winter Sale. Vote in each of our 8 categories to share your top Steam games and developers from 2018 and obtain this year’s set of trading cards.

Voting closes January 3rd and winners will be announced early February 2019. Good luck to all of our nominees!

Nominees for Game of the Year

• PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS
• MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• HITMAN™ 2
• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Nominees for VR Game of the Year

• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR
• VRChat
• Beat Saber
• Fallout 4 VR
• SUPERHOT VR

Nominees for Labor of Love

• Dota 2
• Grand Theft Auto V
• No Man’s Sky
• Path of Exile
• Stardew Valley

Nominees for Best Environment

• The Witcher® 3: Wild Hunt
• Subnautica
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Far Cry 5
• DARK SOULS™ III

Nominees for Better with Friends

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® Siege
• PAYDAY 2
• Dead by Daylight
• Overcooked! 2

Nominees for Best Alternate History

• Wolfeinstein II: The New Colossus
• Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey
• Hearts of Iron IV
• Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI
• Fallout 4

Nominees for Most Fun with a Machine

• Euro Truck Simulator 2
• Rocket League
• NieR:Automata
• Factorio
• Space Engineers

Nominees for Best Developer

• CD PROJEKT RED
• Ubisoft
• Bethesda
• Rockstar Games
• Digital Extremes Ltd.
• Square Enix
• Capcom
• Paradox Interactive
• BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment
• Klei

Notes on Best Developer category:

“Best Developer” proved to be a highly-contested category with a lot of close calls among the top nominees. As a result, we expanded the set of nominees to 10. In addition, we’ve excluded ourselves from this category. We appreciate the love you’ve shown us, but we want to honor the other awesome developers on Steam, so we have excluded Valve from the final tally.

Gamasutra editor Alex Wawro continues our annual series of year-end roundups by looking back at some of the big events that shook up the game industry in 2018.

A lot of long-simmering game industry issues boiled over in 2018.

As we noted yesterday while looking back at the trends that defined the games business this year, many longtime studios executed big layoffs or shut down entirely.

Unionization in the game industry is a hot topic again, and in 2018& Game Workers Unite coalesced and seemed to focus years of chatter into meaningful statements and action.

After years of giving chase, French media giant Vivendi finally gave up on trying to acquire Ubisoft and sold off its entire stake in the company to (among others) Ubisoft, Tencent, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Iconoclasts finally came out!

2018 was a long one. Before we put it behind us, let’s think about which bits we’ll still be talking about in the year ahead.

The closure of Telltale Games (and Capcom Vancouver and Carbine and Bandai Namco Vancouver and Wargaming Seattle and…)

Telltale Games wasn’t the only studio to fall this year, but it was among the biggest and the most beloved. 

Despite clear signs of trouble (including reports of a toxic work environment, a big round of layoffs last year and a legal fight with ousted CEO Kevin Bruner) it was still a shock when Telltale initiated its “majority studio closure” in September, effectively laying off over 200 people with no warning and no severance.

They weren’t alone, either; Telltale’s sudden shuttering happened within days of Capcom Vancouver closing and Big Fish laying off over a hundred people, meaning the game industry lost two big studios and over 500 jobs in the course of a week. In retrospect, this seems a particularly bad year for mass layoffs in the game industry: 

While Skybound Entertainment works to finish up Telltale’s final Walking Dead game with at least some of the original developers, the once-beloved studio’s abrupt shutdown and failure to pay workers what they’re owed (inspiring at least one class action lawsuit) drove many to ask: will Telltale’s failure be a catalyst for industry reform? 

Valve implements rev-share tiers that favor the biggest earners (as indies flounder)

This year Steam’s polite dominance of the PC games industry appears shakier than ever, seen perhaps most clearly the week Valve announced it was formally creating new rev-share tiers that give big sellers a break.

By cutting its take on big earners (the standard 30 percent take drops to 25 percent on all post-September earnings over $10 million, and 20 percent over $50 million), Valve seems to be making a serious play to keep top game makers from taking their work elsewhere in the years ahead.

This has never been more viable, now that multiple publishers (including Bethesda, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts), and it comes right as Epic and Discord are opening up their own online game marketplaces with much better rev-share rates.

Most importantly, Valve is making this concession to big game makers even as smaller devs continue to struggle with discoverability problems in a market overflowing with remarkable games. Low-profile or niche games can easily get lost in the mix, especially when Valve is tweaking Steam’s recommendation algorithms in ways that drastically affect some devs’ earnings.

Once upon a time, just getting your game on Steam meant nearly guaranteed sales success; now, most devs could be forgiven for seeking greener pastures in which to launch their next game.

FTC agrees to investigate loot boxes in games (closing out a year of loot box backlash)

“Loot box” reward systems have been a thing in games for years, but after the Battlefront II imbroglio of 2017 they caught the attention of media outlets outside of games. Fast-forward to the end of 2018 and they’re now firmly in the sights of gambling regulators around the world, with countries like Belgium and The Netherlands branding them a potentially illegal form of gambling.

This has already caused devs like Valve, Square Enix, and ArenaNet to modify or stop selling games in those regions, and it’s likely that more devs will be impacted in the new year as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission commits to investigating loot box monetization schemes and their influence on young players. 

British game devs get their first-ever union (amid rising tides of unionization talk)

Talk of unionization in the game industry is nothing new, but action remains a rarity. Not so this year, when the United Kingdom chapter of pro-union activist group Game Workers Unite signed on to become an official branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, effectively creating the U.K.’s first game dev union. 

It’s a notable step forward for game industry labor activists, and it should give devs a fresh opportunity to observe what (if any) effect organizing can have on your local game industry. This is important because practical examples of organized labor in this business are still rare (though some do exist), and it caps off a year of reinvigorated conversations about unionization in the game industry. 

(Photo courtesy of @GWU_UK)

Game Workers Unite has been a driving voice in those discussions all year (or at least, since the IGDA unionization roundtable at GDC), but the focus has been on how to curb the game industry’s predilection for precarious, high-pressure jobs that burn people out and push them into other fields at a steady clip.

After a year filled with big layoffs and high-profile stories of toxic, mismanaged, or just plain poor work environments at various game companies ( Riot, ArenaNet, Rockstar et al), those discussions are sure to continue — and the U.K.’s first game industry union is likely to play a key role.

The Epic Games Store launches (bringing the Store Wars to a head)

The continuing success of Fortnite Battle Royale has pushed developer Epic Games in some surprising new directions, most notably towards backing the strongest Steam competitor to date. In launching its Epic Games Store with an 88/12 revenue-share split across the board, the company made a specific pitch to devs: we can take care of you better than Steam can.

While some devs don’t buy it, the evidence is compelling: Fortnite claims over 200 million registered players across all platforms, and while the Epic Games Store reaches only the PC portion of that audience, the company aims to build out a cross-platform market. There’s a (comparatively) small number of games competing for attention on the Epic store, and no paid ads to clutter up search results. 

Perhaps most importantly, Epic’s 12 percent take is among the lowest in the business (narrowly beaten by Discord’s 90/10 rev-share split), and the company waives its royalties on Epic Games Store sales of Unreal Engine games. At the end of a year in which Steam faced fresh competition from Discord (which also boasts over 200 million users) and other would-be game merchants, Epic’s decision to throw its Fortnite-fed weight around in Valve’s territory may create a fresh wave of opportunities for game devs in the year ahead. 

Want to read more about the best of 2018? Don’t miss our look at the 5 trends that defined the game industry this year, and keep your eyes peeled for more end-of-year reflections and lists from the Gamasutra team!

Play The Crew™ 2 for FREE starting now through Sunday at 1PM Pacific Time. You can also pickup The Crew™ 2 at 67% off the regular price!*

If you already have Steam installed, click here to install or play The Crew™ 2. If you don’t have Steam, you can download it here.

*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time