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3 fun games to keep you moving whilst staying at home

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Working from home has a lot of benefits. You miss out on a busy commute to your workplace or school, you no longer have to shell out good money on a sub-par pre-packaged meal on your lunch break and, maybe best of all, the time that would be spent these mundane activities is suddenly time saved that you can spend doing what you really want to. Perhaps the only downside to working from home our already sedentary lives are becoming even more so, with even more of our day now being consumed by sitting at a desk in front of a PC.

That’s why we have compiled a little list of titles which will help keep you moving whilst staying at home. Just a disclaimer, I’m obviously no health professional and the games on this list are of course not a real substitute for a solid workout at the gym or park but I still feel they could nevertheless very beneficial to your wellbeing; provided they’re used in conjunction with other forms of regular exercise of course!

3. Jump Rope Challenge

Platform(s): Nintendo Switch

Price*: Free!

Kicking off our list is Jump Rope Challenge which was recently released for free onto the Nintendo eShop. Players hold a Joy-Con in each hand and utilise the gyro controls to simulate jumping with a skipping rope whilst an onscreen bunny avatar mimics their actions. Every jump you make causes a pleasingly tactile controller vibration and increases the on-screen number counting up your jumps. You can set up daily goals with a range from one hundred to nine hundred jumps, which may not sound like much but you’d be surprised what nine hundred jumps in a short period of time can do to your calves!

You are incentivised to come back every day by a calendar screen which fills in each day with your time and number of jumps. This also serves a nice way to track your progress on your jumping journey. As a nice little bonus for pushing your limits, reaching the daily cap of one thousand jumps unlocks a special background image and accompanying set of whacky sound effects. There’s even an included multiplayer mode – provided you have enough joy-con’s to share around of course.

It sounds very basic and that’s because it is. For free however you can’t complain and if you’re particularly budget conscious, Jump Rope Challenge is an excellent way to get you and your family moving every day. Just make sure you remember to wear your Joy-Con straps or you might end up having to shell out for a TV repair!

If you want a little more variety in your daily exercise, or perhaps don’t own a Nintendo Switch, then read on…

2. Just Dance 2019

Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, Wii U, Wii mini, Wii, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3

Price*: ≈£15-£25 depending on platform, free demo available

Just Dance 2019 may seem a curious choice for this list, especially in light of the release of the more modern Just Dance 2020, but the incredible volume of platforms on which the game is available, both ancient and brand new, make this game miles ahead of the other titles on this list in terms of sheer accessibility.

In Just Dance 2019, players select a song from the included song list and then wildly flail their limbs in an attempt to mimic the on-screen dances as closely as possible. Whilst it’s a little slow at first, most songs gradually pick up the pace and by the end of a session you will have likely worked up quite a sweat. With a solid scoring system, which comes the ability to compare your totals to an online leader-board, and the tantalising prospect of unlocking more songs and goodies, it’s shocking just how addictive, and enjoyable, Just Dance can become.

There is a good variety in the forty songs included in the track-list which features popular mainstream artists like Britney Spears, Ariana Grande and Pharrell Williams, some international titles from Hatsune Miku and Blackpink and even the Pac-Man theme! If the included titles are not to your liking, there is also a subscription service which unlocks an additional four hundred songs through ‘Just Dance Unlimited‘. As a little bonus, a copy of the game comes with a one month free trial of this service.

The ‘Just Dance Controller’ app is a fantastically handy feature, removing the need to splash out on additional controllers if you want to get your friends or family dancing alongside you in the up to 6 person local multiplayer. Players can also try the game out before buying through the free demo, available on all platforms, which is restricted to a single song.

However, if you’re looking for something a bit less fun-oriented and more oriented towards serious exercise, then check out the item below…

1. Wii fit

Platform(s): Wii mini, Wii

Price*: ≈£40 second hand (including balance board)

Wii Fit is one of the best selling Wii titles and one of the best selling console games of all time – and for good reason! Using the included Wii Balance Board, players can undertake a variety of fitness activities accompanied by a virtual personal trainer. You can receive serious virtual lessons which coach you in yoga and building up core strength or partake in the more light-hearted mini-game activities which have you jogging around a virtual island paradise or shaking your hips around for a virtual hula-hoop.

The in-built body mass index (BMI) calculator is a fantastic tool and a good way to track your fitness as well as monitor the positive effects of your various digital workouts. It’s lesser-known successor Wii Fit Plus, also for the Wii and Wii Mini, adds a great many more minigames and exercises alongside a host of useful tools such as a calorie counter, the ability to create custom fitness regimes and even a few elements made to help you assess the fitness of your pets!

Lesser known still is the games sequel Wii Fit U, which is available on the Wii U. The Wii Balance Board returns accompanied by a gamepad stand and pedometer. This version of the title adds even more features and tools, even carrying over your progress and biometric data from the original Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus.

Just beware however, as any version of Wii Fit requires both a working Balance Board and Wii Remote, tracking down a fully functional version now almost thirteen years after its initial release could become quite a gruelling task.

*Prices are obtained from a range of sources and were accurate on the date of writing.

3 teeny-tiny developer mistakes that had catastrophic repercussions

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Believe it or not, we all make mistakes. Mistake making is one of the defining characteristics of humanity. Believe it or not, Game developers are also human, and that means they can make mistakes. Unlike the rest of us however, the smallest mistakes on their end can have absolutely huge knock-on effects.

Although it is certainly through making mistakes we learn,  sometimes it can be quite fun just to look back at some painful memories and reminisce about our (or others’!) mistakes. This is exactly what we’ll be doing here by coming together to point and laugh at 3 examples of tiny developer mistakes that had catastrophic repercussionson their games.

3: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing – Forgetting to make the truck move

Image result for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

Platform(s): PC

Price*: NA

Developer: Stellar Stone

When it comes to Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, it’s quite hard to find part of the game that isn’t a mistake. It’s a veritable buffet of errors. Everything from the missing textures on maps to the strange behaviour of the “physics engine” and the non-existent collision detection for your vehicle aims to hamper this would-be racer.

After many hours (40 seconds) of careful deliberation however, we have decided that the most egregious error is the fact that the developers seem to have forgotten to make your opponent’s lorry move. That’s right; Big Rigs is a racing game – without the racing.

What’s worse is the fact that the developers could has programmed in your oppositions movement. In an official patch version that surfaced online some time after launch, your rival actually moves! They don’t finish the race of course, just stopping short of the finish line (sorry if I got your hopes up). At least it’s something I suppose.

2: Team Fortress 2 – The crate that crashed a market

Platform(s): PC

Price*: Free!

Developer: Valve

By 11 years old I had already made plenty of mistakes. In Team Fortress 2‘s almost 12 year career however, it had very few under its belt. After over a decade of clean updates that would put other titles to shame, Valve was long overdue a major muck-up and, sure enough, in the last few weeks it finally arrived.

Ironically, it wasn’t a large-scale update that finally broke the game; but the simple addition of a new crate. It should have been an easy task. The TF2 team was just getting ready for a nice summer break and just needed to add a few new cosmetics in a groovy summer box before they could kick back and relax. They’ve added literally hundreds of different crates over the game’s long lifetime; everyone thought nothing could go wrong.

Everything went wrong.

Some strange coding mishap resulted in the game’s most valuable items; the highly coveted “unusual” hats to drop guaranteed from certain crates. This naturally tanked the game’s thriving Steam Community Market based economy and cost some hat traders losses hundreds of pounds in real world cash. The long term effects of the mistake are still unknown, but the market seems to have stablised in the last week. At least the community seems to have taken the glitch well, with countless hilarious memes appearing on the game’s subreddit.

1: Aliens: Colonial Marines – Giving the aliens lead poisoning

Image result for Alien Colonial Marines

Platform(s): PC, XBOX 360, PS3

Price*: £24.99

Developer: Gearbox Software

Gearbox Software is no newbie when it comes to controversy. Although this year’s trend seems to be to victimise the company for their allegiance to the Epic Games Store they have fallen victim to the internet’s disdain on many previous occassions. One such occasions was the release of the highly anticipated Aliens: Colonial Marines way back in 2013.

Freshly burned by the company’s previous disaster; the absolutely dreadful Duke Nukem: Forever, many fans and critics were quick to notice that Aliens: Colonial Marines was bad. Quite bad in fact. The title was critically panned with one of the main criticisms directed at the enemy aliens’ utterly incompetent AI.

What would have been an already mediocre horror-FPS became completely farcical with enemies that got stuck in walls, jammed in corners or otherwise just failed to acknowledge your existence. It took 5 years for a strangely dedicated modding community to pin down a problem with the AI. It wasn’t that the alien’s were inherently badly programmed, but rather that their programming was jeopardised by a typo.

Believe it or not, a mere typo managed to absolutely decimate a modern AAA game. Correcting “PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether” to “PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather” in one of the game’s files exponentially improves the enemy’s AI.

I’m not going to pretend that fixing this error makes the game that much more enjoyable, but it certainly makes it at least playable.

*Prices are Steam store prices (excluding discounts or sales) as of August 2019.

5 times DLC was so good it would make you regret not buying the season pass

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It’s safe to say that DLC is one of the most divisive topics in the gaming world today. Some people love it, some people hate it. It’s also safe to say that no matter on which side of the fence you sit we can all agree that some DLCs are definitely better than others. In light of this, why don’t we take some time to set aside our differences and discuss some of the times that DLC was so good it would definitely make you regret not buying the season pass.

5: The Crew: Calling All Units

Image result for the crew calling all units

Base game: The Crew

Platform(s): PC, XBOX ONE, PS4

Price*: £20.99

The biggest problem for me with the base game of The Crew was that it was quite frankly incredibly boring. A generic racing game with an admittedly enjoyable online open world that suffered from a severe lack of anything real to do. Luckily, The Crew: Calling All Units is a surprisingly expansive DLC that remedies that issue.

Calling All Units feels much more like what The Crew originally should have been, taking a leaf or two from games like Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Picking a side; either as a police officer or a criminal, transforms the vast open world of The Crew from a boring inconvenience you have to navigate between missions into a dynamic arena jam-packed with activities. As a policeman, you can patrol around urban the map participating in engaging police pursuits with any wrongdoers you happen to encounter and as a criminal you can cause as much vehicular chaos to your heart’s content while avoiding the watchful eye of the law.

Coming bundled with the previous expansion, The Crew: Wild Run, that £20.99 price tag feels like very good value for money – especially considering the base game is frequently free on Ubisoft’s store Uplay. As well as the online play to player content, the pack unlocks a set of very nice police and off-road vehicles, a host awesome customisation options and a even two whole new story campaigns to follow for people who aren’t too keen on the online aspects of the game.

4: Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep

Image result for Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep

Base game: Borderlands 2

Platform(s): PC, XBOX ONE (HD Ed.), XBOX 360, PS4 (HD Ed.), PS3

Price*: £7.99

Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep may be only one of the numerous DLC available for Borderlands 2 but it is certainly the strongest of the bunch. Offering an interesting twist on the Borderlands formula, Assault on Dragon Keep takes you to the world of an endearingly over-the-top parody of tabletop role-playing games.

With a distinctive artistic flair accompanied some of the funniest dialogue in the franchise, Assault on Dragon Keep stands out from the crowd. Although admittedly quite short, it’s length is certainly appropriate for the under £10 price tag and the co-op modes combined with the game’s inherent strong level of replayability means you’re certainly getting a lot of bang for your buck.

Whether for a fan of the franchise as a whole, a fan of the titular narrator Tiny Tina, around whom the whole DLC is centred, or just someone who wants to squeeze a couple more hours out of Borderlands 2, Assault on Dragon Keep is an absolute necessity.

3: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

Image result for xcom 2 war of the chosen

Base game: XCOM 2

Platform(s): PC, XBOX ONE, PS4

Price*: £34.99

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is the most expensive DLC on this list and for very good reason. Originally conceived as a fully fledged sequel to the superb XCOM 2, War of the Chosen packs a jaw-dropping amount of content.

War of the Chosen adds a renewed level of threat to the Advent regime; with a huge number of new enemies paired with never before seen mission locations and deadly new hazards but most importantly the inclusion of several new mini-bosses; the titular “chosen” who can appear randomly throughout the campaign and transform an already brutally difficult game into a nightmarishly tense desperation fuelled bid to save not just your squad, but the whole of humanity.

On top of all this, a new faction system adds a host of potential allies in the form of other human resistance factions. These potential allies however can also be potential enemies, and an in-depth level of micromanagement allows you to carefully control and monitor your relationships with each group.

Although its immense difficulty restricts this DLC exclusively to XCOM  2 veterans (seriously if your first playthrough is with this DLC you have zero chance of success) it is the rejuvenating boost the game needs to keep its experience fresh, even many years after its release.

2: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Rise from the Ashes

Base game: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Platform(s): PC (HD Ed.), XBOX ONE (HD Ed.), PS4 (HD Ed.), NINTENDO SWITCH (HD Ed.), NINTENDO 3DS (HD Ed.), NINTENDO DS

Price*: £29.99 (Trilogy pack)

Whilst technically not a DLC in the modern sense, Rise from the Ashes – a special bonus episode added to the DS port of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – was certainly too significant to overlook.

Rise from the Ashes fills all the check-boxes for a perfect DLC, with a length rivalling that of almost a third of the base game, a stand-alone story which introduces some of the series’ best characters, new and excellent additions to the base OST and most importantly a set of new forensic themed game-play additions which despite being all new to the series managed to fit in seamlessly with pre-existing game-play elements.

Despite being a bonus case, Rise from the Ashes is by far the strongest, most tightly written and deeply engaging of not just the first game – but arguably the whole original Ace Attorney trilogy.

If you missed this case first time or simply overlooked it, it is most certainly worth picking up a more modern variant of the game – I’d recommend the HD remasters with which it is included as standard – and see what all the fuss is about.

1: Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

Image result for far cry 3 blood

Base game: Far Cry 3

Platform(s): PC, XBOX 360, PS3

Price*: £12.49

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is unique on this list as the only truly stand-alone DLC. With a seperate launcher, menus and even steam store page; Blood Dragon is very good at presenting itself as a very different take on the Far Cry formula.

Whilst Far Cry 3 was an exploration of vulnerability, putting you in the shoes of a fragile protagonist and watching their struggle to overcome insurmountable odds and cope with the emotional impact of the sacrifices you had to make along the way, Blood Dragon is a power fantasy, playing as an almost indestructible cyborg power-commando in a mission to slay legions of robot troopers and occasionally the titular Blood Dragons.

Where Blood Dragon truly stands out however is not its gameplay, which is effectively just late-game base Far Cry 3, but rather in its presentation as an over the top parody of 80s action. With plenty of references, a brilliant synthwave soundtrack and many little details from the CRT overlay, the VHS tracking loading screens and ridiculously cheesy over-the-top dialogue which demonstrate that Blood Dragon is far more than just a basic Far Cry 3 reskin but rather an extremely well crafted love letter to all things 80s action.

*Prices are Steam store prices (excluding discounts or sales) as of April 2019.