Minecraft. Lots and lots of Minecraft.

The Teletext Preservation Project- a project to preserve Teletext- has recently come into a load of updates from Digitiser from 1995 to 1998.

Spanning 125 different editions of the daily games magazine from the era where we lost the SNES, the MegaDrive and the Amiga in favour of PlayStation, Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Windows 95-based PCs, the Archive features lots of the Digi-o-humour we've not seen for years.

It's also interesting how little has changed- the standard coverage basically stops for E3, and the letters pages are still full of accusations of format bias and asking if developers have run out of ideas.

Sony are releasing something for it in May!

CVG reports that Diggs Nightcrawler a detective story, will be the first game released for it since Book Of Spells, which launched with the peripheral.

They also had a trailer, but that seems to have been taken off YouTube.

The whereabouts of the Walking With Dinosaurs tie-in we've not heard anything about since January is still unknown.

My main game of late has been Virtue's Last Reward.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I'm not a story-game person myself- I feel that's probably more Ben's thing, certainly Duane's- but it's been difficult not to want to play through this, despite- on a 'game' level at least, not being much good.

The 'game' elements of VLR consists of monotonously tapping through dialogue until you reach a puzzle room. After which, it's more monotapping until you reach a Prisoner's Dilemma game, and round and round it goes.

It's certainly more 'game'-y than Lux Pain, which is another Rising Star Games-published visual novel which has appeared in WWP before (albeit mocking its godawful translation rather than giving it much critique as a videogame) simply by virtue (hoho!) of these puzzle rooms, which call to mind the Crimson Room flash games as opposed to the whack-a-mole like games in LP.

While the puzzle rooms are enjoyable, the game suffers for encouraging you to go down all the story paths, by seemingly presenting each change in story branch as deja vu, and also blocking progression down certain routes until another route is exhausted.

This means that, for each story path, you have to tap through many of the same broad plot points over and over in a basically identical manner.

One character who may or may not be murdered based on which timeline you're in will continue to be killed at the exact same point in the exact same way- and you'll have to tap through everyone being shocked about it and accusing one another of killing them.

With your only input on the matter to be the broad story path chosen and not a specific action relating to the murder victim, this makes fully completing the game- and experiencing its story- laborious. More 'game' in between puzzle rooms would have made a great difference here.

However, it may also take away what makes VLR different enough to work.

Visual novels are far enough away from what we generally consider 'games' that you change your expectations and forgive the lack of involvement.

This isn't something that strictly flies with Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit. While it manages to be amusing for the most part in both gameplay and in its humour- certainly the minigames and ridiculous death animations for the mini-bosses can raise a smile- the game suffers in both departments for being slightly longer than its ideas.

From a distance, the game looks a lot like a Metroidvania, featuring as it does an openish two-dimensional platform world with routes arbitrarily blocked off by the absence of some ability gained later in the game.

However, you soon find that mini-bosses which were clever breaks from standard gameplay start to repeat all too soon, as do their death mingames/animation sequences (which are much too long to be sat through more than once) and the 'new' ablities are just bigger versions of the your old ones.

As such, it's rare they offer any new way to traverse the levels or represent a new technique for a later (mini) boss.

Coupled with the unexciting platforming, with the poorly-spaced checkpoints often immediately before some deeply empty area, miles away from anything, despite the game's humour, it's hard to recommend it over the more straight-laced exmples of Metroidvania-age, like Metroid or Shadow Complex.

Well, that's been my week. How's yours been?

We all have our views on gamification- some people- mostly games designers- think it's the worst thing in the world, and other- mostly marketers- think it's amazing.

So BBC Radio 4 sent Hardeep Singh Kohli to have a bit of an ask around.

Hardeep's Game Of Life spends more time explaining what gamification is rather than really getting into the positives and negatives of the technique.

However, in that it still manages to provide a range of views from both sides of the argument, from people responsible for the more marketing-focused implementations of gamification, as well as popular, Radio 4-friendly gaming talking heads Ian Bogost and Stephen Poole.

If you want to give it a listen, it's on iPlayer until 11 AM on the 9th of March.

A study by an Italian university has found that playing what has been described as an “action” video game for twelve hours spread over nine sessions is more effective in improving the reading and attention skills of dyslexic ten-year-olds than a year's worth of actual reading.

The study, published in Current Biology and reported by the BBC, found that when dyslexic children who had played the game had improved reading and attention skills than a group of similar children who had not.

The game itself tested perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills and has also been described as fast moving, unpredictable, and consisting of a series of minigames. The game remains unnamed, but to us that sounds a lot like Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, or maybe a Rabbids game.

Anyway, the study found that reading skills improved as the children were able to read faster without sacrificing accuracy- attributed to the need in the game to process visual information more quickly. The same way that one might quickly identify on on-screen target from another without consciously thinking about it, readers found it easier to identify the words on the page.

This backs up previous research suggesting that dyslexia is a matter of visual processing, rather than language skills.

Dr Andrea Facoetti, who lead the study at the University of Padua provided the obligatory caveat whenever there's a story that suggests something fun might have a positive effect, saying ”These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision.”

The team now plan to attempt similar tests on younger children, who have not yet started to learn to read.

Project X Zone, the crossover RPG featuring all those Capcom, Namco and Sega characters, has just been blessed with a surprise announcement of a western release.

Launching in the US, Europe and Australasia this summer, the game features 50 characters from 29 different franchises and seemingly was well-received on its Japanese release last October, scoring 8, 9, 9, 8 from Famitsu.

The story- such as it is- concerns a "rift in time and space" causing all the characters from the various worlds spilling in to one, with gameplay involving strategy-RPG brawling where characters from different games come together to augment each other's strengths.

The game is heading for 3DS, and has been co-developed by Banpresto and Xenoblade Chronicles developer Monolith Soft.

GALLERY:
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Following a single complaint from a viewer, the Advertising Standards Authority have elected to ban the further use of a Wii U advert which implied that being able to play a game on the GamePad screen instead of the TV was universal.

The advert which premiered during Homeland last October- and has barely been seen since- made a show of the Play-On-Gamepad mode as the voiceover announced

"Say someone wants to watch TV when you're halfway through a game ... do both, and everyone's happy"

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The ASA largely agreed with Nintendo's argument that many of the other features seen in the advert, such as using the GamePad to shoot at the screen, would not feature in all titles. However, it decided that

"as this was a new console consumers would not have an awareness of whether this was something specific to individual games or a general feature of the console"

and deemed the advert to be misleading for not making a point of showing that it wasn't.

The advert now "must not appear in its current form".

Clearly, Gas Powered Games weren't lying when they said that Age of Empires Online wasn't working for them, as they're turning to Kickstarter for their next game, Wildman.

The campaign page bills the title as a "thrilling mix of action-role-playing and real-time strategy that only a developer like Gas Powered Games can deliver."

Further reading suggests that the gameplay will be split into two, alternating between the genres- an RTS this level, then RPG the next- with progress in one influencing the other- a bit like how Dust 514 is supposed to affect EVE Online, but single player.

If that sounds risky, it's probably because it is! CEO Chris Taylor told Gamasutra that

We're all in on this, We spent all the last dough that we've had, and the last several months working on it. So we're betting the company on it.

There's no word on a projected release, but the Kickstarter's only got until International Cheap Chocolate Day- February 15th- to reach its funding goal. Which is, y'know, possible.

Playstation 3's getting it, xBox 360's getting it, even the PC's getting it. But Wii U isn't. Why? Because!

No particular reasoning was given when producer Dave Cox tweeted the bad news in reply to a fan's question, merely stating that there's "no chance" of a Wii U version.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate is still on for 3DS in March, though- so there's that, at least.