Canadians yet to complete census can expect phone calls, in-person visits
According to a Statistics Canada press release, 'census enumerators will begin contacting households from which a completed questionnaire has not yet been received.'
#Canada #Consumer #Census #StatisticsCanada
https://globalnews.ca/news/11887156/canada-census-2026-follow-up/

Inspector Waffles Early Days (Evercade): COMPLETED!

A while back I played the Playdate game Chance’s Lucky Escape, which was pretty good. This game, is set in the same universe and is a Game Boy title (albeit on the Evercade). As the name suggests, it’s a prequel to another game in the series – Inspector Waffles. Which I didn’t know existed and have just discovered it has a cameo from Lord Winklebottom. Blimey.

But never mind those games, what about this game? Well, it’s an adventure game where the eponymous inspector solves his first few (linked) cases. A robbery, some arson, and so on. There’s nothing too difficult to deal with, but I did have to play through the whole game twice as I missed completing the (optional) side quests involving “Maffles”, so if you play this, keep an eye out!

Of course, now I have to buy the “main” game in the series to complete the set.

#completed #evercade #waffles

Timber Rush (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

See, Idle Slayer? This is how you make an interaction-necessary incremental clicker type game. It doesn’t outstay its welcome, you make constant progress, and (after a certain point) you don’t need to touch anything most of the time.

In Timber Rush, you are a lumberjack. You chop down trees, wear high heels, suspenders and uh, make lots of money. On Wednesdays you also go shopping, probably. Chopping wood nets you money, and money can be spent on better axes, helpers, and other upgrades to get more money faster. Soon enough, you’ll have thousands of logs flying everywhere, automatically collected and turned into cash.

Unlike other clicker games, you have a limited amount of “chopping time”, so each “run” is only a few minutes during which you try to improve your chopping skills on the fly, much like you would in something like Vampire Survivors. You gain XP, and each level you get to choose a random upgrade that only applies to that run, like a multiplier or a speed increase or a higher chance of getting two logs for a single chop. Get the right combinations of these upgrades (like an increased chance of doing critical damage, and an increase in the amount of critical damage) and you can get a huge payout. After your run, you get buy permanent upgrades and skills.

There’s not a lot of depth, but playing with upgrade combos is fun and seeing numbers go up, especially exponentially, is always satisfying. However, there is a suggestion on the Steam forums that pretty much the whole game is AI generated. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, but you might want to check that out before you buy it.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

Idle Slayer (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

The title of this game is a bit of a lie. It implies it’s one of those cookie clicker type idler games where you kill things, but actually, there’s a lot of non-idle “gameplay” needed in order to actually progress.

The basic idea is you run left to right, automatically, and collect coins and kill baddies. Coins let you buy upgrades for your equipment which basically act as coins-per-second increases and multipliers, meaning more coins more quickly with which to buy more stuff to repeat the cycle with ever-increasing numbers going up.

So, it’s same as most of games like this. However, there’s a second currency – souls – which can only be earned by resetting all your progress. You collect them mainly from slaying foes, but can’t actually use them until you wipe out all your upgrades, coins and equipment and start again. The souls can then be spent on permanent upgrades and unlockables. This too I’ve seen in other games and is sometimes called “prestiging”. Later, there’s also a third type of currency which you can sort of “super prestige” with, which also wipes out your permanent upgrades but lets you buy other properly permanent upgrades. Oh, and there’s a gem currency which you can buy various thing with but requires Real Actual Money, so I never touched it.

The “idle” bit which isn’t though, is the auto-runner stuff. Sure, you can just leave the game running (or even not running, and coins and souls rack up when you’re not playing), but there are missions and requirements where you need to interact. Like, boost so many times, or collect boxes that require you to jump, or enter and complete bonus levels which are tricky (the first few times, but not when you’ve done them over 200 times) platforming timed-jump challenges with big money rewards. If you don’t do these hands-on bits, you progress much, much less quickly. And, since this game is months long (yes, I’ve been playing it for months, off and on) you have to take part or it’ll be years.

In terms of completing it, I bought everything. All upgrades, all items, all unlocks. There’s no “congraturation you sucsess” and there’s no credit roll, but I literally ran out of things to do, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m done. Should you play it? No. It might be free but it’s stupid and too time consuming and there are a few bits in your progress where it takes too long between improvements. Like, when you first hit Billions of coins, it takes hours to accumulate them and reach the next milestone. Same when you get to Octillions. But you skip over Trillions so fast you barely notice they exist. There’s a bit of a pacing issue, and I can’t help feel it’s intentional to get you to cave and spend Real Actual Money to skip these slow bits. I think I’d have prefered to pay a bit for the game and not have to deal with Crawl or Pay.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

The Mr Rabbit Magic Show (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

I do like Rusty Lake’s weird little point and click adventure games. What I hadn’t realised, is that I had this game, unplayed, in my library. Or that it even existed. I saw an article about it and looked it up on Steam and lo – I already had it. It’s also free, just in case you haven’t.

It’s actually a meta game, being set in the Rusty Lake offices as they prepare for a company birthday celebration (which, cyclically, this game was released to celebrate), but it starts as you playing the Mr Rabbit game within the game, where you help said bunny perform various magic tricks, mostly by clicking on things in the right order or spotting patterns. These tricks do get a bit… weird.

After a while you “break out” of the game and have some tasks to perform in the studio offices, and this bit plays out like, and references many of, the other Rusty Lake games. Unhinged dark macabre humour included. Those wacky Dutch, eh? Must be something in the water. Or the brownies.

It’s short, has a few clever bits and is well worth playing, especially if you’ve played others by the studio.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker! (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

What if Balatro was a cookie clicker card battler? Well, this, it seems.

Like Balatro, you have a deck of cards that – over time – you can modify to add or remove cards, and have special cards that add extra points or multipliers to hands you play. Unlike Balatro, hands played are automatic – you just click the deck and a hand is dealt. Quickly, you get the ability to autodeal hands on a timer, just like in cookie clicker games.

As you score points based on poker hands played, you spend those points on upgrades, like more decks, cards, multipliers for different hand types, and so on. Eventually you get loads of decks running at the same time, with seven cards in a dealt, and extra poker hands like five of a kind or a 7 card straight. Numbers go up, you get bonuses for “resetting” the game and permanent upgrades that persist (and can only be obtained by) resets. Just like any number of “modern” incremental clicker type games.

Only, there’s more. Because the plot is that Jester, the clown on the artwork, has actually trapped you and you have to make money to pay for your release. Naturally, he reneges this deal and you have to actually fight him. It’s here the card battling, albeit automated, comes into play.

It’s a surprisingly deep, and short (which works in its favour), game of the genre. It’s a bit fiddly to play on the Steam Deck because some of the text is impossible to read even when zoomed in, but luckily there’s nothing that important you miss. If the devs could just scale everything up a bit for the Deck, it would be amazing.

#completed #steam #steamDeck

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope (Switch): COMPLETED!

What seems like a very, very long time ago, I played the original Mario + Rabbids (apparently it’s “Mario Plus Rabbids” not “Mario And Rabbids”, which sounds clumsy) on the Switch and it was great and I was well up for the sequel when it arrived. But, like many other things, it got forgotten and I never got round to buying it. Until it was so cheap on the eShop recently that it was basically free. And I mean this in a “it was about £5 instead of £50” way of being “nearly free”, rather than Kotaku’s thinly veiled adverts for “nearly free” Macbooks that are $899 instead of $999 or something. Yes, those adverts annoy me so much I’ve deleted Kotaku from my RSS reader. Yes, I still use an RSS reader.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Sparks of Hope. In most ways, it’s more of the same not-quite XCom of the original, only this time it blends Rabbids with Mario Galaxy’s characters, mashing Rabbids with Lumas to make Sparks, which essentially give you extra abilities you can use in battles.

I’m also pretty sure the game no longer uses a proper grid-based movement system. I mean, it is still effectively grid-based but feels like it isn’t, with movement ranges being shown as circular areas and freedom to move whereever in that you like. You do, however, “snap” to a sort of grid, and cover like rocks and crates are still noticeably square, so it’s a bit fake. Outside of the battles, the overworld feels much less grid-like though, except many puzzles there involve moving things in rectangular areas.

Other than those changes, and some new characters and tweaks to moves and rules, it’s more of the same. Battles seem a bit quicker, although some of that could be the quicker load times on the Switch 2, and the game seemed a lot easier. So much easier that I don’t actually recall losing a single fight. Doesn’t really matter though, because it’s fun – especially when you manage to chain attacks like tackles, movement sensor reactions, and making baddies bounce into the air so they move and get shot all in one turn, obliterating even difficult foes.

Also, Rabbid Peach channelling Mean Girls is great.

#completed #mario #rabbids #switch

Once Upon A Katamari (Switch): COMPLETED!

It seems like forever since there was a new Katamari game. Aside from that incredibly hard iOS one that was free on Apple Arcade, of course, but that doesn’t count.

Running out of ideas for new things to roll up and places to do said rolling up, Namco Bandai Namco (Bandai) BandaiNamco have decided to use time travel in this iteration, with the King of All Cosmos taking The Prince across various stereotypical time periods and locations as Cave Man Times, Ancient Greece, and The Wild West, so you can roll up guys in togas and dinosaurs and pirate ships and stuff. Does it make a difference? Not really. It’s just an envelope for the levels to live in.

The rest of the game is exactly as you’d expect, and, I’d wager, want. It’s certainly what I’d want anyway. Loads of things to roll up so you get progressively bigger, with levels where you have to roll to an exact size, or avoid rolling up specific things (like the reprise of Cow or Bear from an earlier title), or roll things up while you constantly move forwards. Or roll up a person into food items to make them fat. Or become a sponge and spread water across a desert. You know, standard stuff.

And it’s as good as it ever was. I’m slightly disappointed there’s no Switch 2 update for it, ideally to get rid of the (to be fair, mercifully short) mid-level loading pauses, but it’s fine. I coped with the PSP game so I can cope here.

#completed #katamari #switch

Sixth Varda mission successfully returns
https://atlas.whatip.xyz/post.php?slug=sixth-varda-mission-successfully-returns
<p>Varda Space Industries completed its latest reentry mission May 18 as the company balances supporting
#successfully #industries #completed #mission

Psyche Spacecraft Completes Mars Flyby
https://atlas.whatip.xyz/post.php?slug=psyche-spacecraft-completes-mars-flyby
<p>NASA’s Psyche spacecraft completed its close approach of Mars on May 15
#spacecraft #completes #completed #psyche