Exploration & Cookery Game

One thing that I find disappointing about Skyrim is how cooking serves no purpose. There’s a paltry Xbox achievement for cooking, mining and chopping wood once. The health benefits you get from cooking are nothing compared to the most inexperienced alchemy, the ingredients of which are cheaper and abundant. Besides which, pre-made potions are two a penny – much more common than cooking spits.

Then there’s the fact that you mainly find food items in towns, where you least need health items. The weight values of vegetables versus their healing properties make them not worth carrying around. Finally, if you calculate it, you notice that selling the individual food items raw fetches more gold than cooking them together. Not that any of them are worth anything like as much as any other piece of junk you can pick up out in the field.

It makes food in Skyrim a gimmick, one that you’ll get bored of quickly – just like chopping wood, which is the least time-efficient way of making money. If you never stole a single item in the whole game, you’d still make plenty of money just going out questing. If you don’t go out and quest, there’s no point playing Skyrim in the first place, which is an exploration RPG, not a life sim. In other words, cooking is pointless.

Pokemon Snap Walkthrough: All Pokemon, Signs and Challenge Scores

Pokemon Snap: The only game in the world where you lob things at small fictional creatures in their natural environment, then take photos of it to an old man in a lab who criticises them.

Pokemon Black / White

Close, but just falling short of the mark: 4/5

Pokemon. A franchise you either politely and determinedly ignore, like a yelling homeless man on the London Underground, or one which you follow with an insane glint in your eye and a fire in your heart that may well turn you into that yelling homeless man on the London Underground. I fall into the latter category, I fear. An avid Pokemon fan since the age of eight when I stole my brother’s version of Blue and used his Venusaur to destroy a Persian, I am hooked and lost to the world.

The franchise has continued, rightly or wrongly, for fifteen years, spinning off shows and toys and comic books, plus a whole host of other gimmicks, interesting for five minutes and hanging around for just as long. Yes, at one point I really did want a Pokemon themed N64. But we won’t talk about that. After all, Pokemon is a collector’s game; now with 650 little critters to collect, I’d say you’d have to be dangerously obsessed to keep on going.