Bandai Namco has announced today the establishment of its new development group Bandai Namco Amusement Lab Inc., which will focus primarily on developing and operating VR, AR, and MR experiences for Bandai Namco arcade and entertainment facilities.

It seems the company decided to open up this new subsidiary to bring VR in arcades to the next level, as it will also take care of management operations, software and hardware development, and network development for such experiences.

The new group will officially be established on October 1 2018, and will be physically based in Bandai Namco Studios headquarters in Tokyo.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Dunedin, New Zealand

• Immediate start date
• Dunedin, New Zealand
• Permanent
• Full Time
• Terms flexible dependent on the candidates skills, experience and fit

Systems, game mechanics and level design

• High and low-­level design of gameplay systems and mechanics
•  Design and creation of game levels and placeholder assets
•  Produce documentation and prototypes detailing the logic and desired implementation of designs
•  Meet project deadlines/schedule as set by Creative Director
•  Collaborate effectively across multiple disciplines
•  Manage time off, workload and work hours in consultation with the wider team

Skills/Requirements

• Experience with systemic and procedural game mechanics
• Experience with in game economy and itemization balance
• Experience with designing and implementing puzzles into levels
• Proficiency with Blueprint and Unreal Engine 4
• Familiarity with other aspects of game development (asset creation, programming, sound production)
• Familiarity with version control software and practices
• Ability to rapidly prototype
• Over 5 years experience in game designer positions
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Open to direction and feedback, willing to revisit work
• Excellent organisational skills when working under time pressure
• Passion for games and creativity
• Good level of English language

About the studio

Dunedin, New Zealand-based RocketWerkz began in 2015. The independent game development studio was founded by Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall and employs staff from all levels of industry experience across multiple projects. In 2016 internet giant Tencent invested in the Studio. The focus of the studio is as a creative factory – developing PC games, new genres and cooperative multiplayer experiences.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

In today’s episode of ‘Japan gets all the cool stuff and we’re incredibly jealous’, we present to you this new set of Splatoon 2 trading cards that are set to launch next month.

The cards feature beautiful, standalone pieces of artwork on one side, with written chunks of information on the reverse, and even come with edible wafers inside each pack so that you can get addicted to them in more ways than one. There appears to be 25 to collect in total, and packs come with a completely randomised set of cards inside so we imagine buyers are expected to trade with their friends.

A 20-pack of cards is currently available from Amazon Japan, which offers international shipping depending on your location, for ￥2,502 (approximately £17.14 / $22.50 before delivery).

Would you like a complete set of these? Shall we all just move to Japan already? Let us know below.

Lucky Pokémon are about to be introduced into the mix, if a recent Pokémon GO datamine is anything to go by. Looks like you’re going to have to catch ’em all over again!

In this guide, we’re going to briefly explain the differences between a Lucky and regular Pokémon, and take a look at how you can catch these brand new critters.

Please note that this feature isn’t actually available in Pokémon GO just yet though, so all of the information in this guide is subject to change. We also don’t know of the exact inner workings just yet, so plenty of this is just speculation at this point.

Pokémon GO Lucky Pokémon – What They Are & How They Differ

Lucky Pokémon are a new type of Pokémon in Pokémon GO. We assume they’ll work in a similar manner to Shiny Pokémon, in that you’ll have a small chance to encounter one in the wild.

The difference between a Lucky Pokémon and a regular Pokémon, is that Lucky Pokémon don’t require as much Stardust to power up, and will include a special background while viewing them in your Pokédex. You’ll also see a new counter displaying the number of Lucky Pokémon caught for each species.

You’ll know a Pokémon is Lucky while viewing it in your list of Pokémon. Glance just above its HP and you’ll see a new ‘Lucky Pokémon’ label. Check out our tweet above to see all of that in action.

Though we still need to see the update in action to know for sure, it appears like Lucky Pokémon will receive a 50% discount on Stardust when powering up.

Pokémon GO Lucky Pokémon – How To Catch Them

As the feature isn’t currently live in Pokémon GO, it’s not clear exactly how you go about catching a Lucky Pokémon. Early speculation includes:

• Rare spawn in the wild like Shiny Pokémon
• Only appear when traded

Rest assured that we’ll update this guide as soon as the feature is live in the game and we’re aware of how it all works.

Pokémon GO Lucky Pokémon – Can A Pokémon Be Both Lucky And Shiny?

This is the million dollar question, and one we’ll aim to answer just as soon as the feature has rolled out in a future update.

Previously, we saw how to enable and disable systemd services by hand, at boot time and on power down, when a certain device is activated, and when something changes in the filesystem.

Timers add yet another way of starting services, based on… well, time. Although similar to cron jobs, systemd timers are slightly more flexible. Let’s see how they work.

“Run when”

Let’s expand the Minetest service you set up in the first two articles of this series as our first example on how to use timer units. If you haven’t read those articles yet, you may want to go and give them a look now.

So you will “improve” your Minetest set up by creating a timer that will run the game’s server 1 minute after boot up has finished instead of right away. The reason for this could be that, as you want your service to do other stuff, like send emails to the players telling them the game is available, you will want to make sure other services (like the network) are fully up and running before doing anything fancy.

Jumping in at the deep end, your minetest.timer unit will look like this:

# minetest.timer

[Unit] Description=Runs the minetest.service 1 minute after boot up [Timer] On‌BootSec=1 m Unit=minetest.service [Install] WantedBy=basic.target

Not hard at all.

As usual, you have a [Unit] section with a description of what the unit does. Nothing new there. The [Timer] section is new, but it is pretty self-explanatory: it contains information on when the service will be triggered and the service to trigger. In this case, the OnBootSec is the directive you need to tell systemd to run the service after boot has finished.

Other directives you could use are:

• OnActiveSec=, which tells systemd how long to wait after the timer itself is activated before starting the service.
• OnStartupSec=, on the other hand, tells systemd how long to wait after systemd was started before starting the service.
• OnUnitActiveSec= tells systemd how long to wait after the service the timer is activating was last activated.
• OnUnitInactiveSec= tells systemd how long to wait after the service the timer is activating was last deactivated.

Continuing down the minetest.timer unit, the basic.target is usually used as a synchronization point for late boot services. This means it makes minetest.timer wait until local mount points and swap devices are mounted, sockets, timers, path units and other basic initialization processes are running before letting minetest.timer start. As we explained in the second article on systemd units, targets are like the old run levels and can be used to put your machine into one state or another, or, like here, to tell your service to wait until a certain state has been reached.

The minetest.service you developed in the first two articles ended up looking like this:

# minetest.service

[Unit] Description= Minetest server Documentation= https://wiki.minetest.net/Main_Page [Service] Type= simple User= ExecStart= /usr/games/minetest --server

ExecStartPost= /home//bin/mtsendmail.sh "Ready to rumble?" "Minetest Starting up" TimeoutStopSec= 180 ExecStop= /home//bin/mtsendmail.sh "Off to bed. Nightie night!" "Minetest Stopping in 2 minutes" ExecStop= /bin/sleep 120 ExecStop= /bin/kill -2 $MAINPID [Install] WantedBy= multi-user.target

There’s nothing you need to change here. But you do have to change mtsendmail.sh (your email sending script) from this:

#!/bin/bash # mtsendmail

sleep 20 echo $1 | mutt -F /home/<username>/.muttrc -s "$2" my_minetest@mailing_list.com

sleep 10

to this:

#!/bin/bash

# mtsendmail.sh

echo $1 | mutt -F /home/paul/.muttrc -s "$2" pbrown@mykolab.com

What you are doing is stripping out those hacky pauses in the Bash script. Systemd does the waiting now.

Making it work

To make sure things work, disable minetest.service:

sudo systemctl disable minetest

so it doesn’t get started when the system starts; and, instead, enable minetest.timer:

sudo systemctl enable minetest.timer

Now you can reboot you server machine and, when you run sudo journalctl -u minetest.* you will see how, first the minetest.timer unit gets executed and then the minetest.service starts up after a minute… more or less.

A Matter of Time

A couple of clarifications about why the minetest.timer entry in the systemd’s Journal shows its start time as 09:08:33, while the minetest.service starts at 09:09:18, that is less than a minute later: First, remember we said that the OnBootSec= directive calculates when to start a service from when boot is complete. By the time minetest.timer comes along, boot has finished a few seconds ago.

The other thing is that systemd gives itself a margin of error (by default, 1 minute) to run stuff. This helps distribute the load when several resource-intensive processes are running at the same time: by giving itself a minute, systemd can wait for some processes to power down. This also means that minetest.service will start somewhere between the 1 minute and 2 minute mark after boot is completed, but when exactly within that range is anybody’s guess.

For the record, you can change the margin of error with AccuracySec= directive.

Another thing you can do is check when all the timers on your system are scheduled to run or the last time the ran:

systemctl list-timers --all

The final thing to take into consideration is the format you should use to express the periods of time. Systemd is very flexible in that respect: 2 h, 2 hours or 2hr will all work to express a 2 hour delay. For seconds, you can use seconds, second, sec, and s, the same way as for minutes you can use minutes, minute, min, and m. You can see a full list of time units systemd understands by checking man systemd.time.

Next Time

You’ll see how to use calendar dates and times to run services at regular intervals and how to combine timers and device units to run services at defined point in time after you plug in some hardware.

See you then!

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

New fin-tastic outfits in the Item Shop now! pic.twitter.com/b4fL8tz4yp

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) July 22, 2018

Reel in the victory with the On the Hook emote ?

Available in the Item Shop now! pic.twitter.com/kbErxycuDJ

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) July 23, 2018

Learn how to write for an international audience in this article from our archives.

Writing in English for an international audience does not necessarily put native English speakers in a better position. On the contrary, they tend to forget that the document’s language might not be the first language of the audience. Let’s have a look at the following simple sentence as an example: “Encrypt the password using the ‘foo bar’ command.”

Grammatically, the sentence is correct. Given that “-ing” forms (gerunds) are frequently used in the English language, most native speakers would probably not hesitate to phrase a sentence like this. However, on closer inspection, the sentence is ambiguous: The word “using” may refer either to the object (“the password”) or to the verb (“encrypt”). Thus, the sentence can be interpreted in two different ways:

As long as you have previous knowledge about the topic (password encryption or the ‘foo bar’ command), you can resolve this ambiguity and correctly decide that the second reading is the intended meaning of this sentence. But what if you lack in-depth knowledge of the topic? What if you are not an expert but a translator with only general knowledge of the subject? Or, what if you are a non-native speaker of English who is unfamiliar with advanced grammatical forms?

Know Your Audience

Even native English speakers may need some training to write clear and straightforward technical documentation. Raising awareness of usability and potential problems is the first step. This article, based on my talk at Open Source Summit EU, offers several useful techniques. Most of them are useful not only for technical documentation but also for everyday written communication, such as writing email or reports.

1. Change perspective. Step into your audience’s shoes. Step one is to know your intended audience. If you are a developer writing for end users, view the product from their perspective. The persona technique can help to focus on the target audience and to provide the right level of detail for your readers.

2. Follow the KISS principle. Keep it short and simple. The principle can be applied to several levels, like grammar, sentences, or words. Here are some examples:

Words: Uncommon and long words slow down reading and might be obstacles for non-native speakers. Use simpler alternatives:

“utilize” → “use”

“indicate” → “show”, “tell”, “say”

“prerequisite” → “requirement”

Grammar: Use the simplest tense that is appropriate. For example, use present tense when mentioning the result of an action: “Click OK. The Printer Options dialog appears.”

Sentences: As a rule of thumb, present one idea in one sentence. However, restricting sentence length to a certain amount of words is not useful in my opinion. Short sentences are not automatically easy to understand (especially if they are a cluster of nouns). Sometimes, trimming down sentences to a certain word count can introduce ambiquities, which can, in turn, make sentences even more difficult to understand.

3. Beware of ambiguities. As authors, we often do not notice ambiguity in a sentence. Having your texts reviewed by others can help identify such problems. If that’s not an option, try to look at each sentence from different perspectives: Does the sentence also work for readers without in-depth knowledge of the topic? Does it work for readers with limited language skills? Is the grammatical relationship between all sentence parts clear? If the sentence does not meet these requirements, rephrase it to resolve the ambiguity.

4. Be consistent. This applies to choice of words, spelling, and punctuation as well as phrases and structure. For lists, use parallel grammatical construction. For example:

Why white space is important:

5. Remove redundant content. Keep only information that is relevant for your target audience. On a sentence level, avoid fillers (basically, easily) and unnecessary modifications:

“already existing” → “existing”

“completely new” → “new”

As you might have guessed by now, writing is rewriting. Good writing requires effort and practice. But even if you write only occasionally, you can significantly improve your texts by focusing on the target audience and by using basic writing techniques. The better the readability of a text, the easier it is to process, even for an audience with varying language skills. When it comes to localization especially, good quality of the source text is important: Garbage in, garbage out. If the original text has deficiencies, it will take longer to translate the text, resulting in higher costs. In the worst case, the flaws will be multiplied during translation and need to be corrected in various languages. 

Driven by an interest in both language and technology, Tanja has been working as a technical writer in mechanical engineering, medical technology, and IT for many years. She joined SUSE in 2005 and contributes to a wide range of product and project documentation, including High Availability and Cloud topics.

The 2018 MacBook Intel Core i9-powered 15-inch Pro refresh strikes some chords with some long requested features, and as often is the case with Apple products, stirs up some controversy.

On the outside, the largest size MacBook remains utterly unchanged, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s still 17 percent lighter and 14 percent thinner than its 2015 predecessor, and feels as premium as ever.

The unibody aluminum design mates beautifully with the glass display, touchpad, and Touch Bar with touch ID sensor. We’ve used a wide variety of premium laptops, and while some copycat designs look nice in professional photographs online, nothing else comes close to the MacBook Pro.

Keyboard first

The only physical difference you can touch is the updated third generation butterfly switch keyboard. Apple has been forthcoming about how quiet the new keyboard is, and we can positively confirm that.

But, minus conflicting internal documents, Apple still has nothing to say about a silicone gasket sheet attempting to fix the problems plaguing what Apple calls a “small percentage” of MacBook Pro owners.

We’re not taking the keys off to show you. But, the crew at iFixit suspects that the quiet keys is a secondary effect of the silicone protection layer added.

Only time will tell how effective this will be, but the still tactile but quieter keyboard is a welcome change. We will continue to collate data regarding failures, and will update you all in six months or so.

Speakers

Just like with the 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, the speakers have been updated. This is an impressive feat since the MacBook Pro already has the best sounding speakers, so we applaud Apple for improving things they really didn’t need to.

Finishing off with the exterior, the display now supports Apple’s True Tone technology, and retains the P3 color gamut.

The Touch Bar is unchanged and still has the same utility as it did at launch —but your mileage may vary, as ours does inside AppleInsider.

At the (Intel) Core of the matter

Intel’s long awaited 8th generation CPU’s are here and Apple chose to include a six-core processor in every model of the 15-inch MacBook with the i7 in the base model, which we’ve already looked at, and the i9 in this one.

That i9 is remarkably affordable at about a $400 option. With a base clock speed of 2.9GHz and a massive maximum turbo boost speed of 4.8GHz, this chip has great potential for performance.

Testing with Geekbench 4, our i9 MacBook Pro scored a very impressive 5555 points in single core and 24,326 in multi core, coming in 14 percent and 10 percen higher respectively than our 15-inch base i7 model. Putting this into perspective, the best available CPU in the current model 27-inch 5K iMac scores a slightly higher 5736 in single core, but a much lower 19,774 in multi-core.

Unfortunately, this potential isn’t fully realized in such a thin and light laptop because of thermal throttling, which has stirred up quite a controversy.

Under Cinebench R15’s CPU test, which puts a 100 percent CPU load while running a complex render for a long period of time, our 2018 15-inch i9 MacBook Pro scored an average of around 920 points, where the base model averages 885. That’s just a 4 percent performance difference, mostly because the processor is slowing down because of heat.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, and it isn’t just Apple facing thermodynamics problems with the toasty i9 processor. Dell and Lenovo are catching heat from users regarding the throttling in laptops as well.

Furthermore, All 15-inch MacBook Pros from past generations we have tested going back to 2014 have experienced some amount of slowdown under extended high CPU load applications. This newest generation gets hit the most. More cores, more heat.

But, the thermal condition, and processor throttling isn’t a cut-and-dried situation, and greatly depends on workflow and applications used. We’ll be taking a much closer look at the performance differences in real life usage, including Final Cut Pro, in our full review.

Thunderbolt 3

Yes, we’re talking about it again. Thunderbolt 3 is a game-changer. Every port has sufficient bandwidth to drive a dock that supports every possible port you could want, and a high-resolution monitor, in addition to power.

USB-C is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. Two years later, it’s time to stop complaining about it. At this point, it is very apparent that Apple is ignoring the complaints about no USB-A.

If you don’t want the “dongle life,” like we have about always had, get cables for your peripherals. USB-C to whatever you want on the other end is pretty cheap now.

32GB of RAM, and a better GPU

Moving onto other components, The RAM has been updated from 16GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 to 16GB of 2400MHZ DDR4 soldered onto the motherboard for an additional $400. Our model is configured this way, which could be reason enough to upgrade to a 2018 MacBook Pro, again, depending on your workflow.

You already know if you need 32GB of RAM. If you’re wondering if you do, you probably don’t.

On the graphics side, both the base model Radeon Pro 555X, and top spec Radeon Pro 560X, include 4GB of video memory. In the recent past, we had either integrated graphics or a 2GB dedicated graphics chip which is adequate for light to medium tasks but there were noticeable slowdowns or limitations with heavy tasks, especially if connected to a 5K display.

The actual graphics performance looks to be a fair improvement over the 560 in the 2017 model, with the 560X scoring 52,499 in Geekbench 4 OpenCL vs around 42,000.

We opted for 512GB of storage, but Apple now offered up to 4TB of ultra-fast SSD if you can afford it. The $3200 jump in price over the 512GB model gives you massive and fast storage locally, but also a price tag that Apple has only eclipsed in portables a few times before.

A lot of computer for a lot of money

The thermal condition in the MacBook Pro is real. It does impact some workflows, particularly those with high, sustained processor loads.

However, the doom and gloom about the machine being slower than the computer’s predecessors is inaccurate, across the board. Unequivocally, despite the heat, the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro models are faster than the 2017 in every regard —if not as fast as it could be.

If you’ve been holding off with your trusty older Retina MacBook Pro, and the low-travel keyboard isn’t a problem, we can tell you right now to not wait to buy either the i7 model we first looked at on Friday, or this i9.

This all said, it is not the computer it could be, and there are theoretically steps Apple can take in software. We’ll see what comes with Mojave and future system updates.

We’ll be putting this $3,500 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro with an intel i9 CPU through its paces in a variety of tasks, including connecting the BlackMagic eGPU kit, for our full review that will be coming in the next few days.

Where to buy

Those looking to purchase a 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro, including models equipped with Intel’s Core i9 processor, can save $50 instantly with coupon code APINSIDER at Apple authorized reseller Adorama.

To activate the discount, you must use this shopping link or the pricing links in our 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro Price Guide, and enter the code APINSIDER during checkout. In addition to the coupon savings, Adorama will not collect sales tax on orders shipped outside New York and New Jersey, and shipping is free. Those wanting to finance the purchase can also take advantage of no interest financing when paid in full within 12 months using the Adorama Credit Card.

Need help? Send us a note at priceguides@gmail.com and we will do our best to assist.

Minaurs is a bizarre experience. Featuring gnomish, subterranean, space-faring creatures who are just trying to save their species while righting the wrongs of the past, it asks you to be very patient as it reveals to you its depth and wonder. The longer you wait, the more you realize that it’s kind of just pulling you along on a ride that never gets very exciting.

You are one of the last free minaurs of your kind. The rest have been scattered to the stars and are lingering haphazardly in dangerous places in hopes for someone to come rescue them. You, with your sense of heroism and agency, conduct mining expeditions to dig them out of their potential graves, and maybe profit on the way. A mining expedition has multiple goals. To pass the mission and move on successfully, you have to find the specified number your incapacitated brethren in the caves below. On your way, you can also mine the some of the natural Resource growing in the many caverns.

You can’t just saunter into any given cave system all willy nilly – there are rules to be followed. Your hero minaur moves automatically, turning when he hits an obstacle he can’t climb over or swim through. These are usually walls for neighboring chambers, that can be reduced to rubble (or rebuilt) with a tap. Tapping the ground will open a hole that the minaur can fall through to reach lower levels, but he cannot climb back up to the level he fell from without some extraneous effort.

Put together, a round of Minaurs is a lot like a round of Lemmings, with your autonomous and diligent pawn trudging to a fate he doesn’t know, while you work the levers to ensure his trip is a success. It takes some strategic thinking to carve a proper path to the lost minaurs effectively, as they’re often on separate levels nowhere near each other. Navigating around natural hazards like choking gas, acid, and belligerent creatures adds tactical wrinkles that throw wrenches in your plans.

This seems more or less straight forward, but how things interact with you feels overly complicated. Your Resistance shield is a catch all buffer between you and bad things around you. Falling from tall heights or standing in poison will damage the shield, and if the shield is broken, you’ll start taking damage to your Energy Bar. Your Energy Bar is the currency you spend to build things and break things down, and without energy you’ll go unconscious. Both your Shield and Energy Bars regenerate and watching them both interact with wildlife and other dangers is a confusing sight, even if your character isn’t in any consequential danger.

For a game with so many instructions, it’s pretty tough to understand. Almost everything you do is punctuated by a tutorial menu, explaining the significance of this thing to the greater Minaurs ecosystem. But these screens then find themselves buried in the glossary, and paging through to get a refresher on a finer point of exploration is daunting. The prompts themselves are jarring, blasting into your face and completely pulling you out of the game, even if it’s just for a few moments. In some instances, they show up in rapid succession, becoming super annoying when all you want to do is watch your minaurs move from one side of the screen to another. At its worst, prompts will trigger sub-prompts, and suddenly you’ve drilled down into multiple Inception dream levels of tutorials.

Progression in the game is at a glacial pace. You have to rescue a certain amount of minaurs before you can move to a new planet, and that number can be needlessly high. The first planet requires 90 saved minaurs, and with each expedition having somewhere between 1-3 scattered across it, it will feel like an absolute chore to make the jump. As you rescue them, you’ll find maps to start Noble Minaur rescues or to drop into expeditions with large numbers of Resource to mine, but the process never changes much, and it gets old very quickly.

You’ll find as you explore, you’ll be gaining several different bars that are filling and shrinking without much fanfare. One of them involves the aforementioned Resource – this blue, iridescent stone – is what you spend to upgrade your skills and are a fee to go on any expeditions. You’ll get Resource as bonuses for finding minaurs, but you can also reap it from the land. I’ve never had a problem where I didn’t have enough Resource for something I wanted, and I spend very little time going out of my way for it.

Challenges pop up as you do things like gather and find wildlife. They each have specific goals like find a certain amount of Noble Minaurs or fall from a certain height X amount of times. When these goals are met, you are rewarded with a state boost and something called Prestige. Prestige is also gained every time you learn something new (every time one of those damned tutorials pop up). It serves as both a number to denote the progress of your knowledge of the Minaurs universe, and a gatekeeper for learning abilities. It never feels like anything more than wholly arbitrary.

Skills allows your hero to do things he couldn’t normally do without coaxing, like turning at will or not falling off of ledges for a short period of time. They don’t come very naturally – suddenly after reading enough tutorial menus your first set of them open up. That said, they do add a level of control to the process that makes the gameplay more active and gives you more of a reason to invest in the moment to moment stuff and not just your big picture path to victory. Unfortunately, they feel as convoluted as the rest of the game.

Minuars doesn’t look bad, but it can be hard to really appreciate the art direction because of how dark and monotone the color palette is. Greens don’t look much more vibrant or vivid than the browns do earthy or muted. There’s a twisted, jagged, Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal sort of naturalism throughout, which is charming. The animations struggle to give any of the characters and wildlife that same sort of liveliness.

All in all, Minuars is a solid concept bogged down by way too many systems, and the dreadful experience of learning them all. It also it far too long. That is to say, you spend far too much time doing menial things just to see something new, and to quickly realize that it isn’t all that different than the thing you’d already been doing.