'Tis the season for snowball fights, at least if you're lucky enough to live in a part of the world that gets below freezing. Grab some friends, put on your snow-pants, ball up some icy white residue from the sidewalk, and let it fly.

Video games have a history of great snowball fights, and Uppercut Games' SnowJinks hops on that bandwagon with goofy gusto. It's a simple action game for iOS devices that works a bit like the Xbox game Gears of War, but with kids, and snowballs.

Each level is something of a shooting gallery, where your character, a rapscallionish boy or girl in snow gear, rolls up on a whole gang of neighborhood kids determined to take him or her down. They'll shellack you with snow, ice, hose-water, and hailstones, and you'll have to quickly duck and roll behind cover while picking them off one by one. As you progress, the kids get tougher to take down, and come up with all sorts of ways of driving you from cover.

The game is a juggling act where you'll constantly be shifting between ducking, dodging, and shooting, and it all comes together very well. It helps that SnowJinks looks great—it's another bright, colorful iOS game based on the Unreal engine (a version of the same engine, as it happens, that powers Gears of War). The bobbing camera, cartoonish colors and smooth animations make this one of the better looking games on iOS, and it looked particularly nice on my iPhone 5's high-res screen.

By the fourth or fifth level, you'll find yourself frantically timing your shots to take down an ever-more-complex array of foes, from fast-moving dodgers to icecube-chuckers who take cover to the dreaded water-hose kids, who will freeze you in their tracks if they hit you. There are a bunch of levels to work through, and of course, your scores will be posted on leaderboards so you can compete with your Gamecenter friends.

SnowJinks has a holiday theme, and the levels are also populated with gifts that pop up—if you shoot them, you'll get a bonus item, like a quick health boost or a powerful fireball to throw. Health boosts in particular are very useful, as you'll only get one health bar for each full round. Die and you'll have to start all over again. You can also tap on coins that pop up all over the levels, and if you earn enough you can spend them to unlock different outfits and snowball-types to use, as well as make the present power-ups in the game more powerful.

SnowJinks is a frantic and addictive cover-based shooter that just happens to feature little kids throwing snowballs. And hey, after you're done playing, you won't have to shake the snow out of your pants.

SnowJinks [App Store, $0.99]

It's Game of the Year season. You'll be seeing lots of people name their Best Video Game, Best PC Game, Best Xbox 360 Game, Best Shooter, Best Fighting Game, Best, Best, Best...

And yet I can tell you right now that some games that deserve recognition won't win anyone else's awards, because they don't fit. We're going to prevent that problem, you and I, by creating all sorts of new categories that our favorite games of 2012 can win.

Join me, starting with...

Best Game That Lets You Teach a Rabbit How To Act As Well As How To Trick Shoppers Into Buying Stuff They Don't Need

The winner...

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask. By a nose!

WHY: The new Layton doesn't just let you solve puzzles in order to solve mysteries as the esteemed Prof. Layton (plus minions). It also gives you access to a variety of nutty side games. There's a little side adventure that involves you guiding of a toy robot through a dangerous land. That would be other games' odd side mode. In Layton, that's playing it stupidly safe. In this game there's a mode in which you select a cute bunny rabbit, teach it new poses and then have to figure out which of those poses it should strike while it is on stage "acting" in a series of plays. You are graded on the quality of the bunny's acting.

And then there's the amazing I-think-there's-a-hidden-message-here shopping mini-game that straight-up requires you to up-sell shoppers and trick them into buying stuff they don't need. It goes like this: here are a variety of, say, fruits. Put them on a store shelf in such a way that the item the shopper comes into the store to buy is similar to the one next to it, in the hope that shopper will buy the one next to it, too; then line up a third item that is similar to the second item so that they impulse-buy that. They came in for a red apple? Put a yellow apple next to that, a banana next to yellow apple, etc. This will fool them into buying all three pieces of fruit. But don't line this stuff up in such a way that the shopper will see two appealing things at once because that will make them think about their purchases and bail. No, line these things up in such a way that they fall for each product in succession and clear the store of all its stuff. Wow! Is Layton also our Satirical Game of the Year??

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask gets the first nod. Please give out some more awards below.

(We'll be doling out some more traditional awards in the weeks to come. Don't worry!)

A lot of people don't seem to realize what the Wii U is. Is this cryptic Nintendo commercial just another Wii? I don't get it, some people said. Even Michelle Obama didn't make the distinction.

But maybe this commercial would help clear up that this is a new console. Or, hell, maybe it'd make things even more confusing when people started to shine light on their Wiis in the hopes that it'd evolve into a Wii U, like the Pokémon franchise Nintendo is so synonymous with.

Man, I wish my Wii would just up and evolve into a Wii U. Congratulations! Your Wii evolved into a Wii U. You don't have to spend any more money now.

FPS Russia is one of my favorite YouTubers, because I get to live vicariously through him shooting weapons that I doubt I could get my hands on.

Yesterday the esteemed shooter uploaded a video to show off some of Far Cry 3's weapons, which Kirk is a big fan of.

Watch FPS Russia shoot Far Cry 3 enemies Vaas and Buck with the various weapons, and definitely stick around for the end when he whips out the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. Holy shit.

From Yingpei Games, the developer formerly known as Epic Games China, comes Mercenary Ops, an Unreal Engine-powered on-rail zombie shooter that's one of the best Resident Evil games on iTunes, despite not being a Resident Evil game.

One look at the game's iTunes description makes its inspiration abundantly clear: "In Mercenary Ops, you are Leo, the seasoned mercenary hired to face his toughest mission – contain the exploding biological crisis in a small European town before the biological terror spreads to the major cities of Europe! You will face infected adversaries and bosses from out of this world!"

Leo. Not Leon.

Yingpei might have a little problem in the originality department — Mercenary Ops is also the name of what looks like an entirely different PC shooter from the developer — but it makes a pretty good on-rails shooter. The visuals are lush, the one-handed tap to shoot control option works incredibly well, and the tapping slaughter of biologically weaponized humans and animals is broken up by brief moments of finger-swiping drama. Hardcore players can opt for a more traditional control scheme, and gyroscopic aiming is available for those that enjoy looking ridiculous while playing an iOS game. There was a little slowdown on my iPod Touch 5th gen, but the less-powerful iPad Mini handles the game like a champ.

Mercenary Ops is available as a free one-level demo on iTunes, with an additional seven levels and Survival mode added via $1.99 in-game purchase. Give the free bit a try, and see if you are ready to take on the dramatic third level:

Oh, Yingpei.

Streets of Rage has to be one of the all-time classic side-scrolling beat-em-ups, right? It had a sense of an atmosphere of menace that other games lacked. After a fan-made game was scuttled by Sega, the only activity on the old-school series has been mobile releases of the original games. So it's a real shame that the remake demonstrated above never made it out into the world.

A tweet from Ubisoft level designer Sean Noonan revealed the footage, which comes from a digital downloadable that was reportedly in development at Ruffian Games. Destructible environments, brutal takedowns, street gangs straight out of The Warriors… it's all there. Throw this one onto the pile of promising dreams that will never become reality

Video Spotlight: Cancelled Streets of Rage "Reimagining" Footage Leaks Online [Sega Driven, via Spong and NeoGAF]

I've never played Morrowind, but when people rave about it—usually in sentences punctuated with faux outrage and admonishments like "How have you never played Morrowind???"—they like to play up its creative, bizarre world, a place where gods interact with mortals on a regular basis and wizards live in houses carved out of overgrown mushrooms.

Skyrim's new downloadable content, Dragonborn, takes you back to that strange land. The result is the game's best piece of DLC to date, a self-contained adventure that feels like a legitimate—and legitimately good—expansion pack.

If you're anything like me, you were probably disappointed by Skyrim's last two DLC packs, Dawnguard and Hearthfire. While Hearthfire was just a housemaking add-on, Dawnguard sold itself as a full-fledged piece of DLC—DLC that I found rather underwhelming.

Dragonborn, on the other hand, delivers on Bethesda's promises. Plunging you into Solstheim, an island located northeast of Skyrim and right on the edge of Morrowind, Dragonborn gives you a whole bunch of new stuff to play with: there's a new map, new types of weapons and armor, new dragon shouts, new cities, new enemies, and all sorts of new quests, from the mundane (find out where a wizard's assistant ran off to) to the insane (pick up a gem that turns out to contain the spirit of a goddess, who asks you to escort her to her temple and clear out the evil within).

You can also ride dragons, although that isn't nearly as cool as it seems.

WHY: Dragonborn adds a whole new world to explore, complete with an interesting questline, a lot of new things to do, and lots of dragons.

---

Skyrim: Dragonborn

Developer: Bethesda
Platforms: Xbox 360 (played), PS3, PC
Release Date: December 4 (Xbox), early 2013 (PS3/PC)

Type of game: Open-world RPG

What I played: Completed main questline in roughly 6 hours, then spent another 4-5 hours wandering around Solstheim and soaking in its world.

My Two Favorite Things

• Solstheim is a lovely, interesting island that is a lot of fun to explore.
• The main quest line is fascinating, even if it ends with a bit of a whimper.

My Two Least-Favorite Things

• Having to reboot my 360 because the game just randomly froze.
• Dragon riding.

Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes

• "I wish I didn't like this DLC so I could be like 'Dragonborn? More like Dragonbored!'" - Jason Schreier, Kotaku.com
• "Dragonborn? More like Dragonawesome. See? That doesn't quite work." - Jason Schreier, Kotaku.com

More importantly, Dragonborn re-evokes that feeling of excitement, that rush of untapped whimsy that massive open-world games like Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas are so good at offering. A new map brings with it new places. New dungeons. New quests to discover and rewards to unearth. It's an explorer's wet dream.

Sadly, with a game like Skyrim—and consequently, with its Dragonborn DLC—the potential is often more exciting than the results. Unlock a particularly tough door, for example, and your only reward might be a couple wheels of cheese and a chest with some worthless armor. You might find that an enticing-looking fortress holds nothing but a bunch of generic bandits. Quests might end abruptly and unceremoniously.

The main quest's conclusion is similarly underwhelming, but in that as in all of Dragonborn, what matters is the journey, not the reward. It's the little moments of joy when you find a new location, or when you're exploring a corner of the map that nobody else would even bother exploring, only to find a hidden treasure or easter egg that you know the designers threw in just for you.

There are a few different types of dungeons to explore in Dragonborn, some better than others. While some temples and catacombs are just like every other Skyrim dungeon you've ever fought through, complete with draugr and blade traps, there are also plenty of great ancient Dwemer ruins to delve into. Some of these ruins have their own sets of puzzles—never quite Zelda depth, but they come close.

A large chunk of the main quest also takes place in a daedric realm—a plane run by one of Skyrim's many gods—that I won't describe too much, to avoid spoilers. It's pretty trippy, though, and one of my favorite parts of Dragonborn was maneuvering my way through the swirl of foul black goo and gruesome fog that makes up that bizarre world. And I haven't even mentioned the Cthulu-esque squid demons. Squid demons!

You visit this realm, by the way, as part of the main storyline, which is like all video game storylines in that you have to save the world from a terrifying evil thing. This time, the thing is Miraak, an enigmatic being that seems to want to kill you for one reason or another. Oddly enough, as you ask around Solstheim for more information, nobody seems to know who he is. Yet the name sounds peculiarly familiar to everyone. Riddles atop riddles.

This main quest—which is on par with Skyrim's best questlines in terms of quality and variety—took me roughly six hours to beat completely. There's plenty more to see and do on top of that, though. It is still Skyrim.

And since this is still Skyrim, you are probably wondering if Dragonborn is full of bugs. It is indeed. Random little glitches have become a trademark of the most recent Elder Scrolls (and Bethesda games in general) and Dragonborn follows suit. My game even locked up and froze completely once or twice. Royal pain in the ass.

But. Bugs aside, Dragonborn is a great piece of DLC. Worth playing, worth exploring, worth leaping into like you're starting Skyrim all over again. Because there's nothing quite like opening up a new map and imagining all of the adventures you're about to find there. It's a feeling that can't be beat.

Grabbing social gamers by their dangling music nostalgia glands, SongPop tops Facebook's list of the top 25 web-based and mobile social games of 2012. It also makes for a lousy top image, so I went with number 14, NaturalMotion's CSR Racing, instead. Pretty car.

Using a mystical combination of App Center star ratings, negative and positive user signals and engagement numbers between January and November, Facebook has compiled a rather diverse list of games in this year's top 25. Sure, it's got the requisite six Zynga games on it, but there's also a racing game, a little baseball and a mid-core dungeon romp. The times, they are a-changing.

Check out the full list below. Just don't try playing all of these, as they represent more lost productivity hours than your entire lifespan.

1. SongPop (FreshPlanet)
2. Dragon City (Social Point)
3. Bike Race (Top Free games)
4. Subway Surfers (Kiloo)
5. Angry Birds Friends (Rovio)
6. FarmVille 2 (Zynga)
7. Scramble with Friends (Zynga)
8. Clash of Clans (Supercell)
9. Marvel: Avengers Alliance (Playdom)
10. Draw Something (Zynga)
11. Hay Day (Supercell)
12. Baseball Heroes (Syntasia)
13. ChefVille (Zynga)
14. CSR Racing (NaturalMotion Games)
15. Candy Crush Saga (King.com)
16. Matching With Friends (Zynga)
17. Legend Online (OASIS GAMES)
18. Jurassic Park Builder (Ludia)
19. Dungeon Rampage (Rebel Entertainment)
20. Pockie Ninja II Social (NGames Limited)
21. Jetpack Joyride (Halfbrick)
22. Social Empires (Social Point)
23. Bil ve Fethet (Peak Games)
24. Ruby Blast Adventures (Zynga)
25. Pyramid Solitaire Saga (King.com)

Today's Nintendo Direct revealed tons of new, great footage of titles coming to the Wii U. In case you missed it, the whole video can be found above. To make looking up the new footage a bit easier, here's a list with the times to skip to to look at the most interesting games and new features.

• Lego City: Undercover—00:31
• Game & Wario—12:04
• Pikmin 3—19:10
• Dragon Quest X—27:48
• Google Street View—38:03

Inception features dreams that are in dreams. Nintendo's newest Wario title, Game & Wario, is kind of like that, too.

Game & Wario is a collection of 16 mini games, but not a Wario Ware micro game collection that features an onslaught of bit-sized games that last seconds. Fans of the series are well aware of the difference.

One of the Game & Wario mini games is called "Gamer". In it, you play Wario Ware micro games on the GamePad. On the TV, you try to avoid being caught playing video games by your mom. When she comes to check on you, you must put down the GamePad so as not to get in trouble.

How wonderfully post modern of Nintendo: Wario Ware games within a new Wario title. Next time Nintendo, try cramming a Wario Ware in a Wario Ware that's in a Wario Ware that might or might not be a Wario game.

プレゼンテーション映像 [@nintendodirectch]