Marsh and Graham come together to drop children into lava in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, destroy buildings in Teardown Part Two, infect entire populations in WorldBox, and for a change of pace, construct some lovely spaceships in Sunshine Heavy Industries. Also discussed: the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Community, and why you should never go back to anything.

• Voting begins today for the Crate & Crowbar community’s Game Of The Year awards. If you’d like to join in, you can visit the happy microsite, built by lovely community member Kane.
• We like The Back Page podcast, by friends Matthew Castle and Samuel Roberts, and reference their recent episode on Lord Of The Rings games. Do the LOTR films hold up? Does anything?
• New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe on Nintendo Switch has helped Graham turn his son into a gamer boy. He regrets dropping him in lava.
• Halo Infinite goes a bit binfinite in its last third, says Marsh.
• Teardown‘s “Part Two” update rounds off the campaign for the smash-and-grab ’em up, but mostly by adding novelty-led levels and messy robots that fail to satisfy like the initial heists.
• Sunshine Heavy Industries is spaceship building game and the opposite of Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
• WorldBox is a god game without objectives, where you’re given bundle of toys with which to help or hurt (and infect) tiny pixel people.

You can hang out with us and our community on our Discord channel. If you have a question for a future episode, send it to us at [email protected] or tweet us @crateandcrowbar. You can also listen to it on YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you like.

The Crate and Crowbar is kindly funded by our Patreon backers. If you’d like to know more about supporting our podcast and its spinoffs, click here.

Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.