juicy trail

The animals have voices, there is a planet twice the size of any other, and eight of you can play on it. SOUND • Every animal makes its own noise when it uses its power. Real recordings — the tiger and the bird sound for as long as you hold it down; the monkey, frog and seal call out once as they go. • It no longer stops your music. The game plays over whatever you already had on. • Everything the game used to play has gone: the beeps, the stings and the synthesised splats. The six animals are what you hear now. JACKFRUIT GIANT • A new planet, and the one you start on: snow at both poles, a desert, grassland, and an ocean across the middle with a volcano standing in it that erupts. • A red cabin with a sleigh and nine reindeer at the north pole, frozen lakes at the south, a pyramid out in the sand, and a sign on a mountain. • Snow falls over the ice caps and nowhere else. • EIGHT PLAYERS, here only — every other planet still plays four. Private rooms hold eight too. IT RUNS PROPERLY NOW • A long-standing stutter is gone. It was the audio engine, awake and working every moment of every match whether or not anything was making a noise. • Sideways layouts fit on the screen. ONLINE • Names float over the other players, so you can tell who is who while you are running. • Change your name from inside a room, without leaving it and losing the code. • QUICK MATCH gives you a new game. It could drop you back into the one you had just walked out of, several rounds in. THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES • The tutorial asks your name first, teaches the three controls, shows you what a trail does to somebody — and lets you try all six powers before you play. • The characters go by their animals: MONKEY, TIGER, BIRD, FROG, SEAL, PANDA. • Flick up to jump works on a fresh install. It had been failing on the very first run and nowhere else. SMALLER THINGS • The panda's Barge lasts half again as long and comes back twice as often. • The frog and the seal no longer flicker between the ground and the air mid-jump, and the tiger settles out of a sprint instead of snapping. • The monkey's banana leaves his hands rather than his feet. • Sprinkles on the Dragonfruit Donut.