When you hear the word "safari" you probably get pretty distinct mental images: the savannah, lions and elephants, straw yellow and burnt earth. But this is not what Brisbane-based Defiant Development had in mind, at least if Ski Safari is any indication.

Maybe it has something to do with living in a country where a mundane trip into your backyard could yield a wildlife encounter considered exotic on other continents.

While I'd never stoop to the old "games cause violence" argument, there's little doubt that games teach us to treat death as a numbers game. Each individual demise isn't important: what matters is the body count, the chain reaction, the comforting tick of small numbers getting bigger.

Pandemic, a morbidly fascinating disease simulator from Dark Realm Studios, is a game that, played successfully, trades in enormous numbers.

The appeal of a novel is readily apparent. Fascinating characters and intricate plots suck you into elaborate worlds, and you furiously flip pages to find out what happens next. But video games are more complex than that. Stories are just one aspect of the total package, and the balance of the various elements determines how effective the adventure is at getting you invested.

One of the beauties of smartphones, and especially tablets, is how beautifully they fit traditional board games. The daddy of them all is chess. It's been rather brutalised by technology in the past, one of computing's pre-emininent challenges being a program that could defeat a human grandmaster, until, in 1997, Deep Blue finally felled Kasparov. It's a mighty achievement, tinged with tragedy.

There's nothing quite like a good old-fashioned shoot-'em-up to get your pulse racing and your thumbs twitching. And if there's one company that knows a thing or two about hurling a barrage of beautifully crafted bullets at you, it's Cave.

The human immune system is one mad marvel. It monitors our physical well-being through a series of rigid precautionary and at-the-ready defence systems. It's governed by an army of cellular bodies carrying out their respective duties, in order to repel invasion from hostile viral and bacterial agents.

The Mario Sports games are known for being larger than life and filled with color, bombast, and hyper-unrealistic movesets. Mario Tennis Open eschews much of this, following in the footsteps of some of Nintendo's earlier tennis games in an attempt to become a purer, more focused tennis experience. It doesn't quite hit the mark, falling somewhere between the two styles. Despite being largely stripped back, it manages to be convoluted thanks to a variety of jarring control schemes.

In many ways, Tera is a whole lot like other massively multiplayer role-playing games. You team up with other players, fight monsters, level up, earn new gear, and so on. It is, in fact, a very traditional online fantasy adventure in most respects but one: its action. And that action is so smooth, so immediate, and so enjoyable that it's likely to keep you invested in Tera, even as you skip from one quest to the next, ferrying messages between characters standing 20 feet from each other.

The appeal of a novel is readily apparent. Fascinating characters and intricate plots suck you into elaborate worlds, and you furiously flip pages to find out what happens next. But video games are more complex than that. Stories are just one aspect of the total package, and the balance of the various elements determines how effective the adventure is at getting you invested.

I hope you weren't holding your breath. Save for the New Play Control Wii remix of GameCube's Mario Power Tennis in 2009, we've been left hanging on for a proper update to the series since 2005's Mario Tennis: Power Tour on Game Boy Advance. Quite why this solidly successful formula skipped the entirety of the DS generation has been something of a mystery - at least, it was until I'd spent several days thwacking my way across the courts of the series' 3DS debut.