CAPTAIN TOAD: TREASURE TRACKER

WII U

It's been ages since we've had a good reason to visit the least conventional of all the consoles, Nintendo's Wii U, and it's typical, really, that they timed the release of one of its best games in ages to just miss the Christmas shopping rush, thus depriving countless children of an especially nice treat in their stockings. It's essentially a platform game, with 64 levels to complete, each of them a gorgeous self-contained 3D world filled with traps, pitfalls and villains that Captain Toad must evade. Which is not easy for him, as he is possibly the least adept of any gaming protagonist: while you may recall him as a manic bit-player in Mario Kart, here, he's on foot and is basically defenceless – he can't even jump, restricted to an awkward waddle. Success, then, comes from shuffling Toad about, solving puzzles, exploring these clockwork-like micro worlds, and deft use of the moveable camera to find your way. It's all totally charming, and, like Mario Kart, is another example of how Nintendo remains head and shoulders above its competitors when it comes to imagination. AH

FREE-TO-AIR

SOUL MATES

JANUARY 21, ABC1 10.15PM

This new six-part comedy from Christiaan Van Vuuren and Nick Boshier – the creators of online series Bondi Hipsters – have taken their original characters Dom and Adrian, and expanded on the idea – here, their bromance stretches throughout history, and the pair play best mates in four different lifetimes. There's the achingly hip Bondi Hipster fans already know, then we meet them as cavemen 50,000 years ago, as a pair of crime-fighters, the Kiwi Assassins, in 1981, defending New Zealand's international interests (their first mission tonight is to convince a prepubescent Russell Crowe to go back to New Zealand before he becomes a famous actor and is "claimed" by Australia) and in 2093, where they work as futuristic time travel agents. The future Dom and Adrian are perhaps the most fun (their time travel gags are sharply written) although the Kiwi Assassins come a close second. KN

DVD

DARK STAR 

GRYPHON (G)

John Carpenter's endearing 1974 parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey can be viewed as a Vietnam allegory or simply an acknowledgement that interstellar travel might be as boring as any other blue-collar job. We follow four shaggy astronauts lost in deep space as they go about their mission of bombing "unstable planets"; more or less abandoned by their overseers back home, they're well and truly sick of each other and desperate for distraction of any kind. Co-writer Dan O'Bannon plays the especially pathetic Sergeant Pinback, who uselessly protests that he was never meant to be on the mission in the first place, and who conducts a pitched battle with a pet alien resembling a beach ball with chicken feet ("I used to think you were cute"). There are early indications of Carpenter's gift for constructing suspense sequences along clean geometrical lines, but the side-of-the-mouth wit feels more characteristic of O'Bannon, who also took charge of the ingenious no-budget special effects; subsequently he would work in the same capacity on Alejandro Jodorowsky's never-produced adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, as well as co-writing the script for Alien, which revisits the same territory with tongue less obviously in cheek. JW

PAY TV

LEANN AND EDDIE

WEDNESDAYS, ARENA, 9.30PM 

LeAnn Rimes, the sweet 13-year-old girl from the Deep South who in 1996 topped the charts with a dreamy country ballad called Blue, grew up to become the star of her own celebrity reality program about her and her jobbing actor husband, Eddie Cibrian. In the 19 years since she came to fame, Rimes has featured more prominently in the tabloid press than in the charts, despite having recorded a further 14 albums. It is the salacious headlines that have dogged her and Cibrian, who met while they were both married, that are the raison d'etre of the show, or so they insist. In telling their side of the story, they enact everyday scenarios such as attending red-carpet premieres and jumping out of planes for charity. Throughout, Rimes maintains her Southern composure, and her heavenly country voice is still apparent in an a capella rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. BM

DVD

2046 

HOPSCOTCH (M) 

Does the title 2046 refer to a year, a place, a state of mind? All of these possibilities are in play in Wong Kar-Wai's wilfully disorientating 2004 romance – a loose sequel to his 2000 In The Mood For Love, with Tony Leung reprising the role of Chow Mo-wan, a suave writer emotionally adrift in 1960s Hong Kong. Still longing for Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), whom he loved and lost in the earlier film, Chow embarks on a string of arbitrary love affairs with the tenants who move into the hotel room next to his own. All these women come to seem interchangeable, static figures trapped in the amber of memory; meanwhile, Chow dramatises his emotional paralysis by writing a science-fiction novel in which the hero (Takuya Kimura) falls for an android (Faye Wong) on a train hurtling away from a mysterious zone where "nothing ever changes". Perversely devoid of the spectacle which the futuristic framework seems to promise, this is Wong's cinema at its most claustrophobic and wrapped up in itself: obsessively repeating musical cues and lines of dialogue, and jumping around in time as if orbiting a secret that never comes to light. JW