Welcome to a new edition of Press Any Button! We’re a little later in the week this week because I (Alice) had to wait until the embargo lifted to tell you all my thoughts on Forza Horizon 6. In addition to those pearls of wisdom, this wee’s edition also has my thoughts on which games should be Lego-ified next, and Tim reviews the new Super Mario Galaxy movie and is one of the last people to remember Sega’s Game Gear.

Enjoy!

I Played Some Forza Horizon 6

By Alice

It is really hard to judge a new game in a series you love from just a preview. There’s the risk of bringing in too many expectations, too much love, and too much “this had better be better than the last one and also the best game ever” which is just unfair. A game can only ever be what it is, and your baggage is yours alone.

From the start of Forza Horizon 6, it was extremely clear that this is a Forza Horizon game, largely because the intro followed the exact same beats of Forza Horizon 5. You drive a fancy car through some picturesque areas of a new country, meet a person from that country with a stereotypical name (Mei, in this case), the voice over mentions an iconic form of transport from the area, and then you race to the festival.

In this game, you’re no longer coming to the festival as a readymade champion, but you have to prove yourself as you did in the Colorado and Australia games. I’m really looking forward to that aspect, because the journey to prove yourself is always more interesting, and it also hopefully means that the other characters will be less sycophantic.

The Japanese map is absolutely massive. Just an absolute chonking beast, as I’m sure at least one youth would describe it. Not all of it was available in the preview, but it was nice seeing how varied it all was.

Everything you expect from a Horizon game is there: boards and other misc objects to destroy in exchange for currency, skills to bank by doing almost anything, many flavours of races, PR stunts, beautiful scenery, and weather. What this brief couple of hours didn’t show me was anything substantially new. It also didn’t show me any new accessibility features, which is troubling. Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon 5 both debuted exciting new accessibility advancements, yet I couldn’t see sign language or blind driving assists included here, let alone anything new on that front.

In terms of gameplay, Horizon 3 opened up significantly more of the map, 4 introduced weather, 5 introduced more terrain, weather and race types. I’m still not entirely sure what 6 is bringing to the table in terms of new features. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not turning down a new Forza Horizon game, my save file for 5 is so borked that I’ll never be able to complete it and so I’ve been waiting to visit a new game for a long time. But I guess I wish that the first few hours of a preview of an unfinished game that still needs a lot of polish blew me away a bit more.

I eagerly await the full release next month where I’m sure more of what makes Horizon 6 special will be revealed.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: If you’ve been waiting for a distraction from your Balatro addiction, you could do a lot worse than Raccoin. It’s basically one of those coin-pusher gambling machines where you put money in and hope your coins are the final nudge needed to push a big stack of coins over the edge. But it’s a rougelite, so there are all kinds of bonuses and effects you can buy over the course of a run. It’s a really good time. I’ve also had a dabble in Darwin’s Paradox, an octopus vs aliens platformer that has wonderful presentation but hasn’t exactly hooked me yet. There’s an emphasis on stealth puzzles that I find a bit of a turnoff. But some of the platforming and powers have been inventive.

• Alice: Aside from inhaling Forza Horizon 6, I’ve been playing a bit of the new Fortnite season with friends. It’s fine. I don’t know why The Rock is there, and the many staff recently laid off were clearly integral to quality control. You can skip this season.

As one six-year-old behind me would not stop saying the entire two hours, ‘Absolute Cinema’

By Tim

It’s the Easter school holidays, and that means going to the cinema for a big, pretty kids movie. This time it was Mario Galaxy, one of the biggest and prettiest. The reviews have been fairly harsh, and to be honest they’re not wrong if you’re judging this as a movie, against the best animated movies. But that’s certainly, in fact almost explicitly, not what the film is going for.

If I had no knowledge of Nintendo and was just watching this as a film, it would be a baffling experience. It dispenses all pretense of character development and background, with no analogue to the first film’s grounded Mario Bros. origin in the real world. From start to finish it’s a linear march through areas taken from the game and a few newly invented connective locations, with sparse dialogue purely there to give exposition for where we’re heading next, or or add comedic (frequently screamed) exclamation points. I won’t spoil any plot points (though you could easily guess them all), but there are really only three relationships between characters here, they’re all flimsy and the film is not interested in progressing or resolving them whatsoever.

What’s happening on screen here is a blend between a Nintendo game cutscene and a Minions movie, so anyone expecting drama is sure to be nonplussed. At points I wondered whether this was originally a three-hour film, and somebody came along and ripped out literally every meaningful narrative scene and moment, but I think it was actually designed this way. You’re not supposed to be storing any of the stuff that you see, even to your short term memory, you just enjoy it while it’s on screen.

And to that end, I did enjoy it. So many obscure characters and references appear, the animation is beautiful, the score is great (and mercifully free of 80s licensed bops), and it’s just fun to see Mario stuff on the big screen. An appearance by Fox McCloud was flagrant advertising, and the most memorable parts are all “remember this from the 90s” stingers, but somehow the kids in the cinema loved it. So as far as achieving its goals, I think it’s a huge success.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Lego has been dabbling in the gaming space so much recently with sets based on Fortnite, Super Mario, Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda, etc. So, here are some sets I want to see next:

Assassin’s Creed: I would specifically like Odyssey, but I’m not greedy. I think there are so many cool buildings and scenes to be made here that they could make something really breathtaking.

Driver: San Francisco: This game was an absolute fever dream, and a Driver play set would be epic. Niche. But epic.

Xena: Talisman of Fate: I just think it would be really funny.

Muscle March: This is another one that I think would be hilarious, but I also think there’s a lot of good play value there, and that’s an important juncture. As an aside, they need to re-release this game on Switch.

The Last Of Us: On the one hand, it would be deeply depressing. On the other hand, I think the Lego designers would have fun making cityscapes that have been reclaimed by nature. There is a lot of good building potential there, mixed with an active fanbase, which makes it a genuinely good idea that I think they should make.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

On paper, Sega’s Game Gear should have blown the Game Boy out of the water. Released the year after Nintendo’s portable, it had an LCD that could display 32 simultaneous colors from a palette of 4000, versus Game Boy’s four shades of pea soup green. It had an integrated lamp for backlighting, so you didn’t have to sit under a light or squint to see what was happening. It had a more powerful chip that put it roughly on par with the Master System home console. It had a sleek, black, grown-up design. It even had an optional aerial accessory that let you watch TV on the go. Imagine! But despite (and because of) its technological superiority, the Game Gear had a major weakness.

While the Game Boy would happily sip on four AA batteries for more than 30 hours, the Game Gear would demolish six of them (!) in less than five. The tiny cathode tube lamps of 1990 weren’t particularly power efficient I guess, meaning you could play in the dark but also conceivably drain a dozen batteries in a day. In retrospect, while the system is comfy to hold, it’s also potentially a bit too big.

The Game Gear has a decent library of more than 350 games and, though a lot of them are ports from Master System, there are some great portable takes on Sega franchises that are exclusive to the machine. That includes Sonic Triple Trouble, the kart racer Sonic Drift, Tails Adventure, Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe, GG Shinobi, Tempo Jr, Fantasy Zone Gear, Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya and Defenders of Oasis. Japan also got Game Gear spinoffs of Phantasy Star, Aleste, and Panzer Dragoon.

Played today, the Game Gear holds up pretty well thanks to that backlit screen and the invention of rechargeable AA batteries. However, practically every unit that hasn’t had its capacitors replaced by 2026 will have leaked corrosive junk all into itself. Game Boys, even at 35, typically have no such problem.

Alice is back in the country, but only barely and not in the sense that her mind has fully returned from Taiwan, so it’s a double does of me this week. I make no promises about the reigning in of any sicko tendencies.

You had me at ‘Daisy in a plant suit’

By Tim

Many have characterised Super Mario Bros Wonder as somewhat forgettable, a collection of good 2D Mario levels that doesn’t really innovate. And yet, I do believe Wonder is the best post-90s 2D Mario has ever looked, sound and felt, and I’ve enjoyed going back over the last week to revisit the game for its content-packed Switch 2 Edition.

Rosalina is an appreciated addition to the already large cast, while Luma is a new little-kid-helper who can zoom anywhere on the screen and faces no peril whatsoever. Changes to the rules mean you can now apply assist mode (no risks) to any character if you like instead of just Yoshi and Nabbit, and you can set it so the camera always follows player one. All of which makes things less frustrating when playing with little ones.

When you start up the game, Bowser’s Koopalings arrive to steal magic flowers from a new area on the map called Bellabel Park. The upshot is that a new boss battle is added to each of the seven worlds, and these are a highlight of the game. Much more thematically and mechanically distinct than the base game’s Bowser Jr fights, they include a giant puppet battle and a portal-jumping fish.

Also new is a super-cute plant powerup — the character’s arms turn into sassy leaves and you skip when you walk — which gives you a flutter jump and the ability to throw petal projectiles vertically. Yet while you can take it into the original game’s stages, it only actually appears in the new boss levels. Boo. I’m a sucker for Mario outfits, so yes I did put everyone in the plant suit to admire it, and put Rosalina in every powerup. Her black dress for the drill mushroom is chef’s kiss, but I think Daisy hangs on to the sartorial crown overall.

Elsewhere for solo players, a new set of 74 training missions is a really good time, if a little easy. The rest of the update is dedicated to multiplayer.

It’s interesting to see what the 2D Mario team comes up with when designing specifically for multiple players, and the result feels a little like Nintendo Land. And as with that Wii U game, your mileage will vary. There are 10 different VS modes, but the biggest hooting from my kids came in response to Phanto Tag (one character hunts the others, who can transform to look like scenery) and Boo’s Coin Spree (you have to freeze when a giant boo opens its eyes). There are also seven co-op modes, which I think would work best in groups of four. There is a mode designed for two players though; one moves the character while the other jumps, which is more complicated than it sounds.

The least interesting part is Game Rooms, six modes designed to be played on multiple Switch 2s with each player having their own screen. But it’s really just Phanto Tag plus five kinds of races.

All up, it’s the most new content we’ve seen for a Switch 2 Edition, and it nicely fleshes out an already excellent game. The boost to 4K is definitely noticeable as well, with all the tiny details on characters and enemies now much easier to appreciate, and I found myself admiring the backgrounds a lot more this time around.

What’s on our radar

• It’s been all Mario for me lately. I got 120 stars in the Switch 2 version of Mario Galaxy 2, and wow does that game still hold up in every department. I’m not sure I have it in me to get the green stars though. Then I returned to the Flower Kingdom, as you know, to mop up the last remaining collectables in Mario Bros Wonder and check out the new Switch 2 content. This also inspired my kids to get that creepy physical Talking Flower for their room. As I type this I can hear it remark, unprompted, from down the hall: “They say the ocean tastes like … tears.”

• I started listening to an official Sonic the Hedgehog audio drama called The Chaotix Casefiles, because I wanted something to entertain the kids before bed that wasn’t screen related. I found it completely randomly, I don’t know why it exists, and I can’t see how it wasn’t marketed to me (it began in January and just concluded two weeks ago), but it’s surprisingly good. Like, tolerable kids movie good.

• Also if you haven’t played Absolum, the awesome brawler roguelite from last year, it just got added to Game Pass.

It’s a good thing indies and older games are still affordable

By Tim

A lot of things sure do keep getting more expensive.

Sony announced last week that the PlayStation 5 in Australia would cost $920 for the Digital Edition, and $1000 for the one with a disc drive, starting April 2. As a reminder, the console will be six years old later this year. It launched at $600 and $750 respectively. In previous generations, we’d be long past the point where consoles were being sold for less in order to supercharge software sales.

You could put this down to Sony being greedy if you wanted, but I think the real problem is much deeper and less pleasant. Software sales aren’t as guaranteed and aren’t as lucrative as they used to be. Big games take longer and are more expensive to make than they used to be, and more players sit on huge unending live services, which also generate more income. Oh, and components for consoles are impossibly expensive, because as a society we’ve decided to put more resources than we can sustainably produce into giant wrong-answer machines. And America’s made global logistics unhinged.

For now, the Xbox Series X is looking comparatively good at $850. But it’s also a tough device to recommend to a new player given Microsoft seems yet to decide what the future of its games business looks like. Will new games continue to get Xbox versions when the next console goes all in on Windows? Will that next console be a better value (with the ROG Xbox Ally X currently at $1800, probably not). Game Pass is great, but it’s also $36 per month for Ultimate.

Nintendo isn’t safe from the turmoil either, even if it’s so far avoided lifting the price of Switch 2. It made headlines recently after announcing a new price strategy for digital versus physical games, bringing some markets into line with how it already does things in Europe. Nintendo says that physical game prices are not going up; actually digital prices are going down! But this is not the economy for lowering prices for no reason.

In Australia, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book will be $110 at physical retail, the same price as Donkey Kong Bananza. It will be $95 digital, a 25% or so increase on a game like Yoshi’s Crafted World from 2019. So that’s risen in line with inflation. Unfortunately, the money we have spare to spend on games has not risen at all. And the physical version is just straight up more expensive.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Tim

My oldest kid is very much into board games, but he has specific tastes. Games need to be quick to get into but also have a load of complicated rules and concepts, or change repeatedly, or have the potential to descend into chaos. For this reason he tends to invent a lot of his own board games, which I promise I try to support enthusiastically.

For his recent ninth birthday we got him Zombie Kidz Evolution, which looked like it would fit the bill while also being something we could all do together since it’s 2-4 player co-operative (plus it’s $30, so worth a gamble). As it turns out, we all love it.

This is a legacy game, meaning it changes with every play, and you permanently add or modify features as you go. I’ve played legacy games before but none that I’d consider easy for our six-year-old to play. Zombie Kidz starts off very simply; you hop around the board eliminating the undead as they enter your school, keeping their numbers down and using teamwork to lock the four entrances.

But every time you play, you apply a little brain sticker to your passport. And whenever you win, you check the list of achievements to see if you can tick any off, for an extra sticker. This also keeps things fresh, as you want to adjust your playstyle to hit those cheevos. After adding a certain number of stickers, you get to open one of the game’s secret envelopes to see what’s inside. And if you have young kids, you probably just got a vicarious adrenaline rush from that last sentence.

The envelopes add new rules to put inside the instruction booklet, new achievements for the passport, super-powered versions of the zombies which add new mechanics, and new abilities for your heroes. We’re more than halfway through and at this point there can conceivably be 10 actions we have to take on each person’s turn, but the mechanics have been introduced so gradually that it all makes sense. And I love that there’s an emphasis on synergising abilities and exploiting zombie actions; it’s a strategy game the kids understand and can engage with.

We first found out about the game when my kid visited a friend who had it, and they were extremely keen to have him play, which seemed strange with a legacy game that was part way done. But when I examined our copy, sure enough, there’s an achievement for playing with five different friends. Genius marketing.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

It’s that time of month! Here are three games that celebrated a major anniversary in March.

Now 20: The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Released just months after the launch of the Xbox 360, and well before we had Gen 7 consoles from Sony or Nintendo, Oblivion was a big screen PC-style RPG on a scale that had previously seemed impossible. So many experiences from this game are burned permanently on my mind, but the most vivid have nothing to do with the story or the characters. Looking up and seeing the consistent cycle of stars and planets across the various seasons. Delving into ancient ruins without knowing what I’d find there. Discovering an entirely new major questline after 60 hours and wondering how anyone could possibly cram this much stuff into a video game.

Now 30: Resident Evil Infamous for its cheesy dialogue and stiff controls, this first game in the series brought horror adventure into 3D with some genuinely scary twists and genius use of a sprawling maze-like mansion. Played today the controls might feel clunky, and the long slow door-opening and stair-climbing may be distracting, but at the time these were innovative workarounds for the PlayStation’s limitations that felt like intentional design. And they still help make it scary. The HD version available on current platforms isn’t wholly faithful, but it’s great.

Now 40: Fantasy Zone Released a year after Konami’s Twinbee, this was Sega’s early contribution to the cute-em-up genre, rejecting the stark black space shooter aesthetic that filled arcades and instead embracing the colourful. Sure, Fantasy Zone may look like it was made in MS Paint when viewed today, but its style really elevates it above other 1986 shooters. It’s still pretty difficult, and in fact it’s more annoying that the bad guys destroying you are so cute, and it has a few interesting innovations like a shop where you can cash in coins for upgrades. Also Opa-Opa is adorable, and I love that if you fly to the bottom of the screen, he sprouts little legs and walks around.

This week in the newsletter we’re challenging the frequently-expressed notion that the Switch 2’s first year of software hasn’t lived up to Switch 1’s, recapping the Melbourne toy fair, playing reverse Jenga and finishing off our look back at the best Star Wars game adaptations.

The hits are adding up

By Tim

It’s fair to say that the response to the first-party exclusive lineup on Switch 2 has been a bit tepid. The go-to comparison seems to be Switch 2’s first-year combo of Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, versus the original Switch’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. Four incredible games obviously, but I can see why anyone might point to the latter pair as superior.

And yet, I’ve been thinking about the comparison as I’ve been making my way through Pokemon Pokopia. A Switch 2 exclusive, it’s wonderful and surprising and impressive, and yet also probably isn’t up there with the Marios and Zeldas in the eyes of the people who might be inclined to make such comparisons. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like I’m actually extremely pleased with what the Switch 2 has done within its first 10 months, and there’s an argument for it being stronger than the original Switch’s.

The Switch was a clean slate. Though Breath of the Wild wasn’t technically an exclusive, the Wii U was not in the discussion. Nintendo had heavy hitters in the chamber ready to go, thanks to the Wii U’s failure, including Odyssey, Splatoon 2, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. It also brought over enhanced Wii U games like Mario Kart 8 and Pokken Tournament. Third-party support was decent, featuring an exclusive Street Fighter II variant for some reason, indies and third parties the likes of Shovel Knight and Sonic Mania, and Ubisoft’s Mario + Rabbids. Overall the lineup was good, but it was overwhelmingly carried by the two big guns Nintendo needed to propel the console out the gate following Wii U’s collapse.

The situation with Switch 2 is very different. The original Switch is still thriving, and games releasing for it also work on Switch 2, although this isn’t as exciting as truly exclusive content. Switch was a thrilling new hybrid format, where Switch 2 is a more powerful version of the same where old games run better or get updates. And yet, there’s also an exclusive lineup that feels like a Gamecube-esque era of Weird Nintendo, but coming from a palace of confidence rather than complacency.

Nintendo could easily have made Odyssey 2 instead of Bananza, but it chose to recapture a lapsed franchise and flex some technical capabilities. Mario Kart World, Mario Tennis Fever and Kirby Air Riders are also both weird choices that I absolutely love. Pokemon Legends Z-A and Metroid Prime 4 are on the OG Switch as well but clearly definitive on the new hardware. And Pokopia is a game that’s unlike anything else on any platform, a blend of slow life, crafting and collecting that’s superbly integrated with one of the biggest gaming brands there is. Like Switch, Switch 2 also got some great indies day and date (Silksong, Hades II), but this time I’d argue it had the best versions of them. And some bigger games like Resident Evil Requiem arrive on day one as well, unheard of on the previous console.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve fallen back into the cosy, enveloping ridiculousness of UFO 50, because I received my physical copy of the strategy guide I pre-ordered ages ago and forgot about. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a collection of 50 full new games, designed as though they were 80s classics lost to time. The package was always full of stuff to do, with each game carrying three earnable accolades (a gold cartridge for finishing, a cherry red cartridge for some specific further achievement, and a toy for the strangely included pet pig simulator), but the book drew me straight back in. Partly because I realised how deep some of the games I never gave a chance were, and partly because it includes a sticker chart so I can see my golds and cherries in physical form. Also, I’ve been revisiting quite a few Switch 1 games on Switch 2, because of a new update that lets them run in TV mode while in handheld. This means they display in 1080p (rather than 720p, which tended to look awful on Switch 2), addressing what was pretty much my only remaining issue with the console.

• Alice: I’m still in Taiwan! This week I saw a panda, and it was so cool. I’m also still playing a lot of Pokopia, and going all out trying to get all the postcards I can carry in Pikimin Bloom

Toy Fair shows that what’s old is new again, and what’s new will make you feel old

By Alice

Melbourne Toy, Hobby and Licensing Fair was on recently at MCEC. It’s basically the industry event that decides what your kids will want for Christmas, which toys all the retailers will be stocking, and lays out the release schedule for board games going into Australian hobby stores. Booths will have toys they’re floating as a possible release, if any retailers take them up on it. Toys that a wholesaler had full confidence in on Sunday, might be dead in the water on Wednesday, whereas others might have Cinderella stories. Of course, I went down to check it out, as I have done now for more than a decade. While a lot of the really cool stuff I saw is NDAed out the wazoo, there were some really interesting trends.

The most striking trend I noticed is horror. All the old Universal monsters (Frankenstein, etc) are back in a big, big way, across toys, collectables, trading card games and board games. Almost every booth I visited had some kind of nod to horror movies, like Annabelle dolls, or Frankenstein rubber ducks, and board games. Reps were talking about how they used to only be able to sell these kinds of toys to adults at Halloween, but now there’s year-around demand. Not sure what that says about the state of the world, but I’m sure someone is writing an anthropological thesis on it.

In terms of video games, obviously there’s a lot of Minecraft, Mario and Sonic toys because of those franchises movies, and Pokemon toys for the anniversary. What was less expected was the rise of even more toys based on Roblox experiences. There’s always been some Roblox toys at the event, but this was a massive expansion of the range across multiple booths.

The rise of toys based on Influencers and YouTube channels isn’t so much surprising, as it just makes me feel very old. These aren’t even scripted YouTube channels, just mid-tier influencers who have aesthetics kids want to mimic and play with.

More depressing was the sheer amount of AI generated imagery on toys ranging from the cheap and cheerful, to premium toys where there definitely would have been space in the budget for a real artist.

It’s a brave new world, and I’m really interested to see how actual children respond to these toys.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

I love a simple board game. One where everyone will know the rules in the first 5 minutes, and then you can spend the next dozen play throughs trying to hone your skills. I want rules to provide structure and boundaries, rather than making it feel like memorising War and Peace. One of the games I played at Melbourne Toy Fair was such a great example of this, and I can’t wait for it to come out so more people can experience this simple joy.

That Brick Game is from the makers of That Sound Game. They’re an Australian couple, one of whom works in construction, which seems appropriate. The game is kind of like a reverse Jenga, but with cards that can be used strategically.

Each turn you roll a die to find out how you’re playing a brick on the work area. You could be forced to place one or two, or have to put it on its side or its head. If you knock the pile down during your turn, you have to collect the bricks, and the loser is the person with the most bricks at the end of the game/winner has the least. The cards can be used to make someone take your turn, place an extra brick, force them to place their brick on the highest stack of bricks, and all kinds of other barbs.

The designers billed it as a game you could take down the pub, and I can see it working well at all kinds of venues and picnics, because it’s so small and portable, and the rules are quick to learn. But it’s also a great game for all ages. It would really work from age 5 until death, as long as you had one steady hand.

That Brick Game has all the ingredients of a classic, and I look forward to seeing how it goes.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

The 2000s had so many Star Wars video games. Many were genuinely bad, including some that remain beloved by folks who were still in a prequel trilogy haze at the time (or who were 12 years old, or both), and so get a pass for holding onto some content otherwise better forgotten. Some games of the era are absolutely high points for the franchise though, including Knights of the Old Republic, which cleverly avoid the prequel narrative by going back 4000 years in the past. I’m not looking at that one here though, because we’re still squarely focusing on games that did justice to the films.

2001: Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader There was a notable lack of TIE Fighters and X-Wings in The Phantom Menace, but Factor 5 was all too happy to play the hits in this launch title for the Gamecube. You got to blow up both Death Stars, fly around the iconic battles of Hoth and Endor, plus engage in some less canon activities including taking down a Star Destroyer and kicking the Empire out of Bespin. Besides all that, it was and remains one of the best audio-visual takes on Star Wars dogfighting in video games, and I think it might also contain the best playable Death Star trench run (of many!).

2004: Star Wars Battlefront What if Battlefield, but Star Wars instead of World War II? This game understands that the locations, vehicles, items and random background dudes of the films are at least as important as the Jedi and the Sith. You play as one disposable soldier in an army, doing your part to control key points of the map and push the enemy back, and there are four distinct factions across two eras (rebels vs imperials, republic vs separatists). I have very fond memories of both the campaign mode and skirmishes over LAN, but in retrospect the best part is Galactic Conquest, which adds a meta strategy element as your battle on each planet affects your faction’s hold on the galaxy.

2005: LEGO Star Wars The first of Traveller’s Tales’ Lego game franchise, this is also an amusing parody of / tribute to the prequel trilogy. These games have always been mechanically simple and a bit janky, but the smash-everything approach is a gloriously offbeat match for Star Wars and allows some of the quirkier and sillier aspects of the movies to shine through. It’s a blend of dumb pantomime and superbly geeky fondness for the franchise, which rules.

Let’s go!

Coming to grips with old rubber

By Tim

I love my Xbox Elite Series 2 and my PlayStation DualSense Edge controllers. They’re extremely expensive, sure, but over thousands of hours of play you get a lot of benefit out of the rubberised grips, the remap profile switching, and the rear bumpers. The current Xbox controller may be the best pad ever made (I prefer its layout to the DualSense, which is also disqualified because of its abysmal battery life), and the Elite makes it even better. But both of these controllers share a weakness, and it’s those grips.

Having rubber glued to the grips does feel great, but the design is doomed to fail on pretty much every controller. The material absorbs oil from your hands over time and expands, eventually coming loose or developing bulges or sticking out in weird spots, in a way that’s impossible to fix because it won’t fit in the space it used to live in.

My Elite has absorbed a lot of gameplay hours (and oil) in its more than 6 years, and by a couple weeks ago the grips had finally had enough. Did I drop $280 on another one? Of course not, this one still works. I dropped $50 on an aftermarket shell.

A quick disclaimer: Microsoft and Sony have not made these controllers with user repair in mind, and in fact it is difficult to disassemble these things without breaking something. I would suggest contacting them first before going DIY, in case you’re covered by warranty or they can offer you parts or repair.

I have bought stuff from ExtremeRate, out of China, before, and the quality has been fair. That’s my experience with the Elite 2 shell I bought from them too. Some bits came still connected to plastic frames and required some filing, and the included magnets, adhesive and tools were very basic, but the plastic shell at $50 feels nice and solid.

The real decider will be how confident you are at tinkering. I had all the right tools and have done this kind of thing before, and it still took me two hours plus a break to clear my mind when I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong with the rear circuit boards. I’m not sure how complex the DualSense is (though I may soon find out, given how wrinkly its handles are), but I’d wager it’s similar. The Elite 2 is absolutely packed with tech to facilitate the charging case, magnetic bumpers, adjustable hair triggers, rumble and so on, and it all needs to come out and go back together as you move it to a new shell.

In the end I think it looks good (I kept the stock silver screws, whereas ExtremeRate included black, and I added a silver d-pad I already had), and it will hopefully keep the pad going another six years. But I would have preferred it if we skipped the rubber in the first place.

What’s on our radar

• March is pretty quiet this year, unless you’re into Marathon. I’ve been spending my time replaying old Zeldas, finishing up the wonderful Planet of Lana II, building Star Wars Lego and dabbling in WWE 2K26. As someone who hasn’t played many wrestling games since the early 2000s there’s a lot here that makes me say “why do people accept that this is ok?”, but I’m also having fun. If for some reason you don’t have access to Cyberpunk 2077, check it out on Game Pass this week!

• Alice: I’m in Taiwan this week! So the only things on my radar are non-caffeinated bubble tea and selvedge denim.

I didn’t know they shipped V-Bucks through the Strait of Hormuz

By Alice

It’s not my joke in the headline, but it does seem somewhat ridiculous that Epic is using the cover of rising inflation and power costs to increase the price of a virtual currency the company has full control over, particularly given this virtual currency only buys cosmetic, in-game items.

For those who missed the news, last week Epic announced that shrinkflation was hitting V-Bucks, because “the cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and [they’re] raising prices to pay the bills”. You see, they’re just a small indie company trying to keep the lights on. So, for the money that used to buy 1000 V-Bucks, you’ll get 800 V-Bucks. The season pass used to cost 1000 V-Bucks and contain 1500 V-Bucks, so if you got to level 160, you’d have enough V-Bucks to pay for the next season pass and save up for a skin. Now it’ll cost 800 (so, at least the price of the pass hasn’t gone up), but you’ll only earn 800 by completing the pass, so now most people won’t get their V-Bucks back.

It was always a good deal, but the point of it being a good deal was to keep people engaged with the game and playing more to “beat the system”, and through playing more, people would then want to keep up with the latest skins and emotes encouraging them to buy more. This had been a successful strategy for years. At least now the V-Buck rewards are limited to the regular battle pass (the first 100 levels), and are no longer spread over bonus rewards. I wonder how long it will take for them to start shifting back up to level 160?

A person who wanted to justify this nonsense might say “well, the trading conditions have changed” or “Fortnite’s popularity is declining so it’s reasonable to squeeze the existing playerbase to get all the juice out before leaving it to shrivel”, or “at least they’re not just doing layoffs this time”. To that strawman I point out that the most recently reported profit for the privately owned company was close to $6bn USD. Sure, it’s always nice to make number go higher even if it is already more money than could be reasonably spent in a lifetime, but at what point does alienating a portion of the playerbase make number go lower? Framing this as necessary to “pay the bills” is disingenuous. It’s just to pay greed, and they’re hoping that an audience that is mostly children either won’t notice or won’t question it.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Let’s talk about Duplo. When people think of Lego, their minds (usually) immediately turn to the small bricks we all know and love. But Duplo is more than just a gateway brick, and we should really be integrating it more into our builds.

There are a lot of people who don’t know that Duplo and Lego System bricks are compatible, But they actually form the (very solid) foundation of a lot of the larger scale statues you see at events like Brickvention and at Legoland. They’re the most cost-effective Lego way to build up a large scene. They also just come in shapes that are a lot more interesting.

My daughter has loved Duplo bricks since she was old enough to hold them, but since she was around 16 months she’s been a lot more interested in building with them, and thus I have also spent a lot more time around Duplo, making me think about it more than I had since I was her age.

Before we left for Taiwan, we were using the First Time At The Airport Duplo set to prepare her for what the airport would be like, and set expectations for what a longer flight would involve (she’d only ever been to Sydney a few times before this bigger trip).

As well as loving the compatibility and more interesting moulded parts, I’ve enjoyed the freedom and fun that’s come with building Duplo. I have to admit that when I do my own Lego builds, I’m focussed on making the perfect display piece and then I never allow anyone to touch it ever again. I’m essentially the dad in the first Lego Movie.

But when I’m setting up my daughter’s play area for the next morning, I’m not caring about instructions or making it look perfect. I’m thinking “what will be the most fun structure to knock down?”, “which track layout will be the most interesting to watch, but not overwhelming for a toddler to process?”, and “what kinds of stories can she tell with what’s on display?”. When she gets old enough to start building more intentionally, I’m sure my perspective will evolve to a new thing. But it’s making me fall in love all over again with the potential that only well-made interlocking bricks can offer

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Best Star Wars film-to-game adaptations Part 2: The 1990s.

The 90s was a golden era for Star Wars games, as they exploded out into every kind of genre while also building on the platform and arcade shooter games that had come before. While I personally have fondness for some of the weirder offshoots including Star Wars Chess and Masters of Teräs Käsi, in choosing three games here I’ve opted to go for those which adapt the movies’ plot in interesting ways. And, you know, those which are actually fun to play.

1992: Super Star Wars The film may have been 15 years old at this point, but it still ruled to have character sprites, portraits and music interpreted by the awesome power of the Super Nintendo. There were even faux-3D Mode 7 vehicle levels between some of the platforming stages. Unfortunately you’ll never see too much of it, because the game is monstrously difficult. And while it doesn’t take Scorpion Vader levels of liberties with the plot, it’s still humorously exaggerated. I don’t remember Chewie terrorising Mos Eisley with a thermal detonator for example, or Luke doing triple flips to avoid Sarlaac tentacles before he’d even met a Jedi. Then again, there is a speeder level where you can target womp rats on Tatooine, so you know the devs were paying attention. There was a whole trilogy of these games, but the first is the only one I ever made it very far into.

1994: TIE Fighter The PC flight sim series that started with X-Wing in 1992 were essentially extensions of the Star Wars arcade games, and I don’t think it’s controversial to say TIE Fighter is the best one. Set between the second and third films, the game has you play as an Imperial goon committed to the Empire’s mission of peace and order, heading out on missions to murder rebels, pirates and turncoats. The sim is mechanically complex but the early 3D hasn’t aged spectacularly well. Played today, the best part of the game (and especially its expansions) is the way it expands on the lore to show what the Empire is up to between films, including inserting Thrawn into the mix.

1999: Star Wars Episode I: Racer If you watched The Phantom Menace and felt that the podracing scene held more excitement and intrigue than everything else in the rest of the movie combined, you’re not alone. Ok, so the dual-bladed lightsaber was also very good, but attempts to turn that into a video game would take a few decades to get good. Here, the Tatooine podrace is perfectly recreated but also expanded into a Galaxy-spanning tour that cleverly picks out or invents franchise locations best suited for high-speed death circuits. Characters like Sebulba, Anakin and Watto make great showings, while all the other racers are given more time to shine in the game than they ever had in the movie. Plus, it just looks, sounds and plays extremely well.

Welcome back to Press Any Button!

In this week’s newsletter, Sony is learning from Microsoft’s mistakes, Tim is playing Planet of Lana’s sequel, old Star Wars games are real and can hurt you, and Alice has found a new board game that you should play.

Enjoy!

The return of the console exclusive

By Alice

PlayStation is reportedly moving back to console exclusives, no longer releasing single-player games on PC, according to Bloomberg last week.

Bloomberg put this change in strategy down to three things:

1. Concerns that it could weaken PS5 and PS6 sales (if you can play all the games you want on the PC you already have, why would you need a new console?)

2. PC sales for PS games have been weak.

3. Rumours that the next Xbox will be able to play PC games, because Sony absolutely does not want you firing up The Last Of Us and God of War on Xbox.

This comes after an interesting couple of years of video game companies moving away from exclusivity. Xbox started releasing games everywhere, partially because the company was trying to get regulatory approval to buy Activision Blizzard for the Candy Crush revenue and wanted to demonstrate that Call of Duty would still be available everywhere, and partially because Xbox consoles are hardly flying off the shelves. Someone buying a game to play on PlayStation is more money than no one buying the game, I suppose. The brand then doubled down on this with the bizarre “Everything Is An Xbox” campaign, encouraging people to sign up for Game Pass and play Xbox games on their phones, shortly before making the price of Game Pass significantly more expensive, making it harder for people to justify. Reportedly, this strategy of “there is no point in buying our physical products because you can subscribe to our service and play the games everywhere” has not gone well for Xbox.

Sony may have seen the PC sales numbers on its games, watched Xbox go down that path, and then decided that the company wanted to walk down a separate, more profitable path.

While it’s true that most game companies do not make a significant profit on hardware sales, Xbox and Sony do get a significant cut of digital game sales on their platforms, which is money Sony would very much like to keep flowing in by having people buy its consoles and be forced to use its storefront.

While this is probably a good business move, it’s not great for gamers who have a PC and can’t afford a PS5 (which will likely have another price jump in the near future due to RAM prices), or game preservation. But it will be interesting to see how it goes, and whether Microsoft will also change course to match, or if it’s too late.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been playing a lot of Planet of Lana II (see below) and also Pokopia. Slow-life building and crafting is not my vibe, but damnit I do really love this goopy Ditto protagonist and all these adorable creatures I have nostalgia for. I also started a new save on Twilight Princess for Gamecube, and cursed Nintendo for stranding the HD version on Wii U. Of all Zeldas, I think it’s the most unfairly maligned.

• Alice: This past week I have been all about trying to level up my Fortnite battle pass so it’s not a complete wash (I’m currently only at level 76, which is my lowest level in a full season since I started playing) and Pokitopia, which I love and will soon share my full thoughts on once I’ve played more of it.

Sequel of Lana: Mui’s Revenge

By Tim

Planet of Lana was one of my favourite indies of 2023. Mechanically inspired by cinematic platformers like Flashback, Prince of Persia, Oddworld and the much more recent Inside, it paired beautiful painterly art and a sweet soundtrack with a moving and genuinely surprising story told with no words. So when I sat down to play the sequel last week and discovered it was basically more of the same, I was thrilled.

There’s a lot to explain about Planet of Lana if you never played the original, but all you really need to know is that it’s about solving puzzles and making precise jumps, and that your child protagonist Lana has a cat-like creature who is the true star of the game.

Mui is absolutely adorable as they bounce around after you making cat sounds, and of course you can crouch down to cuddle them at any time. But they’re also vital for solving puzzles, because you can separate the partners and control them independently. Lana is better at moving heavy stuff, manipulating levers, and can swim, while Mui can jump higher, squeeze through gaps and chew through cables, but they can both press buttons. Mui will obediently do anything you ask, which makes me very nervous because they can and will be killed by robots, electricity, monsters and fire.

In the first game robots invade Lana’s idyllic village and capture the humans, including Lana’s sister, leading to an epic rescue mission that ends up revealing secrets about how humans came to be on this planet, the nature of the robots and the awesome power inside Mui. In Planet of Lana II, humans have harnessed the robots as semi-autonomous tools, but a rogue tribe arrives to sew chaos and poisons Lana’s younger sibling. As the adults ride to war, Lana travels to find ingredients for a cure.

As with the first game, all dialogue is in a made-up language, so that’s really only my interpretation of what’s happening. And also like the first game, the main story is sidelined rather quickly by a world of intrigue and rich history. Each level brings new wonders, whether of the natural world or the humans that have settled on it, and the implications are even grander and more emotional this time.

The game does grow mechanically as well, however. Mui’s psychic power is put to constant use here to temporarily disrupt machines and to mind-control small creatures to their strategic death. Some early examples include forcing fish to lure huge sharks away from Lana’s path, and making cute little bramble-excreting snowballs create fuse trails and jump in a fire to light them.

This is a beautiful and varied game with a killer score and heaps of unforgettable moments, and I highly recommend it. It’s on all platforms, and included with Game Pass.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

I finally played some more of my board game pile of shame recently, and Modern Art was a real standout. It’s a game that highlights how ridiculous the modern art market is, while also showcasing beautiful art and allowing for creative strategies and different paths to victory.

At the start of the game you’re dealt a hand of art cards, you auction off a painting when it’s your turn, and have the option to buy other cards for your collection during the other player’s turns. The round ends when the 5th painting from the same artist goes up for auction. At the end of each round you get money for having paintings from the three most popular artists that round, with the rest of the paintings becoming worthless.

It’s a commentary on who decides what art is valuable, and what isn’t, and how art is treated like a commodity rather than a vital part of life. It’s also just really fun.

In our play through, the winner was the person who bought basically no paintings and instead focussed on auctioning off the most popular ones. Everyone else was chasing the money that you could get at the end of the round by having the popular artists, and forgot that sometimes the real profit was in sales.

As we played, we discussed the art on the cards, we developed favourite artists. Interestingly, the most popular ones were almost never the ones we liked the best, just the ones we had more access to.

I love a game that has you discussing the art and how it makes you feel. I even more love a game that puts effort into its art and how things are displayed, with the little eagle and gavel for the auction being just darling.

It’s a nice, lightweight game that I strongly recommend for groups of 4+ players.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

This month I’m in a Star Wars mood, owing to new Lego sets and the fact that my kids have randomly got into The Mandalorian. So I’m going to be counting down the best games (out of a huge library) from each decade. Starting today with the 80s.

1983 Star Wars (Arcade)Though not technically the first game adaptation, it’s by far the first impactful one. Putting players in the cockpit of Luke’s X-Wing, Atari’s game involved battling TIE Fighters, zooming across the surface of the Death Star, and finally performing the trench run to strike the final missile shot. The control yoke has four buttons to fire the X-Wing’s four laser cannons independently, and the game has charmingly low-fi synthesised versions of the iconic TIE noise, Red Squadron chatter and John William’s score. But the best part is the coloured vector graphics. The sense of three dimensional space, for the time, is incredible.

1983 Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle Meanwhile on home consoles and computers,Parker Brothers was innovating a grand tradition of Star Wars games that take extreme liberties with the source material. In this one you play as the Millenium Falcon, dogfighting random enemy ships with a view of the half-built second Death Star in the distance. But there’s a huge deadly forcefield above you. You need to wait for a hole to open, slip through it and then shoot apart the Death Star Breakout style. My favourite parts are the sweet Hyperspace effect when you’re through the forcefield, and the Death Star’s indiscriminate use of its main planet-killing weapon to try and swat you out of the sky.

1987 Star Wars (Famicom) Wow, Luke really kills a lot of Sand People with a lightsaber in this one. Like father like son. Namco’s adaptation was never released outside of Japan, but despite being extremely difficult it’s a wonderful game. You get perfect 8-bit renditions of the music, as well as awesome pixel art portraits and animated scenes from the movie. But you also get recurring boss Darth Vader transforming into a scorpion or a wampa, the ability to float using the force, an Egyptian (?) temple level, a sick trench run and the option to call your friends whenever you like. This would be a great 80s platformer even without the Star Wars license.

Today in the newsletter we’re looking at the upcoming Guitar Hero spiritual successor, reviewing Resident Evil Requiem, recapping recent Lego announcements and re-evaluating the Virtual Boy. Let’s go!

There’s a good chance we might be so back

By Alice

The new, back from the dead, Red Octane Studios just revealed its new game. Red Octane was legendary for making Guitar Hero back in the day, and now it’s back with a game that is legally distinct from Guitar Hero. It’s called Studio Tour and it promises a lot of customisation features, and a set list filled with rock, metal, and unnamed other genres of music. It looks a bit janky, as you’d expect from a AA game, and the website has a section where you can suggest including music from your own band.

The big questions we all had when the studio was first revived remain: Will this game end up being free-to-play? Obviously it will have to be very DLC based to cover the inclusion of new songs, or will it be subscription-based? Going for a subscription makes the most sense given the evolution of music licensing, it’ll be easier for songs to cycle in and out that way without people getting up in arms about losing what they’d paid for, or having to delist the game. But then that creates other problems, because so many people have such subscription fatigue.

Also, what is this going to have that games like Clone Hero and Fortnite Festival don’t already offer? Is it going to be more mainstream than Clone Hero, or will it be available across all consoles? Will it take an anti-gen AI stance to differentiate it from Fortnite Festival?

I am cautiously optimistic that it’s going to be good. The team behind it obviously had the chops. But so much is going to come down to the set list, the price, and which kinds of accessories are going to be released to go with the game. I want a key tar and electric drum kit compatibility.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been playing a lot of Resident Evil Requiem, and also Virtual Boy, both of which you can read about below. I was also sick a lot of last week, so I reached for a comfort game and that ended up being Breath of the Wild. Exactly nine years after I first experienced it the game remains astounding, and I blasted through dozens of shrines and three divine beasts. You never get back that same feeling of playing for the first time, where every new rule you understand shifts your entire perception of what’s possible in the world. But on the other hand, playing on Switch 2 in a solid 60 fps is transformative in its own way. I’ve realised that I avoided certain areas (the Great Forest, the peaks, the marshy woodlands) because the performance was so poor on the original Switch, and now I’m finding stuff I’m not sure I ever saw way back then.

• Alice: All I have played this week is Pikmin Bloom. All hail Pikmin Bloom.

Requiem for a dream team

By Tim

Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7 are my favourite two entries in the series. So you’d think that Requiem, which smooshes the styles of those two games together, would be exactly my cup of tea. But going in, I had some reservations.

The last time Capcom tried to collide multiple threads and styles together in this franchise we got Resident Evil 6, one of the most viscerally disappointing games I can bring to mind. Having now finished Requiem I can assure you that it is nowhere near what could be considered a failure. But it’s not a slam dunk either.

A follow-up to the Ethan story with RE7 gameplay set in a creepy intensive care facility, where the zombies are all patients who hold on to aspects of their former lives and memories and maladies, sounds incredible. And revisiting the original Raccoon City narrative, with an older Leon playing like RE4 but in nuked RE2 environments, also receives a big tick from me. We get both of those things in this game, but joining them leaves each underdeveloped, and the connective tissue between them provides the game’s few iffy moments.

To be clear, the game rules. The moment-to-moment will thrill any RE fan, whether you’re willing a hulking brute not to see you as you lurk around as Grace, or going chainsaw-to-chainsaw against decrepit zombies in an exploding gas station as Leon. For most of my twelve hours in the game I was just living the moments, and there was a nice mix of modern design, old-school throwbacks and pure weirdness.

But both of these gameplay styles really deserve to eventually reach an unfolding puzzle box moment. For Grace’s half of the game, I wanted to fully become the master of the space, to know every nook and cranny and collect every bit of upgrade material, discovering shortcuts and secrets. For Leon’s half, which is paced like a miniaturised hub-and-spoke design in the style of RE Village, I wanted to express my playstyle with cool weapons and custom upgrades.

In Requiem, each part has a flavour of these designs, but can’t fully commit because the game needs to move you through a linear narrative that takes you from place to place and between protagonists. It’s like a rollercoaster themed after those earlier games, rather than a proper sequel to them.

But the upside to all of this is variety, and on that front the game stands out ahead of any other entry in the series.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

This past week has been a huge month for Lego releases. Unusually huge for nerds in particular.

• First up, there’s the release of the new Pokemon sets. I absolutely love the massive Charizard, Venusaur and Blastoise 6838 piece set, but the more affordable Eevee set is also great.

• For Tim, specifically, but also other people, there’s the Zelda: Ocarina of Time - The Final Battle set, which is expensive at $200, given its 1003 pieces, but just looks so damn good. I love Link just absolutely yeeting himself off that building.

• The Model T Ford looks really cool, but is a bit controversial due to using illegal building techniques (an illegal building technique is one that puts undue strain on a piece, which may cause it to break).

• More importantly, though, there are 8 Smart Play Star Wars sets, which is 5 more than were announced at CES. I’m getting my hands on some this week, and will have a review for you next week, but I really can’t wait to see what people do with the Smart Play system. It’s expensive, which will likely hold some people back from jumping in at the beginning, but I think it represents something special for Lego, and I want it to last long enough that the company feels comfortable to get a bit weird with it.

• I’m pleased to see a smaller and more affordable London Double Decker Bus, and that Maersk ship sure is a blast from the past.

• I am obsessed with how beautiful those Magnolia branches are.

• The big Winnie The Pooh will give me nightmares for the rest of my days.

But, perhaps most importantly, these Brick Clogs which I think would be the perfect beach shoes and I would have already bought them were they not $320.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

The legacy of the Virtual Boy is that it’s become known as Nintendo’s biggest ever flop, and potentially the most prominent flop in all of video game hardware. It lasted less than half a year in the Japanese market before the company pulled the plug, and around one year in America. So, in retrospect, was it unfairly maligned? Or did it deserve to fail?

By all accounts, the system was doomed before it was even released. Design mastermind Gunpei Yokoi was not happy with it, as for regulatory and safety reasons the original lightweight head-tracking design had shifted to a heavy, table-mounted console you had to peer into. Nintendo’s decision to release it at all seems to have been a shot in the dark, since it wanted to cease development and move all focus to the Nintendo 64.

The red-and-black screen of the Virtual Boy isn’t actually a weakness, I would argue. For 1995, the fast-flickering LED array provided a vector-like contrast where the backgrounds were truly black, which paired with the 32-bit processor provided some impressive sights and sounds, like a supercharged original Game Boy. Were it in a more comfortable form factor, and supported by many more games, it might have been a hit.

But of course that never happened. It gave people headaches. The controller, which you can tell was an attempt to enable simultaneous movement across multiple axes, didn’t really make sense for the available games. It wasn’t at all portable, and yet wasn’t comparable in quality to a home console. The stereoscopic graphics worked very well, but you couldn’t really appreciate that unless you had one.

Ultimately, the strengths of the Virtual Boy are all hypothetical. I’ve played the new $130 replica of the device, and I bought the $30 cardboard version, and it’s a fun way to shine a light on what could have been. The graphics look great, though not as high contrast as they really should if you’re using an LCD Switch, and games like Wario Land show how creative teams could make excellent experiences you played 20 minutes at a time, which were unlike anything you could get on handhelds or consoles at the time.

But the accuracy of the new versions extend to the fact that there are barely any games to play on it, and that it’s essentially impossible to find a comfortable way to enjoy it. It’s disappointing that there’s no official controller to go with it. The new device is a fun history lesson, but still not a great experience.

Welcome to a new week of Press Any Button. Last week the games industry continued to crumble, just as you think there can’t be any more people to lay off, Sony found some. Then, the shifts within Xbox might have huge consequences, or mean nothing at all. It’s an odd time.

This week, Tim digs into that a big more, I (Alice) look at what the next divisions are going to be for gamers, plus party games and game birthdays to make you feel old.

Enjoy!

Leaving money on the table? Nah.

By Tim

What a week it was for being reminded that big companies don’t always align with consumers when it comes to business. Personally I try not to mix my industry-watching with my game-enjoying. I think years of hype and marketing and commentary have trained us to care too much about what’s happening behind the scenes, as though the entire industry wasn’t predicated on massive companies extracting capital through the consumption of art and products. Big companies are bad. They exist to make money. But they also facilitate the stuff we love. Generally I think the trick is to love the stuff, support the creators and try to be indifferent to the corporations, but here I thought I’d give my take on why the big three can’t “just do” the things everyone online seems to have been telling them to in the last week.

Why can’t Sony just let Bluepoint make stuff? Sony closed Bluepoint, not because it’s blind to the studio’s value, but because it wants to save money. Bluepoint didn’t have a game in the works, meaning the choice was between dropping them or funding their whole studio and a massive production for at least the next five years. Fans love to say companies are “leaving money on the table” by not making the games they personally want to play, but how confident are you that Sony could double its investment on a Bloodborne remake? Sony’s decision to pivot all its teams to live service multiplayer was a bad one. But combined with the general economic downturn, this is how it’s shaking out.

Why can’t Microsoft just make good games and consoles? Phil Spencer’s stepping down as Xbox boss, and a lot of people seem happy about that. I’d suggest the bulk of iffy decisions from Microsoft over the past years would have come through regardless of the exec in charge, just without the gamer-friendly initiatives spearheaded by Spencer, but he was the boss so all of it’s ultimately on him. Now it’s on the new Microsoft-installed Xbox head Asha Sharma, who comes directly from Microsoft’s AI division. Whether or not this portends a Copilot-powered disaster, don’t expect a massive change of strategy. Microsoft is a $3 trillion USD company, and operating the third most popular game console business is not profitable enough for them. Operating the broadest games ecosystem and publishing the biggest games across all platforms may be.

Why can’t Nintendo just give us all the Pokemon games in our subscription? This one’s a bit different, because a) I think players have the most right to be angry about this one and, b) I think Nintendo is the least greedy of the big three. Pokemon wouldn’t work on the apps because Nintendo does not want people using save states, rewinding, cloud saves and so on with this franchise. It’s very protective of the purity of monster-catching, especially given the competitive scene. But being asked to pay $30 for one ancient Game Boy Advance game feels extortionate. It’s not the first time Ninty has charged too much for an old game you can’t legally get anywhere else, but it feels especially bad here because it runs counter to the idea of Nintendo Switch Online, and erodes trust in that service.

What’s on our radar

• Tim - I’ve mostly been playing a new game I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but I did also have a Zelda day to celebrate Saturday’s anniversary. I played Oracle of Ages, and introduced my youngest son to The Wind Waker, which remains just the loveliest game. He spent most of his time trying to throw a pig into the ocean, which I had never considered. Turns out it can swim! I also got the Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition and have been enjoying the interviews and the DOS version of the game I’d never played. Dozens of new (to me) levels.

• Alice - Lately I haven’t had a lot of time to play “proper” games, so I’ve been enjoying more mobile games while listening to podcasts on public transport. One such game is Potion Punch 2+ on Apple Arcade. It’s your typical stressful restaurant game, but the story is really cute, and I enjoy the different unlockable restaurant locations. It’s perfect for those smooth brain days.

The next battlefront

By Alice

A lot of things that have happened over the past week have further pointed to the idea that we are moving away from the original “Sony vs Microsoft kinda vs Nintendo” battles of the gamers. I remember the console wars, and I’m still tired, and they’ve been over for a long time. However, gamers love factions and teams, because of all the games we play that have factions and teams. Here are some of the upcoming battlegrounds I can see coming, some of them worthy, some of them silly, all of them potentially interesting to explore (if a touch exhausting).

Pro-AI vs anti-AI

There will be some people who can see great value in cutting out creative barriers to creating games, who say that the only thing holding their incredible idea back is their inability to learn literally any skill that could aid them in that. These are also often the same people who say any request for accessibility features in a game or easier difficulty levels are “skill issues”.

Personally, I see no value in art that hasn’t been created by a human, because the meaning of art comes from humanity and the things that make a person a person. Art/games that are just some badass army guy fighting a dragon are boring, I need both the army guy and the dragon to be imbued with the kind of meaning and nuance that only a skilled (and slightly messed up) person who is trying to work through something can make. I guess there are some people who enjoy soulless, meaningless content and aren’t interested in the layers, I just think those people should be studied in a lab and then perhaps taught how to read.

Mac vs PC

On the one hand, Mac has already very much lost this battle due to the lack of games. However, the more I play games on Mac, the more I enjoy the experience over a gaming PC. M-series chips mean that there’s no real performance loss, and frankly now that Microsoft has gone all in on AI, Windows is a mess with so many broken functions. I don’t think Mac will ever truly beat PC in this battle without something major happening, but I think there is strong potential for the debate to at least be interesting.

AAA vs Indie

As the AAA space gets more constrained, and (somehow) more risk averse, indie games are likely to get more mainstream attention as people start to look elsewhere. Indie games have always been the most adventurous and interesting, they just don’t get the attention they deserve because they don’t get the clicks. I think we will see that tide start to turn more soon as people hunger for more interesting games. At least, I hope we will.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

My usual board game group is one that pretends it’s too cool and sophisticated for silly party games (which I say with love and affection). So, some members of the group went into playing Dumb Questions to Ask Your Friends with suspicion and an assumption we would hate it. Turns out, though, that with the right questions (and a willingness to weed out the wrong ones), it is hilarious. Even those who were initially suspicious were fully won over by the end.

The game is just a box of questions divided into categories: Numbers, players, animals, objects, famous people and food. The guesser closes their eyes and the rest of the group draws a card, looks at the question and then everyone says their answer out loud. For example, the question might be “what’s the weirdest object you have ever owned?” And then everyone says their number.

The guesser is then given a stack of five questions (including the one everyone answered) and has to draw those questions individually and place them on a track in the position of how likely they think that was the question, ranking them from 0-4. The guesser will then get the number of points that correspond with the position they put the actual answer on the board.

The thing that makes it hilarious is hearing how the answers given relate to the other four questions. So, for example, the answer to “what is the weirdest object you’ve ever owned” might be “a uterus in a jar”, and then that fits with all kinds of questions like “What should you never give a person on the first date?” Or “What would you take with you to a deserted island?”

It’s a great dinner party game, or something to take to a family function.

The rules say that you should play so everyone gets to guess twice in 3-5 player games, or once in 6-8 player games, and I think you should ignore those rules and match the number of turns to the group. Sometimes that might mean four players get one guess each, sometimes it means that 8 players keep going for 90 minutes. In party games like this, rules are just serving suggestions.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Now 30: Pokemon Yep, the Red and Green versions came out on February 27, 1996, seven years into the Game Boy’s life, fundamentally redefining what a portable game could be. It’s a testament to the strength of what Game Freak built back then that the past 10 years of core Pokemon games have been pretty shabby, yet it remains one of the biggest properties on the planet. Cute little guys you can befriend and grow, and who fight each other, is simply too powerful an idea to deny.

Now 35: Street Fighter II And speaking of powerful ideas, what about a collection of wacky racial stereotypes — hindi priest, china silk dress lady, hairy Russian beefcake, GI Joe, karate man, sumo man, American karate man, hideous Brazilian mutant — fight each other? But they all have different moves and abilities, and the music while they fight kicks ass? This first version of SFII might not be the most memorable, but it’s got practically everything that made the series massive, including the all-important special move combos and the beat-up-a-car minigame.

Now 40: The Legend of ZeldaThere’s not much left to say abouta series this foundational, but Zelda stands out as especially special for a few reasons. In contrast to almost every other 1986 video game, The Legend of Zelda remains a delight to play. And among franchises that began in the 80s, it’s tough to think of another besides Mario that stayed influential for 40 years, with a consistent level of invention and imagination throughout. In my memory I can easily conjure 18 different Zelda games, and every one has its own vibe and its own ideas, even though they all stay true to the core spirit expressed in this first entry.

This week I (Alice) tried to make up for missing Laneway Festival by playing Fortnite Festival. It was not the same. And I tried to solve a murder with ghosts! Meanwhile, Tim played the somewhat uneven Mario Tennis Fever and looks at the options for playing Game Boy games in 2026.

Enjoy!

Fortnite Festival is better now but Fortnite has bigger problems

By Alice

I have fallen off Fortnite pretty hard this year, having only played a handful of times. There are a few reasons why:

1. Mostly the use of generative AI. There are genAI jam tracks, emotes and assets in-game. For a game that rakes in billions of dollars, that’s unconscionably lazy and greedy. It leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, and it’s not something I want to support.

2. I hate the changes that have been made to the battle pass progression. It just feels needlessly fiddly. There’s already four battle passes in the game; they didn’t need to segment the main pass to make it even more confusing. When I was playing more, I wanted to spend my time playing the game, not faffing about with added nonsense.

3. The changes to Battle Royale this season have been neither fun nor inventive.

That said, Chappell Roan is now the headliner for the new Fortnite Festival season, and given I have the Fortnite Crew subscription for free through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate anyway, I still want to unlock all the Chappell Roan stuff. At least none of that appears to be AI generated, and hopefully Roan is getting paid a decent chunk of cash by Epic.

I’ve been playing Festival on my Crkd Xbox Gibson Les Paul Guitar, and I’m kinda stunned by how much it feels like playing Guitar Hero in my bedroom as a teenager. My skills aren’t the same, but the tweaks to the game mode have improved it so much. Harmonix has really found a groove with it.

I don’t recommend giving Epic money or support until the AI situation is worked out (and I don’t think that’s coming soon), but Chappell Roan fans with free access to the pass will have a good time.

What’s on our radar

• Alice: This weekend I had a board game day with my friends, and as always there were more games to play than there was time to play them. One game that we didn’t get to, but that I am still keen to play is Mycelia. It’s a 1-4 player mushroom-themed deck building game with beautiful art. It’s a game I have been wanting to play for nearly a year now, and one day I will get around to it.

• Tim: Over the weekend I played Reanimal, which is the two-player horror adventure from the developers of the first two Little Nightmares games. It has a great quasi stop motion Tim Burton aesthetic and some suitably creepy scenarios, and I love any co-op game where you’re running around on the same screen but need to do different things at the same time to solve puzzles. But I also never really clicked with this kind of “horror”, where something kills you repeatedly until you figure out what you need to do to survive. With no real stakes except more wasted time, it takes the edge off a bit. I’m also eyeing the Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition. I want to watch the documentary bits, but I already own multiple versions of the original game, so I’m not sure I can justify the purchase.

I got a fever, and the only prescription is Waluigi

By Tim

Mario Tennis peaked in the year 2000, with the Nintendo 64 version perfecting the sport mechanics and the Game Boy Color version nailing the RPG story mode. None of the subsequent versions have come close in my opinion, but this month’s Mario Tennis Fever is the best attempt yet.

To answer the biggest question first; no, you should not be excited for the “Adventure Mode”. Camelot is definitely capable of making a satisfying singleplayer experience, but it’s flubbed it here with a mode that would be better labelled “Baby Academy”. After some promising cutscenes that set up a bizarre narrative (Daisy is fridged by a mystery illness and our heroes are transformed into babies with the only solution being to get really good at tennis), it’s just a really long and dialogue-heavy tutorial with bad mini-games.

By comparison, the rest of the game is phenomenal. On default settings the ball is a bit slow and floaty, but that’s ok because you have so much else to pay attention to. Each player equips one or two Fever Racquets that can unleash a special ability when charged. Some of these are offensive, spawning a fire bar on the opponent’s side (my favourite) or creating a slippery ice pool. But these are risky because they only activate on bounce, so they can end up hitting your side. Others are defensive, like spawning an extra CPU helper, while others are more passive, like temporary invincibility.

Combined with a massive roster of characters, the Fever Racquets make the regular game a lot of fun, especially for couch multiplayer. You can set up custom matches, work your way through three stages of tournaments, try a range of very silly special modes, or work your way up the Trial Towers, which are kind of like Smash Bros challenge modes, where you have specific goals to accomplish.

As ever in these kind of competitive games, I logged in online the day of release and found that Japanese players were already somehow 4000 times better than me. There’s some kind of meta strategy that allows you to make sure your opponent gets hit in the face immediately with no chance to return, I guess. I’d like to get good enough to turn the tables on these folks and get some wins, but there’s only so much time in the day for practicing, by which I mean getting hit in the face constantly and hoping to learn something from it.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Mysterium is one of those board games that sounds perfect on paper, but could still use some fine tuning in reality.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s essentially a lovechild between all the best parts of Cluedo and the ok parts of Dixit, but co-op. There has been a murder, and you and your friends are mediums who are communicating directly with the victim. The only problem is that the victim is giving each of you conflicting visions.

During the first seven rounds the ghost (another of your friends who is playing behind a DM-style screen) gives each of you clues pointing you towards one of the face up cards, first in the murderer category, then scene of the crime, followed by murder weapon. The clues are art cards, which could reflect the vibe of the thing they’re trying to point you towards, or the colours, or something that makes sense only in your friend’s mind, or simply the last card they had in hand. Each round you guess which card you’re being pointed to, and your fellow mediums can then say whether they think you’re right or wrong to earn points. If you’re correct, you can take your card to put in your envelope of potential answers and move onto the next category, if you’re wrong you get another clue next round.

These first 7 rounds are really fun in a good group, because you’re getting to see how your friends interpret art, which aspects they value and the kinds of details they notice. It’s what makes Dixit so interesting.

It’s what comes next that was a bit annoying. Once you’ve hit the end of the 7 rounds, the ghost then gives the group clues to tell them which medium has the correct answer. The number of points you got during rounds 1-7 dictates how many of the cards you see before you make your vote. In theory, it sounds pretty good. But in practice it just takes a lot of the wind out of the sails after such a good first part of the game. It’s almost like most of the development effort went on rounds 1-7 and they had to rush how the ending would work. It’s not enough to stop me from recommending the game, we played it twice because we had such a good time. I just wish it had stuck the landing.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

The Game Boy remains one of the most iconic and popular form-factors for portable retro gaming, and looking at my shelves I must have at least nine little devices capable of playing Game Boy games. So if you’re looking to add some old-school capabilities to your daily carry, I thought I’d run down some of your best options in 2026.

A real Game Boy Color: This option has really become one of the best and most cost-effective options, in part because of Nintendo’s indestructible hardware and in part because there are so many aftermarket parts. A fully custom unit with a modern screen and battery will set you back around $300. Or get a used one in good shape for $100 (you want it for the board, so don’t worry if the case or screen is rough), plus a new no-solder case and LCD kit for around $60. It’s BYO original cartridges, but if you don’t want to be juggling all that plastic on the go I recommend the $130 Everdrive GB X7.

High-end FPGA emulator: These all come with pros and cons. The Analogue Pocket is constantly out of stock and extremely expensive, but it is a stunning modern Game Boy that also plays GBA carts out of the box, and supports dozens of FPGA cores to play other handhelds and consoles. The Modretro Chromatic has a great metal build and functions just like a GBC, but much of the retro community frowns on the company’s ties to military weapons. And FunnyPlaying’s FPGBC is a steal at around $150, it’s just not as premium or advanced as the competition.

Cheapo software emulator: It is true that you get what you pay for, but if all you want is a cute little device that can play Game Boy games then you really don’t need to pay much. Chinese consoles from Anbernic, Miyoo and Retroid Pocket start at around $50 and tend to come with packed SD cards so you can play out the box or customise to your liking if you don’t mind tinkering with Linux or Android. There’s no cartridge slots here though, so you’ll have to be ok with delving fully into piracy.

Switch 2 sold very well in its first six months, but the roadmap ahead is pretty thin, and it’s become clear most third parties couldn’t get software ready pre-launch. I played Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata on the console and they look great, so the hardware isn’t the thing stopping every big new release from arriving. On the other hand Nintendo is going as all-out as it possibly can bringing Virtual Boy to Switch Online, which at any other time would have felt like a move of absolute desperation. With third parties dripping in slowly and Weird Nintendo firmly locked in, I think all we need is some banger third party announcements for later in 2026 to keep the Switch 2 hype train moving.

This week in the newsletter we’re looking at the Dragon Quest VII remake, which takes a wholly different approach to the Final Fantasy VII remake, and going on a picnic with Pikmin Bloom. We’re also testing out a fun vocabulary card game and a new take on an old-favourite computer.

Fragments of the forgotten past

By Tim

Dragon Quest is a strange series. It’s hugely popular and influential in Japan, made by a whos-who of RPG development and design, scored by game music legends, with art from the late great Akira Toriyama. Some early games saw release in the US, but for the rest of us the series really only arrived with 2006’s Dragon Quest VIII. Everything older feels like a relic of an alternate past that never happened.

In this context, the recent remakes of Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest I-II offered a profound look at the series’ past, albeit with a lot of the hard edges rounded off. But this month’s Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is a much bigger and more ambitious project.

Curiously, while Square approached the remake for Final Fantasy VII — another beloved PS1 game — by expanding the themes and story, Dragon Quest VII feels compressed. And while battling was thoroughly modernised for FF7, here it remains old school.

If this is your first Dragon Quest, I expect it will feel like a throwback, and an easy one at that. You get quest markers by default, and your party members always reinforce where you should go, so you never get lost. I’ve played a lot more of the 2016 3DS version of the game than the PS1 original, but in the opening hours of Reimagined I could also tell the maps and story have been streamlined, and the overworlds feel smaller.

All that said, the ingredients that made the series — and this entry in particular — beloved are on full display. Enemies are endlessly charming, and I love a good job system, enhanced here by the ability to learn two professions at once. The visuals are gorgeous, with the original Toriyama designs rendered as though they were maquette puppets.

There is a lot of dialogue, and it’s now mostly voiced, which is a double edged sword because I find the faux-British dialect grating. But that’s balanced by the excellent narrative structure that sees you time travelling to parts of the world that have since sunk into the sea, with your actions leading to their re-emergence in the present day.

It doesn’t feel like a new game at all, but it’s special nonetheless. As your characters are scrounging around looking for fragments of a past they never knew, to shine a light on the elements of the present they love, it feels like that’s what you’re doing as well. Dragon Quest is a massive part of contemporary RPG design, and this is one of the nicest ways to discover it today.

What’s on our radar

• In addition to Dragon Quest I’ve also been revisiting another older RPG; Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I started this playthrough last year and picked it up again recently, but in the time between it’s actually been added to the Nintendo Switch Online library, so I can recommend the game to anyone with a Switch 2, rather than only to those with a Gamecube and $700 to burn. This is one of the finest games in the whole series, with a refreshing story about a humble mercenary (not some royal or deity, as is usual) becoming the champion of a righteous war and a hero of anti-racism. The characters and strategy mechanics are wonderful, though it comes with the usual FE stress that downed fighters can be dead for good. Take my advice for a first playthrough; use per-turn save states if you want to get through a particularly rough level, but don’t sweat trying to keep everyone alive. You get access to plenty of good characters, and potentially sacrificing one to save your favourites is part of the fun. I’m also really looking forward to Mario Tennis this Thursday!

• Alice: The big thing on my radar this week is chocolate. Godiva is releasing an Animal Crossing themed collection for Valentine’s Day, and while I’m usually more of a Haigh’s person than Godiva, who can resist the decadence of Belgian chocolates and one of the more random collaborations I’ve seen. Animal Crossing has been doing all kinds of collaborations recently, with the Sea Life Aquarium, Crocs, Lego, Uniqlo and now Godiva. This Valentine’s Day range looks simply adorable with keepsake tins and shaped chocolate. Being Godiva, it is very expensive. The tins with 6 chocolates are $30 or $22 (depending on which type of chocolate), and the big tin with 9 beautifully decorated bon bons is a ridiculous $50 and I want it.

Pikmin is blooming good (and I will not apologise for this headline)

By Alice

I love a game that makes you go outside. It can’t just be any game though, it has to be undemanding, something that encourages you to explore, but doesn’t require you to be on your phone the whole time you’re doing whatever it is. It’s a hard balance to strike. Pokémon Go found that balance in 2016, and then added so much that it’s now incomprehensible to anyone who took too long of a break.

Pikmin Bloom, however, still seems to be at the right level almost 5 years after release. I played for a few weeks when it first released, and then completely forgot it existed. It wasn’t until a special Pikmin-themed picnic last week that I remembered how cute and entertaining it is.

I know I’m not playing it to its fullest potential, because I know there’s so many aspects of it that I’m clearly missing/ignoring. But I do want to make sure I get enough steps each day to ensure my little Pikmin are able to grow to their aims so I can grow more Pikmin and slowly take over the world.

I send these little buddies out on missions to bring me back resources, and in turn they send me out on missions to get steps so they can plant more flowers. We’re helping make each other a little bit better, and sometimes that’s enough.

So, sure, I could be playing to achieve more in game, and I’m sure the makers of the game (Scoperly, formerly Niantic, the makers of Pokémon Go) would prefer I got more into it and spent money. However I like that it can be played and enjoyed at a more surface level than Pokémon Go. It’s striking all the right balance for me.

If you haven’t played yet now’s a good time to jump in, there’s a Valentine’s Day event going on, with decor if that’s your jam. Who doesn’t love an excuse to go for a nice walk?

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Party games that have the potential to get unhinged are actually the best. Especially when they don’t have the option to become too mean spirited (I’m looking at you, Cards Against Humanity.)

The best game I played over the Christmas break was Just One, a game where each turn, one player has to guess a word, and the other players have to write down one clue to help them guess that word. The catch is that if anyone gives the same clue, those clues get removed before the reveal. It’s a great way to discover you have the same brain as some of your friends, and also how people associate words in interesting ways.

It’s a game you can play with friends and strangers to get to know them better, and it’ll work with basically anyone who speaks the same language as you, and isn’t a complete arsehole. Because it’s a collaborative game, you win and lose as a team, so there’s no incentive to spoil the fun in the pursuit of winning.

I enjoy the meta game of trying to guess what everyone else’s clues will be, so I couldn’t overlap.

Just One has now shot up the ranks to become my favourite party game. It can be played in a group of 3, but a bigger group of 5+ would be ideal. I absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for a good party game.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

A lot of my earliest memories involve video games, and I have some particularly warm recollections about the Commodore 64. I remember going across the street to the neighbours’ house and my dad buying the computer off them; with a disk drive and a box of pirated games on 5.25-inch floppies. I can only assume he bought it exclusively for me to play with, because I can’t remember anyone else ever using it.

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t read, and I don’t remember who taught me how to load and run. I also have vague dreamlike memories of most games, with only a few actual names standing out — Boulder Dash, Everyone’s a Wally, Elidon — but the art and music of the era and the machine are so specific that there’s a generalised kind of nostalgia for it. That includes the sound of the drive clicking and whirring and thumping as I waited in anticipation of the games too.

I’ve been playing recently on the Commodore 64 Ultimate, an official $500 machine featuring FPGA hardware emulation in a case that looks and feels just like the original, and it’s stoked that nostalgia far better than other emulation boxes. It works just like the old console, with its blue BASIC boot screen, and it even has original-style serial and DB9 ports that I could use if I still had those old disks and joysticks kicking around.

But there’s also a new software layer on top that lets you load tape, disk or cartridge files via USB, or create virtual disk files to write your own software. It feels authentically 80s, except you can use the internet to source files, so it’s like having a friend who can lend you any program ever created. The system comes with a glossy spiral-bound user’s guide that teaches you about coding as well as describing all the machine’s functions, and a USB stick loaded with licensed games, demos and music.

But my favourite part, and something that’s emblematic of the incredible care put into this project, is a tiny speaker buried somewhere inside the machine. All it does is provide authentic disk reading noises, at all the appropriate times.

Welcome back to the newsletter for 2026. We hope you had a good break, stretched, hydrated, touched grass, played some good games and what not.

Tim and I are excited to be back for our fourth year of Pressing Any Button and hoping for the best. With a new year comes change. Instead of weekly gaming recommendations, we’ll tell you what’s on our radar.

Everything else remains the same, however, with gaming news, reviews and opinions, retro throwbacks, and whatever Bricks, Boards and Beginnings means that week.

In this week’s issue, I take a look at the games I’m looking forward to in the first half of 2026, and go hands on with the Lego Smart Play System. Meanwhile, Tim talks up the year of the PC and has a look at the major anniversaries for Nintendo this year.

Enjoy!

2026 is going to be good for games, at least

By Alice

2026 looks set to be a massive year for video games. Looking at the first six months of the year there’s a lot to be keen for:

First up, the Animal Crossing 3.0 free update and Switch 2 Edition, which would have been incredible in 2020 with GameChat, mouse support and slumber islands. I would have been obsessed. I am still very into it, and will have my review ready for next week.

Secondly is Forza Horizon 6. Obviously, I was going to be excited for Forza Horizon 6, but this time it’s set in Japan, which seems cool. But also, something I’ve been talking about with a friend recently is how Forza Horizon is the ultimate comfort series in a world that’s just constantly a bit much. It’s a game that rewards you for having fun, whether that’s racing perfectly, or driving badly while exploring the countryside. It looks stunning, it plays well, and I’ve always wanted to go to Japan, I may as well visit the digital version.
Mixtape is one of my most anticipated games of the year, and while the date hasn’t been announced, I am manifesting early 2026. It’s a gorgeously soundtracked game about a “mixtape of memories”, and everything I’ve heard about it makes it sound like exactly my thing and I want it.

Pokemon Pokotopia is out in March and it looks like it’s going to be Animal Crossing but with Pokemon, and I don’t need to know any more than that. I’m here for it. I’m ready to purchase merchandise. Let me at it.

I am morbidly curious about Life is Strange Reunion. I don’t think it’s going to be good, it seems to be undoing a lot of what the previous games established, but I’m also really interested to find out what they do with Max and Chloe, given I don’t know what more of their story we need to see. Will it be good? Probably not. But maybe.

I have been so burnt out on Lego video games, ever since that run where it felt like I was reviewing a new one every couple of months. However, it’s now been long enough between games that I think I’m ready for Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. It’s going to have a lot of Batman heroes and villains, including Condiment Man, and that’s really all I need to know about the game. I’m sold.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been in a bit of a funk and mostly playing old comfort games. But I’ve also been checking out games I have installed but never got around to play from last year, and one of them has stuck in a major way: Death Howl. It’s an isometric turn-based tactical deck builder with retro computer graphics and a bit of Souls influence, none of which really made me excited to play it. But once I gave it a chance I haven’t been able to stop. The map reveals itself as you explore, so you have full view of where the battles, bosses and major rewards are. But you can only heal at bases, respawning the creatures, so it’s a risk reward of pushing each expedition as far as you can go, while tipping the odds in your favour by crafting cards with synergies that work for each area’s enemies. Also, if you like metroidvanias and have PlayStation Plus, make sure you grab Ultros this week.

• Alice: I’ve been looking forward to playing some new board games, and the next two games on my list are Mysterium and Modern Art. Mysterium is a murder mystery deduction game that looks like it’ll be fun to play with the right group and Modern Art which I know very little about, but got just before the Christmas break and I just like the look of.

2026 will be the year of the PC, and that’s weird for me

By Tim

There was a small window of time in the early 2000s where I played a lot of games on PC. I didn’t have access to current consoles, and I didn’t have money for games, so my play time was mostly a couple of old beige towers — sides removed, fans pointed at their roaring insides — tethered together by a twisted cable and running games we’d pirated or found in the Harvey Norman discount bin. Every other time in my life has been all about consoles, but I think that may be changing.

PC gaming is unrecognisable now. You don’t need the big tower; a laptop or handheld or tiny desktop machine or any other shape will do as long as it runs Windows or Linux. You can use controllers. You can buy cheap new games legitimately. Multiplayer is seamless. And the walls that used to kept PC and consoles apart are going away.

Xbox has lost essentially all of its unique character. It’s simply Microsoft now, and Microsoft is Windows. I still use my Xbox consoles a lot, but I can’t in good conscience recommend them to people. Microsoft has some of the best properties and developers in the world, and their games are all coming to PC. Xbox-branded hardware will soon be PCs, whether they’re handhelds or stationary. PlayStation may be a long ways off following down a similar path, but I’d bet we start to see new Sony games on PC this year too.

I’ve played more PC games in the last couple of years than I did in the prior 20. Part of that is due to Xbox’s moves, and the increase in cross-buy and cross-play. But the other part is the Steam Deck. PC devotees can continue to enjoy their rituals and idiosyncrasies, but here’s a device that plays those same games while streamlining it all into a console-like experience, and I’m really excited for the same interface on the big screen with the Steam Machine this year.

The major holdout is Nintendo. I don’t think there’s any chance those games are coming to PC, so my Switch 2 is going to stay in regular rotation for all that good stuff. But there’s a good chance my third-party and indie purchases move off the Switch, which is usually my go-to, and head to Steam where they’re likely to be available on all my devices.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Over the break, Lego flew me to Las Vegas, USA, to go hands on with the company’s new Smart Play System, and it’s something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I left CES. I will admit that in the lead up to the event, the idea of a brick that could play music and light up didn’t seem very exciting. We already have light and sound bricks, and they’re fine. They’re a nice addition to any build, but they don’t really change much.

However, now that I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the Lego Smart Play System, I can see how it’s going to be an absolute game changer for kids, and something that parents will welcome (I know I will welcome it, largely because I want to play with it).

The Lego Smart Play System consists of a Smart Brick (which has an onboard synthesiser and is packed with sensors including an accelerometer and light sensor), Smart Tiles (2x2 tiles with RFID tags to tell the Brick what to do), and Smart Minifigures (like the Tiles, but a minifig). What sets it apart from other tech toys is that it cannot connect to a screen, there’s no Bluetooth pairing, it doesn’t connect to the internet in any way, and there’s no on/off button or reset button. Another unusual feature is that none of the sounds are prerecorded, the onboard synthesiser generates the sound to match the activity. That means that it’s meeting kids’ desire for more reactive toys, but also isn’t adding any screen time, and it’s not just cycling through the same 5 pre-recorded sounds like other noise making toys, slowly driving the parents insane.

That combo of sensors and synthesiser means that if the Smart Brick is paired with a helicopter Smart Tag, kids can run around their room and the helicopter will make zoom noises appropriate for the speed. If they turn the helicopter upside down it’ll make angry beeping sounds, and if it crashes into something, it’ll make that sound too.

The Smart Play System is launching with just Star Wars sets next month, which I still see as a bit of a missed opportunity to showcase how broad its uses are across the Lego range. But I’m really curious to see how the MOC community take these tools and turn them into something cool.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

This is going to be a big year for anniversaries. Because, since the ‘80s, years ending in 1 or 6 have been bangers for some reason. But while I’ll cover the games at the end of each month, I wanted to take a sec here to cover some of the Nintendo hardware with big birthdays in 2026.

Turning 40: Though it never officially escaped Japan, the Famicom Disk System is a big deal historically. In 1986, it changed the capabilities of Nintendo’s home console, and opened up easier and cheaper game distribution. Zelda, Castlevania and Metroid got their start on this system, and I’d argue many later innovations in the Famicom and NES cartridge space (extra sound hardware, built-in save memory) were the result of devs needing to match the features of the FDS.

Turning 30: The Nintendo 64 didn’t lead the charge for 3D, but it’s home to some of the most enduring games of the era. So much of the system is an evolutionary dead end, including sold-separately save memory and controller rumble, additional RAM units, the ridiculous three-pronged controller. And yet all that stuff is a vital part of one of the most beloved consoles of all time. The 64 also saw many of Nintendo’s biggest franchise make the jump to the third dimension for the first time.

Turning 25: What a year 2001 was! The Game Boy Advance delivered the first real increase in power for a Nintendo handheld since 1989, then was joined by the Gamecube later in the year, both of them resplendent in purple and grey. Nintendo’s own games from the era have a specific cheeky, experimental vibe that I love. And the Gamecube, together with the PS2 and Xbox, hosted a golden age of third party content; competent, performant 3D games that weren’t yet bloated, homogenous or always online.

Turning 20: I was 19 when the Wii came out, and now the Wii itself is 19. Cool cool. It’s turning 20 this year, and that feels normal. Could I play Wii Sports today, with the state of my joints? Unclear. But there are absolutely old people in the world right now that still play their Wii, and they’re probably limber as hell. Because the Wii’s most lasting legacy isn’t the Mario and Zelda games or even the weird controller, but the way it massively widened the market for games.

Welcome to the last Press Any Button of the year! 2025 has been a wild ride, and we’ve loved getting to share it with you.

As is tradition, these are our games of the second half of the year. If you haven’t had a chance to play them, Tim and I recommend getting into them over the summer break.

We look forward to bringing you this newsletter again in the new year. Until then, play some great games and rest up!

Tim’s GOT2HOTY

By Tim

Absolum

From one of the teams responsible for 2020’s Streets of Rage 4, with awesome hand drawn art from Supamonks, this is a brilliant side-scrolling brawler that feels incredible in both one- and two-player modes, but its most genius stroke is its roguelite structure. Each time you die, your progress earns you alternate paths, more powerful mid-run upgrade options and even new playable characters, which all make your next run more viable and exciting.

Rougelites are hardly unusual at this point, but there’s a lot that goes into making a truly rewarding looping structure. Here it’s the layers of progression and expansion that unfold gradually, but also allow for every run to feel like it makes a permanent difference. Making it to a certain point might mark a little mystery on your map. Solve it next time and a new route may open for the following run. Explore it and you might face a boss that unlocks bramble powers as upgrade options for all future runs. Combined with great brawling, it’s super compelling.

Hades II

This roguelite does things differently, of course, because like the original its complex and unfolding narrative is as important a part as the slashing and dashing. You’re running repeatedly through a lightly randomised path and meeting the same enemies, gods and boss creatures again and again, but your personal narrative feels like it flows through unbroken, thanks to the genius way upgrades are paced and conversations are triggered.

With beautiful art, great writing and smoking hot gods, it’s a sensational spectacle. But that wouldn’t matter if it didn’t also feel great to play. I love exploring the synergies and build options of different boons through each run, and that feeling you get when you’re on a streak and keep managing to press your advantage with boons that work. There’s also a weapon for every playstyle (give me the fast blades), and some of the coolest bosses of the year.

The Drifter

I’m not the biggest fan of old-school point and clicks, where you have to find just the right elements to activate and the right items to combine in order to complete unhinged non sequitur puzzles. But while The Drifter borrow a lot of conventions from the genre, it avoids most of the major pitfalls. And I was able to look past any minor annoyances anyway, because this is a wildly ambitious piece of Australian sci-fi noir that sucked me in with its spiral of surprise, suspense, and gut-punch revelations.

The story follows Mick Carter, haunted and houseless, as he stumbles into an awful conspiracy as well as a time loop that keeps him from dying. Throughout the game, barely 20 minutes ever pass without some subversion of expectations that reframes where the story is going, from masked spec-ops agents to supernatural elements to heartbreakingly pedestrian tragedy. Great voice acting and a fantastically stark and simple pixelated style elevate it to must-play status.

Donkey Kong Bananza

Depending on what you want to do second-to-second, DK’s latest outing can be a hugely impressive do-what-you-want sandbox, a comforting collectathon platformer, a series of lightly puzzling challenges, or a goofy Nintendo world to explore and be surprised by. But taken together, it’s a masterpiece.. The destructible terrain is a literally ground-breaking innovation that makes each player’s game unique, while the story and characters reposition DK’s world in a way that’s endearing and exciting, but still respects his past forty years of history. And that finale!

Levels are broad and filled with goals, where you’re free to dig, climb and destroy as you like, extending the design of Mario Odyssey while mixing in the climb-anywhere freedom of Breath of the Wild, and the design-subverting powers of Tears of the Kingdom. I even feel some ARMS and Splatoon DNA here in there. This is Nintendo at the height of its power.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

After a very long and seemingly troubled development there were no guarantees that Metroid Prime 4 would turn out okay. And when the opening hours introduced me to some talkative companions, a huge empty desert hub and a motorcycle, I wasn’t sure what to think. Now looking at it as a whole, there are signs of false starts and misfires, elements that weren’t fully fleshed out or exist purely as buffers against other bits grinding together. And yet, those other bits combined make for an incredible game.

Though the original Metroid Prime felt like a metroidvania in 3D, this one feels like a 2000s era Zelda with first person exploration gameplay, which is a potent mix. You bounce between main locations finding keys, relics and upgrades, and they’re all distinct and incredible, from the heavy metal album cover of a motorcycle factory at Volt Forge, to a quiet and sinister frozen autopsy lab at Ice Belt. It’s still great to feel like you’re inhabiting space princess badass Samus Aran from right behind her eyes, and although she isn’t quite as cool here as she was in Dread (staying silent while the inexplicable human characters waffle on gives here a bit of a goofy vibe), the lore, guns, puzzles and environments here are among the strongest in the series.

Alice’s GOT2HOTY

Ball X Pit

I loved Ball X Pit so much. It was exactly the game I needed this year. Undemanding when I wanted it to be, or filled with strategy when that’s what I was craving. I have always enjoyed brick breaking games and farming games, and this is a brick breaking game but with demons instead of bricks, and farming in between bouts of demon breaking. It’s captivating, rather than literally addictive, even though you can see it’s constantly pressing all the buttons for the good brain chemicals. I’m really hoping that the new year brings DLC to this excellent game, because I would like more.

Super Mario Party Jamboree Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV

The name of this game is stupid, and yet I am fully back on the Mario Party band wagon. The Jamboree TV upgrade pack for Switch 2 wasn’t as substantial as I’d hoped it would be, but it’s still enough to revive my interest in a game I thought I had squeezed every last drop of joy out of.

Was it a good update? Technically, no. Nintendo made some deeply weird choices that should be studied in a lab for how odd they are. However, emotionally yes, because I really like the dumb camera games, and Air Hockey is excellent. But it’s only worth it if you already own a Switch 2 and Mario Party Jamboree, not if you have to drop all the money to get it.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4

I cannot tell if I loved the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 remake because it’s a genuinely good game, or just because it reminds me of being a teenager with enough free time to master skateboarding video games and discover new music. Whether it’s actively targeting the nostalgia centre of my brain, or if it’s a legitimately good game is irrelevant, however, because I love it.

This remake keeps a lot of the original spirit (even if it does sanitise some aspects for better and worse), but adds new parks, including the awesome abandoned water park and tweaks some rules. Old skaters come back, new skaters were added, ready to inspire the next generation.

The removal of a lot of what made 4 special is deeply frustrating, trying to make it fit into the format of 1, 2 and 3 was a bad choice. But 3 is just so so so good and so lovingly remade that I’m willing to overlook 4 (much like the original consumers did, given how much less popular 4 was than 3 originally).

For those looking to enjoy a little nostalgia, Tony Hawk 3+4 ticks almost all of the right boxes.

Pergola

On paper, Pergola seems like a game I would hate because it has way too many currencies, way too many win conditions, and seems like it would be cluttered and confusing. What it actually was, was a game that fit together perfectly, made complete sense, and was an absolute joy to play. The variety means it takes a long time before it starts to feel stale, and there are so many things you can try in it. The garden-themed art is absolutely beautiful, and it’s a game that I think about at least once a fortnight. I can’t wait to play it again over the Christmas break.

Hitster

Hitster is another board game that had no right being as good as it is, however this one is far more dependant on who you play it with. Luckily, every time I’ve played Hitster it’s been with the right group and I’ve had a wonderful time discussing music and scratching my head over those songs that I know, but can’t remember the details of.

It’s a musical quiz game where you scan a QR code to play a snippet of a song from Spotify. This means that the game is at risk, should Spotify ever change the rules of its API, but also allows music connoisseurs with knowledge of music from the last 100 years to have a great time flexing their trivia muscles, or hearing parts of songs they never would have heard otherwise.

As much as I love getting questions about songs from my youth, I equally love hearing random songs from the 1930s that I’m going to get wrong, yet still enjoy the true gift: knowledge. For those looking for board games for Christmas parties, this is a great one to bring out and play with a crowd.

Congratulations on surviving the first week of summer! You’ve earned a relaxing weekend of video games.

In this week’s newsletter, Alice is angry about AI in Fortnite and is also displeased with the Jetpack Joyride board game. While Tim explains why Samus needs to be better than everyone in Metroid and makes us all feel old with game anniversaries.

Enjoy!

My expectations of Fortnite were low, but holy crap

By Alice

This month’s new Fortnite season has opened with a lot of ground breaking things, some fun, some that are souring me on the game somewhat.

The fun thing is that Fortnite has finally freed the nipple and allowed a second shirtless male skin to have an exposed nipple for the second time in two months. Does this mean we’ll get more nipples in the future? Is this progress?

However what I’m troubled by is the proliferation of generative AI content in the game. There’s an emote featuring an AI-generated song, which is just gross. Epic is a company with more money than god and connections to every major music label out there, as well as limitless resources to discover and foster new musical talent. There is no excuse for this.

Generative AI has also started invading the game world, with AI slop posters littering the landscape. No wonder Tim Sweeney (Epic’s CEO with an estimated net worth of $5.1bn) came out against labelling games made with AI after Valve talked about beefing up its AI labelling features.

Say what you will about Fortnite, but I’m just not interested in interacting with art that hasn’t been made by a person or animal. A game as profitable as Fortnite has no excuse for using AI slop. Fortnite’s projected revenue for 2025 is around $6bn. If Epic paid developers $150k a year, that’s enough to cover 25,000 developers with an extra $2.75bn for other operating costs and profit. They just simply don’t need to be doing this nonsense.

While I don’t plan on fully quitting Fortnite over this (I’m hoping they change course) it does guarantee that I won’t ever spend another dollar in the game. If they’re not going to value their assets, why should I?

What to play

• A new month means new games for PS Plus subscribers to add to their libraries, and this time it’s five rather than three! Like a Christmas present you pay for. The headliner is Lego Horizon Adventures, which adapts the popular Sony franchise into a brick-bashing affair. Then there’s the dash action of Neon White, a pair of first-person horror games in Killing Floor 3 and The Outlast Trials, and the extraction shooter with the name I steadfastly refuse to ever say out loud, Synduality Echo of Ada.

• Day one additions to Game Pass this week are throwback arcade brawler Marvel Cosmic Invasion, and sci-fi moon base horror Routine. Narrative adventure Lost Records: Bloom & Rage has also been added, and a surprise drop late last week was an early access version of co-operative space life sim Young Suns.

• A big week for Apple Arcade, with Cult of the Lamb, Power Wash Simulator and sidescroller Spongebob: Patty Pursuit 2 all hitting the service. There are also plus versions (meaning no ads or microtransactions) of Subway Surfers and Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm.

Samus! Don’t forget to use missiles!

By Tim

As a long-time Metroid fan, it’s easy to get frustrated with the way Nintendo handles the series. We’ve got studios all over the world making great games inspired by 2D Metroid, yet it’s 15 years between Fusion and Samus Returns? We get three excellent first-person games in the space of five years, and then an 18-year gap? Clearly the issue is that a small number of people really love the series and nobody else cares, so it’s not necessarily worth investing in unless the fanbase can be widened. And attempts to address that may be responsible for some of the biggest misses in the series.

Metroid games are about exploring in isolation. Dead planets with dead cultures. The bravest and baddest bounty hunter in the galaxy against hordes of pirates and their bioweapons. When you think of bad Metroid games, you think of the ones where Samus has her power diminished by chatty idiots telling her how to operate. Where the final messages of ancient beings are undercut by loser humans worried about petty nonsense. So you can imagine my concern when, barely an hour into Metroid Prime 4 this week, I was interrupted by a whiny idiot human who immediately started telling Samus to check her map and when to use missiles. And instead of incinerating him immediately, the space goddess let him tag along.

Dialogue in Metroid games isn’t an instant deal-breaker per say. Fusion has it, and so does Prime 3, and people don’t complain so much about those because they’re great the overwhelming majority of the time. I’m not finished with Prime 4 yet so I’ll withhold judgement for now (I’m loving it so far, troopers aside), but the bigger problem isn’t that Retro put humans in here when they should know better. It’s that they’ve only partly committed to messing with the formula.

By all means, have elements to remind us that Samus is the final line of defense for millions of regular humans, not just extinct bird people. Find ways to humanise her too, if you need to. But you can’t have humans talk to her like a peer, or tell her what to do, if you also want her to be the ultimate mysterious badass who’s all business and almost never says a word. If anything, it makes Samus seem like the buffoon when she’s silently standing there amid quipping comrades, making occasional gestures the others need to interpret.

If we’re committing to the need for other characters in Metroid, to contextualise and tutorialise, then Samus needs to become more like Master Chief, a super soldier of few words (not none!), but one who’s respected and feared by friend and foe alike. She needs to reciprocate their humanity a little, and show why she’s worthy on a personal level as well as in combat. Selfishly though, I’d prefer it if we only ever saw the adventures where she encountered no friendlies whatsoever.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Jetpack Joyride is an absolutely classic Australian mobile game. You’re escaping a lab with a little jetpack, dodging enemies and collecting coins. It’s a simple concept, and we all went nuts for it.

It’s a uniquely video game concept, which is why I was curious about how they would make it work in board game-form.

A group of four of us played the Jetpack Joyride board game on a day when we could have done literally anything else, but instead choose poorly.

In the board game you have four boards each portraying your journey from one side of the lab to the other. During a frenzied race, you and your friends grab different shaped tiles from a pile in the middle to try and neatly avoid obstacles, achieve objectives, get the most points, and get there first.

It’s absolute chaos which has the potential to be good. It came closer to making the mobile game into a successful board game than I anticipated, but it was just missing that spark that would make it fun. It had a lot of elements, yet it was somehow too many and not enough.

Adapting video games into board games is really difficult. There aren’t many that are able to make that switch because some things are designed for their original medium, and that’s ok. It’s just like how some books can be great movies, and some just don’t translate. I bought the novelisation of my favourite web series, so trust me when I say they often can’t translate in the opposite direction, either.

So, yeah. While I appreciate the attempt, all but the most hardcore Jetpack Joyride fans can skip this one.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

It’s time to look back at three games that celebrated a major anniversary in the last month. Historically, most years have had very quiet Novembers, but not 1990. So that’s why all three games we’re looking at today have just turned 35.

Super Mario World On November 21 1990, Nintendo released the Super Famicom, and with it the next evolution of Mario. World not only showed what the new hardware could do, with finely detailed art, huge rotating sprites and orchestral music samples, it also showed off a world of impressive scope, expanding Mario’s capabilities with the cape feather and the introduction of Yoshi. Even beyond all that, World has a level of ingenuity, flexibility and hidden secrets that I don’t think any other 2D Mario has matched. It’s beloved by hackers and speedrunners, but even given to a total newcomer today it stacks up against any platformer from any era.

F-Zero The only other launch title for the Super Facimon, this game was more concerned with showing off the system’s speed and faux-3D graphics capabilities than its ability to host broad and deep gameplay. By scaling the sprites ahead of the player and rotating the background, Nintendo achieved an effect that had so far only really been seen in arcades, and F-Zero made full use of that with blisteringly fast driving that punished mistakes with fiery death. It arguably doesn’t hold up too well against Super Mario Kart, which followed a few years later. But its grimy industrial future aesthetic does give it a unique vibe,

Castle of Illusion On the very same day the Super Famicom launched, Sega put out this officially licensed Mickey Mouse game for its Mega Drive, which had beaten Nintendo’s machine to the market by two years. These days it sounds silly to compare one platformer to the might of the Super Nintendo, but at the time Japanese players would have been weighing up a great new 16-bit game for a platform they already had, against two new 16-bit games for many times the price. Plus, Castle of Illusion is an all-time great. The art and animation feels pulled straight from a Disney short, the music rules, and it’s a tough but satisfying jump-and-bop platformer.

This week we’re talking roguelites, Black Friday, a good Lorcana release (!) and more Castlevania. Did you know Patrick Stewart was in a Castlevania? It’s true!

A good year for boons and buffs

By Tim

Surely, the roguelite is officially the genre of 2025. There have been plenty of them each year since at least 2020, but so many major ones have hit this year, and taking a look at Steam it seems like new games tagged roguelite are releasing at a rate of more than 10 per day. Sure, most of them look like slop, but it speaks to the popularity of the genre.

And we’ve really seen the spectrum widen this year, to the point where it’s not really a genre at all but a design element that allows for a very interesting structure for teaching and storytelling, one that feels like a very comfortable fit for video games compared to anything borrowed from another medium.

Of course at the forefront of many minds we have Hades II, a mainstream powerhouse following up one of the first broadly beloved rougelites, and a perfect demonstration of how to balance temporary per-run growth and structure with permanent meta-progression. But then there’s also the platforming Rogue Prince of Persia, the sublime beat-em-up Absolum (pictured), the puzzly Blue Prince and (inexplicably) the action Breakout-like Ball x Pit applying a similar approach while also excelling in the mechanics of their own genres.

The likes of Megabonk and Clover Pit came out of nowhere, presumably emboldened by the success of Vampire Survivors and Balatro, to capture a huge amount of attention for their own offbeat roguelite designs, which unlike the above don’t really make sense without the rinsing and repeating. An undercurrent of other indie successes flowed throughout the year as well, including Haste, He is Coming, Morsels and Moonlighter 2.

This is also the year we’ve really seen new online co-operative games embrace a roguelite structure too, although you can argue service games like Destiny already had a bit of that flavour. God Breakers, Jump Space and Sworn come to mind, though the biggest is obviously Elden Ring: Nightreign. Could this portend more AAA interest in roguelites? Well, Nintendo did add a roguelite mode to Donkey Kong Bananza as an ideal post-game.

What to play

• The big day one drop for Game Pass Ultimate this week is the early access version of Moonlighter 2. Like its predecessor, this is a roguelite action RPG where the twist is that you’re also a merchant selling the loot you acquire. Also new to the service is Ubisoft’s The Crew Motorfest, spook-hunting action adventure Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, spider-slayer Kill it with Fire 2 and (for PC only) tower-survivor Monsters are coming: Rock and Road. If you’re on Premium, the Game Pass gods deign to give you access to Revenge of the Savage Planet and (the excellent) Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo.

• Nintendo has updated its Switch Online app with four more games. For NES we have Battletoads and Ninja Gaiden II, cool games which I predict will have many players spamming the rewind function. Then there are the Game Boy versions of Kid Icarus and Bionic Commando, which I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting to revisit.

• Free on the Epic Games Store now is Universe For Sale, which sure does look like a game.

Turns out I have expensive taste (but it’s on sale now)

By Alice

It’s Black Friday, which is a fitting name for a bushfire, but a stupid, triggering and frankly offensive name for a sales event that lasts basically a whole month now. That said, Christmas is in a month and now is a good time to get some bargains. The main thing to keep in mind is that not all sales are actually sales. I’ve seen a bunch of stores advertising things as a special discount when they’re the normal price.

The second thing is to be intentional. Long after you forget the price, you’ll be stuck with the item, so if you wouldn’t consider it if the price tag didn’t say “sale”, you don’t need it now.

That said, if you’re a looking around for stuff, here are a few gaming accessories I’ve really loved this past year:

8BitDo Retro Keyboard - N Edition: I absolutely love this NES-themed keyboard. It’s the most comfortable typing keyboard I’ve had in ages, and the shortcut buttons are so helpful. Nothing like slamming down on a giant red button to add whimsy to taking a screenshot. It’s $27 off at Scorptec at the moment.

PS5 DualSense Edge controller: Do you need a pro controller? Probably not. But I never want to have to press the left stick to sprint every again, so it’s worth it to me. Target currently has it for $229, which is $100 off and well worth it if you’re in the market for one.

SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless headset: This is something else that no one really needs, but I no longer know how to live without. It’s a fancy pantsy gaming headset that sounds amazing for gaming, is a decent pair of every day headphones, has a pretty good microphone, lots of customisation tweaks you can do in the software, a spare rechargeable battery, and a good DAC. At the full price of $735 it’s a really tough sell. On sale for $478 at Officeworks, it’s slightly easier to justify if you want one pair of headphones you can use for absolutely everything.

All of those items are still very expensive for what they are, even on sale. But if you’re looking for something to treat yourself, or a really over the top gift, these are the devices I’ve used consistently since I got them.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

I really like the latest Lorcana set Whispers in the Well. The name is delightful, evocative and different enough to the previous sets that it’s memorable, which isn’t the most important thing, but I think it makes a difference. It’s also just a really interesting set story-wise. It’s the first set in a while to pick up the story of the game and run with it. I still don’t entirely understand the story due to it not being memorable, but much like Magic the Gathering I appreciate being able to see the shadow of a larger overarching plot to add an extra layer of intrigue.

The theme of Whispers in the Well is haunting and detective work, which is already interesting. What makes it better than that is that the new mechanics add a new layer of strategy. Finally, Lorcana is growing into a TCG worth keeping up with. It always had potential, now it’s starting to live up to it.

Boost is the new tucking mechanic. Whisper cards allow you to pay extra ink (mana/energy) to tuck a card from your hand and boost the abilities of the card (such as lore gain, strength, card draw, etc). This features a lot in the Simba/Megara Amber/Emerald starter deck, which is all based around whispers. The deck plays well and features a bunch of Disney ghosts, and is great for new players, though obviously more seasoned players will want to strengthen it by adding more powerful cards.

The other starter deck is a Judy Hopps/Robin Hood sapphire/steel deck. Off the bat, Robin Hood pairing up with a cop seems like a weird choice, but whatever. This deck is all about investigating and uncovering the ghosts. It’s less exciting thematically, because it’s hard to compete against ghosts, but they’re fun to play together.

Overall, this is one of the best, if not the best Lorcana sets yet. It adds layers to the game, the theme is interesting, the character choices are mostly pretty good, and it feels less like Magic the Gathering for children, and more like its own thing. I’m excited to see what the future holds.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Continuing on from last week, here are the four must-plays from the second and third decade of Castlevania. And if you’re wondering what the series has been doing in the fifteen years since the final game listed here, the answer is inexplicably nothing.

1997: Symphony of the Night Last time I said Rondo of Blood was “perhaps” my favourite of the series, and that qualification needs to be made because Symphony of the Night also exists, and I don’t want to choose between them. Narratively a continuation of Rondo, but mechanically an exploratory equipment-gated platformer with RPG elements, this is the game that gave rise to “Metroidvania” as a term. You have the sub-weapons of Castlevania, the save-hunting and map-unlocking of Super Metroid, and a whole host of secrets and equippable upgrades on top. Add the gothic setting, great bosses, hilarious translation and voice acting and stellar music, and it’s overall sublime.

2003: Aria of Sorrow I like the first two GBA games in the series, but Aria goes so far beyond being a good Castlevania game or a good GBA action game; you could make an argument for it being the absolute best in either category. Though structurally similar to Symphony, a narrative time jump of 300 years and a new Tactical Soul system (replacing sub-weapons with the ability to steal enemies’ abilities) make things feel fresh. Once again, the game is right there alongside the Metroids of the time in hooking you into a loop of exploration and progression.

2008: Order of Ecclesia As with the GBA, the DS received three great Castlevania games. But if you only play one, it should be this one. Going back in time to shortly after Symphony, Ecclesia charts a very different path compared to the previous DS entries, which stuck close to the Aria format. Here, the action-RPG of it all is augmented with explorable towns, more of a focus on character, and a weird narrative about blood traits and artificial anti-Draculas. Combat-wise a new Glyph system uses a recharging mana bar, which is distinct from previous games.

2010: Lords of Shadow There were 3D games in the series for N64 and PS2, but no good ones until Lords of Shadow, a wonderful hack-and-slash in the vein of contemporary God of War and Prince of Persia games. Developed by MercurySteam, which would go on to make Metroid Dread, the game was very well received but seems to have become regarded more poorly over time, possibly because its narrative stands a bit apart from the rest of the series. Yet that narrative does present an excellent twist on the Castlevania premise. With great orchestral music, cool chain whip combat and Hollywood voice talent (Robert Carlyle, Patrick Stewart), it’s well worth a look.

Welcome to a new week of Press Any Button. It’s that time of year when every shop you’ve ever purchased something from is emailing you to let you know there’s a sale. However, not all sales are created equally, so while you’re tempted to snag some gaming bargains, Google whether this “biggest sale ever” discount is genuine, or if you’re likely to get a better price on Boxing Day or a regular Tuesday. If you still want it and need it now anyway, go for it. Just be weary, because (shockingly) big businesses are lying on the internet again.

In this week’s newsletter we’re taking a look at Roblox’s new age verification and age gating policies, the fancy new Steam Machine everyone who is Tim is excited about, the new Magic the Gathering/Avatar the Last Air Bender crossover set, and Castlevania. Enjoy!

Roblox finds alternative to cutting children open and counting the rings to guess their age

By Alice

Roblox has just announced a new age verification method and age gating policy designed to make the platform safer for kids. Given the many grooming scandals the platform has endured over the years, this seems like a good move. “Seems” being the operative word.

The way it works is players will need to upload a selfie to verify their age. From there people will be sorted into age groups of under 9, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17 and 18-20 and 21+.

The way the technology works is users upload a photo of themselves, and the software will then guess the user’s age and categorise them that way. It’s more secure than using government ID, because it’s less risky if the database is hacked. 5 year olds are also famous for not having drivers licences, and so requiring government ID to play would lock out most of Roblox’s player and creator base.

Now, you might say “But Alice, surely there’s something stopping people from just uploading a photo of someone a different age to get around the very obvious flaw in this system?” That’s the neat part - there isn’t. We’ve seen similar software roll out in the UK restrictions, and kids just got around that by holding up pictures of random celebrities. So, particularly determined children will still be able to play restricted sex games. Conversely, child predators will still be able to gain access to children, only now there won’t be any other adults in the chat.

Roblox was somehow not included in the teen social media ban, which is presumably why Roblox has rolled this initiative out now, so they can try to avoid being swept up in that.

On the face of it, this certainly seems better than nothing, and has the bonus effect of giving them plausible deniability and a press release they can point to the next time something terrible happens. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes, and how long it’ll be before Fortnite introduces something similar.

What to play

• Hitting the PlayStation Plus Extra library this week is Thank Goodness You’re Here, a hilarious cartoon adventure for fans of old-school northern England absurdist humour. There’s also the enjoyable narrative horror of Still Wakes the Deep, the uneven car survival of Pacific Drive, and others. Joining the Deluxe library is the PS2 version of Tomb Raider Anniversary, which is a remake of the very first game in the series using the Tomb Raider Legend tech.

• Joining Game Pass is the excellent top-down co-op action game Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, sequel to Guardian of Light which was added to the service recently. Is there something going on with Tomb Raider behind the scenes? Also added are quirky talk-em-up Great God Grove, cute cozy survival Winter Burrow, and looter shooter Relic Hunters Legend. Oh yeah, and Call of Duty Black Ops 7, but if you were interested in that you’d know about it already and would be grinding for prestige as we speak.

• Fortnite Crew, the Fortnite subscription service that grants access to all the game’s battle passes (and there are so many) was added to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate this week and I (Alice) am being so normal about it.

Attack of the Cube

By Tim

I am absolutely the target audience for the upcoming Steam Machine unveiled by Valve last week. The reason I love the Steam Deck so much is that I have plenty of games in my Steam library but I tend to play them begrudgingly because I don’t like being on PC. I don’t want my work machine to be my play machine, and a typical session of gaming on Windows requires too much desktop and installing and updating and tweaking for my liking. I already connect my Steam Deck to my TV and a controller fairly regularly to get the simple SteamOS onto the big screen. So would I like that experience with more power, as promised by the Steam Machine? Absolutely I would.

I am a little dumbfounded by some of the reactions I’m seeing to the Steam Machine though. I think the three most frequent comments I’m seeing online (not counting enthusiastic approval) are:

• Valve is entering the console space and this is huge and going to change everything.

• People need to stop calling this a console because it’s actually a PC.

• I will absolutely buy this as long as it costs less than a PS5.

The first one I think is just another example of an out-of-control online hype engine. Once any story gets enough SEO traction it becomes a snowball of clickbait headlines and yelling influencers, and then all of a sudden I have old people with no interest in video games telling me their young children are all excited for 2026: the year of the Steam Machine.

To be clear, I do hope the device is a success and video games can move towards more open platforms. But I also think it’s way too early for that to touch the mainstream. I’m sure Valve considers the Steam Deck a success, because it’s made far more people engage with their Steam accounts. But the Nintendo Switch has sold quite literally fifty times as many units, and the PS5 has sold at least 20 times as many. (I’m going off estimates of Steam Deck sales, there are no official numbers.)

Both Deck and Machine are Linux computers that aim to let you play all PC games (including those designed for Windows, which is most of them), without needing to use a PC. The Steam Deck target market is a subset of PC gamers — specifically the folks in the middle of the five-way Venn Diagram of “super nerd that plays a lot of different games”, “not bothered by graphics”, “time-poor Windows hater”, “handheld console enjoyer” and “disposable income haver” — and Valve seems to be pitching Steam Machine as an upgrade for a subset of Steam Deck owners.

Which brings me to the other responses. Calling this thing a console seems to have touched a nerve with a certain category of geek, for whom the line between consoles and PCs is indelible and forms a core part of their personality. “Console” may be a pejorative to some, but I can’t think of a sensible argument that the Steam Machine is not one. It’s designed for use with a controller and the manufacturer’s store.

And no, it will absolutely not cost less than a PS5. Prices being what they are, I’ll be surprised if it’s less than $1500.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

It’s that time again - there’s a new Magic the Gathering set out this week themed around a beloved IP that nerds will doubtlessly throw money at whether or not the set is good.

Luckily, the new Avatar: The Last Air Bender Magic the Gathering set is genuinely good for existing players.

I got to play a pre-release earlier in the week and I really loved the mono-white Ally deck I built, and there’s definitely a joke to be made in there somewhere.

I didn’t pull many good cards in my pool, so my options were pretty limited. Yet even with a deck of mostly commons, the synergy between the Ally cards was enough to impress a business school student. I pulled off a hard-fought win, and the game felt really close and satisfying.

Although I had a good time, and ultimately enjoyed the almost pauper deck that I built, I couldn’t help but feel it was a missed opportunity. A lot of the cards were pretty text and mechanic heavy, to the point where it seemed pretty hostile to newer players.

That kind of thing is fine in a set that’s themed around Magic lore, but it just seems wrong in a set that’s supposed to be bringing in fans of other media. The Final Fantasy set hit the right balance of having something for hardcore Magic fans while still welcoming Final Fantasy faithfuls.

While I fully admit that I’m not the most dedicated MTG player on the block, I’m no longer drafting or playing casual games weekly, nor am I keeping up with the meta, I still consider myself pretty knowledgeable. I’ve played every set since Return to Ravnica in 2013, and my win record is decent. I still found myself lost with some of the triggers on the cards I drew and had to ask for clarification from a judge several times.

It’s not a dealbreaker, it’s still a very playable sets, but for those who want this to be their first introduction to the game are going to be in for a steep learning curve.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Castlevania is an iconic and wonderful series, though often overlooked. Part of that is down to there being too many games, but part is also down to a lack of franchise care on Konami’s part. Nevertheless, it’s a series worth discovering or revisiting, so this week I’m highlighting four must-plays of its first decade.

1986: Castlevania This is one of those miraculous NES games that just arrived fully formed, and if it wasn’t for the archaic and punitive lives system it would hold up perfectly today. Great 8-bit visuals and music, flagrant and hilarious use of the Universal movie monsters as bosses, and brilliant whip-based combat make this a stone-cold classic. And once you get good enough to want to run through without save states (it will only take a few hours), you’ll begin to appreciate the various sub-weapons as well as the double and triple upgrades hidden in the walls.

1989: Dracula’s Curse In most senses this prequel is just a refined take on the first game, with better visuals and music, tighter combat and spookier surrounds. But it also ramps up the storytelling (without resorting to the tortured adventure game mechanics of Castlevania II) by introducing branching paths and three characters you can meet, recruit and play as; a thief, a sorceress and a dhampir. Combining each with your standard monster killer hero gives you more options for tackling each stage, and more reason to play through multiple times.

1991: Super Castlevania Supposedly a remake of the first game, but in effect it only shares the narrative setup. This game takes every opportunity to show off the relative power of the Super Nintendo, with so much stretching and scaling and faux-3D background movement, and yet it also manages to hold onto that Castlevania magic. It’s one of the easiest games in the series so a great place to start, though I’m not convinced that letting the whip strike in eight directions rather than two was a great idea.

1993: Rondo of Blood Perhaps my favourite game in the entire series, Rondo looks incredible, adds CD-quality music and anime cutscenes, smartly expands the combat, has screen-clearing super attacks based on the sub weapons, and makes exploring for secrets a key part of the gameplay. A map of connected levels appears on the main menu as you progress, so you can go back at any time to find secrets and alternate routes. There’s also a hidden secondary protagonist, who fights by summoning animal helpers. Though originally exclusive to Japan’s Turbo-Grafx CD there is an English version, which you can find on PS4’s Castlevania Requiem.

This week we’re talking about holiday game gifts for kids (remember to factor in shipping times!), a board game for groups of mixed generations, the best of the year from Evercade, and remember The Simpsons? They’re back, in Fortnite form.

A costly Christmas

By Tim

When I was a kid, games were always the big ticket item under the Christmas tree. I think there was only one year that Santa actually brought me and my brother a console (a Sega Mega Drive), but there were usually a few packages in a telltale shape roughly 15cm x 10cm, which gave the characteristic “clonk clonk” when gently shaken.

These days a lot of people ask me about buying games for their kids, and it’s becoming more difficult to answer. My Mega Drive arrived in 1995, five years after it was released, and probably cost around $400 in 2025 money. The PlayStation 5 is currently five years old, and it’s $800. Consoles and games are getting more expensive, and not falling in price over time.

Of course if you’re reading this newsletter and have kids you probably already have a home console they can use, or can justify a machine as a whole house present. If you’re looking to get something for an individual kid, here are some of my basic suggestions:

• For younger ones, a Switch Lite is still an excellent choice. It’s getting old, and Switch 2 exclusives are going to get more common, but it’s affordable at $330, it has hundreds of really good games that are generally coming down in price (not Nintendo’s own games), and the family sharing feature is great for lending digital games between various Switch and Switch 2 consoles.

• For a home console to play current games, an Xbox Series S is not bad at $500. Just be prepared to go all-digital and pay $13 or $18 per month for Game Pass.

• Gifting is one of the only times physical games still make sense. The unwrapping and surprise is part of the experience you don’t get with a gift card. The downside is new games are going for $100+, which you’re only going to pay if you absolutely know it’s the game they want. If you know what they have and what they’re into, go to a physical store. Find some options that fit the bill, then Google to see where the lowest price is.

• If they’re into the weird stuff, check out specialist stores and publishers like Limited Run, Fangamer, Super Deluxe, PlayAsia and Pixel Crib. Boxed indies cost a lot more than digital ones, but often have nice extras.

• A surprising number of parents have said their kids want a DS or other retro handheld. The key here is to find out what they actual want it for, because influencers make this stuff sound a lot simpler than it is. A Game Boy or DS from a reputable modder or refurb shop is a great gift, but games for those systems can be expensive. A flash cart or DIY software mod (for DSi or 3DS) will let you fill up on pirated games, but that’s technically illegal, and you might as well get a brand new emulator handheld from Miyoo or Anbernic.

What to play

• New on Game Pass, one of the world’s most popular games has a new annual sequel, it’s included on the service day one, and I (Tim) can’t even imagine understanding it let alone playing it. No not Call of Duty, that’s later this week. It’s Football Manager 26! Dead Static Drive is another day one drop, and this has been on my radar for a while because it looks a lot like a horror take on the old top-down GTA games. Unfortunately it’s in a bit of a state at launch. There’s also Egging On, the dumb egg platformer that was the highlight of the recent ID@Xbox stream, and open world survival locomotive-crafterVoidtrain.

• A new month means more PlayStation Plus games to add to your library. This time there’s Stray, which is an excellent adventure about a cat trapped in a robot town, as well as rally racer EA Sports WRC 24 and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator.

• New on Apple Arcade are Nintendo Wii classics MySims and MySims Kingdom. Why not!

Stupid sexy Fortnite season

By Alice

I have now played a lot of Fortnite seasons with licensed tie-ins. Ever since Disney invested in Epic, they’ve come even thicker and faster than they were before, and there were a lot before. So, trust me when I say that this latest Simpsons tie-in mini season is the best executed use of existing IP Fortnite has ever had. I’m so sad it’s only going to be available for one month, and hope it ends up sticking around longer in its own Fortnite OG-style mini mode.

The love and care for the world of The Simpsons just exudes from every part of the (surprisingly small) map. The house is beautifully recreated, you can’t walk more than a few metres without encountering some kind of reference to the show, the battle bus is a Duff-style Slurp blimp that riffs on the chalkboard gag phrases while also referencing Futurama. I wish they could have better implemented Bart and Lisa’s characters, however Marge, Homer and Ned Flanders are nicely realised in the battle pass, with their regular forms in addition to a witchy Marge, Evil Homer and Stupid Sexy Flanders. It’s just everything you would want.

Well, everything you’d want except a good loot pool, because the weapons this season absolutely suck. I like to think they just wanted to give people more of a chance to admire the scenery and references while opponents die extremely slowly, however you can’t escape that there just isn’t a single good gun in the pool.

The other thing I wish existed was a pacifist version of the map where you can just explore at your leisure and find all the references. Hopefully that comes in the future.

Whether you’re a big fan of The Simpsons, or just a lapsed Fortnite player, this is the season to jump back in and check it out. It’s too good to miss.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

While it’s not a perfect game, I really enjoy Trivial Pursuit. Playing it properly takes eleventeen thousand years, but I love trivia, and the experience of everyone at the table wracking their brains for something they heard about once 20 years ago and collectively sighing in frustration when they hear the correct answer is golden. It’s why I was interested in trying Mind The Gap.

Mind The Gap is a game about generation gaps, so it’s designed to be played by the whole family (or with your friends who have internal ages ranging from 16 to 60) with questions sectioned by generation. It’s a more straightforward track to navigate, without the irritation of wedges, and there’s an additional kind of question - Challenge Cards, where instead of doing normal trivia, you have to hum, do charades, or otherwise act out something for the other person to guess.

The Challenge Cards are certainly an acquired taste. It’s something that people will either love or hate, but either way it livens up a gathering and forces people to get out of their comfort zone. Whether that departure from the comfort zone is welcomed will depend on the group you’re in and how acceptable it is to be a bit silly.

The board is split into five regions, marking each of the generations from Gen Alpha to Boomer. This is fun, because it gives millennials an instant crisis of mortality realising that the oldest Gen Alphas are now teenagers and the oldest Zoomers are 28.

Because the board is so simple (a series of cardboard strips that you put together with plastic clamps), it means the game is pretty cheap, generally in stores for $25, making it an easy pick up for Christmas parties where you want all the generations to have fun and not talk about current politics.

My one complaint is just how niche a lot of the questions are. We played an Australian version, and yet still there are some very America-centric questions. As someone who has written trivia both professionally and for fun, I know how easy it is to assume that everyone has the same knowledge base as you. However when making a game like this, the questions need to be adjudicated by more people to ensure a better spread between broad and obscure questions to find the right balance.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

This has been a big year for Evercade, the brand of officially licensed new cartridges for classic and modern retro-style games, with a full 15 collections on the docket for 2025.

To be honest I’ve been a little down on the brand lately, because after I invested in the cartridges and multiple bits of hardware (there are consoles, handhelds, cute mini handhelds and arcade machines, and I have one of each), Blaze Entertainment changed distributors in Australia meaning carts need to be imported from European stores.

Still, the company tells me it’s working hard on a solution, and I thought I’d shout out my picks of the 2025 selections for anyone with the hardware, or who’s looking to get in.

Neo Geo: SNK games are peak 90s pixel arcade fare, and the first Evercade collection is great quality despite their only being six games on there. The hilarious platform shooter Metal Slug and slick crossover 3v3 brawler King of Fighters 2000 are highlights, but they’re all beautiful and interesting. A second and third cart are still to come this year.

Taito: I already have ways to play these 9 80s arcade games, but I couldn’t help myself, I wanted them on my bartop arcade. Space Invaders speakers for itself, while Bubble Bobble and Don Doko Don are wonderfully weird must-plays. The rest is an eclectic mix of historical interest and straight-up weird. What were they thinking with Growl? A second Taito collection strikes a similar balance.

Indie Heroes: These collections of homebrew efforts are a highlight of the Evercade ecosystem, and this year’s fourth entry is stacked. Purveyors of Game Boy, NES and Mega Drive homebrew might have seen these before, but some were new to me (like spooky Elvira-like point-and-click Batty Zabella, and a conceptually wild adventure starring Jane Austen), plus Flea! 2 is another banger from Alastair Low, and there’s a great Evercade-native arcade game in Murtop.

Still to come this year: A cool collection from Rare, a pack of nostalgic Atari 20600 gems from Activision, and a big bundle of 27 games from prolific 80s home computer dev Jeff Minter.

Welcome to another week of pressing any button and hoping for the best. This week has been another weird one, where a fascist government released propaganda portraying immigrants as The Flood from Halo, and Microsoft chose to stay silent on that. Cool and normal. Love to see a major corporation who once declared that “gaming is for everyone” walking that back to “gaming is for whoever the US government decides counts as 4/5th or more as a person”.

In this week’s edition of the newsletter I (Alice) played Pokémon Legends Z-A and Pergola, while Tim discovered that corporations might be bad sometimes and has kindly once again made us feel old.

Enjoy!

Pokémon Legends Z-A ok, but not legendary

By Alice

Pokémon Legends Z-A is the latest Pokémon game in the series and it’s pretty good! I just have a difficult time imagining it will become anyone’s favourite Pokemon game, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.

The battle system is more fun and engaging than previous Pokémon games I’ve played, with the ability to line up multiple attacks it feels less like “OK, I’ll stab you, and then you can try to stab me”, and more like a battle. I’ve always preferred real time combat over turn-based, however I acknowledge that it’s personal preference.

I like the idea of Pokémon Paris, and I really enjoy that the people who designed Lumiose City clearly had zero first or secondhand knowledge of what Paris was actually like, and maybe just overheard someone talking about it once at a bar.

There’s something about it that feels clunky, though. Most of the game feels like it should be entirely my thing, however the dialogue and the story just rub me the wrong way for no specific reason. I get into the Pokémon collecting and battling parts, however everything around that just feels off and my attention starts to waver. For that reason, I haven’t been able to get as far through the game as I would have liked to before I wrote something up on it. If they reveal at the end that everyone in Lumiose has been possessed by aliens and that’s why they’re so wooden and inhuman, that would go a long way to changing my opinion of the game.

But while I don’t love the setting, characters or story motivations, the new ways in which I can interact with the Pokémon stops me from bouncing off it completely. I’m confident I will finish Pokémon Legends Z-A some time in the next year, and I’ll be able to write more comprehensive thoughts then.

What to play

• New on Game Pass is the brand new Outer Worlds 2, a very fun Obsidian RPG (the second this year, after Avowed!) about space capitalism. There’s also tower defense Super Fantasy Kingdom (another day one release) and survival roguelite Halls of Torment.

• In time for the spooky season, Nintendo has added the original Luigi’s Mansion to the Switch 2’s Gamecube app. That means the whole trilogy is now playable on Switch 2, for all you Luigi sickos.

• Free on the Epic Games store right now is Bendy and the Ink Machine and Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit. They just need to add Poppy Playtime and they’d have a full trifecta of stuff 7-year-olds think is edgy and cool based purely on YouTube videos and knock-off shopping centre merch.

Uh-oh, oppression

By Tim

The Outer Worlds 2 is a great first-person RPG. Following in the footsteps of Fallout and the like, it’s a brilliant blend of shooting, character-building, charming sci-fi and engaging exploration. But while I enjoy the goofy and funny storytelling, and I’m certainly not above turning my brain off for a few hours of questin’ and a-killin’, there is something about the game that bothered me.

I never played the original Outer Worlds, but based on the writing of others I’d picked up that it was set in a sort of corpo dystopia, where ultra late-stage capitalism had resulted in mega-companies that not only manufacture every kind of product but have their own militaries and governments too. The marketing for Outer Worlds doubled down on this, and the early hours of the game throw in a scary separatist colony of space fascists to boot. But then, none of it really goes anywhere.

To be clear, I’m well aware that many video games (and mainstream entertainment products in general) have this problem. As with authoritarianism, populism, racism, fundamentalism or any other source of real-world conflict, games have a habit of adopting autocratic capitalism to stand in as a moustache-twirling villain worthy of ridicule, but the overall message amounts to “it’s bad, but *shrug*.”

The thing is, I really thought there would be more to chew on here. Everyone in the game is a gurning cartoon, whose devotion to their marketing / tyrannical overlords might as well be a big sign that says “oppressive power structures amirite”. These people love doing what they’re told, and it sure is bad for them. The end.

Is it possible to put a bit more anger and urgency and dissent in there while still maintaining a light tone? I don’t know, but I wanted to feel like someone had tried. Even when you’re fighting bad guys in this game, it feels like you and all your companions have already accepted defeat. The evil garbage we’re dealing with in the real world has, in the Outer Worlds, taken over. And we’ve stopped caring.

Again, this is a bigger problem than just one game, and in almost every other way The Outer Worlds 2 is a total success. But certain topics are just starting to feel too dire and present to be held up and jeered at without actual criticism.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

After months of trying to schedule, my friends and I finally managed to have a board game day. Yes, the miracle of four people in their 30s hanging out can come to pass.

The first game we played was Pergola. I have to admit, I only grabbed Pergola because it was so pretty, and went in with zero knowledge about how the game ran. So when we started going through the rules it was super overwhelming. Pergola is a game where you tend to a garden to attract various insects, and gain points based on so many different factors, ranging from the height of a vine, the number of (and position) of bees, size and quantity of dragonflies, lady birds, and a whole range of other situations.

What I was really impressed by, though, was how all these elements came together to make an engaging game that was easy to master. It really only took two turns to get the hang of it, and the wide variety of ways to get points meant that everyone could stick to their own strategy. There was very little crossover where people would be competing for the same resource. I really love game where people largely run their own race without stepping on each other’s toes. There were certainly opportunities for sabotage if that’s the game you want to play, however it’s also easy to change that sabotage by changing tactics.

In the end, the game that I initially was ready to yeet into the sun, is now a game that I can’t wait to play again and again with different groups of people. I’m seriously impressed by the designer’s ability to make so many elements be cohesive in a casual-style board game.

If you have a keen gardener in your life, or just enjoy cute fun games, Pergola is a great choice for rainy afternoons.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Here are some of the games that celebrated a major anniversary in October. It’s much harder to pick just three than it is in a month like May!

Now 20: Shadow of the Colossus Games have always reflected some of the most artful and impactful fantasy stories seen in other media including film, novels and anime, but Shadow of the Colossus is one of the first examples of a blockbuster cinematic video game that feels like it’s telling that kind of narrative in a way only interactive entertainment could. Wander’s actions carry an emotional weight that’s far heavier since they’re also your actions, and the age-old trope of a hero having to pay a high price to save their loved one from death is transformed into something genuinely unsettling. It doesn’t hurt that it’s wonderfully eccentric both visually and mechanically.

Now 30: Terranigma There’s a parallel universe in which Terranigma is the most celebrated and discussed SNES action-RPG, over the likes of Chrono Trigger, which was released in the same year. The primary force working against this Enix classic is that it was never released in America, so the only English speaking people who experienced it at the time are from Europe and Australia. It has great combat, gorgeous art, interesting dungeons, and a wild and massive story concerning the recreation of Earth. One point working against it is its significant difficulty in the later stages, which makes it a fine option to visit on a platform that allows save states.

Now 40: Space Harrier My first exposure to this series was through Space Harrier II, one of the first games I got for the Sega Mega Drive (I assume it was selling cheap at that point), and my main memories are the unfair difficulty and the hilarious voice reocrdings. “Eeeeeeeoooooooorgh! Get Ready.” Little did I know the original was a bonafide hit in Japanese arcades two years before I was even born. Its Super Scaler technology allowed for 16-bit graphics that appeared in pseudo-3D at high framerates, and its hardware design — a seated cockpit with a flight stick — made for an immersive take on the shooter.

This week we’re extrapolating the Xbox Ally to Microsoft’s wider gaming plans, discussing whether apps are ok in board games, remembering Plants vs Zombies and loving Ball x Pit.

The Xbox PC era begins in earnest

By Tim

My first impressions of the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X were not overwhelmingly positive.

It may make strides to improve usability for Windows-based handhelds, but it still forces you to deal with a desktop-style presentation far too often.

It may be a major step in the transition from console to PC for the Xbox brand, but the messiness of that transition is immediately apparent when you’re trying to discern which games you own, which you can access through Game Pass, which you can stream, which support Play Anywhere and which you might own through a non-Microsoft storefront.

It’s certainly a step up from some other Windows PC handhelds, which is great because making Windows more accessible for gaming is a worthwhile goal. (People crowing this week that the Xbox Ally is more efficient when running Linux are either intentionally missing the point, or don’t care to think about it.) But right now I’m not sure the machine has enough going for it to counter some significant awkwardness.

A big part of the issue is the Xbox branding, which to me promises a turnkey console-like experience, and while Microsoft’s working on that it’s not particularly close yet. You can stream the console versions of games from the cloud, and that works great. But if you install a game locally it’s the PC version, and those are just never going to consistently analyse the hardware and apply the settings you need, meaning that for every game you’ll be adjusting sliders and ticking boxes to get to a tradeoff between image quality and framerate you’re happy with.

Coming from a Steam Deck OLED I also feel like the controls, screen and overall experience of the Xbox Ally are sub-par, with sticky buttons and no support for HDR. A 120Hz display is nice, but not an appreciable upgrade over 90Hz for most games. There’s the beginning of a system to highlight games that will perform very well (Microsoft’s “Handheld Optimised” certification), but it’s basically invisible except for in the Game Pass tab.

People who like PC gaming may like the ROG Xbox Ally. But people who like Xbox gaming may hate it. It’s no secret that this device represents the blueprint Microsoft wants all its future game hardware to follow, effectively consolising the Windows Store. But if that’s a worse experience than what we’ve had for 25 years on Xbox consoles, where games just work from the moment you buy them, it’s going to be a tough sell.

What to play

• On Game Pass Ultimate this week is a quartet of brand new releases: the hyper-bloody action of Ninja Gaiden 4; the hyper-cleanly (?) action of PowerWash Simulator 2; the mech-combat-meets-Harvest-Moon of Bounty Star, and; the rougelite city-building of Super Fantasy Kingdom. If you’re on the middle-tier Game Pass Premium you’ll notice some less-new additions, namely Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Commandos: Origins and Evil West.

• PlayStation Plus Extra is getting a pair of spookies just in time for Halloween, with the Silent Hill 2 and Until Dawn remakes both hitting the service this week. And also Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which isn’t really spooky. If you’re paying for Deluxe you also get PS1’s Tekken 3, which is pretty good! I (Tim) have fond memories of getting every single character’s CGI ending

• Free on the Epic Games Store this week is horror game Fear the Spotlight. It looks pretty good, but I (Alice) am too much of a chicken to play it.

Ball x Pit Is better than it has any right to be

By Alice

I have a new addiction, friends. Ball x Pit is a roguelike that’s taking over my life in a way that I am powerless to stop. I love a good brick breaking game, and Ball x Pit is that and more. You descend into the pits of hell/the ruins of some ancient city (it doesn’t really matter which) and have to shoot balls at enemies to kill them, and while I wish the enemies had numbers on them so I could judge how many more hits they require to die, everything else is great.

As you kill the demons, they drop gems that allow you to upgrade your equipment/get new balls that can do new things. Then you can fuse and evolve those balls to give them different properties. There are characters to unlock which have special powers.

Then, in between jaunts into the depths of hell, you farm and harvest crops to upgrade your abilities and farm.

If this game were on mobile with a different aesthetic and micro transactions, it would make one billion dollars and overtake Candy Crush in terms of popularity. However, it’s on PC and console, has no micro transactions, costs $22.45 (or is on Xbox Game Pass) and is gorgeously dark. It also means it’s easier to put down and walk away from it, so there’s less of a dark pattern going on there.

I really enjoy that I can bounce between runs with optimised strategies trying to get the most out of the attempt to kill the boss, and runs where I just try to farm resources and see what different balls can do in weird combinations. It scratches so many itches that I can see it appealing to a wide variety of different places, and also specifically me.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

There is a trend in board games towards getting players to interact with their phones as they play, and I can’t work out how I feel about it. I think I hate it, but it also opens up so many new avenues of play that I don’t feel like I can completely dismiss it.

Take Hitster for example - scanning a QR code to play snippets of the songs on Spotify makes a lot more sense than including some kind of electronic contraption that plays hundreds of songs, because that would be prohibitively expensive. It also makes sense in a game like Alice is Missing, where you have to communicate with your fellow players without speaking out loud. It feels more real world than handwriting everything.

And yet, one of the big reasons why I play board games is because I want to put technology aside for a while and just in the the moment. My phone is full of distractions and constant notifications, and it’s easy to get sucked into something else for “just a sec”.

That’s why I am extra annoyed when the instructions for a board game are poorly laid out, or badly explained. Sure, I could just jump on my phone to watch a video to learn better in ten minutes, but a board game shouldn’t require anything that doesn’t come in the box.

However, I really enjoy Hitster, I’m glad it exists and I want to play it more. I just also want board game designers to ensure that any forays into technology are unavoidable (like Hitster), and not just cutting a corner (like in those crime solving board games I mostly enjoy).

Phones are now required for everything from ordering food in person at a restaurant, to gaining access to places like the aquarium. I don’t want them to be essential for board games, too.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Why is Plants vs Zombies so beloved? That’s a complicated question, but to understand why it made such an impact in the first place, you need to understand 2009. We were on the precipise of a huge expansion of video games into a glorious new casual-friendly form, after years of gritty pandering to a market of teenage boys with consoles. The Nintendo DS was booming, the App Store was just taking off, and on PC we were still in a golden era of Flash games, tower defence clickers and assorted browser goodness (Farmville, the zenith, was just about to appear).

The timing was perfect for PopCap, an indie studio in touch with the trends but also experienced enough (they had already done Bejewelled, Peggle, Bookworm, Zuma and many others) to make a genuinely good game, filled with light tactics but also kitcshy art and music that made it instantly appealing, not to mention a genuinely oddball premise that the game refuses to explain. Plants vs Zombies was the kind of thing the App Store would be filled with inside a year, but at the time it felt fresh.

Unfortunately the game’s success led to EA aquiring PopCap, and since then the intention to monetise has been front and center of every single game the studio has released, which is why I’m honestly surprised people still care about PvZ. I played this week’s Plants vs Zombies: Replanted, hoping to feel some love and care for the game or at least the intention to preserve it, but it’s not there.

I’m not sure how the PC controls are, but on Switch 2 the mouse and touch controls are broken. The “new” modes are uninspired or exactly as they were on Xbox 360. The dynamic music system is gone. The graphics are upscaled awkwardly. And the only archival content is a set of production illustrations that the game’s original artist has claimed did not come from him.

We hope you have now fully recovered from a big PAX Aus weekend last week. Or a big week of SXSW this week. Putting MIGW and SXSW back to back was straight up mean, huh?

In this week’s newsletter I (Alice) continue trying to find the ultimate handheld console gaming device and play a really fun casual board game. Meanwhile, Tim revisited Star Wars Outlaws and Road Rash.

Plus, all the games you should play this weekend.

Enjoy!

A Portal to a world that’s kinda OK

By Alice

Continuing my quest to find the perfect device that allows me to subtly play games without hogging the TV, I had a really good time with the PlayStation Portal recently. It’s an odd device, in that it relies on streaming games directly from your personal PS5/PS5 Pro. So, there are a few extra places where things can go wrong than other handhelds, and it’s not a good option for playing outside under a tree pretending to enjoy the sunshine. However, in the ideal conditions it’s a great time.

On a local network with strong wifi, the latency is almost nothing, allowing me to enjoy Forza Horizon 5 with a high refresh rate, graphics that look so real, and a cold drink next to me.

The use case for a PlayStation Portal is very much “you want to play a game in your house, but someone else is using the TV” or “game is good, but bed is warm, let me reach for my magic mirror instead of walking to the couch”, rather than the traditional use case for handhelds of “my parents bought me this so I wouldn’t complain on the road trip” and “this commute to work sucks, at least the fictional friends in my computer will keep me company”. That’s pretty limited in a world where the Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Game Cloud, Steam Deck and the Xbox Ally are solid options at home or work and don’t require a decent upload speed.

However, those other options are mostly a lot more expensive than the PlayStation Portal if you already have a PS5 and good internet.

Plus, those use cases are not nothing. It’s most of the reason why I want a handheld.

But you can also replicate a lot of the PlayStation Portal experience on your phone by streaming over the PlayStation app and using a BackBone controller.

All that is a lot of words to say that the PlayStation Portal is great in my household of strong wifi and strong upload speeds. At $319 on sale, it’s not a terrible value proposition if your needs are specific and largely homebound. It’s just nowhere near the best portable gaming option out there.

What to play

• This week on Game Pass we get Supermarket Simulator, which seems pretty self-explanatory, plus spooky Dead by Daylight spinoff The Casting of Frank Stone, addictive Breakout-style roguelite Ball x Pit, fantasy ARPG Eternal Strands and for some reason a dodgy-looking Grinch platformer. But the highlight will be Friday’s Keeper, the latest game from Double Fine, featuring an ambulatory lighthouse.

• The PlayStation Plus monthly games are here for October, featuring two of the absolute best 2023 bangers, plus Goat Simulator 3 which I honestly don’t know the release year for because I wasn’t even aware there was a Goat Simulator 2. The games you should add to your library if you missed them are Alan Wake II — a horror mystery with a heady blend of surrealism, crazy game tech and proudly Finnish Americana — and Cocoon, a mind-bending puzzler that casts you as a bug-like person who carries entire worlds like marbles on their back.

• Nintendo has added three new titles to its Super Nintendo Switch Online app, and boy are they weird! Mario & Wario is the first game I (Tim) thought of when we found out Switch 2 has a mouse mode; it’s a Japan-only Lemmings-like puzzle platformer where your character has a bucket on their head and you have to click to guide them. The original Bubsy is a game that for some reason every 90s kid played, and many have told me they loved, but that I’ve always found miserable to look at, listen to or operate. And Fatal Fury Special, which I now know is a home port of an SNK arcade game that was itself an update for Fatal Fury 2, but which at the time I considered to be a rough Street Fighter II clone.

• Free on the Epic Games Store right now is Samorost 3 which (judging by the trailer) has a really cool art style and is about a magic flute. I (Alice) went into the store listing thinking “what the hell is this” and came out with it added to my library and an intention to get around to playing it one day.

A year on, Outlaws proves a galactic classic

By Tim

Star Wars Outlaws arrived a little more than a year ago, and while I played a lot at launch I found it to be deeply uneven and unsatisfying, to the point where I eventually started ignoring main quests and then put the game aside altogether. I was aware of the chatter about it being much improved, but it wasn’t until recently when I - in a Star Wars mood - started a new game that I fully realised what’s happened to the game. Now around 30 hours into this playthrough I’m committed to seeing the whole thing through, and believe this to be one of the great modern Star Wars games.

It’s not that Ubisoft added anything great after release, it simply reconfigured the game to get out of its own way. Originally there were so many instant-fail scenarios and forced stealth sections, and all-out combat was underwhelming even when it was allowed, that many of the missions felt bogged down. With those issues addressed, it feels like a much more free systems-based open world, and the depth of its four explorable planets shines through.

This is a game with so much reverence for the films it’s based on, and I’ve loved diving through abandoned Clone Wars era industrial ruins, skulking around in the bars of Tatooine and blasting my way through gleaming black Imperial installations. The faction and wanted systems remain a bit silly, but since fighting is more satisfying and driving less prone to random collisions they’re more on the level of a GTA, where leaning into the chaos and trying to do jobs while Death Squads are constantly interrupting is part of the fun.

There’s also still a lack of interesting characters, with Kay primarily being a snotty jerk to everyone except adorable rat dog Nyx. But this does fit the overall underworld vibe, and it’s at least refreshing that our main character doesn’t need to join the Rebels or the Jedi or the Senate to become a person of note in the galaxy. This is a story about gangsters and droids and speeders and guns and gambling (sabacc remains a highlight). And this time through, having a jerk protagonist kind of feels like the right call, rather than just one issue in a long list.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Hitster is a board game with a pretty simple premise: listen to music and put the songs in the correct order of release. What makes it fun is that the music spans 100 years, and there are tokens that can be earned for correctly guessing the song and artist name.

The way it works is that each card has a QR code, which you scan in the Hitster app to play a 20 second portion of the song in Spotify. Only the “DJ” can see the details of the artist (which makes it difficult to play two player games, and works better in multiplayer scenarios). When it’s your turn, after you hear the song, you place it on your “track” (where all your other cards are lined up) where you think it fits in. This is easy if you get a song by the Beach Boys and only have songs by Katy Perry and Lady Gaga on your track. It gets a lot harder when you have TLC and Destiny’s Child come up one after another.

Those tokens earned throughout can decide the game if used strategically enough. Having some currency means that you can make up for your trivia weak spots, and adds some strategy to a game that is otherwise “you know it/guess it or you don’t”.

What I don’t like about the game is that the instructions are stored in the app. The only things yo get in the box are the cards and the tokens. It’s not a dealbreaker, you have to use your device to hear the songs anyway, but I like to have a physical reference while listening to the songs. It’s a corner that didn’t need to be cut.

Regardless, I’ve had a lot of fun with Hitster, and it’s a game that would be suited to a lot of different casual play scenarios.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

I’m not sure why I started thinking about Road Rash. Maybe all the bleak news about Electronic Arts got

me thinking back to a time when the company was merely “regular big publisher” bad. It sure did publish some bangers in the 90s and 2000s. Anyway, I booted up Road Rash and was not surprised to find that it still rules. But it is interesting that, in the past 35 years, nobody has been able to make a motorcycle combat game quite as good.

Of course there are nostalgic parts, like the Mega Drive’s twangy guitars and the ridiculous 90s caricature portraits that deliver pithy quotes before each race. But there are also mechanical elements that remain unmatched, and which would be very difficult to emulate in a higher fidelity environment.

The faux 3D sprite scaling gives you a sensation of speed but allows your lateral movement and interactions with the other riders to happen slowly, in a way that makes everything feel epic and controllable. When you knock a racer sideways into an oncoming car you have time to see him come off and go flying backwards out into your review mirror, while his ride tumbles alongside you for a bit before sliding back. When you jump over a cop or narrowly avoid a tree, it feels great in a way that would be impossible to replicate in a more complex game.

The design of the game very much leans into this feeling, filling the tracks with blind turns and hills that can surprise you with traffic and intersections. The traumatic memories of those big red flashes marking a head-on collision in Road Rash, followed by the long limp back to my bike, are probably the reason that I will always drive on the correct side of the road in any game.

And the potential for crashes really does make the game super tense, because there are real stakes. Blowing up your bike or getting caught by the cops can rob you of your hard-earned cash. And if you can’t afford to pay, your game can be over no matter how far you’ve come.

In the newsletter today we’re covering why Hades II is just so good, looking back on September’s game anniversaries and finding out why people are mad about Spider-man in Magic the Gathering. Also Alice has the details on some kind of change to Game Pass? I haven’t read the email from Microsoft yet myself, but the subject line is “Introducing Upgrades to Xbox Game Pass”, so I bet it’s good news!

A Sisyphean delight

By Tim

Hades II, like Hades before it, is as close to perfection as video games tend to get. That is to say, it nails practically everything it’s going for in a way that feels effortless, presenting its world, its rules and the discourse between player and creator as natural and enjoyable happenings without exposing all the tech and artifice underneath. And of course it helps that the rougelite structure is peerlessly executed, the combat feels great, and all of the greek gods and other characters are incredibly ripped and hot.

It should be easy to be snide about about roguelites. True Rogue style games are random and fully reset whenever you fail, meaning the thing that gets you further each time is your own growing understanding of the system. Games like Hades, Dead Cells or Rogue Legacy mess with this by making your in-game character literally stronger over time, adding more abilities and options, and giving you more control to stack the odds in your favour. It’s a lot like an RPG that adjust enemies down to suit your level; it feels satisfying, but are you really getting better at the game or is the hand of the developer just moving things to create the sensation of progress?

In Hades II, it honestly doesn’t matter. I love exploring the synergies and build options of different boons through each run, and being able to set advantages or special bonuses before the run even starts just feels like a natural extension of that. In no small part, that’s because a lot of work has gone into bringing all of the options and mechanics into the world of the game. For example you might earn some nectar by defeating an encounter, and then in a different run you gift it to a god, and in return they give you an equippable artifact that makes it more likely you’ll find their boons in subsequent runs. It doesn’t feel like a box has been checked to make the game permanently easier, it just feels like a relationship with a character.

And that’s really the secret sauce behind much of the game’s success. You’re running repeatedly through a lightly randomised path and meeting the same enemies, gods and boss creatures again and again, but your personal narrative feels like it flows through unbroken, thanks to the genius way upgrades are paced and conversations are triggered. Supergiant has been doing incredible things for 15 years at this point, but with Hades I think it’s really cracked a sensational formula, and Hades II shows it has no problem repeating it.

What to play

• Game Pass has undergone a significant change this week, which you can read all about below. If you were subscribing to Core or Standard (now named Essential and Premium), you’re getting access to a bunch more games and having to pay slightly more. If you’re on Ultimate the price is going up by quite a bit, but the library has become swollen overnight with a huge number of Ubisoft games. So regardless of your tier, there’s very likely some new options to play.

• New to the PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue this week are two excellent but distinct PS1-style survival horrors in Crow Country and The Conscript, plus open world Amazon rainforest simulator Green Hell and celebrated space adventure The Invincible.

• In fun news, Rock Band 4 turns 10 this weekend! In devastating news, it’s getting delisted and you’ll never be able to buy it again after Saturday. So, if you want to enjoy rhythm gaming at its best, you have a very limited time in which to spend $14.95 on excellence (plus however many thousands of dollars you want to spend on extra tracks).

• Just a heads up if you’re considering returning to (or discovering) some of the best platformers of all time with the new Switch versions of Mario Galaxy and Mario Galaxy 2. They’re $60 each on the eShop, but if you want them for $35 each you can go to Target or a couple of other retailers to get the physical two-pack for $70.

Xbox Game Pass has new prices and I am tired

By Alice

Xbox has just finished overhauling the Xbox Game Pass tiers and now they range in cost from “slightly pricey for what it is” to “Jesus Christ, is this what we’re doing now?”.

The good news is that all of the tiers now include significantly more stuff. The bad news is that they all cost more and are aimed at even more specific people than they were before, which is going to make determining the value challenging.

The biggest change that will affect the most people is the death of Xbox Game Pass Core. Core used to be priced from $89.95 a year, include access to online multiplayer, and 25 Game Pass games. It’s been replaced by Xbox Game Pass Essential, which is $12.95 a month, or $35.95 a quarter (which adds up to a minimum $143.80 a year). Essential still includes multiplayer, but now it has 66 included games, PC gaming, cloud gaming, and the ability to earn up to $25 of Microsoft Store Rewards (if you spend a bunch of money on other stuff).

That’s a better deal for families and individuals who want access to a small library on almost any device for a low cost. It’s a much worse deal for, say, EA FC players who just want to be able to play their one game online with their friends.

The new games added today for Essential include Cities: Skylines Remastered, Hades and Warhammer 40,000 Darktide.

The middle tier is Xbox Game Pass Premium, and it got a $2 price increase today, taking it to $17.95 a month. Premium includes everything Essential does, plus new perks for some games, more Store Rewards, and shorter cloud wait times. This is on top of an extra 200ish games in the library, including the transphobic wizard game (I guess gaming isn’t for everyone), Diablo IV, and the promise of new Xbox published games within a year of their release (excluding Call of Duty).

The biggest price jump comes for Game Pass Ultimate, which as an offering was always too good to last. It leaps from $22.95 a month to $35.95 a month, or almost the price of an Xbox Series S ($431.40) a year. It has everything from the previous tiers, plus a game library including more than 400 games (and the promise of more than 75 day one release titles), the best cloud experience, even more Store Rewards, access to Ubisoft+ Classics and EA Play, and the big new feature is access to Fortnite Crew. Crew is Fortnite’s subscription service that gives people access to every battle pass in the game plus 1000V-Bucks a month.

In Fortnite the subscription is $17.95, so hardcore Fortnite players who also take full advantage of the game library and cloud streaming will be happy with this upgrade. Everyone else will likely drop their subscription back to Premium and only upgrade to Ultimate the month a particularly exciting game comes out.

Personally, I’m conflicted. I’m really happy to now have an excuse to get Crew without directly handing Epic money, but having been conditioned to expect a constant stream of huge, AAA titles for one low price a month, the jump of more than 50% is hard to swallow.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Magic the Gathering has been partnering with any major corporation and pop culture property that’s willing to have them lately, which is a great way to get fans of other media addicted to the crack that is TCG. Also a great way to make profits off that new audience. The latest crossover is Spider-Man.

On the one hand, this set introduces some problems to Magic The Gathering - spiders are already a card type and they’re usually (though not always) green. Now, with Spider-Man, there’s so much more spider all over the colour spectrum. This gives players more options for how they can optimise their spider decks, and for some reason people are mad about this. It also combines the type of spider and human, which makes sense for Spider-Man, but introduces complications and previously unconsidered options.

On the other hand, personally, I enjoy it when Wizards get a little weird with it. The City Pigeon card, which is a white flying 1/1 that leaves a food token when it dies, is exactly the kind of card I wanted to see in this set. Like, sure, all the big heroes and villains are important, but the character of New York City is equally important.

I used to be a big fan of the Spider-Man movies and (some of) the comics. Before Marvel decided that every character should be rich and have access to to everything all the time, I enjoyed seeing a superhero who could do all these amazing heroic acts, but then go home and be worried about rent. He was a hero anyone could relate to.

You can tell that the artists and designers on this set also have a real love and appreciation for comic lore and the older movies. The art has life and flair that I haven’t seen as much in recent sets.

It’s also a larger set than recent Universes Beyond collections, lending it more to commander and constructed play instead of just limited and draft formats.

It’s making me wish we could get a Superman set like this, which we won’t because of the Disney partnership. But I would love to see what they could do with the rich lore there.

Magic The Gathering: Spider-Man is available now.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Here are the anniversaries from September!

Now 30: Rayman Conceived by Michel Ancel as a teenager, and comprising abstract representations of his childhood experiences, Rayman is a bizarre but brilliant game that really showed how 2D platformers could benefit from the audio and visual tech of early CD systems. Unfortunately the specific system Ancel chose was the Atari Jaguar, but the game was soon moved to the PlayStation and Saturn as well. Great handmade art and interesting music integration remains a hallmark of the series to this day, or it would if Ubisoft allowed any new Rayman games to be made.

Now 35: Gumboots Australia I’m including this purely out of personal nostalgia, as I doubt it had much industry-wide impact. This Australia-specific take on Carmen Sandiego was one of the very first computer games I had in my home; its bleepy PC speaker sounds and transcendent cyan and magenta CGA drawings of Aussie landmarks are seared far deeper into my brain than any geographical facts it purported to teach. It’s from a magical time in my life where I didn’t really know where computer games came from or how they were made, we simply had a box of disks from somewhere, and this was one of them.

Now 40: Super Mario Bros We already covered this earlier in the month, but it simply doesn’t get any bigger than this when you’re talking about influential video games. Much has been written about the game’s genius, but what it boils down to is a mastery of using play to teach concepts to a player, test them on those concepts, and allow them to challenge the rules and express their own creativity with a set of gratifying tools. It says something about the game that it still remains a great experience for first-timers and seasoned speed-runners alike. And it says something about Nintendo that the core creative team behind it are all still working there.

In this week’s newsletter Alice is thrilled about the new Forza Horizon game (so much so that she didn’t get a chance to play any board games this week). Meanwhile, Tim took a look at the new Wolverine game and looks back on Mr Driller.

Enjoy!

Forza Horizon 6!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!1!!!!!

By Alice

A new Forza Horizon game was teased at the Tokyo Game Show this week, and I promise I am being so normal about it.

Every new Forza Horizon game since FH2, I have predicted that it would be set in Japan. Every year I have been wrong, with games 2-5 going to Miscellaneous Europe, Kinda Australia, The UK, and Most of Mexico respectively (the first was set purely in Colorado USA, which remains funny to to me for reasons I cannot name). So, shortly after FH5 launched, I once again predicted that Forza Horizon 6 would be set in Japan. This week finally, finally, I was proven right.

Judging by the Japanese writing on the image of a promotional numberplate Xbox emailed me this week, the game appears to have Tokyo as the anchor point, though the teaser trailer suggests that Mount Fuji will feature.

The teaser trailer is something that will require further dissection, because while it plays things close to the vest, there are lots of clues there for diehard fans who know more about Japanese car culture to pick out.

There is a reason why I have predicted Japan every time: it just seems like the perfect setting for a car game. As mentioned, there is a huge car culture in Japan, with many iconic cars and car companies based there. The country has a gorgeous and varied landscape, making for more interesting danger signs to drop off, beautiful nature to drive through, and bustling cities with buildings to crash into. Xbox has also been working to become more popular in the region, a game set in the country that respectfully captures The Vibe is a good way to do that.

Respectfully capturing the vibe is harder than it sounds, however, with many Mexican gamers complaining online that FH5 was more of a caricature than an homage.

My wish list for Forza Horizon 6 includes: an accurate representation of Japan, more of a focus on danger signs and less on drifting (I will be disappointed), and a better connection to the music festival aspect of the game (which recent games have departed from). I know that Playground Games will nail the cars and the sounds, so I don’t need to put that on the list.

Forza Horizon 6 is coming out in 2026, and no one I have asked has been able to narrow that down to a season or month. Know that I will keep asking.

What to play

• The Last of Us Part II is dropping imminently onto the PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue, including the “remastered” enhancements if you play on PS5. It’s a grim masterpiece no doubt, and a must play if you’re into that sort of thing and haven’t made your way through it yet.

• New to Game Pass this week is early access 4X strategy game Endless Legend 2, Arthurian co-op action roguelike Sworn, last year’s lovely Visions of Mana which is the fifth main game in the Seiken Densetsu series which also includes Secret of Mana, and Peppa Pig: World Adventures.

• Nintendo has added two games to its Switch Online GBA app, both from Namco and both pretty good. There’s arcade falling block puzzler Mr. Driller 2, and innovative platformer Klonoa: Empire of Dreams.

• Out of nowhere, Nintendo also released a new free-to-play mobile Fire Emblem, which I (Tim) found very intriguing until I saw it seems a lot like a Werewolf-esque social deduction game with a chibi art style, which is giving me pause.

Now it’s my turn, bub

By Tim

Insomniac has given its first proper look at next year’s Wolverine during Sony’s State of Play. And as a big Marvel fan and an enjoyer of the developer’s Spider-man games, I couldn’t help but let my mind wander about every detail on display.

The major question answered in the trailer is that of how Wolverine’s higher level of violence and aggression will be represented given most of Insomniac’s games have been PG or soft M. Around five seconds into the footage Logan has ripped apart or ventilated several soldiers with extremely bloody results, so it’s clear the tone of the game has moved considerably.

Another question answered fairly comprehensively; where will the game be set? All three Spidey games have had New York City as an open world hub, but a Wolverine story confined to just one location would be unconventional given he’s usually on the run or in pursuit. The game footage showed Logan in Canada, Japan and Madripoor, so it’s possible we’ll see many smaller open areas.

This does raise several more questions however. Logan is a character that’s much more about direct, immediate action than Peter Parker or Miles Morales. So much of the Spider-man experience in the games is exploring the spaces, amassing collectibles and completing side missions. With this not really mapping onto Wolverine, does that mean the entire structure of the game has changed? Is this more of a linear Uncharted style adventure? If so, that would be a major change for Insomniac. And along a similar vein, what will we be doing when we’re not slicing and dicing? Spidey swings around town when he’s not kicking ass, but Logan mostly broods and drinks.

Finally, a rich selection of rogues to fight against is a mainstay of the Spider-man games, so who can we expect in Wolverine? The trailer shows Omega Red and Mystique, who interestingly are both great foils to Logan’s healing ability and functional immortality. Most of the nobodies Wolverine carve up appear to be technologically modified humans, and we get a good look at a Sentinel, so maybe it’s a mutant genocide story? Regardless, I’d put money on other famous mutants, both good and bad, playing major roles.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

If you read the above update about GBA games coming to Nintendo’s Switch Online service, and asked yourself “who the heck is Mr. Driller”, then boy do I have some rabbit holes for you to go down. Mr. Driller’s real name is Susumu Hori, and he’s actually the son of two previous Namco protagonists: Taiso Hori of 1982’s Dig Dug, and Masuyo Toby of 1985’s Baraduke. Or at least that’s the version of reality presented across the Drillerverse, a quartet of games with colourful and addictive falling-block mechanics, paired with increasingly unhinged lore, straight-up game satire and an exponentially expanding cast of ridiculous characters.

I say it’s a quartet, when in fact there are probably a dozen of them. But if we discount ephemeral phone apps, download-only 2010s snippets and glorified ports, there are really only four, released one a year from 1999 to 2002. And taken together they’re a wonderful reminder of a time when simple, creative arcade ideas and thoughtful presentation could be at the forefront of a major publisher’s concern.

Mr. Driller is an arcade game with a great look and a sweet soundtrack, backed up with one of those undeniably coin-munching gameplay loops. You dig downwards breaking up coloured blocks to fall as far as you can, with like-coloured blocks disappearing if they fall on each other. But you have an ever-dwindling oxygen meter, and every move brings the risk of blocks crushing you. It’s like the action of Dig-Dug, and the puzzling of Columns.

Mr. Driller 2 followed a year later, adding a second player for co-op drilling (the inexplicably German Anna Hottenmeyer), and Susumi’s talking dog Puchi. The story, such as it is, hasn’t changed much from the first game; a race of cute idiot blobs is overproducing blocks and you gotta take care of that. But the rivalry with Anne sets the scene for the earnest weirdness of the story to come.

Mr. Driller G was the third arcade game in as many years, exploding the scope to include seven playable characters and a full campaign mode. The acid house soundtrack and sheer amount of pure drilling gameplay make this a pure expansion of the original game, but the cutscenes tell a bonkers story filled with parody and Namco deep cuts, concerning a genius professor and his arch nemesis (the evil Dr. Manhole), who are engaged in a kind of drill arms race. Unfortunately it was never localised into English.

Mr. Driller Drill Land was the only game in the series made with a home console in mind, taking the core story, gameplay and characters and presenting them in five separate sub-games. One of them is an impossibly deep cut reference to Namco’s 1984 RPG Tower of Druaga, while another introduces holy water as a means of fighting of ghostly cursed blocks. And of course, there are plenty of bizarre character moments.

If you’re looking to experience Mr. Driller today, the PS1 version of the original is on PS5, the GBA version of the first sequel is on Switch Online, and an English version of Drill Land was finally released for all platforms just a few years ago.