Whew boy has it been a bit of A Week for the games industry. Xbox has once again laid off a bunch of people in search of endless profits (forgetting that to receive profits, you must have products to sell), and PlayStation announced that it will kill off game discs (more on that next week).

But as we passed the halfway mark of the year on the 2nd of July, it means it’s time for Tim and I to look back on the last 6 months and declare our favourites.

So, without further ado, here are our picks of the best games of the first half of the year.

Alice’s picks

What an absolutely packed year. It has been filled with both excellent games and truly depressing news about the games industry, with more than 8,000 games industry workers being laid off in 2026 alone, almost doubling the number of layoffs from this time last year.

With everything going on at the moment, it’s no surprise that I’ve been gravitating towards more cozy games this year.

Forza Horizon 6

I don’t think it’s any surprise that my number one pick of 2026 for Forza Horizon 6, but I did agonise over choosing this one a little, given the absolute dumpster fire Xbox is at the moment. From Microsoft’s ongoing support of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, to Xbox acquiring dozens of brilliant studios only to shut many of them down and lay everyone off (despite revenue being up last year, hitting $23.5bn USD), it’s clear that Xbox is not currently a net good in the world.

However, Playground Games is a brilliant studio which hasn’t been shut down yet, and has made an excellent game in spite of its parent company, and I love Forza Horizon so much. I’m sure it will be at the top of the resume of every person who worked on it, when Xbox inevitably finds another opportunity for “cost savings” (the cost being the livelihoods of talented people, not cutting C-suite salaries or bonuses, of course).

Forza Horizon 6 is a game that is all things to all people who like to drive fast cars. It’s a cosy building game, it’s a collecting game, it’s a serious racing game, it’s a silly driving a car off a cliff game, it’s all that and more. It’s a good way to explore Japan, and the soundtrack is excellent. It’s a game I will live in for 2-3 years until Forza Horizon 7 comes to whisk me off somewhere new. I can’t wait to play it on PS5 Pro with better graphics while maintaining a high frame rate, because that’s the only thing it’s missing.

Rhythm Paradise Groove

Parenthood and limited time to play means that I am in my era of loving a game that’s just a few dozen mini-games in a trench coat. I can jump in, spend a bit of time trying to master the loop and improve my score, and then run off if my daughter wakes up early from her nap. Rhythm Paradise Groove is a simple yet unforgiving game that dares you to be good, but knows you probably won’t be for a while. It’s not great docked on a TV, because of the inevitable latency issues, but it’s a beast in handheld mode.

Tamodachi Life: Living The Dream

On the one hand, I am irritated by the lack of control I have over the characters, and how much it leans into being meme-y and TikTokkable and “so random”. On the other hand, Tamodachi Life: Living The Dream is hilarious and I love the different approach the game takes to life sims. While The Sims goes down the path of theism and casts you as an interventionist god, Tamodachi Life goes down the path of deism, where you create the world and can then be largely hands off from the affairs of your creations. Whether they hunger or need to bathe is not your problem.

One day I want to read a theologian’s take on life sims.

It’s another good snacking game, which you can lose days in, or jump in for ten minutes on a commute. It’s also perfect for people who love the idea of life sims, but easily get choice paralysis.

Pokemon Pokopia

This past year has really been the golden age of Pokemon for me. I missed the craze when I was in primary school, I’ve still never seen any of the anime, and I haven’t sunk any real time into the cardboard TCG. Of course, I’ve played almost all the games since Pokemon Blue on Game Boy, and I’ve enjoyed most of them, just none of them truly captured me and got me to understand the hype. But, thanks to Pokemon TCG Pocket, I have found myself connecting to Pokemon in a new, deeper way, and having Pokemon Pokopia come out this year was perfectly timed for that.

What I love about the game is that for once it’s not focussed on having small children take cute, exotic creatures and force them to fight each other. Instead, you play as a Ditto pretending to be a human, and you bring this beautiful world back to life and work with other Pokemon to achieve your aims. The comparisons to Animal Crossing is apt, in that it inspired similar feelings of care and calm, but it also feels less open-ended and has more direction.

Modern Art

OK, yes, technically Modern Art was originally released in 1992, but I only played it for the first time in 2026 and I really liked it, so it counts. Modern Art is one of those board games that ticks every box: it facilitates having fun with your friends, it has an interesting premise, the gameplay is engaging, the art is interesting, and it gets you to think, engage with and discuss a societal issue (in this case, how we value art and who gets to decide what art matters). In the game you have to bid on and buy art, which can appreciate in value if that artist ends up being popular. You can end up mostly buying pictures you don’t even like, just because they might be worth more. In our game, the winner ended up being the person who sold the most, rather than the people who had bought and held onto art that was supposed to make us profit.

It was easy to grasp the rules quickly, and the game only took 45mins. It really is a game that ticks every box.

Tim’s picks

It’s been such a stacked first half of the year for great video games. And yet, narrowing it down to a top five has not been difficult at all this time. Unusually for me, I’ve found it hard to stick to the quirky narrative intricacies or indie mechanical exploration of the Esoteric Ebbs, Sol Cestos and Titanium Courts, instead preferring the comforting familiarity of more traditional game experiences. I’m getting my fill of surprise and uncertainty elsewhere, I guess.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales

Before I played this game, I thought the title was just another gormless Square Enix word salad. Which it is. But now having explored the game and loved every second, I can see it’s also an attempt to borrow the syntax of Nintendo’s beloved adventure series. Except Square has chosen to use the name of the courageous main character first and foremost, rather than the wise and imperilled princess.

If this game had released for the Super Nintendo in 1995, instead of Chrono Trigger, it would be hailed as a masterful Zelda-like and one of Square’s finest achievements on the system. Yet while much of the game evokes that era (the simple sword-swipe combat, the bombs, bows and boomerangs, the potions), the writing and characters, the gacha-style equippable upgrade system and the freeform overall structure feel very modern. With the gorgeous HD-2D art style also bridging the gap between retro and contemporary, this is a beautiful blend of comfort and innovation.

Resident Evil Requiem

Split dichotomously between two protagonists and two styles of play, it would be easy to say that Requiem brings the best of old and new Resident Evil together by evoking both 2017’s Biohazard and 2005’s RE4. But the truth is more complicated than that. Requiem also burdens itself by roping in narrative millstones from across the series’ tortured history, and indulges in ridiculous action set-pieces that would be perfectly at home in bottom-of-the-barrel entries like RE6. And yet, despite some tonal whiplash, it ends up working wonderfully.

Grace’s main gameplay section inside an absolutely demented chronic care facility is some of my favourite survival horror of all time, mixing challenge and terror with some risk-reward decision-making and a touch of experimentation. The ramp up from gloomy wood-panelled stalker escape scenario to shiny science experiment zombie mess — with blood-soaked mechanical detours and creepy screaming ladies in between — also perfectly encapsulates Capcom’s long-running survival horror series in just one area. And while the rest of the experience is less focused and more meandering, it’s a remarkable encore for Leon Kennedy, and proof that the series can do action without becoming totally idiotic.

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf

Though it’s both a thoroughly traditional cinematic puzzle-platformer and a very straightforward sequel, the combination of hand-drawn visuals, wonderful score and that adorable cat creature Mui couldn’t keep me away from this one. Wishfully’s 2023 original was an emotional journey of wordless storytelling, picturesque settings and a touch of existential dread. And this followup follows the same formula, but with some expanded mechanics and even more of a deep-dive into the lore.

From exploring an undersea area in a leaky capsule to possessing small creatures to sacrifice themselves for your puzzle-solving gain, every section of the game brings new things to do while subtly expanding your understanding of this strange world. And while collecting antidote ingredients to save your sibling doesn’t feel quite as epic as a robot alien invasion in terms of inciting incidents, the emotional and narrative payoffs end up being just as satisfying.

007 First Light

I’m a big fan of James Bond, but as someone who has felt little connection to the most recent films and also could never quite get into the Hitman series, I wasn’t too sold on the idea of IO’s origin story espionage game at first. But it turned out to be an astonishingly fresh and satisfying take on the franchise, adding elements of style, cinema and linear action to the developer’s trademark open-ended sneaking designs.

While too many takes on Bond have seen a cruel, maladapted, problematic old man complaining about progress, here the character’s weaknesses are tied to his growth and inexperience, as he battles a corrupt techno-establishment that thinks it knows best. Ultimately I felt like the series’ signature gadgets were a bit underused, and the sprawling spycraft setpieces of the first few areas overshadowed the linear action of the latter half. But it did remain a thrilling ride throughout, and is easily the best Bond media for decades.

Mina the Hollower

Superficially, Yacht Club’s long-awaited followup to Shovel Knight is a mash-up of Zelda and Castlevania, with a light horror theme and a Game Boy Colour aesthetic. Yes, the cheesy gothic settings are a delight, Jake Kaufman’s genre-spanning score rules, and the animal characters (led by mad scientist monster-hunter Mina) are funny and interesting. But the studio kept the game’s true nature a complete secret, and it’s a shockingly deep experience to fall into once you get started.

What feels at first like a fairly linear action game with soulslike influences turns out to be fully open, gated only by your understanding of the world’s potential and your own abilities. There are layers of risk and reward, from the way you need to stay on the offensive in order to heal, to the way you need to horde currency (which is easily lost if you die) if you want to quickly level yourself up. Every new screen feels like an education in new possibilities, some of which I didn’t grasp until I’d returned to an area for a third time. There’s just so much crammed in here, and thankfully it also feels great to play, and satisfying to overcome.

Is anybody getting a Steam Machine? I’ve never liked gaming on PC, and the less I have to do with Windows the better, but I do like mods, community projects, tiny indies, Linux and early access. The Steam Deck was a perfect mix of form factor, convenience, compatibility and tweakability for me, and I’ve been considering building a Steam Big Picture machine for the loungeroom, so Valve’s new box seems right up my alley. If only component prices weren’t currently so ludicrous. Can I justify $1600 to essentially upgrade the experience of plugging my Steam Deck into the TV? I’m on the reservation list and do intend to buy one, but I’m still not 100% sure it will turn out to be a worthwhile investment.

A tale of two handhelds

By Tim

I’ve always been a sucker for weird and wonderful handhelds, whether they have a strange hardware gimmick, or a quirky software platform, or they’re otherwise just providing strange tools for developers and players to mess around with. Fortunately for me the market is now absolutely full with all sorts of portable gaming things, and lately I’ve been testing a pair of them that couldn’t be further apart by basically any metric.

First, there’s the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, a titanic portable Windows battle station that will brute force practically any game to decent performance, or employ AI trickery to get it up over the 100 frames-per-second mark. It’s surprisingly comfortable for such a big honking device, I don’t mind the look of it as long as I keep all the RGB off, and Windows is getting better all the time in terms of staying out of the way. It’s not as streamlined as the Steam Deck, but once you’re in a game and running high settings at 60fps without needing to do any tweaking, that’s easy to forgive. It can also last a long time on a charge if you pull the power right back, but I’m ok with needing to plug it in after two hours.

At the polar opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve also been having a lot of fun with my new Arduboy. If you’re unfamiliar, this is an open source platform built using Arduino boards, with the goal of creating fun little portables the size of credit cards. It’s a project that’s been guided by one developer for more than 10 years, though hundreds of people have made games for it. The current version, the Arduboy FX-C, is a tiny little circuit board sandwiched between a metal rear and plastic front casing, with an amazingly bright 1-bit OLED and some humorously basic outputs, including a bleepy speaker and blinky coloured LEDs. It comes installed with more than 300 weirdo games, some very original and others lovingly ripped off.

Something these machines have in common is that they cost much more than you might think, given the outrageous state of component production. The Claw is not something I could even consider buying (I’m borrowing an engineering sample), at $2750. Of course that compares perfectly fine to the cost of building a high-end PC, because prices are uniformly insane, so I can see people going for it and also investing in a dock for TV play. The Arduboy I did buy myself, for the equivalent of around $120. That’s the price of one blockbuster new game, and I get endless weird distractions in an effortessly pocketable machine, while also supporting a worthwhile community.

In terms of capability it’s barely worth comparing the two. The MSI could run an Arduino emulator in a window with no impact on performance for whatever AAA game it was blasting its cooling system about. But then again, only one of the machines fits in a shirt pocket.

What’s on our radar

• The Steam Summer Sale is on, so I’ve been going down my wishlist and picking up some savings that frankly seem unethical. I’ve already had my fill of Star Fox, so I’ve just been enjoying some of these gems that have sat on my wishlist for too long, like Peglin (a pachinko rougelite), Demon Turf (a 3D platformer) and Timespinner (a Symphony of the Night like).

• Alice: Rhythm Paradise Groove is out tomorrow on Nintendo Switch 2 and it’s all I want to play right now. I really hope it lives up to the hype of the short preview I played.

Do you need a $1350 gaming headset?

By Alice

We now live in the age of the prices of things just being completely untethered from reality. Obviously no one needs a $1350 gaming headset, especially in this economy, or technically any headset at all, given you can use any wired headphones with a mic and get the job done.

But being an audio nerd, I am really appreciating this new age of ultra-premium gaming headsets. Expensive brands like B&O Play (the low quality spin off of audiophile brand Bang and Olufsen) have certainly tried to make overly expensive headsets to appeal to the rich. Brands with long histories of high quality audio devices, like Beyer Dynamics, have also gotten in on the headset game, with reasonably priced decent headsets.

But the launch of the $1349 SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite headset last year, a wireless hi-res audio headset with carbon drivers, which had no corners cut when it came to audio fidelity is really the marker that gaming headsets have entered a new phase.

When I reviewed my first gaming headset back in 2007, almost everything was just cheap and cheerful, plastic headsets you wouldn’t feel bad about giving to the kids. Now, headsets are refined, they’re trying to synthesise a Dolby Atmos soundstage, they have noise cancelling, you can retract the boom mic so you don’t look like a dork in public. They’re a marker not just that manufacturers are acknowledging gamers aren’t just children, but also that the generation that grew up with consoles is now made up of adults, some of whom have disposable income and a refined auditory palette.

SteelSeries might be the first mainstream headset brand to smash the $1000 barrier, and I’m not sure if it’s earned that price tag yet, given the lacklustre microphone and noise cancelling. But the audio quality means that I have high hopes for the second generation of the Elite, and any other brand that might decide it’s time to create their version of the ideal, money is no object headset.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

It’s the winter school holidays, which means it’s time to find lots of non-screen, indoor activities for the kids to go alongside all the video games they will inevitably enjoy on rainy days. Here are some of my picks for Lego and board games at the moment:

From the Lego side of things, there are so many Toy Story sets at the moment. Everything you could imagine relating to the franchise is available to be built out of bricks. If you’re feeling particularly generous, my pick is the Alien with Pizza Planet Rock Ride.

There’s also the Iconic Pirate Ship, for millennial parents who want to relive their childhoods (I really want this one).

For the Duplo-aged kids, my pick is the Duplo 3-in-1 Creative Ramps with Vehicles set, because it’s adorable and fun. There are cars to customise, and a little ring of fire to send them through. Everyone will enjoy that.

On the board games side, there are approximately one million Bluey-themed board games. My personal picks are the Shopping List Game, which is a cute little memory game for ages 3+, and the Fancy Restaurant Game, which is essentially Go Fish, but with extra steps.

For older kids, there’s Catan Junior and My First Carcassonne are perfect for kids aged around 6 who are ready to start getting introduced to the good stuff.

Older than that, there’s Ticket To Ride - I recommend going with some of the smaller city maps while their attention span is still a bit shorter, to get them into the swing of it. Then there’s also Dixit, which is a really nice game to bond with people and know them better, see how they make associations, and discuss art.

Otherwise, games from the Exploding Kittens universe are good to get a laugh out of a kid.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

June was a big month for anniversaries! Like, really only two notable games, but ones with a huge amount of impact.

Now 30: Super Mario 64 This is the one game you think of when you remember gaming’s transition from 2D to 3D. I can picture Mario’s polygonal face smiling down at me from rows of CRTs at the local Kmart, and can recall the unfamiliar prongs and stick of the N64 controllers at the kiosks as I moved him around Whomp’s Fortress, tiptoeing or sprinting or leaping in any direction, moving the camera around to take in the world from any angle. In retrospect, Mario 64 has a lot of issues. Half of the worlds are great, and the back half are significantly less so. Many of the stars are obtuse or unfair. The camera sucks. Yet Nintendo nailed the fundamentals so well on its first try — the look, the controls, the movement, the voice — that it became instantly iconic, and paved the way for an entire era.

Now 35: Sonic the Hedgehog I could conceivably be the nation’s biggest Sonic fan, and yet I’m not sure I could articulate exactly what makes the series so great. I don’t think Sega knows either, given the paltry and bizarre collection of items it’s rolled out to celebrate the Blue Blur’s big birthday. There’s a nostalgic charm in the earnest coolness and heart of the characters, a very Japanese charisma at odds with constant attempts to Americanise, great music of course, and an innate appeal in going fast but staying just within control. Easier to pin down is why the singular original game is so good. A technical marvel for 1991, it remains timeless and beautiful to this day, and if there was never any more Sonic after this you’d still say it was an argument for what video games should ultimately be; a challenge, an escape, a joy to play, an amalgam of bold visual art, inspired music and innovative design.

Now 40: Bubble Bobble If you count spinoffs I’m sure there are at least 40 of these games, or one for each year, as Taito seems to have spent 20 years doing nothing but churning them out. But the original may be the best. It’s a two-player single screen arcade platformer where you catch enemies by blowing bubbles at them, and then pop the bubbles to defeat them. It genuinely adds something fresh and fun to the Mario Bros formula, and it remains one of the best 80s arcade games to play with a friend.

Welcome to another issue of Press Any Button.

This week I (Alice) got dragged back into Fortnite, and Pokemon seems to be having a crossover event with cardboard and app. Meanwhile, Tim bulked up his Nintendo Switch 2 to make it more comfortable, and his celebration of N64 games continues.

Enjoy!

My sprite collection game keeps being interrupted by a battle royale

By Alice

On the one hand, I hate extraction shooters because they’re too stressful, and what Epic has done to Fortnite and the people who make it is unconscionable. On the other hand, I have been dragged back into Fortnite because of this new Sprite-themed season, because apparently I am a sucker for a Creature.

The way it goes is that the map has several adorable Sprites in it of varying rarities that you can capture and level up, and they will give you boons like extra ways to gain health and shields, deal extra damage, or find extra stuff in chests.

If you die while holding them, they’re gone. But if you go to an extraction site and send them to wherever they go, you get to keep them in your inventory and use them next game. You can also keep them if you get a win.

The problem that I have is that people keep interrupting my sprite collection game by shooting me, or attempting to play a Battle Royale, and I’m just not here for that. I’m here to catch ‘em all and level them up. I care not for guns or shooting or any of those unsavoury activities, unless it will aid in levelling up my beautiful sprites. My babies are the priority here, and if they hunger for blood, then that is what they shall be fed. How dare other people interfere with this beautiful process?

The game isn’t better than it was. If anything, this map is worse, the guns are unsatisfying, and the implementation of the sprites is clunky and there are simply too many for anyone to ever reasonably finished. I’m going to keep playing, because I am a sucker, apparently. But you should save yourself.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been playing Adventures of Elliot, and it’s incredible. I’m only a few hours in, but so far it feels like what Chrono Trigger might have been if someone at Square had stopped development part way through and said “no, this needs to be a lot more like A Link to the Past”, and then it was remade in HD-2D for 2026. Also having a hilarious time with forced-scrolling rougelite two-player shmup Dark Scrolls. Other than that, I’m getting revved up for Star Fox this week.

• Alice: This week I’m eagerly anticipating the new Star Fox on Switch 2, which releases tomorrow, and I’m back on the ranked grind for Pokemon TCG Pocket.

So close, but a bit too far

By Tim

Maybe the Steam Deck has just spoiled me too much, but I find large and flat handhelds like the Switch 2 pretty uncomfortable to hold and play. The original Switch was alright, though vastly improved by a Nitro Deck, but the extra size of the newer machine has my hands getting tired quickly if I try to play in bed or on the tram. There’s just nowhere for my bottom three fingers to rest or support the system in a comfy way. A Nitro Deck 2 is incoming, Dbrand’s Killswitch has its fans, and there are other options from Genki and random Amazon brands, but the first chonkifying upgrade I’ve got my mitts on is a brand new entry from Belkin, imaginatively named “Grip for Nintendo Switch 2”.

This $50 kit has three pieces; a case that protects the back and edges of the Switch 2, and a sheath for each Joy-Con which adds a substantial handle. The rear of the main case has a magnetic plate, but that’s only handy if you’ve paid an extra $100 for the version with a detachable battery unit that more than doubles the Switch 2’s longevity. In contrast to some other cases, Belkin’s fits (very snugly) into the standard Switch 2 Dock so you don’t have to take it on and off or add an adapter. The handles do mean that it won’t fit in a regular travel case though, and Belkin does not supply its own, though it will sell you a satchel for another $55.

Unfortunately, as soon as I attached it all to my console I knew this thing wasn’t going to solve my ergonomics issue. The handles on the Joy-Con are a nice size and provide a place for the lower three fingers to wrap, but they’re low and not contoured, meaning it’s not comfortable to hold them and rest your index fingers on the triggers at the same time.

The grips have a small amount of wiggle too, which hurts the feel even though a little metal clip prevents them from coming off. More concerning is that the extra leverage of the handles means it becomes very easy to accidentally detach a Joy-Con just by rotating your wrist. The whole setup adds a little bit of weight, but it’s not too bad. The version with the battery adds so much, though, that I’d really only consider it for tabletop mode. The Belkin case has a cutout so the stand can still work, which is nice.

Your mileage may vary and depending on your hands this could be a good way to solve the Switch 2’s grip and / or battery life problem. I’ll wait for the Nitro Deck 2, which doesn’t add battery but will hopefully address the console’s third big issue; the lack of a proper d-pad.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Obviously the Pokemon TCG Pocket app draws heavily from the physical trading card game. But the new set announced this week appears to be the first that directly ties into the physical game with a shared event. Ruler of the Skies is the new set coming on the 30th of July (making it the longest lead we’ve had on a Pokemon TCGP set), and it is part of the Mega Rayquaza arc that’s about to launch in the physical game, as the announcement came alongside the reveal of the Mega Evolution Delta Reign set coming in English on the 6th of November (it’s available in Japan from 29 July).

The announcement was very bare bones, aside from the fact that Rayquaza will be involved. But it’s significant that There will be an identical card releasing in the physical game and app at the same time/months early (depending on your language).

This opens up a lot of questions though. Will the app now be more tied with the physical game? The Pocket version is a very different, more limited, faster version of the card game, and both require different strategies. Player numbers for Pocket have been dropping like a stone, is this part of a push to get mainline players to dabble more in Pocket? Will we start seeing crossovers where there are card codes in physical packs?

I’m interested to see what happens next with this integration. I haven’t played more than a handful of games of the physical card game, but Pocket scratches all the right itches for me as I step away from Magic the Gathering. While I realise the motivation is to get physical players into Pocket, deeper integration of the two could be what gets me to finally try playing cardboard Pokemon.

This also raises more questions - everyone’s expecting a new Pocket set to launch next week in line with the monthly schedule, but that hasn’t been announced yet. Are we just getting Deluxe EX again? Either way, it’s nice to have a new curiosity.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

For the fourth part of our 30th anniversary N64 deep cuts exploration, we’re looking at games of 2000. It was the year of the PlayStation 2, and Nintendo’s cartridge-based system was winding down after a short and commercially unimpressive life. The first-party hits were still coming though, with Majora’s Mask, Paper Mario, Perfect Dark, Banjo Tooie and Kirby 64 all hitting in 2000. But there were gems under the surface too.

Stunt Racer 64 With its retail release cancelled, and official availability only through rental stores in the US, this game has probably been owned by more collectors and speculative investors than it has been played by racing fans. Which is a shame, because it’s a fun arcade racer big on speed, drifting, tricks, upgrades and zero-gravity segments. It has a retro-future aesthetic, but also inexplicably a lot of circus stuff. Even if it had had a retail release it probably would have been overshadowed by Nintendo’s Ridge Racer 64, released in the same year, but it remains a great racer with a really sharp look.

Sin and Punishment Treasure may be famous for its Sega Mega Drive titles, but all three of the games it developed for 64 are absolute bangers. This one is a rail shooter with a unique control scheme that uses both the d-pad and analog stick at the same time, and was originally released only in Japan. It’s probably less of a deep cut now than it was 20 years ago, since it made a big splash on the Wii with a Virtual Console release of the original and a full pointer-controlled sequel. It’s a technical showpiece for the 64, delivering a relatively brief rollercoaster of shooting and spectacle.

Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo Everybody remembers Rogue Squadron, Factor Five’s cinematic Star Wars shooter from 1998. And then of course the team returned for Rogue Leader at the launch of the Gamecube in 2001. But in fact there is a game wedged in between them; Battle for Naboo doesn’t carry the Rogue name of course, because it’s not set during the original trilogy, but it plays just the same and is a total blast. In addition to flying missions there are land and sea sections, and even mid-level transitions from one form of vehicle to another. Episode I doesn’t have anything as cool and grungy as an X-Wing, but that’s hardly the game’s fault.

Shiren the Wanderer 2 Fans of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon may or may not be aware that the series actually started in 1993 as a roguelike starring a merchant from Dragon Quest IV. Developer Chunsoft invented Shiren as a protagonist for the series from the second entry, and this N64 version is the seventh full game in the series overall. It’s still a brutal rougelike, but with a meta goal of collecting enough resources from the various dungeons to build your own castle. So in that way it’s a bit more like modern rougelites. There’s a full English translation available, and although it looks pretty plain for the time it has a cute mix of 2D and 3D graphics.

We’re supposed to be getting excited for this?

By Tim

On the heels of an impressive and entertaining Showcase last week, Xbox has now thrown the hype train fully from fourth gear into reverse, with multiple reports that it is currently in discussions to close several of its studios. Reporting suggests that Compulsion, creator of South of Midnight, is being closed. Ninja Theory, developer of the Hellblade series, and iconic studio Double Fine are also apparently in discussions to be spun out or shuttered.

This newsletter generally isn’t about the procedural or political elements of the games industry, rather the games themselves and what we like about them. However, just like the spiralling costs of hardware caused by AI data centres soaking up all the resources, Xbox’s irresponsible management and decision-making is one of those background elements you can’t avoid. It’s had a direct negative impact on the quality of the experience and the health of the industry.

It’s not that Microsoft is alone in letting business targets and ambitions get in the way of fun times for its customers. That’s more or less a given where corporations are in charge of entertainment. But when you’re a corporation worth $4 trillion, the moves you make tend to have an outsized impact.

It’s become clear that many of Xbox’s ideas, including putting games in Game Pass on day one, or paying $US69 billion for Activision, have not had the impact it had planned as quickly as it would like, and the result is years of work being thrown away as games are cancelled and entire studios shuttered. Instead of eating the cost of its mistakes, that cost is passed on to creators, and consumers. This is totally at odds with the narrative Xbox has run with as it acquired and grew studios; that it was funding and enabling creators to produce their best work, and that it had created a sustainable subscription ecosystem to allow that.

Current attempts to bring fans back to the brand, after years of suggesting that Xbox would become a platform-neutral publisher, now ring incredibly hollow. All the flashy or nostalgic trailers in the world can’t counteract the feeling that the people and properties that make Xbox, are ultimately disposable. I remain enthusiastic about the games still in development at other Microsoft studios, and I’m hopeful any outgoing studios and talent will be in a position to be excited about independence. But as a brand, Xbox is in a troubled place.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been replaying Halo Infinite in anticipation of the upcoming CE remake. I originally played through the campaign in a special pre-release version and my save was wiped, so I never really got to explore the full map. I think my original criticisms stand up; the narrative and the open world are too disconnected, and the game doesn’t do a good job escaping from the corner Halo 4 and 5 painted it into. By holy crap is it fun to play around in. It’s disappointing this didn’t become the platform for Halo stories going forward, and I’m a bit bummed we only have a retread to look forward to in the near future. I’m excited this week for Square’s Adventures of Elliot.

• Alice: This week I’ve been getting back into the ranked mode of Pokemon TCG Pocket. Paradox Drive might sound like an emo band from 2004, but it also seems like a pretty underwhelming set of cards, which somehow always ends up having the most interesting ranked meta, so I can’t wait to see what emerges to to make my current fire deck redundant.

The Elysian Fields of rhythm

By Alice

I am a sucker for a rhythm game. Get me to tap buttons to a beat and I am having a good time. So, it’s no surprise that I greatly enjoyed my preview of the new Rhythm Paradise Groove at Nintendo Australia’s headquarters.

It’s been a long time since I last played a Rhythm Paradise (known as Rhythm Heaven in the US, lest they find out that rhythm may not necessarily reside in the afterlife of a Christian god) game, and I will admit to having completely forgotten the drill. The game is made up of a series of mini-games of varying difficulties where you have to press a button at certain intervals to jump, open an umbrella, or do just about anything except actually play music.

The difficulty levels were quite surprising - there is no room to swing the beat, it’s quite unforgiving in a way that means that although the mini games are quite short, it will take a long time to master each one.

The Rhythm Paradise Groove RPG mode was entertaining, but quite repetitive in the limited part I played. The music is fun, and timing the attacks is interesting, however the lack of variety meant that it got stale, fast.

What was excellent, though, was the multiplayer mode. It was brutal. There were some where you had to work as a team, upping the pressure to not let everyone down. And then there was the competition to swipe a slice of cake, and that’s where things got cutthroat. Every player wanted blood (and/or cake). The way it worked is that you had to press the button as close to the end of the 10 second countdown as possible, with only the first few beats being audible. It was ridiculous fun, and I look forward to bringing it out at a party.

Rhythm Paradise Groove hits stores on the 2nd of July, and I am so curious to do the full review to see how the mini games I didn’t get to try hold up.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

A few months back Lego released a selection of three absolutely beautiful Pokemon sets, designed for display rather than play. At the time, I thought it was a bit odd that there weren’t any for kids to actually play with. Well, Lego has just announced a slate of Smart Play Pokemon sets, and suddenly everything makes sense.

There are 12 sets in the range, priced from $25-$200, all including some Smart Tags so the built Pokemon figures can make appropriate sounds when paired with a Smart Brick. What’s interesting, though, is that only two of the sets come with the Smart Brick. This is a departure from the Star Wars release where almost half the sets came with a Smart Brick. On the one hand, that’s good, because it’s not forcing parents to buy more of the expensive bricks than necessary. But I question moving to this more limited strategy so early on, particularly when the sets are still very expensive for their piece counts. Cubone and Gengar’s Spooky Showdown is $159.99 for 782 pieces, including four Smart Tags. This is interesting, because it’s almost the same piece count as the Charizard Vs Jolteon Ultimate battle at 751, which comes with four tags and two Smart Bricks, suggesting the bricks cost around $22 each.

The reason why I don’t like the limited Smart Brick inclusion is that kids who aren’t into Star Wars will have to get the Charizard Vs Jolteon Ultimate Battle for $200 to get two bricks so they can play with a friend, or the Training House With Pikachu (400 pieces) with one brick for $130. If the kid is just into Eevee, or Gengar or Squirtle, they still have to get one of the sets with the Smart Brick to be able to get the full experience. This is before we even get into how much more expensive the Pokemon sets are compared to Star Wars, which has a $100 TIE Fighter set with 473 pieces and one Smart Brick, a Smart Minifig and a Smart Tag. That’s one hell of a Pokemon tax.

Outside the pricing and Smart Brick inclusion, these sets look great. There’s a lot of play potential there, the builds look interesting enough for a kid, and there’s a good selection of Pokemon. Not everyone’s favourite is featured, because there are just too many Pokemon, but there are enough of the classics. I’m looking forward to checking them out when they release in August.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

For the penultimate entry in our month-long N64 deep cut series, we’re looking at the games of 1999.

Nintendo was pumping out Pokemon, Smash Bros and Donkey Kong, with other mainstream concerns around the periphery including Castlevania and Star Wars. But there are plenty of great less-remembered gems from the year too.

Snowboard Kids 2 The original Snowboard Kids is relatively well-known, but its sequel received a notably limited release outside of Japan and doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Once again it’s snowboarding downhill Mario Kart, with items you can use to boost, attack and defend. The tracks are vibrant and varied (how the kids snowboard through decidedly dry castles and jungles is left to your imagination ), there’s a singleplayer adventure mode complete with boss battles, and of course multiplayer battles.

Beetle Adventure Racing! Here’s one I feel like many people know about, but it’s definitely underappreciated and didn’t sell very well by EA’s standards at the time. Originally planned as an N64-exclusive version of Need For Speed, the game was retooled as a marketing vehicle for Volkswagen’s New Beetle, making the fact that it turned out to be one of the best racers on the platform seem like a miracle. Tracks are long and winding, filled with secrets and shortcuts, with heaps of Beetle colours and silly cheats to unlock. The speed and handling are excellent, and multiplayer Beetle Battles are the icing on the cake. The game was apparently rereleased in Australia with Holden HSVs replacing the Beetles, but I only ever saw the original version at the local rental shops.

Hybrid Heaven My only contemporaneous memory of this game is drooling over how cool the box looked at the store, and imagining what the game was like based solely on those six anime-looking badasses and some print magazine ads. Never would I have guessed that this Konami action platformer was also an RPG, and a brilliantly unique one. You run around like it’s Tomb Raider, but when you meet an enemy you move to a combat system that has real-time positioning and turn-based move execution, plus a levelling system that lets you grow each of your body parts the more you use them. Did I mention your moves are mostly martial arts and pro wrestling attacks? The story, as you may expect, is nonsense.

Rocket: Robot on Wheels Three years before Sly Cooper, and ages before Infamous or Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch shipped this experimental physics-based puzzle platformer as its very first game. Taking place in a malfunctioning theme park, the game feels a bit unpolished compared to other 3D platformers of the time, but the realistic physics system — which let you use momentum, friction, mass, and throwing objects to solve puzzles — isn’t like anything else on the system. I’m not surely I really saw anything else like it until Half-Life 2 more than five years later.

Welcome to another issue of Press Any Button. This week I got excited about finally being able to play as the dead wife, and for movie trivia, while Tim talks about his highlights of the “everything old is new again” Summer Games Fest, plus looking back at the best N64 games.

Enjoy!

Finally, we get to play as the dead wife instead of the avenging husband

By Alice

There is a trope in games that behind almost every male hero is a dead wife. She was the perfect woman - so fragile, so dainty, so beautiful. She had long flowing hair and loved laughing while splashing in waves. She seemed like the kind of woman who would laugh at a salad and eat of a lot of yogurt.

But the thing about video games is that death only means as much as the story wants it to. The way I play games, death of a named character is an extremely common event, and they usually come right back. Not wives though, they’re just dead.

Until now. God of War Laufey is a newly announced PlayStation game that has me intrigued. Kratos’ whole deal is that everything is bad, everyone is dead, and now he must be manly and brutal in his grief and vengeance. There’s more to it, but that’s always been one of the pillars.

This new game starts at the end of his wife, Laufey’s, funeral when she wakes up in the afterlife and realises her husband and son might now be in danger. Now she will have to fight through the gods of every mythology to escape the afterlife and save them.

That premise is… amazing. I would love to fight gods in an effort to cheat death itself. As a Xena fan, I am no stranger to badass female god killers for whom death is irrelevant. It’ll be my first time experiencing it with a heterosexual character, but I guess that’s ok.

Sony’s Santa Monica Studio makes great games. I’m really interested to see what they do with this extremely nuanced story, which gods they’re going to bring in to make trouble, and how much this game will just be a God of War with boobs vs its own thing, given the different setting and protagonist. I can’t wait to play it in the next 4-24 months. Also, why does she look like Gwyneth Paltrow?

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’m still putting time into Mina the Hollower. I loved every second of my first playthrough and I’m happy to confirm it’s an absolute delight to run back through, hunting for secrets and items you’ve missed. There are so many trinkets and abilities not focused on combat that help you get around and discover new paths, but there’s also a lot I simply didn’t see the first couple times around. Plus there’s fishing!

• Alice: This week I’m travelling again, and looking forward to catching up on all the trailers from Summer Game Fest on my return. So far the games that have caught my eye (in addition to God of War) are Fable, Crazy Taxi, and Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush.

The remakes of Summer Game Fest

By Tim

We saw so many fresh new concepts over the week of various showcases, but also a near-unprecedented slate of remakes. Whether you chalk it up to the nostalgia economy, or risk-averse decision making, or both, get ready for some familiar faces with new bells and whistles over the next year. I ordered them all by how old the original is, so here are the top five.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is due in 2027 and is a remake of 1996’s Tomb Raider, making for a 31-year gap. As a big Tomb Raider fan I am a little bit burnt out on revisiting this game. We got a remake in 2007 that remains playable on Xbox (and is currently $4.50), and a nice remaster in 2024. I also really enjoy the most recent trilogy of games, so I’m not too enthused for Amazon to usher in a return of the more vapid, aristocratic, caked up Croft. But my mind is open, and it could be great.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation is, I suppose, a remake of the third part of 1997’s Final Fantasy VII. But we’re in uncharted territory to a certain extent because 2020’s Remake was a significant departure from the source material, leading into 2024’s Rebirth which in places felt like a different and original world altogether. So to what extent are we getting a remake at all here, versus the third entry in a new series that was originally inspired by a beloved RPG? I’m excited to find out.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is apparently set for a remake this year, though I somehow feel I know less about the project now than I did before Nintendo’s trailer. The company is clearly hoping that the mere mention of anything related to the legendary 1998 game will be enough to drive fans wild (and I think it mostly has), but it’s given no indication of how deeply reimagined the game is, whether it’s just a Nintendo 64 game with nicer graphics, or even when it will release.

Resident Evil Veronica must be a remake of 2000’s Code Veronica, even if it’s essentially unrecognisable in the trailer and has mysteriously dropped the “Code”. I have fond memories of the game on Dreamcast, but I’m mostly hoping the new game is a fitting follow-up to 2019’s incredible Resident Evil 2 remake. Rockfort Island prison could be a brilliant backdrop for a similar survival horror setup, with Claire treading a circular path outward through tricks and traps to find an escape.

Halo: Campaign Evolved remakes the singleplayer portion of 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved. This week we got our first look Operation: Meteorite, which is a collection of three brand new missions that will be inserted into the story. As with Tomb Raider, I’m not sure we necessarily needed to revisit this story; we got a remake in 2011 which is still playable via 2014’s Master Chief Collection. And yet, if the new project leans into revisionism with new story and retrofitted mechanics and gear, it could be different enough to justify.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Ages ago I was given a board game that came in a VHS case, and I was intrigued. I put it on my shelf, waiting for the right moment, assuming it would be lame. Well, the right moment came last week, and I finally played the Blockbuster board game. And it was so good!

The game has you and your friends split into two teams of a minimum of two players (but the more the merrier up to around 5 per side). Each game round has two components. The first half is one player from each team trading off naming movies with a particular attribute (ie movies with car chases) until the 15 second timer runs out. Whoever is the last person to name a movie gets a stack of 6 cards and can then pick which three their team has to guess, and which team their opponents get to guess. The three cards for each team are then placed by that round’s leader into the three clue categories. One movie will have to be guessed with charades, one with a quote and one with just one word as a clue. Each team will then have 30 seconds to get through their movies, and then start on the other team’s remaining movies (if there’s time).

The winner is the team that collects one of each of the 8 colours of card first.

Having the person who gives the clues alternate between each member of the team was really fun on our 3-member teams, and it was also nice not having them all be charades, or all be quotes. Mixing it up gave a real challenge to all involved.

We had a group that knew just enough about movies to make it fun, and we all had a fairly similar level of movie knowledge. Had the knowledge level been super lopsided, or we not known much, it wouldn’t have been fun at all. This level of knowing just enough was ideal.

I will admit, I had assumed that I would play it once and then give it away, but Blockbuster has certainly earned its space on my game shelf.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

For part two of our 30th anniversary Nintendo 64 deep cut series, we’re looking exclusively at 1998. Yes, this was the year of Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie, but that’s not all the console had going on.

Rakugakids This is a 2D fighter from Konami with a unique kids drawing art style (rakugaki meaning scribble), and mechanics very similar to Street Fighter II. I love the concept of different kids pitting their doodled creations against one another, and it’s brought to life cleverly here with the various characters (a musical cat, a robot, a bear-tank) all having silly movesets and magical finishers. There’s not a whole lot to do by modern standards, but the game sure does look and feel fresh to this day.

Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls If you read last week, you may have assumed that Chameleon Twist was the strangest long-tongue acid trip deep cut with a reptile on the cover we’d be featuring. But perhaps not! This abstract sphere-racing game designed by Jools Watsham at Iguana is just as weird. You have to use your grappling hook tongue to launch onto upper platforms, swing around hazards, and yank your opponents downward to slow them. I can’t believe a game with this name was released, but it’s good!

Body Harvest This is a personal favourite of mine since it’s one of the very few N64 cartridges I happened to get new, which was always an exciting experience. Made by the team that would release Grand Theft Auto III just three years later, it’s a sci-fi proto-GTA set across five massive open areas in different time periods. You requisition cars, trucks, bikes, tanks and planes, shoot massive alien bugs, try to stop the population being used as genetic fuel, and fight bosses with your spaceship. It’s awesome.

Geomon’s Great Adventure While it appeared in the West to be a fourth Mystical Ninja game, this was of course just the latest in Konami’s prolific Geomon series, which was mostly exclusive to Japan. What puts this above other N64 entries though is the sidescrolling gameplay, which stacks up excellently against more prominent 2.5D games on the system, including Kirby 64 and Yoshi’s Story. With a folklore theme, diverse mechanics, a great soundtrack and optional two-player co-op, it’s one of the finest platformers on the 64.

This week, I’m running down just a few of the reasons Mina the Hollower is the game of the year so far and shedding light on some lesser-appreciated gems from the Nintendo 64’s first two years, while Alice has played Star Fox and is giving some insight into the process of choosing board games for a party. Let’s go!

One mouse against the world

By Tim

I’ve been waiting years for Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club’s first big original game since Shovel Knight. And not only has it completely exceeded my expectations, it’s become the highest reviewed game of the year so far on both OpenCritic and Metacritic. A lightly horror-themed top-down action adventure starring a mad scientist mouse with a delightfully eccentric burrowing ability — it’s a jump, a dash, a dodge and a second jump all in one — it’s a game that brilliantly hides layers and layers of complexity, charm, challenge, humour and worldbuilding beneath a retro exterior. But to avoid going over too many points you may have already heard, here I present five reasons why Mina rules, without any comparative references to other games or genres.

1. An open, non-linear world. You start with six possible locations to head out to, and at first I thought only one was accessible, and the rest would become available as you unlocked new gear. Not only was I wrong (five of them are easily accessible from the start if you get the right item or resources), but in retrospect the area I went with is not the one the game nudges you toward, and it was an incredibly difficult start. I also poked my nose into the wrong places and ended up doing what’s evidently meant as the final area fourth, which again made things much harder than they might have been. But I loved it.

2. It rewards risk and exploration. A big part of the game is pushing your luck. Every time you level up a stat it becomes more expensive to improve, and holding onto currency is a risk because subsequent deaths can bankrupt you. So do you hold onto those bones to pour into attack points, and risk losing them if you fail? If you see a tempting side path or treasure, do you go for it? How far is it until the next save? Combat itself is all about risk too, as your ability to heal depends on you getting in some good smacks on your enemies without taking a hit yourself. And exploring off the beaten path can get you weapons and upgrades that significantly alter your options and abilities.

3. You’re never truly stuck. The systems seem harsh at first, and they are, but you always have options. For example when I was throwing myself against a late-game boss way too early, I opted to do some rounds grinding on nearby enemies to juice up a few levels. Then I tinkered with my weapon and trinket loadouts. I loved the gun I had picked up, but maybe my original whip would be a better fit? Should I de-prioritise plasma and ramp up DPS? Of course if I couldn’t proceed I could have backtracked to a different area and tried again later. As a last resort there are a huge number of difficulty-lowering toggles, but using one will disable achievements on that save file.

4. It’s built to replay. I loved exploring Tenebrous Isles and am planning to do so again multiple times, and luckily the New Game+ is substantial. You keep all the gear you’ve discovered, and the state of which treasures you’ve found or missed remains, encouraging you to explore differently. Plus, there are specific permutations for seven successive replays, making the game slightly different and more challenging each time by rearranging save spots and other details.

5. It looks and sounds delightful. Just as Shovel Knight was slavishly devoted to NES imitation, Mina perfectly evokes the Game Boy Color, just in widescreen. And it’s not just an aesthetic, the game is built mechanically around the fact that vertical depth is an optical illusion in top-down 2D, and plays with the format to great effect. The soundtrack from Jake Kaufman (Shovel Knight, Shantae) is similarly something you can imagine coming out of a GBC speaker, assuming the cartridge had a hypothetical sound chip inside to add some extra channels. It’s moody and gothic, but also with some total bops and surprising genre switches blended through. I’ve never bought a digital OST on Bandcamp so quickly.

What’s on our radar

• It’s a mercifully quiet week in the leadup to Summer Game Fest and all the related shows, so I’m taking it easy with some recent games rather than jumping straight to anything else. Donkey Kong 64 is coming to Nintendo Switch Online this week, but unless they’ve patched it to be less belligerent about wasting my time with character-gated bananas, I think I’ll pass for now.

• Alice: FOOOOORRRRRRZZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Star Fox 64 is back, now in Switch 2 form

By Alice

I’m going to admit something that I think might be illegal: I can’t remember ever playing a Star Fox game before. I think I probably have played at least one at some point, but I didn’t have a Nintendo 64 growing up, so I don’t have those nostalgic memories tied to the franchise. So, I didn’t know what to expect coming into the preview of the latest Star Fox game at Nintendo Australia’s headquarters.

The new game is a reimagining (not a remake) of the Nintendo 64 game, though it doesn’t look anything like a N64 game, and certainly the cut scenes and voiceovers have been made to suit modern hardware. But it has the spirit of games from that era in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

The levels that I played had me flying, dodging, shooting, doing flips and U turns to try and beat the bad guys. I didn’t have a lot of context for what was going on, but I had a lot of fun.

Multiplayer is where it got really interesting. There was one mode where I controlled the ship, and a friend controlled the weaponry, which was chaos, alternating between fun and frustration. And another mode that was closer to capture the flag, playing on GameChat with various avatars that mirrored our facial movements was hilarious.

While I don’t know if it’s faithful enough for longtime fans to be thrilled, for me it felt like a really good way to be introduced to Star Fox, and the preview made me want to play more and invest in the game, so I’m looking forward to the release date of 25 June. Though, is it an experience I would pay $100 to have, given how short the campaign is likely to be? I’m not sure I would, so maybe hold off on a pre-order until proper reviews are out.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

(I forgot to take a photo of the games, so please enjoy this photo from the original chip blind taste test)

Finding the right board game to play at a party requires a careful balance. It has to get everyone involved with playing the game enough that they’re having fun, but not so much that they don’t converse with the other guests. It has to be competitive enough that there’s a point to playing, but not so competitive that losers don’t have fun. Team games are usually best, because if everyone is going to gang up on each other anyway, why not provide structure for that?

With that in mind, we played three games on the weekend, two of which we’d played before, and one that I’ll write up a review of for next week, and they really demonstrated the difference between a good game and a bad game.

The highlight, surprisingly, was Blockbuster, a movie trivia game wearing the corpse of a successful video rental franchise as a hat. It struck a good balance between being challenging enough, while still allowing for whimsy.

A close second was Dumb Questions To Ask Your Friends, which relies on how well you know your friends, and is hilarious with the right group. Luckily, I had the right group.

The worst was Mind The Gap, a trivia game that asks questions about news, pop culture, etc from different generations. While I maintain that it might be ok if you were playing on teams with a member of each generation, getting stuck in Gen X music hell for 8 turns was just tedious. If you have gaps in your knowledge of certain categories, we had to create new rules to make it fun again, and this was a table of people who love trivia.

The perfect game for your friends will depend on your friends, but finding something that doesn’t feel too competitive, and doesn’t require you to remember the names of 80s hair metal bands, is always a good place to start.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

This month is the 30th anniversary of the Nintendo 64. But rather than count down the seismic big hitters we all know plenty about, I thought I’d take a look at some of the deep cut gems you may not have played, in order of their release. Today, we’re covering 1996 and 1997.

Wonder Project J2 Exclusively released in Japan, but now with a readily available fan translation, this is a gal game life sim and a rare mostly-2D outing for the 64-bit system. You play as yourself, a mysterious character who can see through the screen into the life of a girl robot who wants to become human. You answer her questions, watch how she responds to the world, and try your best to help her learn. There are some surprisingly emotional scenes, and some expected creepy weirdness, but it’s beautiful to look at and a truly interesting design that goes largely overlooked.

Mischief Makers In a list of the greatest games developed by Treasure, this one likely wouldn’t rank too highly. But in a list of deep-cut N64 games from 1997 that still play great today, it absolutely does. It’s a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer in which you can grab, shake and throw practically everything, sometimes to defeat it or get loot, sometimes to activate hidden functions. It’s a chaotic fever dream of pre-rendered sad faces, surreal boss fights and your character — a robotic maid on a mission to save her creator — screaming “Shake! Shake!” over the top of everything as she sprints and jet-packs around.

Chameleon Twist This is one of those games that, if you didn’t play back in the day, you’ll probably have a hard time believing it was a real thing. Every bit of it looks so cooked, sounds so ridiculous, and seems like it shouldn’t have been viable as a commercial product, but it exists. You’re a chameleon who follows the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland down a magical hole, somehow transforming into a humanoid that still has a lizard tongue. It’s a 3D platformer where you can stop and steer your extendible tongue out and around the space, licking up creatures to spit out or wrapping around poles to swing from. It’s clearly designed for kids, but it’s such a wild concept that it’s worth a look.

Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 AKI’s WCW and WWF games for the system are legendary, but this Japan-only entry is underappreciated by many fans. Mechanically it sits between the WCW game World Tour and Revenge, but the real reason to play this one is for the roster. There are so many big names from 90s Japanese promotions, mixed in with wrestlers from WCW and even legends like Terry Funk, Andre the Giant and Abdullah the Butcher. While you’re grabbing an English translation patch, you can also grab a save file that gives all the wrestlers their proper English names, for a truly nostalgic all-star roster.

This week I (Alice) dive into the PlayStation Days Of Play Sale and mull over whether or not to properly curate my board game collection. Meanwhile, Tim is looking at how Nintendo can give price relief to customers, and celebrates the anniversaries of some classics.

Enjoy!

PlayStation Days of Play

By Alice

PlayStation’s annual Days Of Play event has kicked off for 2026 and there are deals to be had for those who have accepted that their ‘to play’ list is never actually going to get any shorter.

For those looking for a subscription, the good news is that PlayStation Plus tiers are discounted 33% for new members, and old, stale members can also save 33% if they upgrade to a higher tier. Those who have been subscribed to the highest tier for some time get nothing because loyalty is meaningless and new is always better* (*this is merely implied).

Those who are subscribed to PlayStation Plus during the event (from the 2nd of June) will receive monthly games, as per usual, including Nickelodeon All Star Brawl 2, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and Grounded Fully Yoked Edition. What’s interesting about that isn’t just that these are pretty decent games, but that Grounded was once an Xbox exclusive title, and it’s still wild enough to see Xbox exclusive titles on PlayStation, let alone be given away as a PlayStation Plus subscriber perk. What a strange new world we live in.

Other bonuses include making Destiny 2: Legacy Collection available for Extra and Deluxe members from the 9th of June, as well as exclusive packs for EA Sports FC 26, War of Tanks and Marathon. That’s in addition to Game Trials of 40+ indie games, some PlayStation Indies Avatars, and PlayStation Tournaments in EA Sports FC26, NBA 2K26, Mortal Kombat 1, EA Sports UFC 5, Gran Turismo 7, Astro Bot, Asphalt 9: Legends, and Fortnite.

That’s a lot, but notably it’s all based around subscriptions rather than stuff you can buy and own, but I guess it’s not like you ever really own any digital purchases anyway, may as well drop the ruse.

Personally, my picks of the event are EA Sports FC, Baby Steps, and Grounded.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: Where did all these game releases come from? I’ve given decent starts to Forza Horizon 6, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. They’re all great in their own way and I’m excited to go back to them, but then this week I’ve had to move on to two of my most-anticipated games of the year, 007 First Light and Mina the Hollower. I’ve finished Bond and can highly recommend it as an Uncharted-like that makes the most of both its license and IO’s history making Hitman games. I’ll have more to say about Mina next week once I’ve finished it, but it’s shaping up to be an exceedingly special, once-in-a-generation love letter of Shovel Knight scale.

• Alice: There are too many games. Does there need to be this many games? I’m still playing Forza Horizon 6, but I’m really looking forward to diving into Yoshi and the Mysterious Book and Lego Batman ASAP.

The Switch 2 needs price relief

By Tim

I think a lot about how constant price increases and the general high cost of games is affecting the health of the industry. Games and systems these days start expensive and sometimes never get cheaper, which locks an increasing number of people and families out. Those people instead end up served by free games, putting the kind of games and franchises I love in danger of dying out since no new players grow up loving them.

This is an industry-wide issue but it seems particularly dangerous for Nintendo. That company lives and dies on its properties, and business realities have forced it to up the price of its current console after a year on the market. Will the likes of Pokemon, Zelda and Mario continue as strongly when the new games are locked to an expensive system that may never come down into impulse buy territory? Unclear. So here are three predictions / suggestions for how Nintendo could make the platform more financially accessible, ranked in order of how likely they are.

1. Leverage digital. In some regions (not here in Australia) Nintendo is currently selling a very smart bundle. It costs what the system will cost after the upcoming price increase, but it includes a game. Since big Nintendo games cost at least $100, adding one (or more) to the box effectively and significantly lowers the price for new buyers, and if the games are digital the impact to Nintendo is a lot more stable compared to trying to reduce hardware costs. Nintendo has an eShop code system that lets it offer choice in its pack-ins too, for example the current bundle lets you redeem either Mario Kart, Donkey Kong or Pokopia, which is also perfect for gifting because the receiver gets to choose the game. When the Switch 2 is $770, why not just make a big list of all the first-party Nintendo games and let players pick any two?

2. Switch 2 Lite. The expensive parts of the Switch 2 are not really negotiable. Any version of the system is going to need memory, storage, and processing power. So Nintendo needs to find ways to carve money off around the edges, and it already has a recipe in the Switch Lite; go handheld-only, no TV play. Many components of the Joy-Con are gone because the controls are attached to the body, you could drop one USB-C port, you get a smaller 1080p display, you could pull out some performance and cooling bits given it will never need to run 4K games, and of course you don’t need to include a dock or HDMI cable. Could these removals get the console to under $500? It might still be a stretch.

3. Switch 2 TV. This is something I always thought they should do for the original Switch, but there was never any sign Nintendo was even considering it. Maybe the price pressure could force its hand this time. A Switch 2 TV would be the same console, just with no screen, no controllers, no battery, and the dock ports integrated. It’s a 4K Nintendo set-top box. They could even sell a version with no included controller. There are enough compatible pads around already.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

How does a board game earn a place in your collection? I was talking to my good friends from Five or Eight this week about how we curate our board game collections, and I realised that my approach is less “carefully curated reflection of my taste and style” and more “chaos hoarder”, which admittedly describes a lot of my collections (particularly DVDs, which you will pry from my cold dead hands).

There are the games that I’ve bought because family members have loved playing them, and games that I’ve been given as incredibly thoughtful gifts from beloved friends, and then there’s the games I’m sent for review which range from some of my favourite games of all time, to the worst garbage I’ve played and I don’t know what to do with it.

At times, I’ve been forced to cull my collection, because I live in a tiny apartment, and I do give games away to friends if they’ve really enjoyed it and I don’t think I’m going to play it again. But I’m a firm believer in holding onto physical media just in case a good sequel in released or something similar comes out so I can compare. It’s similar to how you end up with a shed filled with random bits of junk that “might come in handy some day”, or that time my headphone collection breached the 100 pairs mark.

The thing is, a collection is only a collection if it’s complete or curated. If it’s just a bunch of stuff you’ve got with no cataloguing or order, then does it actually count? Who can say?

All I know is that I’m now inspired to definitely intend to do something to make my collection more intentional and less bloated.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

It’s the end of the month, so time to look back at some of the games that celebrated a major anniversary in May.

Now 20: New Super Mario Bros In the 10 years before NSMB, Nintendo only released two original Super Mario games; Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. The virtual console wasn’t a thing yet, so 2D Mario games were like forgotten relics unless you still had a Super Nintendo plugged in or invested in the GBA rereleases, and the indie revolution hadn’t quite hit so sidescrolling platformers in any shape were rare. New Super Mario Bros was therefore a very exciting prospect. And even though in retrospect it’s a much weaker game than most 2D Marios, and the “Bros” in the title is a bit of a stretch given the main campaign is Mario only, we only have that perspective because this game helped usher in a return for one of gaming’s greatest genres.

Now 40: Dragon Quest Looking back, you might think the genre we sometimes call J-RPG arrived fully formed in this single game. It’s like nothing that came before, yet very much like the turn-based party RPGs we still have to this day. However at the time, the game was a result of Yuji Horii’s desire to create more story-focused video games, and an intention to adapt PC RPGs for console play. The version most of us will be familiar with, the English version, was also heavily improved and updated years after the original had released. Of course the long-lasting appeal of the game also has a lot to do with its legendary illustrations and score, provided by manga artist Akira Toriyama and classical composer Koichi Sugiyama.

Now 50: BreakoutBack when games were both brand new and could be developed in a matter of weeks, hits were often determined by happenstance, marketing and sly business nous more than anything else. Atari’s Pong was not the first digital tennis for example, and is functionally identical to some older efforts. Taking that idea and making it singleplayer was something several companies did — like Ramtek, with 1974’s Clean Sweep — but it was again Atari that capitalised with 1976’s Breakout, which it was somehow able to copyright. Moving a paddle to hit a ball and remove blocks is undeniably a good time, and the setup has gone on to influence some true greats. But I think Breakout specifically is now best known for its influence on the Apple II, and as the story of how Steve Jobs cheated his friend Steve Wozniak out of $2500.

This week we have impressions of Mixtape, Forza Horizon 6, and Mega Cat 3 for Evercade, all coincidentally couched as counters to things that people who are wrong might say. But you’re a person of good taste and rational thought dear reader, so you can simply nod smugly along with us and our rightness.

Stellar Blade is art, this is just talking!

By Tim

Nothing is more boring to me than discourse about whether something is a video game or not. I do think we need to develop a better vocabulary for discussing levels of interactivity and feedback, but folks getting riled up because other people enjoy games that are less focused on active play is purely wasted energy.

Remember when “walking simulator” was invented as a pejorative, around the time Gone Home was making it big, to imply that the game was not so much a game as it was a digital escape room? The main sticking point at the time was the combination of “there are no fail states, there’s no challenge”, and the fact that the game was being highly praised by critics. And if it felt to you like there was a thinly veiled contempt for the game being openly “woke” in that criticism, I don’t think you were wrong. Look at The House in Fata Morgana, one of the highest-rated games of all time. It is literally a novel you read on your game console, but it’s sexy, so not as much of a problem.

This all came to mind over the past week with some of the unavoidable (vocal minority) discourse around Mixtape, which has also seen near-unanimous praise from traditional outlets. I have no issue with using the word “game” to describe everything from a highly technical action-RPG to an experience that works like a DVD menu. If it’s rendered in a real-time engine or played with an input device I tend to call it a game, and maybe that will be challenged as media collides and every experience is a blend of visual art, audio and user interface design. But the idea that Mixtape — a narrative adventure game in the form of interactive vignettes and playable music videos — should be disqualified from the category is preposterous. Such calls indicate a subjective dislike for the format or content, from a person who can’t or won’t articulate why they don’t like it. And that minority discourse ends up poisoning the pool, to the point that even the positive Steam reviews end up concerned with lowering the review scores or doing bizarre calculus about playtime relative to cost, as though this three-hour experience should only be worth 5 per cent of a 60-hour systems-based RPG.

For my part, I think Mixtape is great. It’s interactive cinema, but it only works as a video game. I’ve heard some niggles from Americans saying the 90s coming-of-age setting feels unreal, like a pastiche, inconsistent, not accurate or more informed by media than reality. But as an Australian who viewed America as a cultural utopia in the 90s (the developer of Mixtape is also Australian), it rang true in the sense of representing a time and place that was real to us but didn’t actually exist. And that theme does end up feeling pretty universal. The game also looks and sounds incredible, has great direction and is thoroughly slick and polished. Call it a film or a playlist if you like, or use it as an example of why comparative review scoring is flawed, but neither argument speaks to the quality of the experience at all. It’s a game, and it rules.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been replaying the Mina the Hollower demo again because I’m just desperate to have that game at this point, and I wanted to test out the other weapon options. Hammer is still totally my vibe though. I’m going to be playing Forza tomorrow when it’s accessible to us plebs who did not pay for the $190 version, and looking forward to a stacked weekend of Yoshi, Bubsy and Lego Batman.

• Alice: I’m travelling again, somehow, so on my radar for this week is Yoshi and the Mysterious Book which releases on the 21st of May, as well as Good Pizza, Great Pizza+ on Apple Arcade for the flights.

My favourite cosy racing sim

By Alice

We hear a lot about the rise of feminine “cosy games”, and how they’re either a boon for the industry or not real games, depending on the angle of the person giving the opinion. But we don’t hear a lot about masculine cosy games, which is a shame, because Forza Horizon 6 is both excellent and the epitome of a cosy game.

Forza Horizon is a series that wants you to have a good time. There are almost no meaningful negative consequences for anything, every single action is designed to give you a dopamine hit, and it’s designed to be friendly to newer players as well as people who want to get hardcore into it. You can even personalise your own estate in the game, and dress your character up in different outfits.

It’s a comforting, cosy game that would pass you a blanket and a mug of warm soup if it had arms. But, because you’re driving fancy cars instead of farming, it gets counted as a AAA racing game instead of a cosy racing sim.

I’ve been playing Forza Horizon 6 for a couple of weeks now, and I can say with confidence that it’s the best game yet in the series. I had reservations about the preview, because it seemed so empty, and the progression was off. The full game, however, is chock-a-block with activities and traffic, and the progression flows so beautifully. It’s a game I want to live in for the next couple of years until Horizon 7 comes and sets a new benchmark for the cosy racing genre.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Pokemon TCG Pocket has been a daily companion of mine for more than a year now, but I’ve been watching friends steadily fall off the grind, and that’s largely been because the app is so user unfriendly. There’s just so many screens to tap through to do almost anything that the grind feels too grind for some.

DeNA recently introduced some changes aiming to slow that exodus, and I, for one, enjoy all of them, though it still didn’t go anywhere near far enough.

The most important change is that you can now open up to 10 promo packs at a time. During events I’d end up with 15+ promo packs sitting in gifts from a play session and opening each one individually just to get duplicates of the same common card over and over again was tiring rather than the dopamine hit I think the developers originally envisioned.

Another bonus is that the promised counting of duplicate cards across sets has come into effect. So, now only missing reverse foils will show in Deluxe EX packs instead of all the cards you already got in the A block sets.

But still there are too many screens between finishing one ranked match and starting the next, there’s no dark mode, and pack points are still siloed to each set.

While it’s nice getting all the extra pack hour glasses and other rewards DeNA has been showering players like a divorced parent trying to win Christmas, it’s still not the full shake up that the player base has been calling for. Hopefully those changes are coming soon.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

One of the least understood elements of the Evercade ecosystem are the homebrew carts. New games made for old systems? Tiny games, made by nobodies? And you’re not even playing them on the systems they were designed for? Who would want that? But as someone who plays a lot of homebrew in a lot of formats, I actually love the experience on Evercade.

There are some carts that only feature one or two big-name homebrews, but the best ones have a whole bunch, like the “Indie Heroes” series that Blaze puts together, or the Mega Cat collections. Mega Cat is a publisher that handles physical versions of homebrew games made by a whole host of developers, and I’ve recently been playing its new collection of 10 games, in its third Evercade volume.

Some of the games are already available cheap on itch.io, for play on your emulator or flash cart, while others can be had on Steam for between $5 and $20 each. Some are only available on physical cartridges, which is going to run you at least $50 each. I would never pay $50 each for these games; only a hardcore homebrew purist and collector would. But since the Evercade cart ends up at $4 per game, that’s great value. You don’t get to choose the games like you would with a DIY ROM solution, but do get a package for your shelf with nice manual.

On the latest cart, the clear highlights for me are Rocket Panda — a cute and graphically impressive Mega Drive maze shoot-em-up — and Super Fanger, a simple but entertaining Super Nintendo tag game for one or two players. But then I’m also having a lot of fun with Plyuk, an NES puzzle platformer where you need to carefully create 12 stationary clones of yourself to solve each level. And there’s a Halloween-themed Game Boy RPG about a gumball that is surprisingly deep and I’m excited to play more of.

Do the games hold up to the best of the 90s for polish and content? No. But they offer a unique blend of retro tech and modern perspectives that I really enjoy. Four of the games are experiences I’m unlikely to go back to after a quick try, purely because the genres aren’t for me. But I still enjoy checking them out and reading about them in the manual, and even if you exclude them the value ends up at around $7 each for some really great retro games.

Welcome to the newsletter. This week Alice is remembering a preview of co-op title Heave-Ho 2 while recovering from her latest toddler-borne illness. Meanwhile, Tim is looking ahead at the games to come, as well as behind to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Enjoy!

A Ho for multiplayer

By Alice

There is nothing like a good, silly, couch co-op game with the right group of friends. Having now played a preview of Heave-Ho 2, I am really interested to see how people experience it when the game releases. Is this a game that’s great with the right group? Or is it one that you’ll play with a few friends once for 15 minutes, promise you’ll all play again, and then forget about it?

The game follows the same general idea as the original: you’re a head with arms who must grab stuff and move. It’s simple, but the rag doll physics and having to rely on team work makes it super hard to master.

I played a few different levels, including a couple where we had to hang from the ceiling like those little monkeys in a barrel toys, clutching onto each other, trying to get the person on the end to grab the next part of the ceiling, and hoping the person in the middle didn’t let go. The person in the middle often let go and it was infuriating, especially when you were the person in the middle and genuinely did not mean to let go.

It’s those kinds of levels that I loved because they relied on team work and problem solving, and I could see it bringing on the chaotic fun with the right people in the right mood.

However, there was a level where we had to put large vases and statues in order on plinths, and because of the physics it was just annoying. It tipped the scales from being a fun challenge, to having me wish a pox on whomever came up with it.

The issue I had with the game was that the levels didn’t change depending on the number of players. You can’t play it alone, only with 2-4 people (other local or online), but the experience with 2 people will be wildly different to that of 4. In the level with the keys, I don’t see how it would have been possible with just two players. The one with the statues would have been nigh impossible with four due to the chaos. One of you would die of blunt force trauma.

What’s interesting is that this sequel will allow for online play for the first time in the series, which would make it more of an exercise in communication, which would add a really rich extra dimension to play.

There isn’t a release date yet, but when Heave-Ho 2 does come out on Nintendo Switch (1 & 2) and PC, I definitely look forward to testing it out and seeing how it goes in a group that knows better how to read each other.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been replaying Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I don’t know why. I’m really trying to commit to a sith playthrough, but this is the absolute height of silly Bioware morality choices, where to get “evil points” I have to kill people for no reason, rob myself of content by refusing to help anyone, and be as rude as possible to my friends. Which I guess, according to the prequel trilogy, is how it works. I’m also excited for Mixtape but haven’t got around to it yet.

• Alice: I’ve spent this past week reviewing Forza Horizon 6, which I am very excited about (and you can read more about after embargo lifts). I am also really looking forward to playing Mixtape after I finish my review.

Winter of our chic content

By Tim

The middle of the year may traditionally be a quiet time for big-budget releases, but a few recent announcements have made the next two months absolutely huge for those of us whose favoured genres skew a little bit retro. Here are eight games to put on your calendar.

May 21

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book There’s a lot about this game that remains to be seen, and our ability to predict is hampered because we still don’t know who the developer is. But all the footage shown so far has been adorable, and I think if you go in expecting Yoshi’s Story levels of complexity you’ll be satisfied.

May 22

Bubsy 4D Bubsy sucks. Every game so far has been deeply flawed, despite the original being a cartridge that seemingly everyone had. But this revival comes from Fabraz, the developer behind wonderful indie 3D platformers Demon Turf and Demon Tides. It may be time for the bobcat’s redemption.

May 22

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight This one was not on my radar until the recent round of media previews. A cohesive new story with references to the greats? An open-world Gotham? Its own fighting system? From the trailers I thought it was just a collection of movie memes made into Lego levels.

May 29

Mina the Hollower Announced four years ago, this Game Boy style action adventure has been a long time coming, but the demo showed it will be worth it. Multiple weapon styles, Zelda-meets-Dark-Souls inspiration, gorgeous art and music. It’s from Yacht Club, the developer of Shovel Knight.

June 17

Denshattack! Pictured. This is one for all you Dreamcast sickos. It’s got the 2000s Japan street style, the bizarre mashup concept, the satisfying arcade gameplay loop, and a whole heap of speed. You play as a train that can trick and grind as it goes. And it sounds exactly how you think it sounds!

June 18

Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales Square Enix does not know how to make an English game title. But its Team Asano sure does make some beautiful, old-school RPGs, like Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy. This is the first one with a real-time, Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana vibe.

June 25

Star Fox Say what you will about the weird new realistic art style and sketchy chat filters, Star Fox 64 is an all-time banger and that doesn’t change even if you make the same game five times. You’re going to struggle in those solar and underwater levels again, and you’re going to like it.

July 2

Rhythm Heaven Groove The legendary Tsunku returns, despite his very unfortunate medical issues, to provide music to this throwback to a time when rhythm games were king. So, that very small window around 2006, 2008. Looks perfect.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

A new fan-made decompilation project for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has just been completed, effectively meaning there are now Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile native ports of Nintendo’s 2006 epic to enjoy. If you’re not familiar with these kinds of projects, how they typically work is that you need to copy the data from your authentic copy of the game (in this case a Gamecube Disc), and integrate it with the community-made program. Yes, this is technically illegal in some parts of the world. And yes, that is silly.

The new project is called Dusk, from a team called TwilitRealm, and it’s a very slick experience. It’s ready in seconds once you have your disc data, and the default settings will work great for most people, with resolution scaled to your monitor and common controllers automatically configured. But there’s also a lot to tweak in the settings.

Improvements made for the Wii U version of the game, including bigger wallets and faster climbing, are on by default here but can be turned off. You can mirror the world and reinstate some bugs from the Wii version if you wish, and there are also a range of visual settings and game-breaking cheats you can play with. There’s a built-in achievements list which gives a bit of modern flair, but you can also set it up to look and feel more or less exactly as it did at launch, for maximum nostalgia.

I was able to transfer my in-progress save game from the Gamecube version easily, and configured gyro aiming with my controller in a matter of seconds. Paired with the HD, widescreen resolution and 60fps performance, it’s the ultimate version of the game, until Nintendo makes an official new port for Switch 2.

Like Game Pass, but without the 300 biggest games

By Tim

Everyone loves a lucky dip. You pay a little bit of money, you’re not sure what you’re going to get. Odds are you end up paying more than you should have, but the thrill of discovery is part of the experience. You don’t get that very often in video games, unless you count discount bundles and mystery charity packages that are almost always disappointing. Playdate got close. And then there’s Indie Pass, which I’ve been testing over the past week.

Yes, it’s what it sounds like; a Game Pass for indies. But with essentially no big-name known quantities. I looked through the entire catalogue of 70+ titles and recognised five games, though I hadn’t played any of them. You’re paying for the excitement of booting up something totally unknown, and hoping that it’s good.

The service comes from publisher indie.io, and it’s currently only available on Windows PC. The first game I downloaded and played was Pie in the Sky, one of the names that I did recognise. It’s a Tony Hawk style explore-and-collect with PS2 graphics, made in Australia by a solo developer, and it’s kooky and hilarious. Next, Echoes of Plum Grove was a polished and lovely cozy life sim, Assault on Proxima was a cool FPS with a great art style, Dark Deity was an impressive Fire Emblem like that I’m going to load onto my ROG Ally because I want to keep playing it. Everything I tried was very good.

But to be honest, there were a lot of games that I simply didn’t try because the title, key art or screenshots turned me off. There are some games on the service that I have a hard time imagining anybody giving their time to, based on the way they’re promoted here, unless this was your only app for games.

And that’s really where the flaw with Indie Pass becomes clear. Something like Game Pass can be a person’s entire gaming life, at least for a month. Indie Pass, at $10 Australian per month, can not. If I had a PC and a $10 monthly budget for games, I think I’d be much more likely to scavenge around Steam sales than pay for Indie Pass, and I’d still be able to pick up some of the platform’s best games as they’re inevitably discounted.

Still, I’ll be keeping my eye on the service to see if it stays updated with new additions as promised.

What’s on our radar

• I was never really big into Vampire Survivors, but follow-up Vampire Crawlers has got its hooks into me deep. It’s an old-school first-person dungeon crawler with turn-based combat, but it’s also got modern deck-building roguelite elements, meaning each run is about optimising your synergies to create some truly monstrous cards. The combo system, where effects are boosted if you play cards in a certain order, is simple enough but can be extremely satisfying in a numbers-go-up kind of way. I’ve also started Saros, and I love how fast and pretty it is, but I’m getting the impression I won’t stick with it for the long haul.

• Alice it’s new pack week in Pokemon TCG Pocket, so I’m currently trying to find a good deck to be competitive in ranked this season. I’m also prepping for the new retro console-themed Pikmin Bloom theme coming up in May.

The spirit of Horizon

By Alice

Last week I got to live the Japan Forza Horizon festival in real life (thank you Xbox for flying me over), and I have to say, it is Quite Good. In typical over-the-top gaming event fashion, Xbox rented out several floors of a Shibuya parking garage and filled it with extremely rare cars. I almost got tackled by security for putting my hand slightly too close to a prototype Nissan.

Each floor was filled with cars, snacks, influencers, and swag. The rooftop had a DJ and a food truck, though the rain meant that the dance floor never quite took off.

It’s not my first time getting to spend the day at a Horizon festival in real life, but previous festivals I’ve been to have all been about the driving and the cars, while this one was more about highlighting the culture. I’ve always wished that the Forza Horizon games would lean more into the festival aspect. The festival was such a key part of the first and maybe second games, and it got pushed to the background for subsequent games because it’s a difficult thing to pull off if you’re not going to pull a Fortnite and put live performances in game, or somehow get the musicians to be a part of it. Luckily, it looks like the finished version of Horizon 6 will take it back to being more about the festival with car meet ups and more social opportunities. Hopefully more musical integrations will follow suit.

That rainy day in Tokyo highlighted the thing that makes Forza Horizon my favourite game, and that’s because it’s not just about the cars, but the people and community that grows around those cars. Other games will take the cars too seriously and make it all about the racing, or will make it too much about being goofy and the cars are just there by accident. The whole thing of Forza Horizon is trying to recreate the vibe of being with your friends and living out aspects of Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift but without most of the misogyny, mortality or racism. That’s the spirit of Horizon.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

Harmonies is a board game I’ve had on my “to play” pile for months, waiting for a day when I had exactly four players, and it was worth the wait. In the game, you are trying to make habitats for your animals, drawing cards and tiles each turn, balancing between arranging the tiles to get end game points from building cities, trees, bodies of water, etc, and using them to do what the cards want to get those points. There’s a lot of potential depth, though I don’t think we grasped it on our board game day.

Each turn you draft and play, and it’s reminiscent of what if Azul and Ticket to Ride had a Lion King-themed baby.

The art is beautiful, the play loop is interesting, and I can see the game changing depending on how many players you had, and whether you all wanted to drag the game on or end it ASAP (one of our party went for the end it ASAP strategy and absolutely destroyed the rest of us).

The problem is that it’s a pretty good game. I would be happy to play it again, but it wouldn’t be top of my list, and it’s not something I’m craving. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not as exciting or satisfying as other games with similar mechanics. Sure, I might feel differently after a few more play throughs, or I could play something else.

So, if you already have Harmonies, or end up at an event where someone asks you if you’d like to play, you should absolutely give it a go, you’ll have a pretty good time. I’m just not sure I’d recommend running out and immediately buying a copy.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

It’s that time again, somehow; the ending of another month means we’re taking a look at three games that have just celebrated a major milestone.

30: Metal Slug Unfairly difficult in the arcades, but quickly defeated at home when you have unlimited credits, Metal Slug is a horizontally-scrolling shooter that might have been relegated to history, had it not been for that art style. At a time when most big games were pushing into 3D, this Neo Geo classic is a showcase for high-resolution mid-90s pixel art, and its success allowed for a half dozen sequels that proved more balanced in gameplay and raised the bar even further for looks and animation. This first game has a sort of dark Ghibli wartime aesthetic, with strange WWII influences but some hilarious and cheerful characterisation. Learning to play without getting hit is an exercise in frustration, but jumping into a tiny tank to blast enemies with explosive shells never really gets old.

40: Arkanoid Atari’s Breakout was a big hit in the 70s, spawning a number of brick-bashing clones. But it wasn’t until 1986 that Taito took the genre another step forward, with a design that augmented basic paddle play with a colourful Tron-like aesthetic, a smattering of narrative, a cool roster of power-ups and even a boss battle. Arkanoid was reportedly created in less than a month by a small team working essentially around the clock, and became one of Taito’s most profitable games, proving that slave-driving can be good actually. It resulted in dozens of ports and a new wave of brick-breaking clones, including my own personal childhood favourite DX-Ball.

Now 50: Death Race A simple driving arcade game for one or two players, where you use a pedal and a steering wheel to try and bump into “gremlins” for points, Death Race was originally a quick conversion of a different game. Publisher Exidy had lost the rights to make money off its Destruction Derby, so it put out this modified version as a stopgap to keep it from bleeding money. The game probably wouldn’t be remembered at all, except it became one of the earliest targets of video game moral panic. The US media at the time was outraged by the implications of the gameplay; cars chasing little humanoid figures around, which made a screeching sound and turned into tombstones on contact. Of course, the coverage drove a massive increase in demand for the game.

It’s been a big week. I (Alice) got way too into Tamodachi Life and finally played Mycelia, while Tim pondered the meaning of scores and whether it’s possible to make a good modern N64 controller.

Enjoy!

Tamodachi Wife, Tamodachi Life

By Alice

I think I love Tamodachi Life: Living The Dream. I’ve only played around 6 hours so far, so I’m definitely not qualified to fully review it. But here is why I’m looking forward to continuing to play: it is completely unhinged.

If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s basically a Mii simulator that’s decided to just get a bit weird with it. Think of The Sims, but with significantly less control. You’re not micromanaging these characters, you’re building opportunities for chaos with your own personal touches.

The game starts by getting you to build your first Mii, and so, as we were encouraged to do at the event I was at, I made myself. Going through the simplified Mii maker I answered the questions to make a horrifying approximation and then worked on tweaking it by switching over to the more granular character builder. Then it was time to add other people to my island, and this comes with fraught choices: do you go for real world relative heights? Or do you take the safe option and pretend that your wife isn’t really short? Learn from my mistakes.

You are able to tell the game what the Mii’s real world relationships are, but crucially that does not mean that you will end up with your significant other in the game. In my game, Supergirl immediately fell in love with my wife, which was understandable, yet still a bit rude for her to be so overt about it right in front of me.

You also can’t control what the different characters will actually enjoy to make it closer to the real world. In the game my daughter only likes pink, frilly things and dresses. In real life I have spent the last four months trying to get her to even try on the dress she picked out for Christmas, with no luck.

What’s disappointing is that there’s no way to share your Miis, or download the creations of others without being in the same room as them. One of the fun parts of The Sims is sharing your creations online and playing with the interesting creations of others. There is none of that here. There’s also no way to go back and record hilarious moments if you don’t guess they’re about to happen, which is disappointing, because I keep wanting to send my friends the weird things their Miis are doing.

All up, while there are certainly improvements I hope will one day come to the game, I’m having a great time with what it is.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: It was a big time for releases last week, I’m making my way through Pragmata (which feels pleasantly like it stepped right out of 2008), but I’m not sure if I’ll end up making time for Mouse P.I. I also discovered that something called Retrocade was added to Apple Arcade earlier this year, and it turned out to be a decent little collection of emulated cabinets from Atari, Namco, Konami and Taito. You need to advertise this stuff better, Apple!

• Alice: The main thing on my radar this week is that I’m currently sitting on a plane, about to go to Tokyo! Anyone have any recommendations for things I should check out? I would love to hear them, please.

A case of mixed metascores

By Tim

Video game reviews are a funny thing. I’ve always struggled with the idea of evaluating, comparing and scoring games, even though I understand the purpose of doing so when they cost players so much time and money. In particular, reviews often seem to come unstuck quantifying and comparing individual elements within a game experience; the combat is good, but let down by a too-simple progression system, or the story is interesting, but the dialogue is sparse. As someone playing a game for recreation you might merely come away with a sense of enjoying a game or not, or becoming fatigued by it before it’s over. As a reviewer, you have to try to analyse which elements are causing what sensation, and I’m not convinced the result is always very useful.

I’ve been thinking about all this in relation to Replaced, a game I’ve played through but am not reviewing anywhere. I think it’s wonderful, and I really enjoyed my time with it, but I was struck by the fact that — were I reviewing it by the kind of rubric many gaming sites use — it might be hard to give it more than a 7 or so out of 10. And indeed, it currently has a 76 on Metacritic.

Replaced is a gorgeous looking game, and that’s the main thing it has going for it. The combat and quests and puzzles and platforming are competent, but they’re just things you do while you’re taking in the visuals. Some of the narrative ideas are thought provoking, and some of the character moments stand out. Some of the context around the game’s development, beginning in Ukraine before Russian invasion, and its fascination with AI-empowered segregation dystopia, point at deeper meanings that the game itself doesn’t quite investigate.

But why give negative weight to things the game does not do, when I love what it does? Every scene is layer upon layer of scrolling backgrounds, 3D textured objects in the distance, middle and foreground, and brilliantly animated pixel art elements including all the characters. The camera moves so intentionally, and the various lighting and effects interact with the 2D and 3D elements so beautifully, that basically every screenshot you take could be a digital diorama some artist has painstakingly composed. Some of the running and jumping and hiding and fighting might feel like a cinematic platformer from the 90s, but so what? It keeps you engaged with the world, and it imbues the visuals with extra meaning. The low energy synth soundtrack, optional collectibles, reading material and characters give warmth and context.

In a way I don’t think Replaced is too dissimilar from a game like Journey when it comes to style versus substance. But while Journey moved gameplay into unfamiliar territory, and innovated in online tech rather than presentation, Replaced gets snagged on commentators’ ideas of what pixel art platformers, cyberpunk action, or side-scrolling adventure games ought to be.

None of this is to say that reviewers giving it a 7 are wrong, or even that I would give it a 9. More that, if you can say a piece of media is meaningful, absorbing, awe-inspiring, or even just phenomenal craft, that arguably nullifies the need for numbers at all.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

After literal months of trying to find a good time to play Mycelia, my friends and I finally managed to try it over the weekend. Was it worth the wait? I’m not sure. We didn’t feel like playing it a second time. But I love the game’s attention to detail and I’m really looking forward to playing it again at some point.

The makers of Mycelia clearly wanted it to be Wingspan. It is not Wingspan. What it is is a game about mushrooms that is really easy to get the basics of, but very difficult to play with four players blocking so much of the board. Each turn you can pick two of six actions: move, draw a new board tile, draw a new mushroom card, fruit (play a mushroom card), spore (generate new currency), and decay (retire a spent mushroom). The game ends when a player has spent mushrooms in all 5 slots.

What makes the game challenging is that you need different coloured spores to play mushrooms, and those spores are controlled by whoever’s mushrooms are on that particular tile. You also can’t move through another player’s mother mushroom. So, in a two-player game, it probably moves quite quickly and you’ll have a lot of options. In a four-player game it’s quite congested, so everything is frustrating and takes a long time.

What made me fall in love with the game was the art and the attention to detail. Even the box insert was a textured, mossy brown. It’s those kinds of touches that show not only did the designer go above and beyond, but the publisher was very confident that the game would be a success.

One of the things Mycelia has over Wingspan or Finspan is that the game lasts 30-40 minutes once all players have grasped the rules, while the various ‘Spans can take an hour or (much) more. But is the game as clean, elegant, interesting and almost infinitely replayable as Wingspan? That remains to be seen, but I suspect not.

Either way, I’m glad I’ve played it.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

8bitdo makes some of the best retro-style controllers, deftly navigating the line between familiarity and improvement. But I’ll admit I was skeptical about its first Nintendo 64 attempt. Designed for the Analogue 3D, but also compatible with Switch, Windows, Android and whatever Bluetooth receiver you’ve stuffed into your original console, it sports the familiar six-button face setup, but converted into a more conventional Xbox-style compact pad.

The N64 controller layout is very weird and specific, so I get why people want to change it. But the games are also built with that weirdness in mind, so they tend to map poorly to modern pads, making attempts like these exercises in compromise. For example the 8bitdo’s shallow handles leave the A and B buttons feeling lower than they should, and the d-pad feels quite far in.

Around the back you have two sets of two stacked buttons, just like a modern controller. But when you’re playing N64 games you really only want two; your left index should be on Z or L depending on the style of game you’re playing, and your right should be on R. In a modern controller context, you want these mapped to the triggers, not the smaller bumpers. Yet connected to my Switch 2, the 8bitdo is detected as an NSO 64 controller, mapping the right trigger to ZR (which summons the emulator menu). Connected to my original Nintendo 64, both triggers are Z.

Fortunately, 8bitdo has a quick fix for this very common modern-controllers-on-64 issue; hold any two buttons and hit select, and those buttons swap functions. It reverts when you power the controller off, but it’s a great solution since it works for any device you’re connected to, and it lets you decide how you want your triggers on a per-game basis, removing the need to hit the bumpers at all. Now Star Fox feels great, and on GoldenEye I can choose which side is aim and which is fire.

After some play, I like this controller a lot. The face buttons are substantial, the triggers generously tall. The ergonomics remind me of the Switch 2 Pro, though that does also make me wish this thing had grip buttons. I like the analogue stick too, but it’s maybe the biggest departure from the original. Not only is it on the left rather than centred, it’s a different size. It’s shorter and it has a much wider base. It still has an octagonal gate, but it feels a bit more Gamecube than N64. The rumble, on the other hand, is perfect.

Outside of playing Nintendo 64 games though, the lack of a second stick does limit its appeal. And playing D-pad centric games remains a bit awkward.

This week, we’re using that Nintendo leak to map out a potential calendar for the rest of Switch 2’s year, while also looking at Xbox’s next-gen branding exercise, the new retro handheld coming this year, and why Dixit is the pick of the board game shelf for one 22-month-old connoisseur in particular.

Sweet Switch speculation

By Tim

A big new rumour doing the rounds has appeared to spoil some surprises coming to Switch 2 later this year. They seem credible — originating with somewhat reliable leaker Natethehate and being partially corroborated by VGC — but how might they fit into what we already know about the rest of Nintendo’s 2026 release calendar?

This month we’re getting a new Tomodachi Life, and there’s a major third party release in Pragmata. In May we’ll see Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, with the big non-Nintendo titles being Indiana Jones and 007: First Light.

June is where we see our first obvious gap. We have Square’s Adventures of Elliot, but no major first party release. I’d suggest this could be a good spot for Splatoon Raiders, the inky singleplayer spinoff game that we currently don’t have a date for, but which has recently received an official age rating in Europe.

In July we have Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven Groove, so I’m not sure we can expect to slot another new first party game in there. But the rumoured Switch 2 Edition of Pikmin 4 could find a good home. There are plenty of third party releases still yet to be assigned release dates, so for the sake of speculating let’s also put Professor Layton and the New World of Steam here.

August seems like a good spot to put the new Star Fox, which is also part of the big leak / rumour. Supposedly this is an on-rails shooter in the series’ classic style, with a focus on multiplayer. Fox made a big splash in the Mario movie recently, but an arcade shooter that only lasts a few hours per run could still be a tough sell in 2026, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more to it. We could also add here the supposed Switch 2 Edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, for something a bit meatier.

We still need somewhere for From Software’s The Duskbloods. It also has a multiplayer focus, so I’d put it here in September rather than with Star Fox. And this would also be a great place for Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, which I previously had pegged as a holiday game but will likely be earlier if the new leaks are accurate …

That’s because a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is an obvious option for Q4. Natethehate had no real details on this one. Might it be a faithful adaptation from Grezzo, in the vein of their 3DS remake (from 15 years ago!)? Or could it be a ground-up reimagining, maybe from Monolith?

The only remaining rumour to touch on is the return of some kind of Wii Sports successor, which could be a good companion to Zelda for Christmas. It would make most sense to have a Switch 2 Edition of Switch Sports, so that Nintendo could maximise the awful name potential (get ready for Nintendo Switch Sports Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Big Ball Bonanza), but I could equally see a brand new game emerging.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: After a week of leave I’m returning to the office tomorrow, so I’ve been making the most of my long evenings by replaying Twilight Princess yet again. This is my first time through the original Gamecube version, and honestly I think the game is unfairly maligned. There are some genuinely rough bits, but most of the common complaints (opening is slow, wolf is boring, art style is bland) are things I genuinely disagree with. Later this week I’m really looking forward to pixelpunk cinematic platformer Replaced, and monochrome rubber hose boomer shooter Mouse P.I. For Hire.

• Alice: This past weekend was Pikmin Bloom community day, so that absorbed a lot of my radar. But what I’m looking forward to this week is Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream on Switch 2. After all the controversy about not allowing same-sex relationships in the 2014 Tomodachi Life, it seems that the developers have turned a corner and are not only allowing same sex relationships, but different forms of gender expression as well. It seems like a really inclusive game, and I can’t wait to have a gay, old time (though, as I march closer to my late-thirties, gay and old does now describe most of my time).

Project Helix at least has t-shirts, if not a physical presence

By Alice

Recently Xbox has started trying to build hype for its upcoming console, Project Helix, by sending merch and signed letters from the new CEO to a selection of American influencers, and I am fascinated by the strategy. It acknowledges that everyone is talking about the Nintendo Switch 2 and PS6 organically, and that Project Helix just isn’t getting the interest the company hoped. It’s also confirming that, despite a year of marketing telling customers “you don’t need an Xbox, just use whatever, who even cares anymore?”, Xbox still very much plans on being a console-maker and would like you to remember that.

On the one hand, it seems like a really clunky and slightly desperate campaign from a company that’s still trying to work out its new identity without its previous figurehead. On the other hand, I now want some Project Helix merch, so maybe it’s working?

For what it’s worth, I think the idea behind Project Helix is a solid move from Microsoft. It’s Xbox’s next-generation console, expected to hit retail in 2027/2028, and people will be able to play both Xbox and PC games on it.

This is a great call on multiple levels:

1. Microsoft is the ruler of PC gaming software, leveraging the fact that Steam, Epic, etc already work on Windows devices and just bringing that to a console makes things easier for people who already have PC gaming libraries to justify the purchase if they don’t want to drop a bundle on a new gaming PC.

2. People seem to really want this kind of melding of PC and Xbox with the rise of handheld PCs. If this trend continues until Microsoft is able to track down enough components to build these consoles, it could be a real point of difference for a company that has abandoned console exclusives.

3. It also says a lot about Xbox’s naming conventions that we have to be using some nonsense code name instead of Xbox 5, or whatever. At least now more people know the name Project Helix, even though that likely won’t be the final name and it’s weird to build name awareness for something that isn’t even the final name.

I remain fascinated by this next generation of consoles, because for once there doesn’t really seem to be any reason for a new PS6 to exist beyond “we normally release one every 7 years”. I haven’t heard much rumbling that the constraints of the PS5 are holding back developers. I have heard that the Xbox Series S is holding back Xbox, but the Series X is fine aside from the fact that it’s too expensive and no one is buying them anymore. While the PS6 seems to be “the PS5, but more and less power hungry”, it’s nice to see Xbox potentially doing something new and different. Time will tell if that strategy works.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

At what age can you start introducing kids to board games? This is a classic question, and really relies on both the kid and how you want to introduce them. I have only the one kid, and she’s still relatively fresh (22 months), so I can’t answer this question definitively.

What I can say is that my daughter is completely obsessed with my copy of Dixit, ever since she pointed at it on the shelf and insisted she look through it. It’s not the art cards that have caught her eye (though she does love redistributing them around the apartment), but the scoring cards and, most crucially, the rabbit scoring tokens.

These rabbits have been on many daring adventures, and without any prompting she has assigned different coloured rabbits to be our pieces in the game (naturally, I have the red one).

She knows it’s a board game, and while she doesn’t fully understand the concept of rules (as evidenced by the amount of Texta everywhere), she knows that there are guidelines to how you play and tries to guess what they are.

I’m definitely losing pieces and cards to one of my favourite games, but in return I’m getting some pretty magical moments with my daughter and I’m sneak attack turning her into a board game nerd from a young age.

When she’s ready to play properly, I have a box in the wardrobe filled with Bluey board games for when she’s ready, and I’m already planning on getting My First Dixit and My First Ticket To Ride to get her started on the good path, too.

So, while I’m maybe not an expert in how to introduce a kid to board games, I think my daughter found the best way on her own, and I’m so proud.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

More than five years after the original Evercade system was released, Blaze Entertainment has revealed the Evercade Nexus for later this year. It’s a portable system that plays all the retro console, arcade and computer games released on physical Evercade cartridges, but it offers a few upgrades over the original, or 2022’s Evercade EXP.

This is a larger machine with smaller bezels, cramming a 5.6-inch IPS display into a system around the size of a Switch Lite. That’s good because classic 4:3 games look pretty tiny on the EXP. I may have preferred a squarer screen like those on the tabletop Evercade Alpha or the cute little Super Pockets, but there are enough widescreen games on Evercade that sticking with the modern shape makes sense.

The Nexus also notably has dual analogue sticks, which I’m not yet fully sold on. It does mean that turning the system sideways for vertical arcade games gives you a stick and four buttons, which is nice, but I have a hard time imagining many Evercade games making full use of twin sticks. The system comes with a Banjo Kazooie / Banjo Tooie twin pack, which do need at least one stick. And some recent games including Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain could benefit. But if the sticks cramp out the d-pad or face buttons in any way I’ll consider them a net negative.

Wireless ad-hoc multiplayer is another marquee feature I’m not too keen on. I’ve never even seen another person with an Evercade in the real world, and I’d prefer to keep multiplayer for old arcade games to the big screen at home. The addition of Bluetooth audio is smart though; I’ll take a bit of audio latency for the convenience of sound over AirPods on the tram.

All up, at close to $400 AUD, I think the system looks great for anyone who has an Evercade VS for playing on the TV, is still rocking the original handheld, or wants to start their collection. But, as ever, newcomers may balk at the $40 cartridge prices and opt to stick with their Switch, Steam Deck, or piracy-friendly emulator handheld instead.

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.