A Godly roguelite

Plus a 'price upgrade' for Game Pass, Spidey in MtG and game anniversaries.

Hello there! I hope you’ve survived the school holidays with your psyche intact. My area has had an ongoing internet outage since last night, and aside from highlighting to me that my children have no understanding of how household objects work (I need to start attaching stickers to things to indicate they need internet, mains power, batteries or plumbing), it’s made me glad that we haven’t gone full streaming yet for video games. Honestly, our options for video and audio entertainment are more or less devastated if the internet is out, but games are still on the menu. Assuming they don’t have an update queued.

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

A Sisyphean delight

By Tim

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

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

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

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

What to play

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

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

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

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

Xbox Game Pass has new prices and I am tired

By Alice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magic The Gathering: Spider-Man is available now.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Here are the anniversaries from September!

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

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

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