A legal way to listen to Metroid music

Plus Kamalanite, Lorcana and October anniversaries.

Hello there! This week I’m looking at a lovely welcome surprise from Nintendo, while Alice is taking one for the team and checking out Freedom Town USA. Also Lorcana and old games. I won’t waste any more of your time in this intro because I realise the newsletter is already late. Apologies, and happy gaming this weekend everyone!

Aquatic Ambiance on repeat!

By Tim

I thought Alarmo would be the only surprising Nintendo announcement for October, but I’m very happy to be wrong because the company just launched its own music streaming service. And while many initial impressions will be along the lines of “I wish they had just dropped all the OSTs on Spotify instead,” it turns out the Nintendo Music App is actually surprisingly solid.

You need to be subscribing to Switch Online to access the app, so if you’re already paying for the online play and retro apps you’re good to go. Layout and navigation is very similar to other music apps, with featured playlists and moods, but right away you can spot some stuff Nintendo could not have done on Spotify. Like look at the games you’ve played on Switch lately to make recommendations, for example.

Every game has a “top tracks” playlist, and many have additional playlists, or you can just play the entire OST. Of course there are many other themed playlists that go across games as well, like “Boss Battles” or “Bowser”. You can also create your own playlists.

I was really impressed with the amount of work that went into making this a streaming service that feels tailored to game music. Some tracks just have standard album art like they would on any app, but a whole lot of them have screenshots depicting a specific moment in the game when that music would have kicked off, and they’ll appear on your lock screen as track art. Many tracks also support an album called “extend to”, where you can choose a time limit and the track will seamlessly loop for that duration. I checked with a few tunes to make sure the loop point was set properly and it wasn’t just fading out and restarting, and sure enough it sounded just like it would in the games.

The initial selection of music is pretty small, with only 23 games included, but it is a nice diverse mix. The games are evenly spread between 1985 and 2023, so there are some absolute bangers for the olds (Metroid, Donkey Kong Country), some weird stuff for younger millennials (Tomodachi, all of the Wii system themes), and the greatest hits from Switch (Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3). 

Is it anything you couldn’t find on YouTube? Probably not. But it is really nicely organised and pleasant to use, and I had it AirPlayed to my office speakers all day yesterday. Here’s hoping Nintendo rolls out more music with great urgency than they’ve been rolling out retro games on Switch.

What to play

• Free in the Epic Games Store this week are Witch It, and Ghostwire Tokyo. I’m sure Witch It is delightful, but Ghostwire Tokyo being free is a big deal and you should absolutely go and claim it right now. I (Alice) absolutely loved it when it first launched on PlayStation.

• Nintendo has added two games to its very funny “mature” Nintendo 64 app. Both Shadow Man and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil are unusually bloody for a Nintendo console in the 90s, but a bit hard to go back to now.

I played the Kamala Harris Fortnite Island so you don’t have to

By Alice

Sure, Fortnite is a Battle Royale, but it’s also a collection of deeply weird creator made islands, Roblox style (kinda). I played arguably the weirdest of these islands this week: Freedom Town USA. It’s an official Fortnite island made by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign to try and encourage young male voters to vote for her. Having now played through it three times, I think I can confidently say that no one involved in making this island was a young, male, voter who plays games.

The map opens up with you in the subway, and an NPC tells you that thanks to Harris’ small business tax cut, she has been able to start a construction business! You can help her build homes for America, but first you have to find four items of a work uniform.

Then you head into Freedom Town USA - a large city filled with US American landmarks and zero people. It’s eerie how clean, large, and empty the place is. It takes a very long time to walk anywhere, so the loudest and most obnoxious cars in Fortnite are available for you to drive everywhere. Getting the parts of the work uniform require you to jump through a series of mundane (yet dangerous for a real person) hoops. None of it presents an interesting challenge, so instead it feels like a waste of time for minimal reward.

In that regard, it does make some interesting commentaries about the state of America, but perhaps not the ones the campaign intended.

There are a couple of parkour challenges, and two race challenges, but the race tracks just take you in a circle (and if you use the ramps to jump and make it interesting, you miss the checkpoints). It might be fun for a 5-year-old, but it’s pretty out of touch if they’re trying to use it to get 18-25yo male voters excited about the “promise of America” through this map. That said, my three play throughs got me roughly 8 battle pass levels before the season ends tomorrow, so it wasn’t entirely a waste of time.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings 

by Alice

Next week, Lorcana wave 6 hits the shelves, and this time it’s ocean adventure themed. The basics of the game remain the same, but now the characters from Rescue Rangers, Big Hero 6 and Treasure Island will be joining the fray.

I’ve been playing with the new starter decks, and while it still feels a bit like “baby’s first Magic the Gathering”, I am finding myself leaning into it more. There’s nothing wrong with having the game be more simple, and never having to be mana flooded (or mana screwed) again is a really attractive offer.

Whereas Magic requires you to go deep into the intricacies of decades of rules, Lorcana has the allure of a fresh slate, and is far more suited to casual play on a Sunday afternoon. Although it’s PvP, it doesn’t feel as adversarial as Magic. Sure, I can kill my opponents version of Mickey Mouse (or whatever euphemism the Disney Corporation would prefer), but the aim is still to achieve your own goals, rather than to kill your opponent.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Australian tournament scene grow more, so it’s easier to go and play against the best to sharpen one’s skills and find the hidden synergies in deck building. But I also love that this is a game where you could shuffle together almost any 60 cards and still have a good time.

Wave 6 doesn’t change the way you’ll see or play the game, it doesn’t turn the meta on its head, however it’s far too early in the game’s life to expect that. At this point, the main purpose of each wave seems to be to introduce more characters in the hope it’ll eventually hit your favourite so you have an excuse to jump in, and that’s not a bad thing.

So, if you like the idea of sailing the seven seas with licensed characters, Lorcana Azurite Sea is the right time to jump in.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Here are some of the games that celebrated major anniversaries in October.

Now 30: Doom II Though the original Doom was a revelation, the sequel was unequivocally bigger and better. Unlike many modern game sequels it’s not that it had better graphics or new gameplay mechanics (it didn’t, they were virtually unchanged from the original), it was just more Doom in larger and more complex levels, with a hugely powerful shotgun that made blasting dudes into goo more satisfying. That is was also sold in brick-and-mortar stores, and included native support for dial-up multiplayer, surely helped it become an instant sensation.

Now also 30: Sonic & Knuckles I got my copy of this game loose, from a bucket of random electronics in a charity shop. I had absolutely no context for it, I just recognised that it was a Mega Drive game and that it said “Sonic” on it, and assumed it was related to the Sonic and Sonic 2 I already had. I may even have suspected it was a weird bootleg, since it had a hinged door at the top with no indication of its function. Now of course I reflect on it as one of the greatest 16-bit platformers ever made, and the second half of an epic Sonic adventure. If only I had Sonic 3 at the time. I’m not sure I ever found out what the door was for until after my original Mega Drive was long gone.

Now 35: Prince of Persia To get an idea of how groundbreaking and incredible the original Prince of Persia was, you only have to look at the sheer number of different versions; there are more than 20 official ports and heaps of unofficial ones. The original cinematic platformer, with smooth rotoscoped animation, it was a puzzle-filled labyrinth that feels like playing a swashbuckling mystical Middle East film from the 1930s. I’m personally very fond of the Mega CD version with its evocative music and anime cut-scenes, but I’m sure everyone has their favourite take.