A Lego Adventure On The Horizon
Or something. Plus Xbox's future, new Lorcana and HD-2D games
Hello Button friends!
This weekend looks like it’s going to be absolutely boiling.A good time to stay in the air conditioning and play some games.
This week Alice played Lego Horizon Adventures and Lorcana’s Azurite Seas expansion. Meanwhile, Tim pondered the future of Xbox and which other games should be remade in HD-2D.
Plus, all the recommendations you need for this weekend.
Enjoy!
Oh, that’s why Lego Horizon Adventures exists
By Alice
At first glance, Lego Horizon Adventures seems like a really weird idea. Same with the second and third glances. But once I played it, I kinda got it. Lego games have always followed the same formula: take an established property (usually), make it appropriate for kids, make all the characters look like mini figures, you hit things to collect studs of varying colours and then there’s some kind of customisation aspect. It’s all very paint by numbers, but delightful for the first 10 or so times you play it.
But I couldn’t for the life of me work out why Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West needed the Lego treatment. They didn’t have the popularity of, say, Star Wars. It seemed like Lego and Sony wanted a partnership, and it was deemed that a Lego The Last Of Us might be in poor taste.
Having now played it, I get it. I love the world of Horizon, Aloy is an interesting character, the world is beautiful, and the machines are horribly majestic. Why wouldn’t kids want to try it? Also, sure, the Lego games might be paint by numbers and get old after you’ve played enough of them, however I probably have to play more of them than the average person, and for most people who play them (children), they don’t bring the bag of previous games because this is probably one of their first games. Lego Horizon Adventures makes the Horizon series accessible for a whole new audience who is going to grow up with this now (presumably) classic PlayStation game.
More than that, after playing Lego Horizon Adventures I, for one, welcome the inevitable Lego God of War Adventures and possibly even Lego The Last Of Us. Let’s have fun in these horrifying worlds and teach children the meaning of grief and hard choices through play.
Until then, I look forward to being able to play Horizon games with my daughter sooner than I was otherwise going to be able to.
What to play
The November additions to PlayStation Plus Extra are now live, and include the return of Grand Theft Auto V. I can’t believe there are too many people who don’t own it after more than 10 years, but I guess you could have played it on Xbox 360 and now you have a PS5. Also included are zombie survival parkour sim Dying Light 2, Yakuza meets samurai adventure Like a Dragon: Ishin, radio call-in serial murder thriller Killer Frequency and more. If you pay extra for Deluxe you also get the trippy PS VR 2 shooter Synapse, the PS1’s Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, and the PS2’s Blood Omen 2.
There are a pair of day-one releases on Game Pass this week, though you wouldn’t claim either has had a flawless launch. The tech behind Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 collapsed more or less immediately on takeoff, weighed down by far more would-be pilots than was expected. Meanwhile STALKER 2 appears to be a phenomenally designed survival horror FPS which is currently riddled with bugs. There’s also 2D souls-like Nine Sols, and xenomorph RTS Aliens: Dark Descent.
Free on Epic Games is Beholder, a grim state compliance sim where you’re a landlord ordered by a totalitarian regime to spy on your tenants. You don’t have to, but you have mouths to feed!
Xcloud goes beyond Game Pass
By Tim
Microsoft has taken an important step towards the cloud gaming future it’s clearly convinced will come to pass; letting you stream games even if they’re not part of the Game Pass subscription service.
Until now, playing a game over the cloud using a console, TV, browser or anything else meant you were limited to (many of ) the games in Game Pass Ultimate. But a new update has added popular games to its servers that are not part of the subscription. So if you’re a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber, and you also own Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws or one of the other dozens of games supported, you can pick up where you left off when you’re away from your console, streaming direct from the cloud to practically any device.
It’s still a somewhat limited service of course. You need to have paid for the game and be paying for Ultimate, ands if you don’t own any of the 50 games on the current list there’s no benefit. But big name publishers are far more likely to sign up to this service — because it only makes their games more valuable and they get the same income — than the are to let Microsoft give their games out as part of Game Pass.
I gave it a try today with Outlaws and it performs exactly like Game Pass cloud streaming. It’s not as sharp as playing from a console, but latency is very low, it’s quick to jump into and your saves magically come across. The game did immediately strip me of my DLC and pre-order vanity items when playing on the cloud though, so Ubisoft and Xbox clearly have some things to work out.
As an addition to the Game Pass service this move has no downside, and hopefully going forward most big new games will support it so you can continue to play away from your console. It does portend a slightly more concerning Stadia-like future however, where perhaps you’ll be buying games purely to access them in a subscription cloud.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
I’ve praised Lorcana in the past for making a game that’s easy to learn to play, and packs that make it even easier. But not everyone wants to build decks, and if you’ve brought a friend along to the game shop to give it a try, they might not always want to start by investing in their own deck. Lorcana now has its own version of Magic The Gathering’s Jumpstart format, where you shuffle two Jumpstart boosters together and play.
Jumpstart didn’t do too well for Magic the Gathering, and part of that was because the boosters just generally weren’t that good. You wouldn’t want to use most of the cards for anything other than Jumpstart.
With Lorcana (which released the new Azurite Sea set this week), the process has been made easier. You just use regular boosters. You take the ad cards out of the boosters before shuffling, and put them down as ink, so ramp isn’t much of a problem, and when you run out of cards to draw you just shuffle your graveyard back in.
It’s a refreshing way to play, the cards are potentially useful for proper deck building later (as much as any cards from boosters are), and you’re not stuck with a million basic lands like you are with Jumpstart.
It’s a method that wouldn’t work with Magic the Gathering, because of the way it’s structured. But here it really shows off how few barriers there are to starting to play Lorcana. The boosters are still more expensive than they perhaps should be ($10 each). But shuffling two boosters and playing for $20 is still cheaper than picking up a starter set ($30) if you’re not ready to commit to playing Lorcana again in the future.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is a total delight. Not only is the orchestrated soundtrack and the blend of high-res pixel art with dreamy 3D backgrounds totally stunning, but it’s largely the same excellent game it was in 1988 just with some of the limitations lifted. There’s auto-save, a better map, a clear shopping interface that makes it clear what the products actually do, an optional objective marker and a “recall” system that lets you save snippets of dialogue so you don’t have to keep notes about the cryptic hints random townsfolk give you.
But now that we have our first classic game remade in HD-2D, the question becomes which games do we want to see next? (Keeping in mind of course that these games require years of work from many talented creators; it’s not like they can knock these out in a weekend). My only criteria for the following five picks is that they need to be Square or Enix published games. I’m also skipping Final Fantasy entirely, since we just got “Pixel Remasters” very recently, and the other Dragon Quest games because they’re definitely happening.
Chrono Trigger This is the most obvious one. It’s beloved all over the world, it’s not available on any current systems, and the locations and characters are all beautiful and ripe for a remake. The more action-focused combat might be more difficult to translate than turn-based, but I can see it.
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen Triangle Strategy proved a real-time tactics game in HD-2D could work, and Octopath Traveller’s turn-based battles look great, so Ogre Battle seems like a great option to blend them together. Plus it’s an often-overlooked tactical gem.
Bahamut Lagoon Another blend of grid- and turn-based combat, this Japan-only RPG would probably need some tuning-up in the narrative department, but its premise of raising and shaping dragons before sending them into battle remains strong, and floating islands just lend themselves to HD-2D.
Secret of Mana We’ve been getting a lot of Seiken Densetsu content lately so I’m not entirely sure this remake is necessary, but come on. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game with three-player co-op, begging for a remake. Its wild colour palette and huge story could pose a challenge for the devs though.
Terranigma Yes, at this point I’ve given up hopes of sticking to turn-based RPGs (or of choosing any NES games, sorry), but Terranigma must be acknowledged. An incredible Zelda-like never released in the US, it was published by Enix in Japan and Nintendo in Europe, though it’s currently unknown who owns the rights to developer Quintet’s games (they also made Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia). Square Enix announcing that it not only has Terranigma but is remaking it in HD-2D would be massive.