Hello friends,
Welcome to another week of pressing any button and hoping for the best. This week has been another weird one, where a fascist government released propaganda portraying immigrants as The Flood from Halo, and Microsoft chose to stay silent on that. Cool and normal. Love to see a major corporation who once declared that “gaming is for everyone” walking that back to “gaming is for whoever the US government decides counts as 4/5th or more as a person”.
In this week’s edition of the newsletter I (Alice) played Pokémon Legends Z-A and Pergola, while Tim discovered that corporations might be bad sometimes and has kindly once again made us feel old.
Enjoy!
Pokémon Legends Z-A ok, but not legendary
By Alice
Pokémon Legends Z-A is the latest Pokémon game in the series and it’s pretty good! I just have a difficult time imagining it will become anyone’s favourite Pokemon game, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.
The battle system is more fun and engaging than previous Pokémon games I’ve played, with the ability to line up multiple attacks it feels less like “OK, I’ll stab you, and then you can try to stab me”, and more like a battle. I’ve always preferred real time combat over turn-based, however I acknowledge that it’s personal preference.
I like the idea of Pokémon Paris, and I really enjoy that the people who designed Lumiose City clearly had zero first or secondhand knowledge of what Paris was actually like, and maybe just overheard someone talking about it once at a bar.
There’s something about it that feels clunky, though. Most of the game feels like it should be entirely my thing, however the dialogue and the story just rub me the wrong way for no specific reason. I get into the Pokémon collecting and battling parts, however everything around that just feels off and my attention starts to waver. For that reason, I haven’t been able to get as far through the game as I would have liked to before I wrote something up on it. If they reveal at the end that everyone in Lumiose has been possessed by aliens and that’s why they’re so wooden and inhuman, that would go a long way to changing my opinion of the game.
But while I don’t love the setting, characters or story motivations, the new ways in which I can interact with the Pokémon stops me from bouncing off it completely. I’m confident I will finish Pokémon Legends Z-A some time in the next year, and I’ll be able to write more comprehensive thoughts then.
What to play
New on Game Pass is the brand new Outer Worlds 2, a very fun Obsidian RPG (the second this year, after Avowed!) about space capitalism. There’s also tower defense Super Fantasy Kingdom (another day one release) and survival roguelite Halls of Torment.
In time for the spooky season, Nintendo has added the original Luigi’s Mansion to the Switch 2’s Gamecube app. That means the whole trilogy is now playable on Switch 2, for all you Luigi sickos.
Free on the Epic Games store right now is Bendy and the Ink Machine and Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit. They just need to add Poppy Playtime and they’d have a full trifecta of stuff 7-year-olds think is edgy and cool based purely on YouTube videos and knock-off shopping centre merch.
Uh-oh, oppression
By Tim
The Outer Worlds 2 is a great first-person RPG. Following in the footsteps of Fallout and the like, it’s a brilliant blend of shooting, character-building, charming sci-fi and engaging exploration. But while I enjoy the goofy and funny storytelling, and I’m certainly not above turning my brain off for a few hours of questin’ and a-killin’, there is something about the game that bothered me.
I never played the original Outer Worlds, but based on the writing of others I’d picked up that it was set in a sort of corpo dystopia, where ultra late-stage capitalism had resulted in mega-companies that not only manufacture every kind of product but have their own militaries and governments too. The marketing for Outer Worlds doubled down on this, and the early hours of the game throw in a scary separatist colony of space fascists to boot. But then, none of it really goes anywhere.
To be clear, I’m well aware that many video games (and mainstream entertainment products in general) have this problem. As with authoritarianism, populism, racism, fundamentalism or any other source of real-world conflict, games have a habit of adopting autocratic capitalism to stand in as a moustache-twirling villain worthy of ridicule, but the overall message amounts to “it’s bad, but *shrug*.”
The thing is, I really thought there would be more to chew on here. Everyone in the game is a gurning cartoon, whose devotion to their marketing / tyrannical overlords might as well be a big sign that says “oppressive power structures amirite”. These people love doing what they’re told, and it sure is bad for them. The end.
Is it possible to put a bit more anger and urgency and dissent in there while still maintaining a light tone? I don’t know, but I wanted to feel like someone had tried. Even when you’re fighting bad guys in this game, it feels like you and all your companions have already accepted defeat. The evil garbage we’re dealing with in the real world has, in the Outer Worlds, taken over. And we’ve stopped caring.
Again, this is a bigger problem than just one game, and in almost every other way The Outer Worlds 2 is a total success. But certain topics are just starting to feel too dire and present to be held up and jeered at without actual criticism.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
After months of trying to schedule, my friends and I finally managed to have a board game day. Yes, the miracle of four people in their 30s hanging out can come to pass.
The first game we played was Pergola. I have to admit, I only grabbed Pergola because it was so pretty, and went in with zero knowledge about how the game ran. So when we started going through the rules it was super overwhelming. Pergola is a game where you tend to a garden to attract various insects, and gain points based on so many different factors, ranging from the height of a vine, the number of (and position) of bees, size and quantity of dragonflies, lady birds, and a whole range of other situations.
What I was really impressed by, though, was how all these elements came together to make an engaging game that was easy to master. It really only took two turns to get the hang of it, and the wide variety of ways to get points meant that everyone could stick to their own strategy. There was very little crossover where people would be competing for the same resource. I really love game where people largely run their own race without stepping on each other’s toes. There were certainly opportunities for sabotage if that’s the game you want to play, however it’s also easy to change that sabotage by changing tactics.
In the end, the game that I initially was ready to yeet into the sun, is now a game that I can’t wait to play again and again with different groups of people. I’m seriously impressed by the designer’s ability to make so many elements be cohesive in a casual-style board game.
If you have a keen gardener in your life, or just enjoy cute fun games, Pergola is a great choice for rainy afternoons.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Here are some of the games that celebrated a major anniversary in October. It’s much harder to pick just three than it is in a month like May!
Now 20: Shadow of the Colossus Games have always reflected some of the most artful and impactful fantasy stories seen in other media including film, novels and anime, but Shadow of the Colossus is one of the first examples of a blockbuster cinematic video game that feels like it’s telling that kind of narrative in a way only interactive entertainment could. Wander’s actions carry an emotional weight that’s far heavier since they’re also your actions, and the age-old trope of a hero having to pay a high price to save their loved one from death is transformed into something genuinely unsettling. It doesn’t hurt that it’s wonderfully eccentric both visually and mechanically.
Now 30: Terranigma There’s a parallel universe in which Terranigma is the most celebrated and discussed SNES action-RPG, over the likes of Chrono Trigger, which was released in the same year. The primary force working against this Enix classic is that it was never released in America, so the only English speaking people who experienced it at the time are from Europe and Australia. It has great combat, gorgeous art, interesting dungeons, and a wild and massive story concerning the recreation of Earth. One point working against it is its significant difficulty in the later stages, which makes it a fine option to visit on a platform that allows save states.
Now 40: Space Harrier My first exposure to this series was through Space Harrier II, one of the first games I got for the Sega Mega Drive (I assume it was selling cheap at that point), and my main memories are the unfair difficulty and the hilarious voice reocrdings. “Eeeeeeeoooooooorgh! Get Ready.” Little did I know the original was a bonafide hit in Japanese arcades two years before I was even born. Its Super Scaler technology allowed for 16-bit graphics that appeared in pseudo-3D at high framerates, and its hardware design — a seated cockpit with a flight stick — made for an immersive take on the shooter.