A World Cup should include more than six countries (and other lessons from Forza)
Plus adapting to VR, Lego's latest Technic car, and revisiting the cinematic platformer
Hello, and welcome to another issue of Press Any Button.
This week Tim and I are diving into the depths of Forza Horizon 5’s disappointing World Cup, how to get your body to tolerate VR, the latest from Lego and all the games you should be playing this weekend while painting your nails.
The disappointing World Cup
By Alice
For weeks Playground Games, the developers behind Forza Horizon 5, have been teasing the upcoming World Cup. Being somewhat overly competitive, I’ve been looking forward to my moment to shine and represent my country in the only sport that would have me (one that requires no qualifications, and anyone can enter without being the best).
But, alas, it’s a four week competition where you race cars from the US, UK, Japan, Germany, France and Italy and then those countries get points. They’ve also slimmed down the number of activities available for the weekly seasonal events, removing the ones that gave easy points (like a Danger Sign, or playing The Eliminator) and focussing more on The Trial and seasonal championships.
All of this is fine, I guess, but it’s moving away from one of the things that makes Horizon 5 such a great car game, and that’s that you didn’t have to care about cars or racing. I don’t play Forza to race, I play it to crash into stuff and do ridiculous things - like play infection during a pandemic. Taking away the extra challenges means that it takes longer and is less fun to earn the exclusive cars. I’m now also gaining knowledge about the origin of cars against my will. I don’t know what the country of origin is for my favourite car, what I do know is that it’s red and gets me extra skill points when I go very fast. Racing and car knowledge is what I occasionally visit Forza Motorsport for.
That said, the cup is fun, even though I don’t have a horse in the race, and I appreciate the attempt to streamline the weekly tasks, because they had become a bit time consuming. I just wish the Forza Horizon 5 seasonal roadmap was more closely mapped to the entirely unrealistic dreams in my head, rather than the reality that most players come to racing games to race.
You can take part in the World Cup now, and hit me up on Twitter to tell me which country to race for, I guess.
What to play
PlayStation Vita fans may remember OlliOlli, a slick skateboarding game that’s like if Tony Hawk was an auto-running sidescroller. The series is back in a big way this week, on all platforms, with OlliOlli World. There's a renewed focus on story, branching paths and character customisation, and everything looks adorable in an Adventure Time way, but the core is as simple and wonderful as ever; chain tricks, through aerial spots and grinds, at a supercharged speed. Optional challenges and “local hero” high scores make me want to squeeze as much as possible out of each course over many runs, making this feel more like a fast-paced platformer than a technical skate sim.
A "critics' choice" sale over at PlayStation includes several games that critics were famously ambivalent about, but that doesn't mean there aren't good savings! Down to virtually nothing are The Sims 4 at $5.75, Telltale's The Wolf Among Us at $4.48 (ahead of a sequel announcement this week), and psychological roguelike Darkest Dungeon at $6.59. Ubisoft and Capcom are also leaning into this sale pretty hard, if you're a Resident Evil or Assassin's Creed fan with a gap in your library. Sale ends next Thursday.
It’s time to fire up Apple Arcade and play some Word Laces. Wordle will soon be dead, having been bought by the New York Times, so you may as well find an alternative now. Word Laces gets you to make words vaguely related to a picture and rewards you with different designs of laces. It’s simple, but enjoyable.
Control is going to be leaving Xbox Game Pass soon, and you really must give it a try while you can. It’s the exact kind of game that developer Remedy Entertainment excels at, and while it’s not perfect, fans of third-person action adventure games with supernatural elements will love it.
Nail polish isn’t exactly a game, but the new Xbox and OPI collaboration has filled my head with dreams of being a sparkly princess, and the idea of having my nails match my Halo Infinite armour, not to mention car from Forza Horizon 5, seems too wonderful to pass up now that it’s finally available in stores.
Convincing my body to agree with VR
By Tim
I used to think VR games were not for me, primarily because whenever I tried one it gave me eyestrain and headaches. I'm short-sighted, and it took me a while to realise that I needed to continue wearing my glasses in the headset, even though the lenses are technically centimetres away from my face. Science!
But even with that hurdle mostly surmounted (it is still annoying to wear glasses in a headset, and it's uncomfortable if I have to focus on a character or item up close), I didn't give VR a fair shake. High-end setups needed fancy PCs, elaborate cameras and heaps of room, while PlayStation VR was fun but its cables made it a hassle. The cord-free Quest 2 seemed like an ideal solution, and after some hesitation, I dropped close to $700 on one (plus accessories) last year, unsure if I’d regret it.
Things like Beat Saber or Job Simulator couldn’t exist without VR, and they were the first kind of games I tried, but five months on my favourite experiences have brought new perspectives and interactions to traditional ideas. Like the time-bending first-person shooter Superhot or the stunning VR adaptation of the classic Resident Evil 4.
Ducking your head to avoid a pitchfork or grabbing your grenade, knife or spare ammo clip from a specific spot on your body promises a future where games are more intuitive, less beholden to abstractions like control sticks and HUDs.
Meanwhile, training my body to actually move around a space I can’t see has been a long process. Having my character walk when I’m standing still continues to give me a “falling through the floor when I’m almost asleep” sense of inertia. But it legitimately feels like a new medium in progress, which is worth the adjustment.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Overnight Lego announced its long-awaited F1 McLaren Technic set. Fans had hoped it would follow in the long tradition of exceptionally detailed Lego Technic cars that cost more than a week’s rent, such as the $600 3599 piece Bugatti Chiron, $570 3696 piece Lamborghini Sian and $500 2704 piece Porsche 911 GT3 RS. Next to those, the 1432 piece, $280 F1 McLaren seems both reasonable and puny.
None of those sets adhere to the normal Lego pricing ‘value’ guide of 10c per piece, but they do all come with large, moulded pieces and extremely expensive licences from luxury car brands.
Despite the smaller piece count, the dimensions of 13cm high, 65cm long and 27cm wide means that it will be in proportion with the other cars in the collection.
The problem is, that unless you’re a very dedicated fan of F1 and luxury vehicles, that higher price-to-piece ratio makes it hard to justify when there’s sets like the $329.99 Land Rover Defender with 2573 pieces, the $250 Porsche 911 RSR with 1580 pieces, or even The Batmobile for $170 with 1360 pieces.
Obviously, unless there was a particularly good freebie at the Lego store online, you’d never pay full price, and instead wait for a 20% off sale at Myer.
What’s more important than the money and piece count, though, is how it looks, and working within the constraints of the Technic medium, it looks pretty damn good and accurate. It would have been nicer to have gotten a more detailed cockpit, and open wheels would have been a better look, but this is the coolest looking Technic car for a while (the green of that Sian is a crime against nature). And while the piece count is much lower than the objectively more attractive Lego System cars, such as the VW Camper Van, the increased difficulty of the Technic System means there will be at least a dozen hours of building in this (depending on how many times I bugger it up and have to start again). You could also technically put an engine in it and make it a remote control car… So maybe it is worth it after all.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
This week let's give some love to a more-or-less abandoned video game genre: the cinematic platformer. I don't know when the term was coined, but the genre itself was popularised by Prince of Persia, Out of This World and Flashback in the early 90s.
Cinematic platformers take a traditional side-on view, but emphasise more realistic settings, graphics and character abilities than your standard platformer. Jumps need to be precisely measured and timed, combat is generally methodical and strategic, your hero is often very easy to kill and levels tend to be puzzle boxes of items, gates and bad guys.
Returning to these gems today can be trying, given our collective lack of patience compared to the gamers of three decades ago, but modern remakes and repackagings have added more generous save options, rewind features or maps, which helps. Some modern games also take obvious influence, albeit usually with more forgiving platforming and always with a horror tinge, including Limbo, Inside, Little Nightmares and The Eternal Castle.
My personal favourite cinematic platformer is BlackThorne, originally known in Australia as Blackhawk, an oft-forgotten Super Nintendo adventure made by a pre-Warcraft Blizzard. It's a dark fantasy wizards-versus-orcs affair, but with bombs and shotguns rather than the traditional melee weapons, and to this day I think it looks, sounds and plays impeccably. Particularly tense are the cover-based shootouts where you need to time your shots to take the enemy by surprise.
BlackThorne got decent ports to PC and Game Boy Advance, and a profoundly weird adaptation on Sega's 32X, but today the best way to play it is as part of last year's great Blizzard Arcade Collection on all platforms; it's included in the PlayStation sale mentioned above, for $15. You can also get the PC version of BlackThorne for free, direct from Blizzard.