After a decade, has GTA grown up?
Plus the Lenovo Legion Go, Ticket to Ride Legacy and NEC's PC Engine
Hello there! What an uneventful week am I right? In the newsletter below you’ll find our thoughts on the games hitting the subs around now, the new handheld PC from Lenovo, one of the greatest and least remembered 80s game consoles and more. Oh, and something about that thing literally everyone is covering.
Grand Theft Auto is one of those mainstream juggernaut perpetual hype machines that reaches far beyond the usual cohort of people who are otherwise interested in video games, so it’s unsurprising that a minute-long trailer has already generated millions of words of analysis. But while I have no doubt that GTA 6 will be a success, the main thing I’m searching for in the trailer is any shift in tone. The series prides itself on a South Park like acerbic wit, and this is the one and only area where I’m not convinced Rockstar has the goods to compete in 2025.
A step in the right direction
By Tim
I really enjoyed GTA 5 when I played it for the first time. Rockstar’s worlds are so incredibly detailed, and the way the game blends story set-pieces with crafted missions and an incredible sandbox playground is extremely impressive. But even at the time I thought any elements of satire were pretty weak, and the humour as a whole felt outdated and frequently gross.
Certain story moments and quests in particular stand out in my memory as being edgy and shocking, but not in a way that says anything particularly interesting or worthwhile. That includes Trevor stomping a man’s brains out after he sincerely asks Trevor to stop sleeping with his partner, and Franklin secretly filming a celebrity having sex at the request of a paparazzi.
To be clear, I have no problem with protagonists in these games being absolute dirtbags. The whole idea is to let players loose to do outrageous things in the world, from massacring a beach full of people for no reason to stealing a private jet and crashing it into buildings. That’s fun, and to make it work you need a cartoonishly sick main character. There’s also nothing wrong with being salacious. But that’s different to being hateful, and from women to trans people to folks of various cultural background, GTA 5 relied heavily on lazy hateful stereotypes played for laughs.
Revisiting the game more recently, I was surprised at just how often the gist of the joke is “gay men exist and / or trans people are prostitutes and / or women are sex freaks, and that’s bad”, and the bulk of the rest is surface level observations about politicians and startup bros. From a tech and gameplay perspective I have the utmost faith, but the new trailer doesn’t do much to convince me Rockstar’s social commentary will be as well updated. The one exception is the female protagonist, which is not nothing.
The way women have been treated in singleplayer Rockstar games to date is a well-documented problem. The only women I remember from GTA 5 specifically were Michael’s wife and daughter — who only existed as problems and / or boobs to laugh at — and Maryanne, an over-the-top man-hating fitness freak who challenges the main characters to races. Most of the rest are objects to abuse or walking sight gags.
I wouldn’t be surprised if GTA 6 turns out to have multiple protagonists, or gives players the choice of a male or female main character, but at the very least the trailer suggests a three dimensional portrayal of a woman, which I think is a first for Rockstar with the possible exception of one Red Dead 2 character. We have two full years of increasingly hysterical hype before we find out if this statement of intent pans out.
What to play
It’s been a big week for Game Pass, with the service adding brand new titles Steamworld Build (a western robot city sim) and While the Iron’s Hot (a blacksmith crafting adventure). Also recently added to Game Pass are soulslikes Remnant and Remnant II, one of my (Tim’s) favourite games of last generation Rise of the Tomb Raider, and a few others. Coming tomorrow is Goat Simulator 3.
Over on PlayStation, it’s a new month so that means free games for anyone subscribed to PS+. For December you get blocky racer Lego 2K Drive, satisfying clean ’em up Powerwash Simulator and stunning hoverbike desert adventure Sable.
New to Apple Arcade this week is just so many games. The biggest is, perhaps, Disney Dreamlight Valley: Arcade Edition, a version of the popular game that is actually free of the free-to-play in app purchase nonsense. There’s also Puzzle & Dragons Story, a game which presumably includes both puzzles and dragons arranged around the most perfunctory story you’ve ever encountered. And the game that I (Alice) think Tim will be most excited about is Sonic Dream Team, which looks like a fairly standard 3D Sonic game, and I mean that in the best way.
Free on the Epic Games Store this week are Jitsu Squad and Mighty Fight Federation. Both look kinda ok, but they are also both free, and sometimes that’s enough.
Another portable PC gaming console enters the ring
By Alice
When the Steam Deck was announced, we should have known that it meant every computer company and their dog would soon release a portable gaming device to play PC games. Now, you might be thinking “a portable gaming device to play PC games is a laptop?” and you would be right, but now we also have PCs in the shape of a Nintendo Switch, and I like this for us as a civilisation.
The Steam Deck is, by all reports, pretty great, but limited. The next of its kind to hit the market was the Asus ROG Ally, which I like a lot, and use when I travel, but also I just had to have my unit replaced because it hit a problem where it would crash about 5 minutes after turning on, or it would only boot into the BIOS menu. Neither was great.
The newest kid on the block is the Lenovo Legion Go, and while my experience with it so far has been limited (I’ll have a full review of it soon after I’ve spent more time with it), I like it a lot.
It’s the largest of the bunch, it fits very securely in the hand, the screen is gorgeous, and the controllers are removable so the resemblance to a Switch is even more striking.
Overall, it appears to be a better gaming device than the ROG Ally.
However, because it’s so much larger and heavier, it’ll be a more unwieldy travel companion for those who travel light. It’s fine for using while commuting, but it takes up more carry-on bag space than I’d like for international travel. None of those are bad points, I think the screen of the Ally is too small for long sessions, and the thinness of the machine can make it uncomfortable to hold and difficult to control at times. Having a machine with opposite problems provides more options. But they are all things to consider when choosing your portable gaming console.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Things have really been heating up in our play through of Ticket To Ride Legacy. In our last game, we introduced a new section of the board with a ghost train, which also finally explained the purpose of some of the symbols on the train cards.
I really don’t want to spoil what’s involved or how it unfolds, so forgive me for being vague. Experiencing it fresh as it rolls out is one of the things that makes the game so exciting.
But I mention them because I’m really enjoying how these extra little things that were never in the original Ticket To Ride games is making this Legacy version more exciting, adding more challenges and new things to learn.
We’re now hallway through the campaign, which means we’re discovering more parts of the map, and more of the story is getting unlocked.
The story is unfolding in a way that’s… fine? I’m enjoying the mechanics of the game a lot, but the story isn’t gripping me. Perhaps it’s because we’re not giving it enough weight, or because it’s so predictable for a game about trains that my brain has just tuned it out somewhat. It could also be because it turned out we were doing events wrong for the first 5 games. (I blame this on imprecise instructions, rather than any personal failing. I am sticking with this story.)
I do wonder if there will be a point in the campaign where there are just too many mechanics going on at the same time, but I am really loving the passing curiosities that might last for a game or two, and then disappear. It keeps things interesting, and then they don’t out stay their welcome.
As it stands, I remain solidly in favour of both Ticket To Ride and Legacy games in general, and I can’t wait until our next game day (even though it feels like an age away).
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
The PC Engine is an absolutely fascinating machine, though one often overlooked due to it being more or less an entirely Japan-centric phenomena. A joint effort from then PC giant NEC, and Hudson (which made the chips as well as some of the console’s best games), it was a successful rival to Nintendo’s Famicom / NES, and still worth tracking down today.
In 1987 the Famicom was four years old, and the PC Engine was brand new. It was still an 8-bit machine, but it packed a pair of 16-bit graphics processors, meaning from a visuals perspective the games regularly outshone Nintendo at its absolute best. Just look at an NES graphics showcase like Kirby’s Adventure, next to a decent PC Engine release like Momotora Katsugeki, which came out three years previous, and there’s no competition.
Of course Hudson’s franchises like Bonk and Bomberman weren’t on the same level as Nintendo’s, but it made a good enough case that the PC Engine was immensely popular in Japan until a few years into the Super Nintendo’s reign. Not so much in the US, where it was released as the TurboGrafx-16.
There are more than a dozen models of PC Engine, though I favour the original or Core versions because they’re so tiny, pairing well with the cute art on the game cards that slot in the front. In 1988 NEC released a CD drive for the console, which was absolutely cutting edge, and the system kept expanding with new firmware cards supporting more advanced CD formats. Some of the best PC Engine CD games, like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, are utterly timeless with their incredible visuals and high quality music.
These days a PC Engine is inexpensive, and making them work in Australia with great video output isn’t difficult (the stock composite video is incredibly clean for the time, but there are accessories that will give you RGB). Unfortunately, as with most retro systems, prices for PC-Engine games have seen a steep incline which makes collecting onerous.