Avoiding dark patterns in mobile games
Plus Meta wants more money, board games take a while to get good, and doing forbidden things with retro games.
Welcome back Button Buddies!
It’s another quiet week in games which means we get to dive into ways to avoid games that are addictive without being fun, as well as Meta’s unquenchable thirst for money. Plus, I talk about games that take a while to get good, and Tim talks about forbidden retro experiences, and all our recommendations for the week.
Enjoy!
Dark pattern games are becoming a problem
By Alice
We’ve all experienced that one game that we can’t stop playing. Maybe it used to be fun, but now you’re stuck as part of a habit, or maybe you’re prone to addictive tendencies, or perhaps it’s because most mobile games are now designed as grinding hells to take as much money from you as possible. But, whatever the reason you get caught up in it, dark pattern games are becoming a real problem for people.
Dark pattern games are games that are designed to create positive experiences for the game developer while having potential negative consequences for you. You’d be surprised by how many people put a few hundred dollars into Candy Crush per month during lockdown, or got addicted to farming games. They’re especially dangerous for kids, who might not understand the consequences of all the little micro-transactions.
The good news is that there is a website with a database to help you or your kids avoid addictive games. Obviously, it doesn’t have every game ever, but it covers most of the ones you’re likely to be looking for. It’s called darkpattern.games and covers four different kinds of dark patterns: temporal, monetary, social and psychological.
Some of the things it warns about are playing by appointment, grinding, paying to skip, pay to win, social pyramid schemes (looking at you, Farmville), and illusion of control.
As well as listing games that are bad, it also highlights good games, so it can be a handy resource for positive experiences as well as negative. As someone who spent years reviewing three apps every single week, I’ve seen it all, and gotten caught up in more than I’d like to admit, so I’d highly recommend you check it out some time.
What to play
The greatest skating game of all time is coming to all PlayStation Plus tiers this month and you need it in your life. The remaster of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 was the kind of thing nostalgia dreams are made of. It’s as good as you remember it, which means it’s better than it was, and it still has the soundtrack. This was one of my (Alice) favourite games as a kid and it was the highlight of 2020 (which was an admittedly easy crown to claim). You need it.
The other PlayStation Plus Essential games for August are immersive RPG Yakuza: Like a Dragon and horror platformer Little Nightmares, making for a good month on the service. Xbox Games with Gold, however, has another soft one with wholesome cat cafe manager Calico and 2008's Saints Row 2 now available. Later this month you'll also be able to grab awesome roguelike platformer ScourgeBringer and co-op heist sim Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine.
For PlayStation Plus subscribers on the Extra tier or above, three additional Yakuza games will be added to the library this month: Zero, Kiwami and Kiwami 2. Sony says Yakuzas 3–6 will be added some time later this year.
Coming up on Apple Arcade on Friday is Amazing Bomberman. You know Bomberman, he’s great. Now he’s part of 1–4 player online battles on Apple Arcade for subscribers, so that’s good.
Over on Nintendo Switch Online, Expansion Pack subscribers will tomorrow be able to play eight new tracks on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Returning favourites include the technicolour madness of Waluigi Pinball from DS, the breezy bounciness of Mushroom Gorge from Wii, and the heart-pounding race against a steam train in Kalimari Desert from 64. Also notable for Aussies is the inclusion of Sydney Sprint from the mobile Mario Kart Tour, and unexpectedly there's even a brand new course in Sky-High Sundae (which is debuting here ahead of its inclusion in Tour).
And new to Game Pass this week is open-world tactical shooter Ghost Recon Wildlands, plus an early access version of Turbo Golf Racing, which looks extremely similar to Rocket League but we are not complaining. Mini-golf with acrobatic rocket-powered battle cars? Sign us up.
Making sense of the new Meta Quest pricing
By Tim
The Quest VR headset from Meta (formerly Facebook) has been the no-brainer recommendation for most gamers for years. It’s light, easy to set up, works intuitively, has lots of good games, doesn’t need a PC or to be tethered to anything, and it’s comparatively cheap. The excellent Meta Quest 2 was made even better last year, when the base model had its storage doubled.
But now a decision by Meta to increase the price of the Quest 2 by $150 has thrown the value calculus all out of whack. Last week the 128GB Quest 2 was $480, and now the exact same unit is $630. If you want a carrying case and a better strap with extra battery too, it will cost a total of $910, when just last week it was $690.
To be fair this is still less than half the cost of some high-end VR rigs, but it’s a bad look that diminishes faith in a platform already low on trust. And it also highlights an extreme difference between how Meta views its gaming platform versus industry mainstays like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
In a blog post Meta blamed the hike on increased business costs; everything from parts to shipping are more expensive as the world’s economy tips towards recession. But cost of living is well up too, without a comparable rise in wages, so Meta admitting to passing its increased costs directly on to consumers comes off as extremely cold.
It goes without saying that Meta was always selling the Quest at a significant loss; its plan was to make an unparalleled value in the VR space and it succeeded. But now the business is on shakier foundations (Meta just reported its quarterly profits, which did not grow for the first time ever), those losses are apparently untenable.
Traditional platform-holders make up for their loss-leading hardware with software sales, or iterate hardware over time to increase their margins, so the consumer always feels like they’re getting value. Meta’s decision in this case makes it seem like the company doesn’t know how to run a functioning games platform, which is arguably a bigger hit to the Quest 2’s recommendability than the cost increase itself.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
There are some TV shows where, before you recommend it to someone, you have to warn them about how bad the first season is. I love DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, but season 1 is almost an entirely different show, and you have to watch it so you can understand some of the characters’ motivations. Dollhouse was the best show of 2009 (I do not know how it’s held up…) but you had to really hold on through to episode 5.
It can be like that with games sometimes, too. You have to go into every board game knowing that the first time you play will probably suck, and you won’t know what’s going on, “but it gets good around episode 5”. Wingspan was like that for me. I hated it the first time I played and couldn’t understand why my friends were torturing me with it, and then I played it every day for a year once it clicked.
Hardback and Paperback are like that, and it was something I thought about while teaching a friend to play on Friday. Paperback is nowhere near as good as Hardback, but I think Hardback is easier to understand if you play Paperback first. So, you have to play this game (which is good), but the whole time say “while this game is perfectly fine, you’ll love Hardback, you just have to hang on for a bit”. Which is perhaps not the best way to sell the experience to a newbie, I guess.
One of the things I love about board games (but also struggle with a bit, as I ignore my to-play pile) is that you have to be patient with them. They will almost never be good at first and you have to wait to discover that “ah ha!” moment, and you have to have faith that they will eventually click. It’s just kinda beautiful.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Playing old games through software emulators, or on original hardware through a flashcart or optical disc emulator, is a convenient way to connect to our cultural history without spending all your money and time chasing decaying plastic.
It also happens to be explicitly illegal in Australia, but supposing that doesn’t bother you I wanted to talk about something else amazing that these technologies enable; rom hacks.
I prefer to play on original consoles, and it’s incredible to me that talented developers out there are working constantly on making new ways to play my favourite games on my favourite systems. Some of these are purely quality of life updates, for example to reverse questionable changes developers made when bringing a Japanese game over to the west. Some of the most simple but impactful hacks are for original Game Boy games, injecting colour information or even new art to make them look incredible on modern screens.
But hacks can be so much more complex too, as I was reminded recently when I topped up my EverDrive 64 with new hacks for the first time since I discovered Goldfinger 007 around two years ago.
First up I checked out a multiplayer mod from prolific Mario 64 hacker Kaze Emanuar, which lets you play the classic 3D platformer in splitscreen. Going through Bob-omb Battlefield as Mario, alongside a friend playing as Luigi, without the 64 catching fire, is astounding.
I also played a hack of Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 by Freem, which remixed that game’s wrestlers with those from other AKI games — WCW vs NWO Revenge, Wrestlemania 2000, WWF No Mercy — to create an incredible crossover that you could never get officially in any capacity.
And finally I was blown away by the latest version of Super Smash Bros Remix, an immense effort from a collective of dozens of artists and developers, which aims to add as much content as possible from newer Smash Bros. games to the N64 original. The game now has more than double the number of playable characters, dozens of extra stages, even new modes, and all with more polish and professionalism than some commercially released Nintendo 64 games could muster.