Can Apple Vision Pro be a games platform?

Plus collecting vs playing, a Game Pass haul and GBA on Switch.

Hello there! I hope your wallet’s feeling okay after the big Amazon Prime sales. I managed to not buy anything, but purely because I refused to look. This week we’re testing out the Apple Vision Pro’s gaming capabilities, looking through the new games available on the subs, and playing some Game Boy Advance games on Switch. Jam’s also asking, unrelated to Amazon Prime, whether it’s ok to enjoy acquiring things to put on our shelves even if we don’t handle or play with them. And as someone who’s bought several art books and a Kirby collection from 2012 in the last week, I can’t relate. Let’s go!

The personal TV of the future

By Tim

Extended reality headsets have the potential to make a really big impact on gaming. They can offer fully immersive VR games, augmented reality experiences that put board games or other interactive objects in your real-world space, and the ability to take a huge virtual screen with you anywhere for playing traditional 2D games. Apple’s Vision Pro, at least from a hardware point of view, is the most impressive extended reality headset yet. So, what’s it like for playing?

To get the obvious out of the way first, I’m not about to recommend anyone go out and buy a Vision Pro to play games on it. This is a $6000 headset, and while a combination of good ergonomics, magnetic prescription inserts and a very high resolution screen make it perfectly comfortable to use for long sessions, it’s unlikely to replace a console or PC as your primary games machine. But it does give us a look at where things are headed.

One of the best uses for Vision Pro is as a massive cinema screen you can take anywhere to watch movies and TV, and it works for games as well, but it’s somewhat limited by Apple’s ecosystem. I wish there was an easy way to stream directly from an Xbox or PlayStation, but right now the only simple and effective option is to AirPlay from a Mac. I played this way using a Bluetooth controller and it rules, with only very occasional streaming hitches.

A lot of games designed for iPad work fine on Vision Pro too, appearing as floating resizeable windows, and if they have controller support the result is generally great. A few games, including several on Apple Arcade, have been mildly updated for the system with stereoscopic 3D or AR elements such as floating HUDs.

AR games like a new take on Fruit Ninja and the virtual chess of Game Room show off the potential of the device, but I haven’t found a truly must-play title yet in this format. Full-on VR is also possible with Vision Pro, but without touch controllers or a roomscale mode I can’t recommend it over the Quest 3 right now. Games like Vacation Simulator definitely work, they’re just better elsewhere.

Ultimately, I expect Apple’s Vision platform (and similar from other companies) to become very appealing for gaming once the software and developer ecosystem catches up to the hardware. Paired with a controller, it can give you a 100-inch screen for playing on wherever you are, which will hopefully work with both locally run games and streaming platforms in the future. Meanwhile augmented reality is just getting started, and there’s no reason the two couldn’t merge; imagine playing an online game with your friends, but with them digitally represented as avatars on the couch next to you.

What to play

• As if to apologise for the recent news of a price hike, this week sees five brand new games launch on to Game Pass. Right now you can get flying adventure Flock, which is co-developed by Richard Hogg (of Hohokum fame) and is all about collecting weird bird creatures, meaning it was essentially custom designed to appeal to me. You can also grab the new wholesome pixel art platformer Magical Delicacy. Later this week the service will have Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, which is an action-RPG from the makers of Ashen, stunning alpine Zelda-like Dungeons of Hinterberg and Capcom’s Japanese mythology strategy game Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess.

• Free on Epic Games right now is turn-based tactical deck-builder Floppy Knights, which will switch out later this week with business sim / faux-retro collection Arcade Paradise.

• If you have Amazon Prime, the tech giant would like to lure you into using its Windows PC launcher by offering three big free games — Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Chivalry 2 — for the next 24 hours or so. That’s on top of its usual rotating games selection, which currently includes Card Shark, TMNT Shredder’s Revenge and Knights of the Old Republic II.

Is it okay to amass unplayed games?

By Jam

I’ve been a Warhammer 40,000 fan for over 20 years and a video game fan for over 30.

At this point my backlog of unbuilt minis and unplayed games are both so absurdly deep that the mere consideration of spending another cent on either hobby feels utterly irresponsible.

This past weekend the starter sets for the new edition of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar were revealed, and dear reader, I am not made of stone.

This eternal struggle was memed to death once again over the past few weeks throughout the video game community as the annual mid-year Steam sale came and went.

On a recent episode of Warhammer fan podcast The Painting Phase, an off-hand comment from co-host Geoff Savory got me thinking; at what point do we just give in and admit to ourselves that we’re collectors more than anything?

Members of the action-figure community speak openly about how the thrill of the hunt is what drives them as much, if not more, than the actual pride of ownership or enjoyment of play. I’d wager that folk who are really into records are much the same.

Is it okay to make peace with the fact that the dopamine hit of having found a good deal on a thing and then making the purchase might truly be the crux of our engagement with our hobby?

I’m not suggesting that these habits apply to all tabletop and video gamers, but they’re definitely widespread in the respective communities.

Maybe even the conscious reframing of your ‘pile of shame’ as your ‘pile of opportunity’ doesn’t matter. Maybe just feeling good about owning the things that make you happy is enough, even if you never do find time for them. 

Maybe that’s straying into hoarder psychology though, I don’t know. I will probably push all of these thoughts aside and buy one of the new Age of Sigmar boxes next week regardless.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

The Game Boy Advance has one of the hugest libraries of any classic Nintendo system and, although a lot of it is garbage, it’s a handheld rife with pixellated perfection. So in playing around with the Nintendo Switch Online GBA app recently (which is available to those paying for an NSO+ Expansion Pack sub), I was a bit let down to find a paltry selection of only 20 games, all of them from Nintendo and with some obvious bangers missing.

Some of the platform’s best games are available for Switch in other (much more expensive) forms, such as the Castlevania Advance Collection, Advance Wars 1+2, and the Final Fantasy pixel remasters. But other top-tier entries from Nintendo itself — Wario Land 4, WarioWare Twisted, Mario Golf, Pokemon Ruby / Sapphire — are also missing, for no good reason. Still, if you don’t have your own extensive GBA collection, there are some good times to be had here.

Singleplayer shoutouts include the original Mario+ Luigi RPG, the absolutely incredible Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap, and one of my favourite games of all time in Metroid: Zero Mission ( the very good Fusion is also included). RPG fans get Golden Sun and Fire Emblem, and there are also three Starfy games, cute platformers that are entirely in Japanese.

Emulation is solid, with save states and rewind an appreciated touch, and unlike with the home console apps the “reproduce classic feel” visual option is worthwhile here, invoking a very effective LCD filter that makes things less blocky. But the most interesting part is the mutliplayer: whether through the internet or local wireless, you can simulate connecting your GBAs together, linking up to four Switch consoles for experiences that almost nobody had back in the day owing to those onerous cables and splitters.

With a group of four, you can race together in Mario Kart Super Circuit or F-Zero Maximum Velocity, or team up as a group of puffballs in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror: a metroidvania take on the franchise that lets you explore independently or call each other for help with mobile phones. The best of the bunch is obviously The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, which is brief as far as Zelda adventures go but offers unique multiplayer-focused dungeons and enemies, such as creatures that need to be pulled apart from either side by two players at once.