Do Moblins dream of electric Keese?
Plus Space Marine VR in Zero Latency, new Magic The Gathering, and game anniversaries
Happy Day Before The Grand Final day, to those who observe!
Did any of you manage to secure a pre-order for the PlayStation 30th Anniversary goodies yesterday? I (Alice) missed out on all the guaranteed orders, but am hopeful I’ll get an Edge controller in the JB ballot. May the odds be ever in our favours.
This week Alice worshipped guns in VR and visited a haunted house, while Tim played the new Zelda game and celebrated some milestones. Plus! All the games you should play on the subscription services this weekend.
Who knew VR was best with friends?
By Alice
I love the idea of VR. Being able to put on a pair of goggles and be in another world sounds incredible. The reality of VR at home, however, hasn’t been fully realised for me yet. I enjoy PlayStation VR, but there aren’t enough games, and I find PC VR to be a bit too isolating. Games are a social activity for me, akin to watching TV, they’re best shared with loved ones. Plus, the motion sickness is its own whole thing.
This is why I was interested in Zero Latency. It’s an activity company that dared ask the question “what if laser tag was nerdier?” You and seven friends/strangers strap on VR goggles and pick up big fake guns and share a VR experience together. This week I went to the launch of the latest Zero Latency experience: Space Marine VR - Defenders of Avarax and it was way better than I was expecting.
I’m not really familiar with Space Marine lore, so it was hilarious when the tutorial took us through how this was basically a religion that worshipped guns and violence, making it sound as though we were visiting the USA. We had to fight alien demon things coming from all directions, and work as a team (while also trying to get the highest score).
I was impressed by how realistic everything looked and felt, and how little motion sickness I experienced. I had a wonderful time shooting these creatures and trying not to walk into my teammates.
The only thing I didn’t love was how often in this experience it looked like we had to walk up and down ramps or stairs. It would break the immersion whenever I stepped to go up, only to stumble on air because I was still in the same room with a flat floor. Given how often we went in lifts, it seemed feasible to make the floor level. But that is a minor quibble.
All up, this seems like the ideal way to experience VR. It fulfils the promise that I was originally looking forward to. Definitely worth a shot if you’re ever near a Zero Latency location.
What to play
There are a few arrivals to consider on Game Pass. The new All You Need is Help won me (Tim) over months ago with its trailer, which presented a kind of sicko co-op physics puzzle with sleazy plush animal Tetris blocks. Then there’s a pair of Seiken Densetsu games: Trials of Mana is a 3D remake of the 16-bit sequel to Secrets of Mana, while Legend of Mana is a spinoff originally released for PS1. I can’t speak to these versions, but both of these games are absolutely delightful action RPGs on their original platforms.
New to Apple Arcade this week is Balatro+, the card game everyone has been addicted to. Now you can take it everywhere you go! Good luck with that.
Do Moblins dream of electric Keese?
By Tim
I’m only a handful of hours into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and apart from the fact you can tell fairly immediately that this is a special adventure that’s very much in the Link to the Past / Link Between Worlds vein, an unexpectedly prominent feature is one of my all-time favourite game mechanics: monster summoning.
Any RPG that gives you the option of a class who collects and summons monsters is an easy lock for me, even if it sucks compared to the status-inflicting or heavy-hitting guys. But better still are wide-open systems-based games where you can drop friendly monsters into the world and see what happens, and this is the kind that Zelda has.
It’s delightful from the moment you scan a cheerful little Zol, and from them on you can make sure there are always three friendly little goo guys bouncing around any given screen (or at least that’s what I did). And once I scanned a Peahat forget about it. That’s my go-to offensive summon for life, inflicting maximum psychological damage on errant Keese as it revs up its killer blades.
The system does have some peculiar lore implications though, in the same way some Mario RPGs give hopes and dreams to the creatures you generally squish without a second thought. Does a Moblin summoned by Tri remember things? It certainly acts intelligently enough and knows how to fight. Why is it motivated to defend Zelda? Does it have its own internal reflections, or is it purely a fleshy apparatus controlled by magic? The cute animations when a monster is surprised or recognise danger would seem to imply sentience. What happens when you despawn them, or they’re killed? Do they go back to stasis somewhere, or is your next summon an entire fresh slave? And given that question, are the monsters you ordinarily fight dying, or are they going back into Ganon’s collection of pawns?
It is funny that the game makes a point of retconning the nature of captured fairies (fairies now absolutely love jumping in bottles and will do so of their own accord when you’re nearby and have an empty one) when the entire main mechanic of the game consists of creating sentient life for your own purposes, and then snuffing it out as it suits you.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
The latest Magic The Gathering set is in stores today and it is great. I played some Duskmourn: House of Horror commander this week with the new Death Toll black/green deck and it plays so smoothly.
As you would expect from a horror-themed set released just in time for halloween, there is a lot of bringing things back from your graveyard, there are bird tokens, there’s death touch, and there’s vaguely unsettling art.
The big new mechanic for this set is Room Cards. Room Cards are basically like those sorcery cards with two options of spell where you could cast either half of the card. Room Cards are that, but with different words, and little bits of cardboard that say “locked” or “unlocked”, as well as having more card types available.
Card types are another thing that play into this set. Many cards have multiple card types on them, and triggers that happen when you cast or exile a certain number of card types.
This set also sees the return of the Archenemy format, which is a 1 vs 3 team format. Each of the commander decks this set come with a deck of Scheme cards, which are oversized cards for the “1” part of that 1V3 format. When I played the other day, I didn’t get a chance to play archenemy, and it’s one of the few formats I haven’t gotten around to trying in my last 12 years of playing, so I’m looking forward to it becoming more of a thing so I can give it a go.
While I really enjoy the art of Duskmourn, and the mechanics are fun enough, it’s just a solid MTG set. It’s not one of the sets that every player must try, but it’s also not bad. It’s business as usual. It’ll be interesting to see how it changes the standard meta, but I don’t imagine it’ll be a collection we’re still talking about in a decade.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
With September almost done, we’re around three quarters of the way through another year, and here are some games that just celebrated major anniversaries:
Now 30: System Shock Though not the very first example of what we would now call an immersive sim, System Shock was an early innovator in the genre that led directly to the likes of Thief II, Deus Ex and BioShock. It also became a big influence on walking simulator games, with its world devoid of NPCs and a story that’s gleaned through collectible emails and logs. And, of course, it brought us the rampant AI SHODAN as one of the first truly menacing game villains. The original is tough to play these days, but Night Dive’s 2023 remake is a great throwback PC immersive sim.
Also 30: Tekken At the time of its release, Tekken was one of very few 3D fighters in the arcades, and its similarities to the existing Virtua Fighter are likely not coincidental; Namco had hired a number of developers away from Sega, including the director of that pioneering game. But Tekken was different in several key ways. It implemented a unique control system where each of the four buttons controller a different limb for a start, and it was designed from the outset with home consoles in mind. While Virtua Fighter’s home conversions did well enough on the Saturn, Tekken was the first game to sell a million copies on PlayStation, and the series went on to become synonymous with the hardware.
Now 35: Ducktales There have been plenty of times where a video game being tied to a children’s cartoon was a sure indicator to skip it, but 1989 was not one of those times. Developed by Capcom’s Mega Man team, Ducktales is one of the NES’ finest platformers and the publisher’s best-selling game on that console. The jumping feels great and pairs well with Scrooge’s trademark cane pogo manoeuvre. Plus Mega Man and Ducktales (the show) share a love of diverse and heavily themed locations, so the team was able to create a great lineup of levels covering the Amazon, Transylvania, the Moon and more. Wayforward produced an excellent Xbox 360 remake, featuring the voices of some of the original cartoon cast, which you can play today on Xbox via backwards compatibility.