Emulators Are Good, Actually
Plus: new Magic The Gathering, old Ticket To Ride, and older Mario games you’ve forgotten about
Happy Friday Button Buddies!
This week the newsletter is all about old games and good card/board games, so at least we’re staying consistent. Alice is back on the Magic the Gathering and Ticket To Ride band wagons, while Tim writes about the importance of emulators and the Mario games you might have forgotten about.
Have a great weekend!
New Magic The Gathering smacks of desperation, but also creativity
By Alice
It’s difficult to tell whether this new trend of Wizards of the Coast releasing more Magic the Gathering sets each year, with more partnerships with other kinds of media than ever, is a sign of desperation or success. I’ve played Magic for around 12 years, and for most of that first decade, crossovers were limited to Dungeons and Dragons or Secret Lair limited card drops. But in the last two years there’s been Stranger Things, Transformers, Jurassic Park, Doctor Who, The Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40,000, Street Fighter, and more as part of the Universes Beyond series.
The latest crossover is out this week, and it’s themed around Fallout. One thing that I’m really loving about Universes Beyond is the glee and love you can feel radiating off these cards. The designers are clearly heavily invested in most of the stories they’re crossing over with. That feels particularly strong in this latest Fallout set. The little flavour text touches and artwork. The deck I played at the preview event was the Dogmeat commander deck, which I primarily chose as it’s the only of the commander decks with both green and white (I have a brand to maintain, afterall, and there’s no way I’m touching blue).
The mechanics of radiation counters, Junk tokens, and just having Dogmeat be the goodest boy felt right. I will admit that while I have played and enjoyed games in the Fallout series, my knowledge of them is lacking, but from this perspective it felt like Wizards got the vibe right. From a Magic player’s perspective, there are a few cards in there that I might put in my other commander decks. I think that’s a good balance for the designers to make, and it has to be an extremely difficult balance for them to find.
We should all brace for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed and Final Fantasy-themed sets, as they’re going to bring a lot of excited new players to the game (which is good). But I think Wizards has now shown that they can be trusted to make these crossovers work, while keeping the integrity. I’m keen to see what happens next, and I’d like to take this opportunity to request a Grey’s Anatomy crossover. We can make this happen.
What to play
New on Game Pass is the incredible Control: Ultimate Edition, which packs the next-gen version of the game and all the DLC. If you played and enjoyed Alan Wake 2 but missed Control, it’s absolutely worth going back for. It’s joined by SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated — a remake of the fan favourite 2003 3D platformer — and silly slasher No More Heroes III.
The Sims 4 briefly had an issue with the new Crystal Creations expansion that meant that Sims became quite warped (like a weird Bratz doll) the more they put on and took off created jewellery. This was bad for players who accidentally ruined their important Sims and now can’t undo it. But if you haven’t had a chance to update your game yet, now is the time to play (without updating) if you want to create some truly disconcerting Sims.
Free on the Epic Games Store this week are Deus-Ex: Mankind Divided and The Bridge. Deus-Ex is obviously a legendary series in gaming, and this one is set in the far flung future of 2029. Whether you’ve played them before or not, both these games are worth claiming for free while the opportunity’s there.
Nintendo finds Yuzu sour
By Tim
The recent fate of the Yuzu Switch emulator, whose developers are now abandoning their work and paying Nintendo $3.6 million after a legal challenge, has me once again considering the ethics of emulation.
In terms of Kantian ethics, pirating a copy of a new game before it’s even released is a clear no-no. If everyone did it the entire industry would be undermined and no further games could be produced. Pirating an available game instead of buying it is also hard to justify, for similar reasons. Getting a game you want for free because you think it’s priced too high, or you don’t like the terms of the sale, isn’t ethical.
So what about old, retired games you can’t actually buy? Nintendo would surely argue that even downloading a copy of Mach Rider from 1985 for personal use is harmful to its business, and the law certainly agrees; it’s illegal just like downloading a new game. But if everyone who wanted a copy of that game downloaded it for free, there would be no major impact. Even if people downloaded the entire NES library, I don’t think it cost Nintendo a single dollar. If, on the other hand, someone hacked a Switch to install all those NES games on it, as an alternative to the paid Switch Online service, that would cross an ethical line.
The development of emulators and the decompiling of software has some altruistic merit, enabling cultural works to be preserved by people who care about them (rather than the often cold corporate entities that own the rights to them). And it also enables communities to form around mods, hack and add-ons, made by passionate creators who are talented but wouldn’t be able to make such games starting from scratch on their own. But I think a lot of the ethical questions have to do with context, and whether the piracy provides a free alternative that interferes with the rights holder’s money.
The development of a Sonic the Hedgehog fan game built on Sega ROMs might do no harm at all, but if it’s sold on a storefront next to authorised Sonic games that would be a problem. Yuzu, like emulators and tools for other current systems, might enable work and development now that will be invaluable later, especially as content on digital stores has a tendency to get flushed down the drain at a certain point. But as Nintendo pointed out, it also allowed for millions of copies of brand new games to be played with nobody paying for them, which is one of the few things our overdone copyright laws actually should prevent.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Part of playing every version of Ticket To Ride this year means going back and rediscovering the original versions of the game, which first got me into the series. So, before I start talking about the versions of TTR that get more creative, let’s talk about the vanilla original.
The main version of the game that everyone thinks of when they hear “Ticket To Ride” is the original, USA board of the game. It’s one of the main gateway drugs to board games that are actually good. You grow up with Monopoly and Cluedo, and then discover Ticket To Ride, Catan and Carcassonne and realise that there’s more to life.
The USA board is TTR at its most simple. You collect tickets and train cards, and play routes to achieve your objectives. There is an element of chance involved with the card draw, but there’s more of an emphasis on skill, with it being an easy skill to learn. It’s the kind of game you can whip out at a dinner party and have everyone comfortably playing in 20 minutes because the rules are uncomplicated.
There are a few different ways to play: focus on finishing your tickets and going for the longest continuous line of trains, focus on completing as many tickets as possible, playing as a spoiler and trying to ruin the routes of others and just trying to get points from longer routes. The unspoken rule in our house is that we don’t play as spoilers, because that kind of setting out to ruin someone else’s game rather than focusing on your own just seems mean spirited and means someone probably won’t have fun, though that could be different in your play group.
My preferred strategy is to get at least one really long ticket that takes me across the board, and then keep drawing more and more tickets until I have plenty that are along the way. We also draw around 30 train cards each before one of us breaks and starts placing trains. It’s a solid, yet somewhat versatile game that’s good to get a handle on before you start venturing out to Europe, Germany, or one of the other versions. I’ve mostly played two-player, but five-player is its own special kind of chaos.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
This past weekend was Mario Day and, while it might be a forced and cynical corporate holiday, who doesn’t like an excuse to celebrate one of the finest platforming series there is? I thought I’d use the opportunity to highlight some of the best entries that have fallen by the wayside; while most of the core Super Mario games are currently playable on Switch, here are the notable exceptions through 2014:
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe The GBA remakes of Mario games are included on Nintendo Switch Online, but not this Game Boy Color take on the original Super Mario Bros. Which is a shame, because it makes genuinely worthwhile additions like unlockable bonuses, hidden red coins in every level, high score challenges and even a cohesive world map.
Mario 64 DS Since the original game was famed for its use of the N64’s control stick, playing it on a d-pad is a rough time. But this version of the classic added new playable characters, heaps of new stars and interesting multiplayer options, which all deserve to be preserved in some form, even if it’s not a straight emulation of the DS cartridge.
New Super Mario Bros. Though you can play the most recent game on Switch, the rest of the series — the entries from the DS, Wii and 3DS — are all stuck on their respective systems. And as samey as the series is, that still means there are levels, powerups and modes that risk being lost to time. Including Shell Mario!
Super Mario Galaxy 2 This is a big one, as it’s arguably the finest 3D Mario there’s ever been. The first Mario Galaxy was included in 3D All-Stars for Switch — you know, the one that Nintendo sold for a few months and then delisted for literally no reason — but the expanded and improved sequel remains locked to Wii. The people demand Blimp Yoshi.
Super Mario 3D Land Very few 3DS games have made it across to Switch, which is understandable given how different the hardware is. But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept that this excellent 2011 adventure is virtually impossible for most people to play today. Package this, Galaxy 2 and 64 DS into a second 3D All-Stars and sell it for only six days if you need to Nintendo. I might be the only one who buys it, but that’s never stopped you before!