Welcome back Button Buddies!
This has been a big week in games, mostly in a bad way because the festival of redundancies has continued with people being let go from PlayStation, EA and Supermassive Games. According to Kotaku US, we’re now 60 days into the year, and over 8300 people have been made redundant. It’s shocking that this is coming at a time when games take longer to make, requiring more people, and most of these studios are incredibly successful, creating record profits for shareholders. One wonders how the industry can survive a blood letting this intense, who would dedicate themselves to making games when the pay is low, the hours are terrible, and the job security is non-existent. Now would be a good time to join your union, or create one.
On a happier note, this week Tim has been playing the latest Final Fantasy remake and loving it, while Alice is considering giving FIFA another chance. Plus, Ticket To Ride, feeling old, and what you should play this weekend.
Enjoy!
A different Behemoth entirely
By Tim
As someone who enjoyed Final Fantasy VII Remake but wasn’t head over heels in love with it, I’ve been progressively more blown away the longer I’ve spent with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. This is not merely a second part to the 2021 game, but a distinct experience that feels radically different in its setup and systems.
While Remake followed a generally linear path with some off-the-beaten-path exploring, Rebirth is largely open world. And while the various activities and possibilities are intimidating at first, it becomes incredibly satisfying to break down the map region by region and scour it for content.
There are hidden Moogle villages to discover, endless data to collect which turns into new Materia, shrines to visit that give access to regional summons, treasure chests to hunt, special enemies to fight and of course standard objective-based quests. It all feels natural and related to the core crew and their story, but the exploration makes everything that much more interesting. At various points you also get locked into a town or area for more linear sections, which works well.
The combat, too, is hugely expanded. Every character has a sprawling skill tree to master, but the most interesting bits are the synergy moves. Once unlocked you can perform these with a compatible combo of characters, but only when each has fulfilled the right criteria. Together with abilities, summons and limit breaks, it gives fights a feeling of tiered objectives or goals rather than just repetitive bashing. All the Materia thrown your way also makes it easy (and for some boss battles, mandatory) to completely respec your characters.
And finally, Rebirth includes easily the best in-game collectible card minigame since Final Fantasy VIII’s Triple Triad. With hundreds of cards to collect and heaps of strategic options, it’s addictive and gratifying. I only wish I could play it whenever I liked, rather than seeking out new opponents.
What to play
This week on the Epic Games Store is Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield. Automatically I’m (Alice) prone to judge the game based on the unnecessary underscore, but it actually looks like a pretty neat side-scrolling game. I’m looking forward to playing it a bit over the weekend.
This week on Apple Arcade there is a new crossover between Sneaky Sasquatch and What The Car? and as both of those games are excellent, I (Alice) can only imagine that combining the two will be even more excellent. It’s available in What The Car? now.
Returning to Game Pass this week is excellent platforming action-RPG Indivisible, as well as lunatic shark sim Maneater. New to the service is voxel sci-fi sandbox game Space Engineers.
The sales never stop over on Steam, but there were a few big names that caught my (Tim’s) eye on my scroll through this morning. The PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn is currently down at $19, Monster Hunter World is at $15, and the platinum version of Civilization VI is a whopping 91% off, which makes it $22.
Soccer is good, actually (I’m as surprised as you are)
By Alice
After years of hating on FIFA games for being unrealistic, and soccer having a field that is too large with too many players to properly translate to a video game, I think I owe it a small apology. See, I have gotten into soccer. I don’t know how it happened. One minute I was all basketball, all the time. The next I was watching every televised game of the Women’s World Cup and subscribing to Optus Sport so I could see the games that weren’t on channel 10. Now I’m still watching all the Matildas games, and strongly considering finding ways to watch the rest of the countries Olympic qualifying games, perhaps even just random international friendlies.
However, none of that made me feel the urge to play the FIFA/EA FC video games too much, until the Australia v Uzbekistan game on Wednesday.
The whole thing played like The Matildas accidentally set the CPU difficulty too easy in the first half, and then they turned it up a little for the second half. The 8 goals in the first half reminded me of when I used to play FIFA more often for work (only, I was Uzbekistan, in this reminiscence).
This reminded me that having the difficulty turned down is fine if it makes a game fun for you. You don’t have to play any game on the hardest difficulty to give yourself a real challenge, unless that’s the kind of challenge you want on the day.
Perhaps my dislike of FIFA lay in 1. Not enjoying soccer. And 2. Feeling like I had to git gud before I even found any passion for the game.
Whether turning down the difficulty has the desired effect remains to be seen. But perhaps now that I’m no longer looking at the game from the perspective of an objective observer, and instead have some passion behind it, I’m looking forward to diving into EA FC 24 and seeing how my experience changes. However, given The Matildas don’t feature in the new game, I’m going to have to find a club team I can enjoy, which is a new challenge in itself.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Last week I said I would come back soon with a proper review of Ticket To Ride: Legends of the West. It’s a difficult game to review without giving any spoilers for the full experience, and it’s the kind of thing you need to go into without knowing what’s coming. The surprise and delight of the odd mechanics and mini-games is a key part of what made the experience sing for me. It’s a game that I wish did not end, I wish there were still more parts to discover and themes to come and go. Each part of it is really well designed and thought out. It’s for people who enjoyed regular Ticket to Ride but wanted more (and wanted to make their friends play more, too). At $200, it is very expensive for a game you’ll probably only play 12 times (maybe you’ll do a 13th post campaign game as a token gesture, but it’s more cumbersome than the vanilla version almost everyone who plays this game will certainly have).
Playing Legends of the West has given me the inspiration to start a new quest: I want to play every version of Ticket To Ride available in Australia. Excluding kids versions, but including card games and expansions, there have been 35 versions of Ticket To Ride released, though not all of them are currently available, and not all of them were ever available in Australia. This seems like a doable and enjoyable quest to do in 2024. Well, enjoyable for me, I guess. We’ll see how my wife and friends handle playing more than a dozen versions of the same game.
I want to see how many of the aspects of Legends of the West were fully unique to that game, and whether any of the mini games or themes were borrowed from or inspired by other versions. I also just want to see how different such a classic and straight forward game can get, aside from just doing maps from other countries. This is going to be fun. Watch this space.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Here are the games that officially became old in February 2024.
Now 25: Final Fantasy VIII A black sheep of the series perhaps, but it’s my personal favourite Final Fantasy and I’m the one who chooses which games get highlighted here. The cutscenes and orchestral score blew my mind and were marked improvements from the much-celebrated VII, while the main characters being conflicted school kids trained for war spoke to me more than the steampunk eco-terrorists of Cloud and co. The narrative is completely bonkers and some of the systems are annoying and exploitable, but I honestly believe it has some of the greatest locations, sequences and collectible card game side quests of any RPG ever, and it’s 100 percent chock filled with the weepy sentimentality that teenage me secretly craved.
Now 30: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 A cynic might argue that Sega’s decision to split the blockbuster third Sonic into two parts, both released in 1994, was merely a way to charge double the price while obfuscating the move with marketing BS like “lock-on technology”. But it’s hard to be cynical about Sonic 3; a game that somehow feels bigger, grander and more epic than its predecessors despite coming with effectively half the zones. The music is more modern, the power-ups more numerous, and everything cool about Sonic 2 — the Death Egg, the Chaos Emeralds, weird level gimmicks — is back and amped up. These days it’s hard to separate Sonic 3 from Sonic & Knuckles, as together they form a cohesive story and a massive true sequel. But this game was a hell of a first half.
Now 35: SimCity Will Wright was inspired to create SimCity after discovering he enjoyed tinkering with custom maps in games more than any other part, which I relate to, as well as a passion for hardcore urban planning principles, which is kind of where he loses me. This was a new kind of game where there’s no real win or lose state, and it introduced the gaming public at large to the infectious infatuations that city sims alone can provide. Although for folks like me, who can barely stay focused long enough to type “high-density residential zone” let alone manage one and expand a city with a cohesive power grid and sensible mass transit over dozens of hours, there was also a Scenario mode that let you focus on fixing Tokyo after a Godzilla attack.