Ghost in the dude
Plus building house plants, Nintendo's Virtual Console, Tunic, and the games you should play this weekend.
It is yet another massive week in games, and frankly the industry needs to chill for a minute. This Friday sees the release of Ghostwire: Tokyo, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, all massive games, all plenty of fun, most worth waiting a little while for them to be discounted and have some bugs ironed out. Also, today Xbox announced a competition where you can win two of the most cursed fluffy Sonic-themed controllers you’ve ever seen. So, that’s something
In this week’s edition of Press Any Button, Alice plays Ghostwire: Tokyo and builds a houseplant, while Tim gets a new Tunic and compares Nintendo Switch Online to Virtual Console. Plus all the games you should play this weekend.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is familiar in multiple ways
By Alice
This past week I’ve been playing some Ghostwire: Tokyo, and while I’m not more than halfway through the game so far, I’m really enjoying it. The story begins by having everyone in the Shibuya district of Japan disappeared by sinister fog. We then follow protagonist Akito and the spirit possessing him as he goes about discovering what’s going on and fighting enemies that look like either a caricature of a spooky Japanese schoolgirl, or The Gentlemen from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
The vision of a deserted Shibuya district of Japan probably would have been more shocking pre-covid. After a couple of years living in the Melbourne CBD at a time where I taught my mum to ride a tricycle in the Bourke Street Mall because it was so empty, it just looks normal. I feel perfectly at home in an empty city. The developers have done a wonderful job of recreating the famous metropolis, which I have admittedly never visited, but is so ubiquitous in media I feel like I have.
Clearly the game had started development ages before covid, but it’s got me wondering how long it’s going to be before empty cities feel properly eerie again, and not just like a regular Monday. Obviously, memories of lockdown are already fading for our own self-preservation, but at this point I think I’d be more unnerved playing in a completely packed city than an empty one, and I don’t think that’s the vibe the developers were going for here.
As for whether I’d recommend the game, I’m not far enough through it yet to give a proper review, but I’m extremely intrigued by the story, characters and world. It’s slightly let down by repetitive gameplay, but so far I’d say if you enjoyed Infamous: Second Son, you’d probably enjoy Ghostwire: Tokyo.
What to play
If you’re feeling the need, the need for speed, and want to get in the mood for the Grand Prix, then you’ll be pleased to hear F1 2021 is coming to Xbox Game Pass tomorrow. While it’s not one of my (Alice’s) favourite racing games ever, it is an extremely good racing sim and is about as close as you'll get to driving an F1 car around Albert Park yourself.
Alto’s Adventure - Remastered is heading to Apple Arcade on Friday, and it’s a must play for subscribers. It’s a truly beautiful action puzzle game with incredible art. I wouldn’t exactly describe the gameplay as “soothing”, but the design and aesthetic certainly are, and sometimes that’s enough.
Those subscribing to the premium Expansion Pack version of Nintendo Switch Online have a few new things to play with. Most notably eight "remixed" courses have been added to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Highlights include Paris Promenade (adapted from the mobile game Mario Kart Tour), which changes the direction you drive around the Eiffel Tower each lap, a full redesign of the N64's Choco Mountain, a new coat of paint for the Wii's Coconut Mall, and the surprisingly excellent multi-level Ninja Hideaway, also from Tour. There are new games for the Sega Mega Drive app too: fan favourite shooters Alien Soldier and Super Fantasy Zone, and decrepit dungeon crawler Light Crusader.
And aside from retro games, another strong suit for the Switch is indie goodness. This week Nintendo is hosting a sale that puts so many amazing games from small teams into the $10–$20 range that I wouldn’t know where to begin listing them. But I will list some no-brainer pickups that have dipped below $10: Bastion and Transistor, two action RPGs from the team that would go on to make Hades; Pikuniku, which is a short and sunny adventure about a nefarious conspiracy; nostalgic Australian 3D puzzler The Gardens Between; arresting and visually intoxicating art platformer GRIS; dumb physics-based multiplayer Tetris-like Tricky Towers, and; What Remains of Edith Finch, the greatest walking simulator ever made.
By Tim
Last week saw the release of indie fox adventure Tunic on PC and Xbox Game Pass, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so surprised and blown away by a game I’d kept close tabs on for four years.
There’s a lot of discourse around the similarities to Zelda games, or Dark Souls, but grouping it with the hundreds of other games you could say that about does Tunic a disservice. Unlike Zelda, where a lot of the dungeons and challenges feel designed specifically for you to solve them, this is a world you don’t belong to. It’s hostile, but not in the Dark Souls sense of being oppositional or punishing. Rather in the sense that it’s beyond you; you can’t read its words, many of its treasures are stolen, its quests already failed.
Most strongly, at least for me, Tunic evokes a specific feeling from long ago that no other games manage. It’s the feeling of jumping into a game you don’t understand and can’t predict. A foreign game in a language you don’t speak, or a game for older players when you’re too young to read. Like a game my parents may have brought home from Cash Converters that I had no idea was a well regarded classic, or an unlabelled disk in a pile of pirated Commodore 64 games that ended up being an endless obsession for five-year-old me.
But Tunic is also filled with layers and complexities. The beautifully illustrated manual that you piece together from scattered pages for example (you can’t read it, but it has diagrams and maps), is at first a tool to help you learn the basics that you’re otherwise in the dark about, but eventually it’s revealed to be a sort of meta puzzle of its own, with a constant flow of penny-drop moments changing the way you think about and understand your journey.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
I’ve loved birds of paradise plants (also known as strelitzia) ever since I saw the film Imagine Me & You. In the movie, the romantic lead (played by Lena Headey, in a very different role to what Game of Thrones fans would expect) explains that they were named after Charlotte of Strelitz, who had a great and implausible love story with King George III. I do love a flower with backstory.
In reality, though, birds of paradise grow to be freaking massive and get infested with scale, so they have to be meticulously cleaned every few months. After selling our real strelitzia, the Lego version seemed like a better choice.
Whether you’re also a fan of flowers that tell a story, or are just really bad at keeping real flowers alive, the Lego Botanicals collection has presented some truly spectacular, easy-to-display sets, and the Bird of Paradise set doesn’t disappoint. I built it across two evenings in front of the TV, and really loved how the instruction booklet was presented, and how it catered to building proficiencies of all levels without making it childish or being condescending.
Most of the interesting building is in the pot, which has quite intricate inner workings and is then completely hidden. Building the actual plant itself is uncomplicated and a bit mindless, yet utterly enjoyable when trying to relax after a tough day. I built mine after a particularly challenging week and it brought me great comfort.
If you’ve already built other sets from the Botanical collection, I’d place it somewhere between the Bonsai and Flower Bouquet in terms of difficulty and build technique. It will also look just lovely displayed in your home, or given as a gift to someone you love.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Nintendo's Wii is best known for its revolutionary motion controls, and its role in widening the popularity of video games in general to people who had previously never even considered picking up a controller. But it kicked off another important revolution too, in digital re-releases of classic games.
Back in 2005 when we were getting our first solid details about the company's GameCube follow-up, Nintendo stated its next console would run games from its entire historic collection of home systems, as well as those of former competitors. And it followed through, with Virtual Console.
At launch you could buy a handful of NES, SNES, N64, Mega Drive and PC Engine games to play on your Wii, and new titles were added every week. It was an unprecedented online store, and was popular enough that eventually we got Master System, Neo Geo, Commodore 64 and Arcade titles too.
Many have opined that Nintendo's own modern-day implementation, the Nintendo Switch Online subscription, is far inferior to the VC. But times have changed, and these days Nintendo could never convince the likes of Capcom, Konami or Square to participate in an à la carte store when they could be packaging their classics together for bigger profits. And considering some VC games would set you back more than $10 (and are now essentially inaccessible), I think NSO is becoming better value every month.
For $30 a year you currently get 89 NES games and 59 SNES games (plus online play and cloud saves). Or for $60 a year you get that plus 13 N64 and 22 Mega Drive games, and counting, plus DLC for Switch games. For that same price I only would have got seven VC games per year, and on NSO they have online multiplayer.
It may not be as expansive or revolutionary as Virtual Console, but NSO is an excellent way to play Super Metroid, Streets of Rage II, Mario 64 or dozens of games you may not have tried before at home or on the go.
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