Gran Turismo has started to spark joy
Plus whether you should build your own piano, the value of Nintendo’s Expansion Pack, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night turns 25.
Welcome to another issue of Press Any Button. This week we’re talking about Gran Turismo, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, video game subscriptions, Lego, and all the deals and games you need for this weekend.
This period of constant major video game releases is certainly coming to a middle, with WWE 2K22 dropping this week along with Chocobo GP and the long-awaited Dawn of Ragnarok DLC for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. It’s an eclectic week, to be sure, and as usual you can wait for all of them to go have the bugs ironed out and go on sale before picking them up.
We are always keen to hear your feedback on all things Press Any Button. Please leave a comment or reply, or hit us up on Twitter at @timbiggs, @alicedkc or @_pressanybutton and tell us if there’s anything you want to see more or less of.
Gran Turismo finally wants you to have fun
By Alice
As a racing game fan, people assume that I’ll be super into games like Gran Turismo, but that’s generally not the case. I didn’t fall in love with Forza Motorsport 2 because it was some perfect simulator, but because it was so much fun to race with friends and try to find the perfect angle to crash at in the New York course so I didn’t have to brake for turns.
I’ve hated previous iterations of Gran Turismo because they seemed to emphasise all the things that made racing difficult instead of the parts that made you feel like you were flying. Like, driving a Ferrari in real life is nowhere near as difficult as GT games make it out to be. A Lamborghini, maybe, those are uncomfortable as hell, but Ferraris, McLarens and Bugattis are much smoother and more comfortable, even at high speeds. Forza Motorsport doesn’t quite nail it either, but at least it errs on the side of fun rather than difficulty.
That emphasis is still there in the new Gran Turismo 7, but this time there is a token gesture towards fun with the new arcade-style Music Rally mode and the menu system of having to bounce between cafes, race tracks and other stuff in one giant town. I usually hate when a game unnecessarily makes you go through lots of different graphic heavy menus to do anything because it delays you from actually doing the thing the game is about, yet it’s been a week and I still find it charming. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Playing Forza Motorsport 7 and Gran Turismo 7 back to back finally made me realise another interesting difference between the two franchises: Forza Motorsport is all about the prestige of racing. “Look at how fancy, expensive and exclusive these cars are. Let’s drive around a track listening to the most pompous classical music possible while spitting on the peasants in the stands” is the general vibe. Meanwhile, Gran Turismo 7 is more about the technical achievement of cars. “Aren’t cars amazing and cool and difficult to drive at high speeds? Watch this video taking you through what humans have done since cars were invented, seemingly in real time.”
Both approaches are fine, but they make for very different racing experiences.
What to play
Monument Valley II hits Apple Arcade on Friday, and having played Monument Valley 2 (the $8 version), it is an absolute must play. Monument Valley is a stunning puzzle game that is considered a classic for very good reason.
Cities Skylines will be free on the Epic Games Store for a week from Friday, and it’s definitely worth picking up at that price. It’s a really great city Sim that isn’t quite as good as Sim City, but is still worth investing some time if that’s a genre you’re into.
Tomorrow Game Pass is adding Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a major get given it’s a full-priced game that was released less than half a year ago. More importantly though it’s an incredible experience, even if you’re not someone who pays attention to the Marvel zeitgeist. A singleplayer ensemble adventure from the team behind Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, you play as Star Lord and leverage your powers of diplomacy to hold together a rag-tag group of killers and ex-cons gone good as you explore planets, engage in lightly tactical gun combat and dismantle a universe-threatening plot. But the real highlight is the constant hilarious banter. It’s a really well-written action game.
Also tomorrow on the Game Pass front, Americana magical realism point-and-click Kentucky Route Zero is being added. I know that’s a lot of wanky buzzwords that could easily indicate a game with huge artistic ambition and not much else, and it is true that this is more an interactive narrative than a quote-unquote game. But it is also a uniquely profound interactive narrative, weaving together a number of poetic stories about the endless injustices of a world run by and for the mega rich.
Incalculable value
By Tim
Gaming subscriptions are all the rage, and can seem like a no brainer to sign up when you look at what's included versus what the cost is. But, especially if money's tight and/or you're looking at multiple subs, doing a truly accurate value calculation can be complicated.
Look at Xbox Game Pass, where $11 per month currently gets you access to more than 350 games. By pure division that's like three and a half cents per game per month.
But as much as our monkey brains love that kind of calculation, the real indicator of value remains how much enjoyment you get out of the service.
Are you actively finding things to play, or are you just paying money to keep your options open? And how do you quantify $11 worth of gaming anyway?
The calculus is even weirder with Nintendo's Expansion Pack, a service that gets you additional content for games you've paid for.
The pack is an extra $30 per year on top of the $30 you already pay for Switch Online, adding Nintendo 64 and Sega Mega Drive games, the Animal Crossing Happy Home Paradise expansion and a roster of 48 new Mario Kart courses that begin slowly rolling out this month.
Purchased separately the AC and MK add-ons cost $37.50 each, which makes $30 per year seem ok.
Value is different for each of us, and if paying $11 per month means you wouldn’t have budget left for the four $100 games you really want to play each year, Game Pass isn’t worth it no matter how many titles it includes.
But to be honest I think Nintendo’s model is a little bit more dangerous. If you subscribe for those Mario Kart tracks, you’re trusting the company to announce more value for the subscription in the future. Otherwise you’ll end up paying $30 per year over multiple years to keep Toad Circuit, wishing you’d just bought the DLC outright.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Last week I talked about why the Lego Ideas program is so amazing for Lego and Lego fans alike and mentioned that I’ve been building the Ideas Piano for a bit more than two months now. Well, that was the final push I needed to complete the beast, and the finished model has truly exceeded my already very high expectations.
The Ideas Piano was originally proposed by Sydney-sider Donny Chen, and it’s so easy to see the love both he and the professional Lego designers have for the instrument.
At $530 for 3662 pieces, it’s well outside my usual 10c per piece estimation of value. But, the inclusion of a Powered Up motor and battery pack that connects to your phone so you can “play” music on the keys or turn it into a player piano that moves the physical keys along to a piece of music playing from your phone’s speakermakes up for that value discrepancy. It’s also frequently 20% off at places like Myer (never pay full price for Lego).
At times it was a really challenging build, and I will admit to saying more than my share of swear words as random bits crumbled at inopportune moments. But what struck me the most was how the designers employed so many simple techniques to get breathtaking results. The mechanism of the keys is just a basic seesaw lever, with hammers over the top so it’s less likely to get stuck down, yet it works perfectly.
There’s also just the little details, like the adjustable bench, the wheels on the bottom that actually move, and the little music stand built into the lid like a real piano, not to mention the working pedals.
For me, this is a much more impressive set than the Taj Mahal or Colosseum, despite those having significantly larger piece counts, just because of the creativity on display. I highly recommend it to musical Lego fans.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
This month marks the 25th anniversary of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a wonderful and historically important game.
Symphony took the classic sidescrolling action and supernatural enemies of Castlevania, but mixed it with the exploratory gated progression popularised by Super Metroid. Our hero Alucard (I still can’t believe they got away with that name) is limited in where he can go until he acquires certain items, or learns how to become mist, for example.
In a now-famous twist, the game features a false ending where achieving your initial goal reveals you’re only halfway through, turning the castle upside down to create new obstacles and challenges.
But Symphony of the Night was not an instant hit. The PlayStation was a miraculous mainstream success, thanks almost entirely to the advent of massive 3D worlds and comparatively realistic graphics. Its biggest hits at the time were Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot and (in Japan) Final Fantasy VII. So even though Symphony of the Night enjoyed positive reviews, its 2D look and classic vibe made it seem dated.
These days of course 2D adventures are incredibly popular. And while that likely would have happened without Symphony of the Night, the game (which became a cult favourite and would inspire a subgenre widely known as “Metroidvania”) was a huge part of the late 2000s indie boom that brought sidescrolling back to relevance.
The game is well worth playing today, and is readily available as long as you don’t want it on Switch. On Xbox you can get a version of the original for $10. On PlayStation you have to get it as half of the $25 Castlevania Requiem (alongside Rondo of Blood), and this version features a different English translation to the PS1, designed to bring the script closer in meaning to the Japanese.