Half baked, and yet still pretty good
Plus E3 is dead, Lego's hidden secrets, and mascot platformers
Hello Button Pushers, and welcome to another week of games!
This week Alice finds out what’s wrong with Roller Champions while deeply wishing the sport existed in real life (I would break so many bones, but I think it would be worth it) and gets emotional about Lego’s hidden gems. Meanwhile, Tim ponders the death of E3 and considers the legacy of mascot platformers. Plus, all our recommendations to have you looking forward to the weekend.
Enjoy!
Half baked and yet still delicious (like cookie dough)
By Alice
One of the most frustrating things about live service games and modern games in general is the urgency with which publishers push them out of the nest, whether they’re done or not. It’s almost made it so that there’s no point in playing new games for at least the first month while you let other people find all the bugs.
But, in the case of online multiplayer games, waiting that long can often mean the game dies before it has a chance to flourish, or everyone else levels up their skills too fast and there’s no room for new players anymore.
In the case of Roller Champions, the problem isn’t that it didn’t have enough time in development – I’ve been looking forward to it since it was announced three years ago – but simply that someone in the decision making chain forgot the value of teamwork. A 3v3 game like Roller Champions is horrible if people aren’t actively encouraged to play as a team. In betas, the game is often just played by a dedicated group who love the game, so the problems aren’t as apparent, and the development team would be playing as friends, so they wouldn’t see the issue.
At launch, the most rewards were given to players who scored goals, which makes sense. But in a game based on basketball and roller derby, it’s almost criminal that there were no rewards for assists, successful passes or tackling ball handlers. This just encourages individual players to be selfish, making the game boring.
Being a live service game, there is plenty of time for these things to change, given all the team will learn during season 0. I wish it had been released fully formed, and that lootballs weren’t a thing, and that there were more rewards on the free tier.
It’s still good, it’s just not quite done baking yet.
What to play
This Friday Apple Arcade subscribers will get access to Frogger and the Rumbling Ruins. It seems to be a bit of a ‘Frogger meets Temple Run’ kind of mobile game, which is exactly at the intersection of my (Alice’s) mobile interests. There’s also an axolotl, for some reason, so that’s nice.
Diablo Immortal is launching on Friday for phones and PC. You may remember this game from the time when Blizzard came very close to inciting its own biggest fans to burn down its convention for turning Diablo into a mobile-centric, loot-box-driven, free-to-play MMO. That said, all Diablo games to date have been amazing, so it’s surely worth a shot.
It’s a new month so time to check out the online subscription freebies, although we’re coming in a little bit early this time given it’s still May in America. Microsoft has just announced the June Games With Gold, which includes alien city builder Aven Colony as well as classic brutal platformer Super Meat Boy. In a few weeks they’ll be joined by normal human city builder Project Highrise and another classic platformer Raskulls. Sony hasn’t put out its news yet but the reliable French leakers at Dealabs say PS+ will this month offer fighting games Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl and Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker, plus 2018’s epic God of War ahead of this year’s sequel.
New this week on Game Pass is a special edition of Ubisoft melee brawler For Honor, but more exciting is Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection, which includes the full 2000s-era trilogy of punishing, fast-slashing action.
For Switch Online members, there are two new games in the Super Nintendo app. Congo’s Caper is an underrated platformer starring a half-human half-monkey cave kid but there are also demons, while Rival Turf is a pretty forgettable Final Fight clone. Its superior sequels, Brawl Brothers and The Peace Keepers, are already on the service. There's also one new game in the NES app: Pinball, a game from the mystical land of 1985 where you could simply name your game the thing that it was.
June is still the designated month of hype
By Tim
I was fortunate enough to attend several E3 shows in Los Angeles in the before-times, and previous to that I routinely lived my life out-of-timezone during that special week in the middle of the year where the games industry all came together in an explosion of hype trailers and announcements and demos (and, inexplicably, promotional ghost houses). So June has felt weird every year since that last proper E3 in 2019.
This year there isn’t even a pretend online event to take its place, and for the first time it feels like the big game announcement festival may be dying in spirit as well as in corporeal form. But it’s not completely gone yet.
Sony’s announced a 30-minute presentation for this Friday, although far from the live orchestras and megaton announcements of the past it says this stream will focus on third-party games and PSVR 2 details, implying the big guns are being held for later in the year.
Sega’s got something coming on Friday as well, although it could be literally anything at this point, and Nintendo hasn’t said anything about a June announcement at all. Microsoft’s the lone big name sticking completely to its usual mid-year gameplan, with an Xbox showcase event for its upcoming games scheduled for June 13.
But in place of the physical show floor and press-only merch and awful convention food and insanely expensive live presentations, we now get a more diverse array of June streams for game announcements. Geoff Keighly of the Game Awards has the Summer Game Fest on June 10, Netflix has its own games show on June 11, and we’ll get our fill of indies with the Guerilla Collective, Future Games Show and Wholesome Games Direct all on June 12.
To be honest, for 90 per cent of video game fans, I’m not sure that June in a post-E3 world feels all that different. But selfishly there is a Luigi’s Mansion themed ghost hotel shaped hole in my heart, and I’m mourning for a special kind of magic that put an entire year’s worth of excitement and a lot of my favourite people in one physical space for one ridiculous three-day marathon.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
As an adult, we really only get to experience half the fun of a Lego set. The building is wonderful, but then it sits on a shelf instead of being played with, because either our imaginations aren’t as free as they were when we were children, or we’re just too stressed from the everything to let ourselves enjoy our creations.
Some of the enjoyment I derive from a set after it’s built is knowing the secrets within. Stuff like the first Mario level being hidden in the SNES set, or the activities of people in the Modular Police Station.
Back when the adult Creator Expert sets were first being released, Market Street and Café Corner didn’t have interiors. They were pure display pieces with nothing going on inside. That’s slowly evolved over the years to the point now where we not only get to see the full use of the buildings like the Assembly Square or Brick Bank, but there are those lovely little hidden details that probably no one will see again.
I finished the Fender Stratocaster set on the weekend, and I had assumed that the amp would be a mere shell, just there to bump the piece count and make it a bigger display piece. But I took such delight at the difficulty and intricacy of the circuit board that was almost immediately sealed up. Much like that level hidden in the SNES, it’ll only be seen again when someone dismantles the set, but it was such a loving detail that it made me feel a little emotional about the care this designer put into a set.
At the end of the build the builder is instructed to throw three colourful wedge tiles into the amp as well, to signify guitar picks.
I might not play with my Lego sets, but I know the secrets they hold, and sometimes that’s enough.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
I’ve been playing the Kao the Kangaroo reboot, and it’s fine. A totally functional 3D collectathon platformer straight out of 2000, but with modern looks. There are heaps of glitches, the story is non-existent and the voice acting sucks. Like I said, straight out of 2000.
But the game got me thinking about mascot platformers. Pairing a kooky animal with an offbeat profession or ability, and adding some attitude, was the thing to do for almost a decade before the industry (and players) became thoroughly tired of the idea. Many of these mascots made big splashes at the time but, outside of Sonic and a bunch of Nintendo characters, most are now forgotten. And for good reason.
Almost all of the kamikaze squirrels, secret agent fish, skateboarding dinosaurs, wise-talking bobcats and eco-terrorist possums deserve to be forgotten, because the quirky protagonist was all their games had going for them.
That applies as well for legions of low-effort “cool” mascots with assonant names like Punky Skunk or Rocky Rodent, and characters that just got shortened versions of what the animal is called, like Gex and Croc. They’re not even all animals; there’s also an anthropomorphic pencil, and literally just a glove, not to mention whatever the hell Zool is.
But there are gems in the genre that totally deserve another look in 2022. I’m quite partial to Psycho Fox, which is a super-early example of the genre from 1989 where you take control of a little ginger mammal with the ability to transform into a monkey, hippo or tiger. It’s a similar premise (though a very different design) to 1992’s Rolo to the Rescue, which is also good and stars an elephant.
And then of course there’s Sparkster, the opossum who starred in the incredible 1993 Rocket Knight Adventures and its 1994 sequel, Sparkster. The stretchy-armed Ristar has also held up well.
And stop me if this final one’s too niche (just kidding, I will not stop), but I’ve only recently discovered Tryrush Deppy (pictured). It’s a Japan-only Sega Saturn exclusive starring an anthropomorphic taxi that walks on his rear wheels instead of driving, and it rules.