Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 - Turbocharged is the Forza Horizon 5 your mum says you have at home
Plus new Sonic doesn't care about old people, Animal Crossing Lego is coming, and games Tim thinks Microsoft should resurrect
Hello Friends!
Welcome to a new issue of Press Any Button.
This week, Alice has opinions about the new Hot Wheels game, and Animal Crossing Lego. Meanwhile, Tim played the new Sonic and looks back at the Activision Blizzard games Microsoft should resurrect. Plus, all the games you should play this weekend.
Enjoy!
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 - Turbocharged is better than other licensed tie-in games
By Alice
Everyone who likes cars as a concept loves Hot Wheels cars. Every 80s and 90s kid has some kind of important childhood memory involving one of these little diecast cars. Everyone also loves sweeping generalisations.
As a Forza Horizon fan, I also have a lot of extremely positive feelings about Hot Wheels cars in video games. Both Horizons 3 and 5 do a great job of recreating that feeling of sitting on the floor and pretending that these cars are life size and gravity means nothing.
It's why I was excited to review Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 - Turbocharged.
To get the elephant out of the room: it’s a licenced game aimed at children. It lacks the sophistication and polish of a AAA title like Horizon, and it’s also about $40 cheaper, which balances things out. That said, it’s not as bad as most other licenced tie-ins out there. It plays solidly, if jankily.
The main focus has been on recreating the Hot Wheels cars perfectly, and while the car range isn’t as broad as I would like (given how many Hot Wheels there are to draw from), the cars look superb.
Unfortunately, the experience of driving them is very hit and miss. The focus for this game is on drifting to fill up a boost bar, and unfortunately drifting some half the car classes is the most annoying thing of all time. I love drifting around the final corner, lightly hitting a side wall, and then having the other 11 cars immediately overtake me. So fun. I’m not entirely sure whether the difficulty level matches up with the target audience, but maybe the children yearn to git gud.
The different tracks are a lot of fun, I particularly like the dinosaur and backyard tracks. I don’t love the cameras, because I did end up feeling a bit seasick after half an hour of play.
Overall, it’s a decent game, not the best ever, but worth picking up for die-hard fans, and bargain bin shoppers.
What to play
There’s currently a couple of free games in the Epic Games Store this week: Blazing Sails Battle Royale and Q.U.B.E. Ultimate Bundle. My (Alice) pick of those would be QUBE, but pick both up, because why not?
My (Alice) pick from Apple Arcade this week is finity. It’s a cute little matching game with simple art and no free to play nonsense.
This Friday’s a huge one, with both Marvel’s Spider-man 2 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder hitting shelves. I (Tim) have been playing quite a bit of spidey and, though it is incredible, it is exactly what you’re expecting if you played the previous two games; solid swinging, great combat, lots of side quests and an emotional, twisting narrative. Mario on the other hand I won’t have until Friday (so expect impressions next week), but from my brief hands on it’s quite a departure from the standard New Super blueprint, which is extremely exciting.
Sony has dropped a dozen or so more games into the Extra tier of its PlayStation Plus subscription. I won't list them all but highlights include Disco Elysium, Gotham Knights, Elite Dangerous and Far: Changing Tides. If you're looking to get spooky for halloween, there's also the excellent Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes or Alien: Isolation. In the higher-cost Deluxe tier there are some new "Classics", including the versions of Tekken and Soulcalibur which made it over to the PSP, the minigame-fest Ape Escape Academy and the wonderfully devious puzzle sequel IQ Final.
New to Game Pass this week is Like A Dragon: Ishin!, the recent Yakuza spinoff set in 1860s Japan, with racing sim F1 Manager arriving later this week.
Run rabbit run
By Tim
I came to this week’s Sonic Superstars with a mix of excitement and trepidation. An all-new 2D Sonic is a special thing, but at the same time it comes in some iffy circumstances.
The vibe I’ve got from various interviews and statements is that Sega’s Sonic Team was somewhat annoyed by the popularity of 2017’s Sonic Mania, which it did not develop. The decision to stop the Mania team from returning, and instead create a new 2.5D Sonic in partnership with Arzest (developer of Balan Wonderworld) to me indicates a dogmatic rejection of old-school Sonic.
Yet while all this inevitably coloured my reaction as I started to play (I find the new art style sterile and lacking character, the physics are tough to adjust to), my kids have no such old-person preconceptions to deal with. From the second they grabbed the controllers they were either grinning from ear-to-ear or straight-faced in awe and concentration.
Superstars is by no means bad, especially by the standards of previous official attempts to bring Sonic back to 2D. It just isn’t concerned with speaking to me specifically like Mania was, and that’s fine. In fact there are parts of it I really like.
The soundtrack, some of which is from the phenomenal Tee Lopes, rules. And while I initially hated the idea of DLC “skins” that change the look of the characters, the first one I got turns Sonic into the pale blue rabbit straight out of Naoto Ohshima sketchbook, from before it was decided the character would be a hedgehog. He’s so adorable, and both he and the Lego skins are really well animated.
Having four characters with different abilities from the get-go is also cool, and while same-screen co-op is a ludicrous idea for Sonic (when one player goes fast the other just gets left behind), it somehow works here. It would be super frustrating to play in co-op if you were all serious old people who wanted to scour for secrets and see the whole game, but my kids just blasted around and accepted that the game seems to choose who the camera follows at random. There’s no punitive lives system.
In a sense Sega doesn’t need to create Sonics for old-school fans like me. I have the original games, and there’s no shortage of very good fan-made throwbacks on PC. And while Superstars is an imperfect first step, I’m excited for its potential to begin a new era of 2D adventures for the blue blur.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Good news, friends: The moment we have all been waiting for has arrived! There’s going to be a bunch of Animal Crossing Lego sets coming soon! Well, by soon, I mean the 1st of March 2024. But given that I swear it was January only 5 minutes ago and time has lost all meaning, soon still seems to apply.
There are five different sets: Nook’s Cranny & Rosie’s House, Isabelle’s House Visit, Kapp’n’s Island Boat Tour, Julian’s Birthday Party, and Bunnie’s Outdoor Activities.
All the sets look utterly adorable, and feature brand new minifigures for all the characters, that I already love.
But, I also have to make a confession: I cannot remember who half these characters are. If these sets had released in 2020, or maybe even 2021, I would have been completely obsessed. However, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was my whole world in lockdown 1, which means that the vast majority of my knowledge associated with it has been locked out of my brain, presumably due to some kind of trauma response. I will eventually go back to my island, but I know that my basement is full of rotten turnips, and the shame of my failed investment will haunt my character.
However! With the Animal Crossing Lego, these minifigures will never know how much time has passed, and they can’t move off your island, so maybe this is the better way to play.
Either way, we all have five months now to go back to Animal Crossing, clean up our islands, and rediscover the joy we found there before we can participate in the consumerism-driven joy of purchasing licensed Lego.
The only downside of these adorable sets is that they’re ridiculously overpriced, even by current Lego standards. The most expensive set is Nook’s Cranny & Rosie’s House, which is $119.99 for a mere 535 pieces, which is just heinous. The cheapest is Julian’s Birthday Party, which is $19.99 for 170 pieces, which is significantly more tolerable.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
With Microsoft finally locking in its acquisition of Activison Blizzard, I thought I'd take a look at some of the all-but-abandoned franchises that Xbox could potentially resurrect. Not the Warcrafts, Tony Hawks, Diablos or Crash Bandicoots, but the more deep cut stuff.
Pitfall! The Activision games of the Atari 2600 era are mostly heinous to play in 2023, but get me a modern hand-drawn or voxel take on David Crane’s Pitfall with a few new ideas and modern amenities and I’ll dive right in.
Hexen & Heretic Ancient faux-3D first-person games are already being mined for nostalgic indie “boomer shooters”, and these fantasy Doom-likes could be ripe for a sequel. The rights to these games have been confusing for years, but now that Microsoft owns both Raven and Id, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The Lost Vikings Honestly I’m not sure what you could do with Blizzard’s classic puzzle platformer beyond making a definitive version of the original, which was already done in 2021. That said, a Trine-like with modern co-op could be a lot of fun, or use it as a basis for a Mario Maker style creative suite.
Gun Though massively problematic, Gun was a very impressive wild west adventure from Neversoft in 2005. If you made it a touch more sensitive and added a modern open world you’d just have Red Dead Redemption 2, so I’d say change the time period or location, keep the Quick Draw and GTA influence.
Gabriel Knight An archaic point-and-click series about a Constantine-style occult investigator, this could become an excellent reboot starring an aged Knight with Tim Curry and Mark Hamill returning. Alternatively, I’m sure series creator Jane Jensen has her own ideas to continue the saga.
Blackthorne This cinematic platformer with guns and orcs and a magical civil war is so good, all I want is a sequel in the Super Nintendo style. I can’t imagine it with modern graphics and sound, but maybe a detailed pixel look with Octopath Traveller HD effects would do the trick. And more Glenn Stafford music!
Zork Text adventures only. Because why not.