Is the Series S Holding Xbox Back?

Plus Dungeons and Dragons: The Yawning Portal review, Kirby, and what happened to all the accessories?

Happy Wednesday, Button Buddies!

Welcome to another week of Press Any Button.

This week, Tim and Alice ask the big questions, like was the Xbox Series S a mistake? And what happened to all the plastic accessories that used to be required by games?

As well as that, Alice played the new Dungeons and Dragons board game, and Tim takes a walk down memory lane with everyone’s favourite pink sphere with feet. Plus, all the games recommendations you need to plan your weekend.

Will PSVR2 bring back the plastic junk?

By Alice

Remember the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 days? It felt like almost every game needed a bunch of plastic accessories to go with it: Guitar Hero guitars, Singstar microphones, Buzz buzzers, Duck Hunt guns, Skylanders, Disney Infinity, etc, etc. I still have an ottoman filled with these accessories at my parents’ place (though, my wooden Logitech Guitar Hero Guitar is on my guitar rack where it belongs). This trend dropped off quite a bit during the PS4/Xbox One era when all the toys to life games died and Guitar Hero got too creative with the guitar design, with the exception of failed accessories for the original PSVR, like the gun that could hold the Move controller.

However, it’s now been years since I’ve had to use a ridiculous accessory to play a non-Nintendo game. What happened to all this junk? Is it the death of physical retail and rise of digital downloads making it harder to shift products with difficult-to-store accessories? Did someone at a games company realise that no one has any money or storage space anymore? Or, is it because accessories companies realised that instead of selling a tonne of cheap plastic junk, they could instead sell a few high-end sim kits with high margins, given flight and racing sim users are the last to be using highly specific accessories?

Or, are accessories companies just biding their time to see how PSVR2 does, bracing themselves to once more make guns, guitars and other shapes. Given anecdotal reports of sales numbers (and the new shape of the PSVR2 controllers, which no longer lend themselves to being encased in cheap accessories), we might finally be able to mark ourselves safe from this plastic scourge.

What to play

• If you have somehow managed to escape owning/playing Portals 1 and 2 yet, Steam currently has Portal 1 for $1.45 and roughly $2 in a bundle with Portal 2. These games are absolute must-plays, if only to finally work out why people have been talking about lying cakes for all these years. After you play, you should also listen to the Sara Quinn cover of Still Alive, because it’s really good and a weird meeting of my (Alice’s) interests.

• Today marks the end of the Most Wanted questline in Fortnite, and the beginning of the next stages of the Oathbound and Geralt quests. If you want a Geralt skin, and whatever the hell the Oathbound nonsense is working towards, you have one week from now, so get grinding.

• If you like your media physical, Amazon currently has the excellent Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PS4 down to $55 and the also excellent Marvel’s Midnight Suns on Xbox for $79.95. Over at EB Games, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is $9.95. While I (Alice) haven’t played Guardians of the Galaxy, that is cheap, so those who aren’t burned out on Marvel yet should pick it up.

• The new game on Apple Arcade this week is Kimono Cats and it looks utterly adorable. You select a main character cat and their companion cat, and then you walk through a festival playing carnival games. Do people still say they can’t even? Because I (Alice) cannot even.

• It’s been a good week for Japanese nonsense specifically targeted at me (Tim). I’ve been loving Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe, which is an expanded HD remaster of a 2011 game that in Australia was called Kirby’s Adventure Wii. There are heaps of charming levels for our favourite overpowered pink orb to power fantasy through with a sword or ninja shurikens or tornado gusts or fire breath, as well as lots of minigames and optional challenges, all for 1–4 players. I’m also far too attached to Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, which is like Guitar Hero exclusively for Final Fantasy songs but with its own RPG elements built in; it’s brilliant except for the cursed dead-eyed chibi versions of the characters. Then there’s Octopath Traveller II, a game I’d adore for its visuals alone, but which also has a great combat system borrowed from its predecessor and a bit more connective tissue between the eight main stories than last time.

• Game Pass has a major day one launch for the second week in a row, with Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. I (Tim) am not that far in and I’m not the biggest souls-like fan, but it does look incredible, has a lot of promise as far as exploration goes and features that undeniable Team Ninja combat style. Also new to Game Pass are auto-battle puzzler Merge & Blade, J-RPG Soul Hackers 2, racing sim F1 22 and New Zealand content for Flight Simulator.

• It’s a new month, which means it’s time to check the games that come included with Xbox Gold and PlayStation Plus Essential. For Xbox it's another middling month, with WWII strategy Sudden Strike 4 and sci-fi mystery adventure Trüberbrook. Later in the month you'll also get pixel art survival-horror Lamentum. Over on PS Plus is a trio of more recognisable titles with Battlefield 2042, Minecraft Dungeons and action-RPG Code Vein all unlocking next week.

Does Microsoft have a Series S problem?

By Tim

Microsoft’s decision to release two separate Xbox consoles this generation — one more powerful and one more affordable — has been divisive from the start. But with Larian Studios this week stating outright that it’s unsure about the Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 because of the underpowered Series S, the trolls who doubted the system from the start are doubtless patting themselves on the back.

The $500 system is brilliant for anyone who doesn’t need 4K resolution or who wants to get into the current generation without spending $800+. I use one at my desk or in my bedroom, and while the drop in fidelity is noticeable the games all play perfectly well.

But there have always been vocal concerns that games may be hamstrung on Series X because of the need to support Series S. There hasn’t really been any good evidence behind this so far, especially since most Xbox games are still supporting the much older Xbox One, but as developers shift to current-gen-only that may be beginning to change.

In a statement to the press, Larian said specifically that it couldn’t get its multiplayer mode to work on Series S as well as it does on Series X, which Microsoft requires for the game to ship, and that’s why it’s only announced BG3 for PlayStation and PC.

This alone doesn’t necessarily mean the Series S premise is flawed — just look at the massive range of hardware configurations supported by modern PC games, most should work fine on both X and S — but it does make it seem as though Xbox is harder for developers to support.

So what can Microsoft do if this keeps happening? It could drop the requirement to support Series S, but that would break a pretty clear promise to consumers that the two consoles would play the same games. It’s also unlikely to simply accept that some third party games will skip Xbox. If I had to guess, I’d say Microsoft is probably re-examining its dev support strategy, and has already sent resources and expertise to Larian. Time will tell if that’s enough.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings 

by Alice

After months of playing a lot of overly complicated games, I longed to get back to learning simple board games that didn’t require consulting with the rule book constantly for 6 hours. So, when a friend offered to bring over the new Dungeons and Dragons: The Yawning Portal board game, I jumped at the chance to play a gentle game about feeding hungry adventurers in a tavern.

In the game, you are presented with a long series of tables, each with two slots for hero cards and four types of food. You have four coloured cards which allow you to do a variety of actions, and you can only use one side of one card per turn. Your goal is to place and set up heroes with their desired food to collect gems. The strategy element comes in when the heroes are turned over, showing a picture of a gem, because the number of face up gem cards multiply the value of your gems of that colour in the final scoring, but there are also ways to remove hero cards.

It's all very charming, adorable, and simple. Perhaps too simple. The problem this game comes up against is that it is much harder to make a good simple game than it is to make a good complicated game. Complicated games have lots of distractions and enough going on that there’s always something to be excited about. In a very good simple game, like Carcassonne or Azul, there are lots of ways the game can change on a dime, and ways players can each see what their opponent is doing and react accordingly. The Yawning Portal doesn’t really have that, it just has charm. For $40 or $50, I could see it being a nice weekend game to pick up and play over a meal. For $90 there just isn’t enough enjoyment here to justify the purchase.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

Kirby is one of those franchises that I feel really exemplifies the unique appeal of video games versus other media, and it’s resisted being cinemafied despite being around for more than three decades (the series didn’t even go properly 3D until last year’s Forgotten Land!) There are some who decry the series as too easy or for babies. But that misses the point.

My introduction to the series was 1993’s Kirby’s Adventure via an NES emulator, and at the time it blew my mind how much better looking it was than virtually any other game I’d played for the system.

That game gave Kirby his now-iconic ability to copy enemy character’s abilities, which combined with clever design, bizarre enemies, fun multiplayer and wonderful art gives Kirby its trademark vibe. Over the years there have been around 40 titles, but only half of them feature the standard breezy platforming of the original. The other half is made up of wild experiments.

Kirby has been a pinball, a golf ball, a Breakout ball, and even a ball of clay. He’s been featured in games designed to show off quirky hardware features, like Tilt ‘n’ Tumble (for the Game Boy accelerometer cartridges) and Canvas Curse (for the DS touchscreen), and has also hosted various puzzle games. He has split into 10 tiny Kirbys for the Lemmings-like Mass Attack, and rolled around as a competitive-eating orb in last year’s Dream Buffet.

Even as far as the platformers go, the games usually have some strange gimmick or premise (the aforementioned Return to Dreamland Deluxe being a rare example of a straight-up platformer in the Adventure style). 

This trend began with Super Star on the SNES. It’s a compilation of short platforming adventures and silly mini-games, which is an idea that would go on to inform many of the subsequent platformers. Then there’s Dream Land 3, where everything’s crayon-textured and you need to help a strange character in every level to get the best ending, or Epic Yarn, where all the environments and characters are made from craft materials.

Is Kirby too easy? I don’t think so. Most games in the past decade and a half have a devilishly hard post-game or completionist goal, but even before you get to that the cheerful characters and ability-mixing or experimental play ideas generally provide enough entertainment that I’m not upset about a lack of challenge.