It's About The Sincerity
Plus, Sheeples and Meeples, Tim celebrates anniversaries, and what to play this weekend
Hello Button Buddies!
This week, the plague hit the Bigg’s house, so you’ll have to forgive us for being a bit short and a bit late (and for Tim not reining in my [Alice’s] overly long headlines).
For this newsletter, I played some Carcassonne and couldn’t stop thinking about the weird Catholic epic that was Tekken 8, and Tim took a break from having the flu to make us feel old. Thanks Tim.
Have a great weekend, friends!
Sometimes you can be so unapologetically cringe that it wraps around and stops being cringe and just goes back to being beautiful
By Alice
It’s been a little more than a week since I finished the Tekken 8 story mode, and I cannot stop thinking about it. For a little while, I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was just so terribly written and acted, and the throughline of Catholicism and mummy/daddy issues isn’t really my jam.
But I think it’s stuck there for one simple reason: it was just so sincere. I’m really used to stories that deal with incredibly emotional issues, but diffuse the tension with humour. Or those action movies where everything is incredibly earnest, but everyone involved was too afraid that having a single emotion would make them gay, so they refrained. There’s nothing wrong with the former, there are whole PhDs written about what’s wrong with the latter.
But the sheer sincerity and emotional honesty in Tekken 8 was unusual. It was like reading the creative writing essay of a 15-year-old that was really Going Through it. Unfiltered, unself-conscious (while also being incredibly self-conscious, in a way), and just clearly written by someone who had something to say and didn’t know how to say it.
The acting is bad, the writing is bad, the pacing is bad. The art is great, and it goes places you would never expect, but it’s not going to go down as one of the great stories of all time.
And yet, I’m still thinking about it, despite having watched and played objectively better things since.
Perhaps it’s because it’s a story mode in a game made for 1v1 multiplayer, and most people probably don’t touch the story. It’s just there for fans and reviewers, and because there has to be some kind of story to justify the violence. So, writers can get away with more than they could in a more narrative-focussed game, there’s less editing to dilute(/improve) the original vision. Either way, if you’re getting Tekken 8 anyway, you should definitely check out the story. It takes some turns.
What to play
There are new games on Apple Arcade today! BEAST: Bio Exo Arena Suit Team is named in such a way that you know they started with BEAST and then worked backwards in the most annoying way possible, but it’s also a 3v3 online action game with animals, so colour me (Alice) intrigued. The highlight, though, is Words in Progress, a new word puzzle game, and those are really all the details I need to be fully on board.
Free on the Epic Games Store this week is Doors - Paradox, a game that’s billed as a relaxing puzzle escape game, but whose trailer looks like the opposite of relaxing. Either way, it’s free, so you may as well give it a shot.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
It’s always important to remember the true meaning of Christmas: Adding more expansions to Carcassonne until it is even more unwieldy than it already was. Last year we added the Hills and Sheep expansion. It was dad’s Christmas present, and he lives on a hill and used to have a farm with sheep, so it seemed appropriate.
The difficult thing with adding your 11th (12th? 9th?) expansion is that no single expansion is going to completely change the game anymore. That said, the hills and sheep added a nice extra challenge which we really enjoyed.
The hills are supposed to give you a slight extra edge in draws, like say you each have one person in the town, the person on the hill gets all the points. We didn’t really take advantage of this much, because we kept forgetting it existed and it also just never seemed to come up at the right moment. Also I think we were using hills wrong (I’ll update next time I visit dad).
What did make a difference was the sheep feature. Basically, if you place your shepherd meeple (or your sheeple meeple, if you will), every time you increase that field you can draw a token out of a bag. Those tokens have 1-3 sheep or a wolf on them. If you get sheep, you add them under your shepherd, if you get a wolf you lose all your sheep. Once you have amassed enough sheep, you can choose to cash in your sheep for points instead of drawing a new token. I found this did make a real difference to our scores, and was just fun to play with.
There are also vineyards, which add more points to monasteries. I greatly enjoyed the extra points I got from this (as the only person who remembered vineyards existed), but it didn’t really make an impact on the game.
Overall, while it’s not the best Carcassonne expansion, I would say it’s a worthy addition to your Carcassonne Big Box.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
It’s the start of a new month, and with that we get to look back at games that are old now, and feel ourselves crumble along with them.
Now 10: Nidhogg In an era largely before indie weirdness was visible in the mainstream, Nidghogg became a party phenomenon on PC. A one-on-one fencing fighter with a unique pixel silhouette style and gallons of colourful blood, it’s both competitive and hilarious, perfect for winner-stays-on tournaments with groups. The bizarre inferred narrative about a giant work deity that eats the winner of each round didn’t hurt either.
Now 25: Super Smash Bros Though it’s since become an incredibly popular series that acts as much like a museum for all things Nintendo (and beyond) as it does a competitive fighter, this first entry was a profoundly weird concept; a mashup of various friendly Nintendo characters beating the crap out of each other in acrobatic sumo-style action. These days we’re familiar with “party brawler” as a genre, but at the time this was a significant shake up to a scene primarily composed of highly technical, inaccessible, one-on-one fighters.
Now 35: Golden Axe From Sega’s greatest era of arcade games, this beat-em-up blended the side-scrolling action of Double Dragon with the high fantasy brawn and babes of Conan the Barbarian, but it also added plenty to the genre in its own right. Consumable magic bottles could be used for frequent magic attacks or saved up for epic screen-clearing summons, certain enemies rode gross little steed beasts you could steal and use for yourself, and the three heroes each had their own moves and powers despite functionally being pretty similar. It also made for an incredible port to Mega Drive the same year as its arcade release.