It’s Been A Long Time Between Serves For Top Spin
Plus Princess Peach is a theatre kid now, Animal Crossing Lego, and March game anniversaries
Hello Button Buddies!
This week Alice and Tim went all in on games (and Lego) that give you those warm feelings of nostalgia, which means that it’s business as usual for everyone’s favourite game newsletter (tell your friends).
For this edition, Alice got early hands on with Top Spin 2K25 (and discovered that she is very bad at it), and got some Animal Crossing Lego which opened up a window to the weird time that was 2020. Meanwhile, Tim played the New Princess Peach game and celebrated the anniversaries of old games.
Enjoy!
Tennis is hard
By Alice
Last week I got to play the brand-new Top Spin 2K25 game, and I’m pleased to report that its intended niche will absolutely go ham for it. The last Top Spin game was Top Spin 4, released in 2011, so it’s been a long dry spell for fans.
The premise is pretty simple: you play tennis. There are some famous tennis players to play as, and a shockingly large number of the best tennis venues in the world to play on. Everything is very detailed, which is huge for fans, but also pretty for people who enjoy tennis as a concept.
The part I struggled with, though, is that Top Spin is quite an unforgiving game. You have John McEnroe giving you tutorials, which are detailed and helpful, but the difficulty curve on Top Spin is high. Running to the ball is tough, timing when to hit the buttons to hit the ball is difficult, and then holding for the right amount of time requires impressive reflexes. Often, I’d run to the ball, hit the button, and then nothing would happen. Even on easy it felt far more challenging that it needed to be. Often with these kinds of sports games that rely on specific timing, I’ll play a while on the easiest difficulty to work out what I’m doing, and then turn it up. But the difficulty options only apply to your opponent and not you, which sets you up for a lot of frustration.
If I was in charge of designing the game, I’d set up a campaign where you started out not having to run to the ball, and instead focus just on hitting the button at the right time, then add in releasing the button at the right time, and then add in running and other complications. I think that would be a gentler introduction and make it so more people can play.
In the good column, it has four player couch multiplayer, which is absolutely excellent, and the reason why I look forward to putting in the work to mastering the controls.
What to play
It’s a big week on Game Pass, with the arrival of Blizzard epic Diablo IV into the service, plus the very good arcade racer Hot Wheels Unleashed 2, and the day one inclusion of much-anticipated narrative roadtrip adventure Open Roads. If you’re on PC, you also get access to the ambitious interplanetary grand strategy game Terra Invicta.
Nintendo is adding a single game to its Switch Online + Expansion Pack service; F-Zero Maximum Velocity for the Game Boy Advance. It should be live this weekend.
PlayStation has just announced the new PlayStation Plus free games for April and there are a couple of surprises. Immortals of Aveum was a game everyone talked about for a little while there because it was so good, and then because the studio made so many controversial decisions. Skul: The Hero Slayer is a game I (Alice) am not familiar with, but it’s a 2D platformer, so it sounds like my jam. The big surprise, though, is Minecraft Legends - a Microsoft game, being given as a freebie on PlayStation Plus. It’s unusual, to be sure. Either way, they’re free, so if you already subscribe, you may as well pick them up.
A spotlight for Nintendo’s leading lady
By Tim
Princess Peach: Showtime has just about everything a young Nintendo fan could want. It looks and sounds great, it’s funny and surprising, the play is forgiving, and constant new gimmicks keep things fresh. But how does it hold up for us older, more cynical folks?
The setup here is that Peach is out for a night at the theatre, where 20 plays are inexplicably being performed at once. But when bad guys arrive the princess teams up with a magical ribbon that lets her become the star of each production, whether that’s a ninja, a cowgirl, a thief or a patissiere, making for a lot of diversity in how the levels play. Each one starts with simple jumping and exploring (and Peach’s default ability to inspire good vibes), but while some transition to combat, others might throw you into a cooking minigame or stealth section.
Showtime comes from Good-Feel, the developers behind Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Yoshi’s Crafted World, and if you’ve played those you’ll have a decent idea of what to expect here. The enjoyment comes from surprise, novelty, cuteness and aesthetic rather than challenge, unless there are kids nearby in which case you also get vicarious joy as they cackle at the derpy Theets or cheer in excitement for Swordfighter Peach.
The story is breezy and I really enjoyed playing through it over a small handful of sessions, but I wasn’t as sold on the post-game content. Some of the hidden gems (there are 10 in each level) are nice and tricky to get to, but since this isn’t a traditional platformer it can be frustrating to go through the set-pieces multiple times on the hunt for the shiny secrets. The combat levels and boss fights are also great to play through once, but they don’t hold up especially well when revisited as insta-fail trials or challenges.
Still, you’ll want to grab gems and coins to unlock new aesthetics for the theatre, as well as some of Peach’s most stunning dresses yet. And little ones will absolutely not mind seeing the same levels a million times to revisit their favourite transformations, whether that’s the clearly Disney inspired ice skater and mermaid, or the delightfully badass superhero.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
There are some games that just take on more meaning than others because of the time they were released. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is one of those games, because of it’s timing at the start of the pandemic when people needed extra comfort. Remember when we were all obsessed with the Stalk Market and trying to get the weird villagers to move out so we could get the good ones to move in? What a time.
So, when Lego recently sent me three Animal Crossing Lego sets, the nostalgia took fully took hold far more than you’d expect for just a four-year-old game.
The full Animal Crossing collection includes five sets, ranging from the whimsical Julian’s Birthday Party (for the uninitiated, Julian is a blue unicorn) to the more substantial Nook’s Cranny and Rosie’s House.
On a practical level, the value per part is much better on the smallest set (Julian), with 170 pieces for $19.95. But this is not a collection where practicality really comes into play, given there are so many large pieces and brand-new mini-figure moulds involved.
My two favourite sets are Bunnie’s Outdoor Activities, purely because of the sheer joy on Bunnie’s face, and Isabelle’s House Visit, just because of how much I like Isabelle and Fauna. But it’s also hard to go past Nook’s Cranny and Rosie’s House. It has the worst parts-per-dollar value of all the sets ($119.95 for just 535 parts), but it’s Nook’s Cranny. How do you go past Nook’s Cranny? It’s iconic. Plus, it has a bicycle and a pink umbrella.
With these sets I think Lego has struck a really good balance of making them obviously playsets for kids to actually play with – the buildings are facades, and there’s lots of little accessories – but also acknowledging that a solid chunk of the target audience are adults. Adults who want to be able to look at these sets on a shelf and remember when a video game let them still go outside and play with their friends at a time when we couldn’t do that in the real world.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
With March almost over, it’s time to look back at some of the games that celebrated significant anniversaries this month. And this time it’s a trio of seriously influential titles.
Now 25: EverQuest Not only was this the first definitively successful massively multiplayer online RPG, it’s by far the longest lasting. Launching in 1999, EverQuest has been operating for an astonishing quarter of a century and remains commercially viable to this day, with at least one major expansion arriving every single year and another due this December. Played today it’s pretty creaky, with an impossible UI and two decades plus of gameplay features piled on top of each other, but the fact you can still play it at all is a miracle.
Now 30: Super Metroid This absolute masterpiece of subterranean design set a blueprint that many of the finest games of all time have followed, refining and elevating the genius of the original NES Metroid while giving character and life to the single most interesting universe and protagonist in Nintendo’s catalogue. From the atmospheric opening to the incredible music, and from the surprising map reveals and hidden mechanics to the epic final boss twist, this game simply does not miss. Play it now if you never have, or play it again, on Nintendo Switch Online.
Now 40: Boulder Dash I have ancient memories of Boulder Dash on the Commodore 64, with its glittering gems, its inviting bleeps and bloops, and its mysteriously undulating enemy monster things. But what stuck in my mind most is the gravity. Digging beneath a boulder will send it plunging downward, leaving an empty space behind, which can lead to a catastrophic domino cave-in that buries you just as you’re reaching for the exit. This kind of side-view digging maze makes absolutely no physical sense if you think about it, but the addition of simple physics made for a tense and exhilarating experience.