Hi there! This week on Press Any Button I’m flying solo and noticing the resurgence of Japanese games in the Western mainstream, looking back on a quarter-decade of the still-hard-to-get next-gen consoles, making a case for the Commodore Amiga and of course trawling through the digital stores to find some deals you might want to pick up.
Don’t fret, Alice will be back soon and I’m certain she’s saving up plenty of hot Lego and board game takes for your indulgence. In the meantime please do let us know if there’s anything you especially like or don’t care for in the newsletter. You can comment or reply, or get us on Twitter at @TimBiggs, @Alicedkc or @_pressanybutton.
Why Square no longer wants Lara Croft
By Tim
Back in the day, Japanese video games were dominant. Players may not have realised it at the time, but all the biggest games throughout the 90s — from Mario and Sonic to Final Fantasy and Street Fighter — had originated in East Asia and were localised (sometimes clumsily) for the West. I personally just thought spelling mistakes, onigiri and huge-eyed characters were video game things.
But something shifted in the 2000s. American and European style games that formerly served a niche audience became incredibly mainstream, with the likes of Halo, God of War, Need for Speed and The Elder Scrolls III becoming competitive in their respective genres against Japanese developers’ next-gen efforts. Some Western games, like Grand Theft Auto 3, effectively invented their own genres that Japanese developers were unwilling to emulate.
The reason I bring all of this up is that I think the tide has finally turned and the balance of influence in big-budget games is returning partly to Japan. For years it was the Japanese games that seemed relegated to niche audiences, but recently the likes of Elden Ring, Resident Evil Village and Death Stranding have captivated players in the West. Even explicitly Japanese fare like Monster Hunter Rise, Pokemon Legends Arceus and Nier Automata capture a mainstream audience outside of their home turf.
Those paying attention to industry news may have seen that Square Enix sold off essentially all of its Western studios and properties for a measly $430 million last week, and I think that says a lot about how the Japanese company sees the market. In the 2000s it needed its own Western games, which is why it bought up franchises like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief and Legacy of Kain, as well as the development houses that make those games.
These days its legacy franchises like Final Fantasy are more profitable than ever, and Western gamers are clamouring for its upcoming Japan-made adventures like Forspoken (pictured) and Kingdom Hearts IV. It doesn’t think a video game icon like Lara Croft is worth its while.
What to play
We didn’t do recommendations last time owing to our games-of-the-first-third-of-the-year extravaganza, but wow Xbox Game Pass has had a solid few weeks. It recently added NBA 2K22, Bugsnax, Turnip Boy and 7 Days to Die, which are all great within their respective genres. Then last week we got a trio of very slick vibes with Loot River, which is a hack-and-slash roguelite where you’re also moving the floor around like a sliding block puzzle, gruesome black-and-white samurai adventure Trek to Yomi and solo cyberpunk tabletop Citizen Sleeper. This week brought classroom murder investigation sequel Danganronpa 2, plus Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, which is a very pretty metroidvania prequel to a strategy RPG coming next year.
Xbox has also added its very first free-to-play game to its cloud service, with Fortnite. While you generally need a Game Pass Ultimate subscription to use Microsoft’s cloud gaming, in this case it’s free; just point your PC or phone browser to Xbox.com/play. This also has the side effect of returning Fortnite to iPhones and iPads, where it’s banned from Apple’s App Store.
Golden Week is just wrapping up in Japan, so unfortunately it is time to put away your dolls and fish flags. But there is still time to grab a good deal on some Japanese games. A lot of PS4 titles are 50% to 75% off, but some specific highlights are Metal Gear Solid V for $5, Castlevania Requiem for $6.23, Ni No Kuni II for $14 and Person 5 Royal for $35. Over on Switch you’ll find discounts for most Final Fantasy, Mana, SaGa and Dragon Quest games. These are ending today or tomorrow so get in quick.
Aussie zen puzzle hit Unpacking has finally arrived on PlayStation, if you missed it elsewhere. It’s a brief but really satisfying little story about the different living spaces we inhabit throughout our lives, and the stuff we take with us.
Another new month has begun, so let’s check out the increasingly perfunctory freebies that come with your online subs. PlayStation Plus has FIFA 22 plus a bunch of Ultimate Team players, if you're a fan of the game's built-in casino. Then there's the fairly bland co-op action RPG Tribes of Midgard, and finally the extremely good roguelite Curse of the Dead Gods. On Xbox, Games with Gold this month gets you the delightful pinball adventure Yoku’s Island Express and the just-ok 360 racer Hydro Thunder Hurricane.
Now we have some distance, is next gen a small step or a giant leap?
By Tim
Somehow, seemingly overnight, it has become two-and-a-half years since the release of the latest game consoles. That's right, 30 months this week since the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X hit store shelves for roughly eight seconds before they were all removed and sent straight to eBay.
Luckily the stock situation has improved since then, and these days there are frequently windows of at least an hour where you can beg retailers to take your $750 and send you a shiny new machine. But do you want or need to do that, if you haven’t already?
It's hard to deny this is the slightest upgrade between generations that video games have ever seen. For a lot of people, playing Halo Infinite at 4K and 60fps on Xbox Series X is functionally identical to playing it at 1440p and 60fps on Xbox One X, and the gap hasn’t widened that much in the last quarter-decade. Going from PS4 Pro to PS5 is a similar story.
Other technical areas such as faster loading, and improved performance of older games, are legitimate advantages on the new systems, but they’re hardly sexy upgrades. The variable trigger tension on the PS5 controller seemed like a big deal at launch, but it’s rarely been used effectively and has actually fatigued or hurt my index fingers in several games, so I usually turn it off.
And yet despite all this, and despite a dearth of truly exclusive games, it’s become clear that the consoles are selling in the tens of millions; and not just to scalpers. So while it’s interesting to ask, “do the next gen consoles offer a valuable upgrade over the old gen?”, it’s probably not the most meaningful question. I think the new machines, as the first truly fresh consoles since 2013, have attracted a much wider base of players than many of us realised. And as someone’s first console in a while, or even as an upgrade over the last gen’s 2013 launch models, the new gear is pretty incredible.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
The Commodore Amiga wasn’t the giant of home computing in Australia that it was elsewhere around the world, but thanks to the general popularity of gaming nostalgia that doesn’t mean the new A500 Mini can’t be stocked in places like Big W and JB Hi-Fi for $200.
And I’m glad about that! Our culture is so influenced by American media that we can forget it wasn’t all Nintendos and Segas and Ataris in the late 80s and early 90s. Home computers were really big for gaming here as well as in Europe, and although I personally went straight from a Commodore 64 to an MS-DOS machine, this new microconsole offers an attractive mix of games I remember playing on other platforms at the time, and historical artefacts that are new to me but enjoyable all the same.
The A500 is an adorable miniaturisation of the Amiga 500, and comes with a serviceable retro-style controller and mouse (or you can BYO to a certain extent). Plugging the Mini in to USB and HDMI is obviously easier than tracking down an original device and trying to figure out how the hell Amiga’s RGB video works, and it will only take you a few seconds before you’re immersed in Battle Chess, Cadaver (pictured), Zool, Another World, Speedball 2 or Worms.
If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, imagine a desktop gaming computer that’s more or less as powerful as a Super Nintendo, but that arrived earlier and played games that were largely Western rather than Japanese, and you have an idea of what the Amiga was all about.
The 25 included games are very nicely optimised, and the developers have written up very handy instructions for each, which all makes for a classier experience than trying to set up your own Amiga emulator. And to that end, it’s also easy to play just about any Amiga game on the Mini via USB. Of course you’ll need to find a legal way to get those 30-year-old games from an 88kb floppy disk to a USB stick!