Lego Wins The Contract Olympics
Plus the future of Xbox, solving board game crimes, and Kirby
Good afternoon friends!
Welcome to a new week of games and nostalgia. In this issue, Alice talks to Lego’s global head of product, and plays a disappointing mystery game, and Tim muses on the future of Xbox and the history of Kirby. Plus all the games you should play this week instead of working.
Enjoy!
Lego Races Into The Grand Prix
By Alice
Lego recently released a full range of F1 sets for all ages. The range includes a big Duplo pack with enough bricks to make cars from all 10 teams (but only three car bases, so you can only have three cars at a time), all ten teams in Speed Champions, and, marking the first ever Lego City brand partnership, all the teams are in Lego City, too. This is great for F1 fans, but the thing that impresses me most is how difficult those contract negotiations must have been, which really shows how very mid-30s I am. Car brands are incredibly protective at the best of times, now imagine how protective F1 teams, the associated car brands, and literally all of their sponsors must be, and then consider that some of the cars come in two-packs, and others are solo, some come with garages, some don’t. It must have been like the contract Olympics.
I got to speak with Lego’s Global Head of Product, Lucas Reynoso Vizcaino, at the Grand Prix on the weekend, and according to him, it really helped that both Lego and F1’s vision with the collection was to bring more kids into the sport. Going into negotiations with the same goal made it a bit easier, but it still took two years to get it all nailed down.
Interestingly, deciding which teams to bundle together in City had nothing to do with the teams themselves. “The thinking was always kids first. It’s all about the colours for those kids, it’s not about the team. So we didn’t want to have two similar colours in the same set, because then they’re not racing against another team,” he said.
With the space theme recently going across Duplo, City, Friends and the Creator sets, apparently Lego did have some robust discussions about whether to put F1 sets into Friends as well, but the brand is still mulling it over. However, Vizcaino did hint that we would soon see more themes that break containment and go across the assorted Lego brands and styles, though it’s still unlikely we’ll see any mini dolls and mini figures interacting together any time soon.
What to play
A new set of games are hitting the PlayStation Plus Extra library on Tuesday, but it’s a bit of a lighter lineup than usual. The headliner is clearly Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, which is an impeccable metroidvania, but none of the other half-dozen or so games seem very exciting. Subscribers at the Deluxe tier also get three PS1 Armored Core games.
Free on the Epic Games Store this week are the World of Warships: Anniversary Party Favor and Mortal Shell. Mortal Shell is an action RPG that doesn’t look too bad, and theWorld of Warships Anniversary Party Favor is a collection of ships, credits and camouflages to celebrate four years of the game being on the platform.
Could next-gen Xbox be a radical departure?
By Tim
Recent reporting from Windows Central has given some insight into Microsoft’s hardware plans for the next couple of years. Of course there’s no guarantee the company will stick to those plans, but the report is interesting enough and gels with what we already know to a decent degree, and if it all pans out we could be looking at a significantly different Xbox for the next generation.
The most immediate incoming hardware is supposedly releasing this year and will be built by an unnamed PC manufacturer (think an ASUS or Lenovo), taking the form of a portable gaming PC. Why would we need an Xbox-branded machine like this when you can already play Xbox PC games on the ROG Ally or Legion Go? My guess is that Windows will finally get an update to make it more suited for gaming handhelds, and Microsoft wants to make a big splash with it.
After that, we jump to 2027, where the report contends that Microsoft will launch two new consoles. One will be a successor to the Series X, and one will be a Microsoft-made handheld, which I assume will succeed the Series S. The twist is that the console will reportedly be backwards compatible with everything the Series X will play while also functioning as a PC, letting you install games from Steam, Epic, GoG and more.
That would be a huge leap in functionality, and a perfect match for the current Xbox strategy. The most common criticism of Xbox currently is that all of Microsoft’s games go to PC, so why not just buy a PC? Or why not just buy a PS5, to play all of Sony’s exclusives and most of Microsoft’s when they make it across? If the company can sell this box for less than the cost of an equivalent high-end PC, and optimise its Game Pass service for it, you get access to everything; even the PlayStation games Sony is publishing on Steam.
And backwards compatibility implies the development of a tool for Windows that lets you play a huge catalogue of games from across the four Xbox generations, which could also be a win for players.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Board games with mysteries that you can only play once are an interesting category. On the one hand, probably most people don’t pull out the same game too often if they have a decent collection - we all have your favourites and not every game you pick up will make the cut. On the other hand, it puts a lot of pressure on that one play through to make the price of admission worth it.
Masters of Crime games are fun mysteries to be solved/heists to plan. I’ve written about Shadows in the past, which my whole board game group loved. So, now wanting to work our way through the collection, the next game we played was Rapture. While there were a lot of elements of Rapture that I really enjoyed, it overall left a poor taste in my mouth.
The central story of the game is that you are a drug lord living on a semi-lawless island, and a big American pop star (who grew up on the island) has just gone missing. You need to find the pop star, solve the mystery, and get it done before any outside police (who aren’t in your pocket) start sniffing around.
I could see what the writers of the game were trying to do with the story. There were some great clues sprinkled through, a couple of good puzzles, and there was a clear attempt at diversifying the story. However (I don’t want give any spoilers, so I’m going to be as vague as possible), the ending was unsatisfying. The only clues that pointed to the eventual perpetrator were some vaguely bad vibes and some tired tropes, whereas there was significant evidence pointing to a different outcome.
With Shadows, players were given everything they needed to make the right decisions, and anything missed you could find the moment where you went wrong. With Rapture, you just weren’t given the same tools to get to the right answer.
I’m still looking forward to playing more in the series, but that’s purely because of the quality of Shadows. If I’d only played Rapture, I’m not sure I’d be keen on the others. I’ll report back soon on which of the two games was the outlier.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Kirby Part 3: 2D forever
By the 2000s, all major game franchises were obliged to transition to 3D, if they hadn’t already. Kirby wasn’t entirely immune to this (which we’ll cover next week), yet it was clear the series strengths were not served by fancy polygons and free-roaming 3D planes. Nintendo’s handhelds were a bastion for 2D gaming in that first decade of the new millennium, and they also tended to have weirder hardware gimmicks than the home consoles, which is why Kirby largely became a portable franchise.
Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble came on a cartridge packed with accelerometers, meaning you had to tilt and flick your Game Boy Advance around to roll Kirby around. It was very novel for 2000, though not as interesting now post-Wii and deep in the smartphone era.
In 2002 Kirby starred in a remake of Kirby’s Adventure for the new Game Boy Advance, with new graphics, music and modes, including the ability to play as Meta Knight. But it also used the Link Cables to enable four-player co-operative adventures, which have since become a Kirby staple, and were the overall focus of the series’ next game.
The Amazing Mirror, in 2004, featured four Kirbys exploring a maze Metroid style, complete with bosses and hidden doors, unlockable powers and a convoluted map. In a cute touch, which is also a sign of the times, each Kirby has a mobile phone he can use to call the others, which serves as a way to teleport to each other if you get separated.
In true Kirby style, Amazing Mirror released for GBA just as the Nintendo DS was about to hit store shelves. But HAL had something in mind for the new hardware too. In 2005 Kirby was turned into a ball by an evil witch, meaning no more walking or floating; the only way he could get around was by players drawing rainbow lines for him to roll along. The game was called Touch! Kirby in Japan, which was angrified to Canvas Curse in America and brought back down to Power Paintbrush in other English regions. It’s another case where ubiquitous touchscreens make the game seem simple in retrospect, but at the time the design was a huge validation of Nintendo’s choice to focus on stylus input for the DS.
So revolutionary was Canvas Curse that fans and critics were outraged when the next game turned out to be a traditional Kirby platformer. Squeak Squad is a perfectly good one too, though an odd fit for the two screens of the DS. You use the lower one to store and mix copy abilities. But the final DS game, which was of course released when the 3DS was already out, returned to a full stylus control system. Mass Attack, potentially the cutest Kirby game of all, gave you control of a swarm of up to 10 tiny Kirbys, who you moved and flicked with the touchscreen to help them platform, or to throw them on enemies who they would pummel with their little fists.