Let them eat 30th Anniversary PS5 Pros

Plus gender gaps in NBA 2K, and Sega's Shinobi

Hello there! It’s spring time, so this week I decided to go outside for a walk and a bee immediately stung me in the face and I puffed up like a soufflé. So I sincerely hope your week has treated you better than that! On topic, this week we’re looking at how Sony has completely redeemed the PS5 Pro by painting it grey, the weird differences between the male and female NBA 2K careers, and how much of a badass Joe Musashi is. Read on!

Now that’s a $1200 console

By Tim

Occasionally, and in truth more often than I’d like to admit, I think about how much I wanted one of those grey PS1-inspired PS4s that Sony made for the brand’s 20th anniversary, and how I didn’t quite manage to get one. I ended up scalping one of the controllers off eBay, and I still use it with a Brook Bluetooth adapter to play my PS1, which is cool, but it would be even cooler if my PS1 was displayed next to a grey PS4 in a “don’t talk to me or my son ever again” style arrangement.

The reason I’m opening this particular most grossly consumerism-inflicted wound is because Sony has just announced its 30th Anniversary wares. And while they’re all beautiful and send half of my brain into a “what could I realistically sell that would make enough money by September 26 “ spiral, I think the other half of my brain has digested the regret of last time’s failure into an understanding that my reaction to these things is not healthy.

I don’t want to imply that Sony (and others in the business of expensive and limited nostalgia products) is exploiting the maladaptive behaviours of its playerbase to drive profits. These things cost a lot of money to produce, margins are pretty slim, and it probably doesn’t make business sense to create millions of these rather than a limited number.

But it is abundantly clear that a lot of people will pay full price for a thing they already have and don’t need two of, if it carries an emotionally charged symbol of their childhood, and they’ll complain less about it than when a luxury console is announced at $1200 without a throwback look. This in turn drives a collectibility factor that means many will buy them for purely cold non-emotional reasons, and a secondary market of scalpers. Sony could arguably avoid that this time with a more widely available set of PS1-inspired panels for the PS5, but a 30th anniversary celebration is all about hype, and nothing drives hype like exclusivity. Also you’d still have a black centre part if you did that, so yuck.

To the objects themselves, there is a DualSense, a DualSense Edge and a PlayStation Portal with those beautiful pastel coloured face buttons and a grey-on-grey design. Then there are PS5 digital and PS5 Pro bundles that come with a controller (or two for the Pro) and a collection of bonuses: four cable ties, a sticker, a poster, a paperclip and a bit of plastic that makes a USB-C plug look like a PS1 controller plug. I’m sadly not joking when I say these are most intriguing items to me.

What to play

• The big monthly PlayStation Plus Extra drop has arrived, and it’s headlined by the brand new The Plucky Squire. I’ve played this one and had a really good time, but it does suffer from a bit of the old “incredible elevator pitch, so-so execution”. To 2D sections inside books or notes are so adorable, and having those elements bust out into the real world is so cool, but the actual gameplay is spread pretty thin across a number of less interesting ideas. Also included this month are the excellent Night in the Woods and the interesting Road 96, two very different narrative games. If you pay extra for Deluxe you get Pistol Whip on PS VR 2, Secret Agent Clank from PSP, Sky Gunner from PS2 and the iconic (slightly pervy) weirdness of Mister Mosquito, also from PS2.

• Nintendo has added another four extremely loose options to its Super Nintendo catalogue on Nintendo Switch Online. Battletoads / Double Dragon is a mashup brawler that was originally released on NES, developed by Rare (and, I believe, not influenced at all by Technos despite Billy and Jimmy being there). Kunio-kun no Dodgeball da yo Zen'in Shūgō is a game that was developed by Technos, as a sequel to the game known in the West as Super Dodge Ball. Big Run is a Japan-exclusive port of a Jaleco arcade racing game set in the Dakar Rally. And finally Cosmo Gang the Puzzle is a port of a Namco Tetris-like arcade game, which the company reskinned in the West and called Pac-Attack. Why not give us that Pac-Man themed version now? That’s the least of many questions I have about this lineup.

• New to Game Pass is Train Sim World 5, which is what it sounds like, and delightful pixel tactics game Wargroove 2.

• Free on the Epic Games store is adorable photography adventure Toem and gritty roguelite The Last Stand: Aftermath.

NBA 2K25 personality clash

By Alice

Player character personalities are a really difficult thing for game developers and writers to nail. For every person delighted by how their character responds to certain scenarios, there’s a bunch who respond with “I would not f*@%ing say that”. The worst is when you are presented with three dialogue options, and then the actual dialogue is more aggressive than the polite option you chose.

I thought of this a lot recently while reviewing NBA 2K25. Both the male and female player characters have personalities this year, which is new. The male basketball player is caught between trying to be a team player and an aggressive, egotistical dickhead, with his character varying wildly between scenes. Meanwhile, the female player character in The W is utterly delightful. She’s clearly confident in her abilities, but she’s also a student of the game, and just thrilled to be able to play at all, let alone alongside her heroes.

Part of the problem here is that NBA 2K games are caught up in a cycle of mythologising the men, treating them like unnatural heroes above mere mortals, rather than just unusually tall man who are excellent at basketball. Players now expect legends like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant to be treated like gods, and if they want their character to be on the same level, then they too must have a god-complex.

However, the women are allowed to be likeable (or, at least, they’re not allowed to be unlikable). Arguably, Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart and A’ja Wilson should be spoken of in the same way Jordan and his ilk are, but basketball culture might not be ready for that conversation yet.

This comparison between the two characters means that coming to the men’s side of the game from the women’s is like whiplash. Not only is it worse in terms of navigating to play, and how the men’s half of the game is pay-to-win, the women’s half is just so much nicer. The press conference moments are a breath of fresh air, while I find myself bracing to see whether the men’s character is going to be an arse this time.

The player character personalities are difficult to perfect, but can completely let a game down when they’re jarring.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

In the late 80s and early 90s, ninjas were a big deal in popular culture. So it’s no surprise that Shinobi (a word that is a synonym for ninja in Japan) was one of Sega’s biggest franchises throughout this time. Of course, it helps that the games largely rule.

The 1987 arcade Shinobi saw Joe Musashi leave his peaceful mountain home to battle an evil terrorist organisation kidnapping ninja students as part of a plan to plunge Japan back into the Sengoku civil war period. It’s a slow and methodical side-scrolling shuriken-throwing challenge, but with some sweet ninja magic special moves and a first-person bonus game. The 1989 Sequel Shadow Dancer is similar, but with a far more attractive look and the addition of a dog you can sick on bad guys to distract them (and if he gets hurt, the dog turns into a harmless pup!).

In total there are more than a dozen Shinobi games, but I wanted to look specifically at the three I personally think hold up the best; the trilogy of Sega Mega Drive games.

The Revenge of Shinobi (1989) Called The Super Shinobi in Japan, this is the first game in the series not made for the arcade and the height of the series for me personally. In coming to the Mega Drive the gameplay is expanded so Joe can take more than one hit, and you have far more options in terms of movement, offence and magic. It remains a stunning-looking game to this day, and the ninja-meats-dance soundtrack from Yuzo Koshiro is an all-time great. For some reason, bosses include Batman, Spider-man, Godzilla and the T-800 from The Terminator, though some of these were changed to legally distinct characters in later versions.

Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi (1990) Rather than follow on directly from Revenge, this is a loose adaptation of the second arcade game, combining the improvements from the first Mega Drive game with the awesome idea of a canine partner. It’s set in the future (1997) where a lizard-worshipping terrorist cult has decimated the population and taken hostages, with Joe’s son Hayate out to stop them for good. This game has a lot going for it, but I feel the return to a more arcade feel, including the one-hit-kills setup, makes it the weakest of the three.

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master (1993) Among Mega Drive games there are very few moments as epic and cinematic as the beginning of this game, which sees an older and stronger Joe sprinting through the forests and caves near his mountain home dismantling the goons of a resurgent evil empire, before riding a horse through a storm to battle ninjas arriving on kites. It’s an outrageous Japanese action movie in game form, backed up with an expanded moveset, incredible scrolling backgrounds and heaps of atmosphere. It’s very close to as good as Revenge, but the only things holding it back are the lack of Koshiro’s synthy beats (he only composed the one Mega Drive entry) and a lack of focus that sees some of the later game scenarios get extremely kooky.