Let’s be a little kinder about the junk food of video games (but not too kind)
Plus Marvel’s Midnight Suns, the joy of Solitaire and which games are old now.
Hello friends,
Welcome to another Wednesday filled with games. What an exciting time to be alive. So many games. Too many games? No. But definitely a lot of games.
This week Alice is talking about the junk food of video games and the goodness of Solitaire, while Tim opines on Marvel’s Midnight Suns and looks back at the game anniversaries for November. Plus, all our recommendations for what to play this weekend.
Three cheers for games you can play while doing something else
By Alice
Games with sweeping, engrossing stories are wonderful. Sitting down and dedicating yourself to one of the few activities that don’t allow for multitasking is a treat to be cherished.
However, let’s put them aside for a moment and talk about the mobile garbage we all know and love. The junk food that supplements a well-balanced diet of the good stuff. I must admit that these days I play a lot more snacking games than full console titles because it’s just easier. A terrible reality show where attractive people go on dates with 12 strangers to decide who to bring home to Christmas (a real example) is not enough to take up your full attention. But that paired with a small farming game, or a sudoku, or tower defence, or whatever mobile game is hot at the time can make for a meaningless escape which is sometimes necessary.
Casual mobile games get a bad rap for not being “real games” by people who think that the only real games are the ones targeted directly at the male 16-35 demographic.
We don’t need to listen to those people.
That’s not to say that they’re perfect, though.
Because my Switch battery is purely decorative at this point (I swear I will eventually get around to saving up for the Switch OLED), I just spent a 14.5 hour flight watching For All Mankind and playing SpongeBob Square Pants Solitaire, Spider+, Spelltower+ and half a dozen other games. All of these are Apple Arcade games with no microtransactions, and yet in-app purchases and other gacha nonsense is so baked into mobile games that even SpongeBob Solitaire felt the need to lean into power ups and resource management rather than just allowing a path to victory in every level through skill. It’s sad that the mobile medium is so locked into that crutch, and hopefully a new path forward emerges soon, to make these snacking games a more rewarding experience.
What to play
This week Apple announced the winners of the App Store Awards, which included a whole bunch of games: Best iPhone game was Apex Legends mobile, iPad was Moncage, Mac was Inscryption, Apple TV was El Hijo, China game of the year was League of Legends Esports Manager, and Best Apple Arcade Game went to Aussie studio Drydock with Wyld Flowers. Wyld Flowers is a game I highly recommend if you enjoy peaceful farming games - this is the game you play when Stardew Valley seems a bit intense. Sadly, League of Legends Esports Manager isn’t available in the app store here, otherwise it sounds just weird enough to be worth checking out.
It’s the first day of the month, which means new free games for subscribers of Xbox Live Gold and PlayStation Plus (any tier). Those on Xbox can enjoy the disappointment of Colt Canyon and Bladed Fury (I’ve [Alice] never heard of them either). On PlayStation you can actually enjoy Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Biomutant and Divine Knockout. Enjoy!
New to Game Pass this week is Insurgency Sandstorm, a multiplayer military shooter that was well received in 2018 and should see a new influx of players now it’s on the subscription. There’s also Soccer Story, which I expected to be a pale imitation of Golf Story but actually turned out to be pretty interesting on its own. It’s a voxelly exploration RPG where pretty much all your problems are solved by booting a ball or slide-tackling whatever’s in your way.
Sony is running an Indies Sale on the PlayStation Store. It’s worth a look, but with more than 1000 titles and a lot of fluff in the mix there’s nothing that jumped out immediately. The problem with making recommendations from these kinds of all-encompassing sales is that the best deals are often on older games that most everyone who’s interested will have snapped up already. But if somehow you don’t have Limbo and Inside they’re in a bundle here for $8, while Death’s Door is half off at $15 and and the entire Shovel Knight saga is $20.
Card combat and midnight meet-ups
By Tim
Marvel Games’ current partnership strategy is going well overall, despite one or two flubs. So it’s no real surprise that the company would greenlight Firaxis, developers of the X-COM franchise, to helm a turn-based strategy adventure in Marvel’s Midnight Suns. As a big fan of both Marvel and X-COM I was keen to see how it all played out, and while I can’t give you a definitive review (I’m only around 20 hours in, plus the embargo isn’t up yet), I can tell you this: I’m having a lot of fun, but I do have some reservations.
It would be unfair to expect the game to be purely X-COM. A lot of the tension of those games comes from the fact your beloved soldiers could be horribly killed at any time and lost forever, which makes no sense applied to Wolverine or Captain Marvel. A big part of the joy of X-COM also comes from customisation, determining the kind of capabilities your squad will have, and filling in the blanks of their life’s journey with your own headcanon. Again, this doesn’t work for characters with such incredibly rich histories as Iron Man or Scarlet Witch.
But it feels to me as though Midnight Suns struggles to find analogous mechanics that do work. Combat is largely about synergising your team’s capabilities and adapting to enemy waves or transformations, positioning your crew while managing the bad guys. And this can work really well; I love dropping a portal as Magik to slam some goon into a beefy boss, to put them both in a perfect spot for a Spider-man one-two punch. But at the same time the tightly enclosed arenas and fundamental turn-based nature of the game means you’ll see your heroes standing around just taking hits a lot of the time.
I’m also not completely sold on the deck-building mechanic that determines which moves your heroes can pull off in a given turn. This is something that could definitely grow on me in time, since new cards are unlockable and upgradeable, but it tends to be a bit arbitrarily prescriptive.
Finally there’s the abbey where you spend all your downtime between missions, and this could be the weirdest part. It feels like the intent was to let you date the heroes, and then all actual romance had to be removed at the last second. I’m not objecting to a night of stargazing with Nico Minoru, and the fact that I might unlock new swimsuits for her to wear as a reward seems extraordinarily retrograde in 2022, but my main issue is the narrative and gameplay benefits of these outings is nowhere near as compelling as in, say, Fire Emblem Three Houses.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Why are we as a species so obsessed with the game of Solitaire? Because it’s good, I guess.
It is objectively the best traditional card game that you can play without introducing gambling elements. Some of my favourite afternoons with my mum as a child were spent sitting on the couch playing Solitaire on trays side by side. It was the only game a lot of people played on their PCs back in the days of dial up internet. It’s an enduring and universal game, which is perhaps why there are so many weird variations of it now available for mobile.
Solitaire+ is the classic, vanilla Solitaire where you can play the traditional rules of Solitaire.
Spider+ is Spider Solitaire, which is kind of like regular Solitaire if you squint, but much harder once you start moving to two suits (and nigh on impossible if you go to four suits).
SpongeBob Square Pants Solitaire, however, is a crime against Solitaire. It is kind of like Solitaire in that you're stacking cards sequentially, but also completely different to Solitaire in that it’s a different game with different rules and a different play style. It’s solitaire in the same way that Pokémon is Magic the Gathering. It’s not, and if you suggest that they are in certain rooms, some nerd is going to give you an overly long lecture on it. It’s still an enjoyable game, but let’s call a spade a spade here.
All of these Solitaires employ certain strategies to get you to play every day, because they’re on a subscription service and the only way the developers get paid is if you keep playing so it stays on the service. Normally, I would find that vexing, but a gentle daily challenge actually isn’t too bad as long as you’re not punished for missing a day.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
With November drawing to a close, it’s time to look back on the games that have celebrated a major anniversary in the last month.
Now 15: Mass Effect Bioware’s space epic was instrumental in shaping an identity for the Xbox 360 long before the game itself launched, promising a cinematic next-generation follow-up to Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect did not disappoint. The level of lore and world-building was practically unprecedented for the time (at least at this level of fidelity), and though it would go on to spawn an entire franchise, this first game alone remains a brilliant work of interactive sci-fi. It’s currently easily accessible as part of the recent Mass Effect Legendary Edition, although I have a soft spot for the strange faces and wonky combat controls of the original, which blew my mind as a new 360 owner in 2008.
Now 20: Metroid Prime I once bought a used copy of Metroid Prime with money I was planning to use for food (and I had to beg the EB Games employee to give it to me a few cents cheaper, which in retrospect must have been weird for him), but guess what, it was worth it. In its heyday this was hands down the best-looking console game ever, but its true strength is in its immaculate atmosphere, pitch-perfect adaptation of Metroid mechanics to a first-person perspective, and of course the scan-to-get-lore feature that I can never get enough of. I’m currently replaying this on Gamecube and loving it, though the Wii version has more precise shooting and widescreen visuals. The lack of a HD Switch version is criminal.
Now 30: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 I don’t usually include sequels in these lists, but then most sequels don’t have what Sonic 2 had: the world’s best fox. The mere presence of Tails further elevates a game that also looks better, sounds better, plays better and features objectively better levels than its predecessor. I had Sonic 2 before the original, and when I eventually got a copy of Sonic 1 the whole thing seemed so empty without that adorable orange idiot pinging around and getting himself into trouble. I also developed a method of using two Mega Drive controllers at once to control both Sonic and Tails, which to be honest wasn’t all that helpful. You can get Sonic 2 as part of the great Sonic Origins.
If you haven't tried it already, I highly recommend The Solitaire Conspiracy on Steam. Bithell Games' take on Solitaire combines well-designed puzzle card gameplay mixed with some fun spy drama and card abilities - plus FMV cut scenes!