Mina the masterpiece

Plus Star Fox, board games at parties and hidden N64 gems.

Hello there! I haven’t watched the PlayStation broadcast yet, and I’m trying to preserve the sense of surprise for when I do watch it, which is difficult when I’ve basically orchestrated every device in my life to bring video game news to me the moment it happens. So apologies if something major was announced that you’d expect I’d be commenting on right now.

This week, I’m running down just a few of the reasons Mina the Hollower is the game of the year so far and shedding light on some lesser-appreciated gems from the Nintendo 64’s first two years, while Alice has played Star Fox and is giving some insight into the process of choosing board games for a party. Let’s go!

One mouse against the world

By Tim

I’ve been waiting years for Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club’s first big original game since Shovel Knight. And not only has it completely exceeded my expectations, it’s become the highest reviewed game of the year so far on both OpenCritic and Metacritic. A lightly horror-themed top-down action adventure starring a mad scientist mouse with a delightfully eccentric burrowing ability — it’s a jump, a dash, a dodge and a second jump all in one — it’s a game that brilliantly hides layers and layers of complexity, charm, challenge, humour and worldbuilding beneath a retro exterior. But to avoid going over too many points you may have already heard, here I present five reasons why Mina rules, without any comparative references to other games or genres.

1. An open, non-linear world. You start with six possible locations to head out to, and at first I thought only one was accessible, and the rest would become available as you unlocked new gear. Not only was I wrong (five of them are easily accessible from the start if you get the right item or resources), but in retrospect the area I went with is not the one the game nudges you toward, and it was an incredibly difficult start. I also poked my nose into the wrong places and ended up doing what’s evidently meant as the final area fourth, which again made things much harder than they might have been. But I loved it.

2. It rewards risk and exploration. A big part of the game is pushing your luck. Every time you level up a stat it becomes more expensive to improve, and holding onto currency is a risk because subsequent deaths can bankrupt you. So do you hold onto those bones to pour into attack points, and risk losing them if you fail? If you see a tempting side path or treasure, do you go for it? How far is it until the next save? Combat itself is all about risk too, as your ability to heal depends on you getting in some good smacks on your enemies without taking a hit yourself. And exploring off the beaten path can get you weapons and upgrades that significantly alter your options and abilities.

3. You’re never truly stuck. The systems seem harsh at first, and they are, but you always have options. For example when I was throwing myself against a late-game boss way too early, I opted to do some rounds grinding on nearby enemies to juice up a few levels. Then I tinkered with my weapon and trinket loadouts. I loved the gun I had picked up, but maybe my original whip would be a better fit? Should I de-prioritise plasma and ramp up DPS? Of course if I couldn’t proceed I could have backtracked to a different area and tried again later. As a last resort there are a huge number of difficulty-lowering toggles, but using one will disable achievements on that save file.

4. It’s built to replay. I loved exploring Tenebrous Isles and am planning to do so again multiple times, and luckily the New Game+ is substantial. You keep all the gear you’ve discovered, and the state of which treasures you’ve found or missed remains, encouraging you to explore differently. Plus, there are specific permutations for seven successive replays, making the game slightly different and more challenging each time by rearranging save spots and other details.

5. It looks and sounds delightful. Just as Shovel Knight was slavishly devoted to NES imitation, Mina perfectly evokes the Game Boy Color, just in widescreen. And it’s not just an aesthetic, the game is built mechanically around the fact that vertical depth is an optical illusion in top-down 2D, and plays with the format to great effect. The soundtrack from Jake Kaufman (Shovel Knight, Shantae) is similarly something you can imagine coming out of a GBC speaker, assuming the cartridge had a hypothetical sound chip inside to add some extra channels. It’s moody and gothic, but also with some total bops and surprising genre switches blended through. I’ve never bought a digital OST on Bandcamp so quickly.

What’s on our radar

• It’s a mercifully quiet week in the leadup to Summer Game Fest and all the related shows, so I’m taking it easy with some recent games rather than jumping straight to anything else. Donkey Kong 64 is coming to Nintendo Switch Online this week, but unless they’ve patched it to be less belligerent about wasting my time with character-gated bananas, I think I’ll pass for now.

• Alice: FOOOOORRRRRRZZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Star Fox 64 is back, now in Switch 2 form

By Alice

I’m going to admit something that I think might be illegal: I can’t remember ever playing a Star Fox game before. I think I probably have played at least one at some point, but I didn’t have a Nintendo 64 growing up, so I don’t have those nostalgic memories tied to the franchise. So, I didn’t know what to expect coming into the preview of the latest Star Fox game at Nintendo Australia’s headquarters.

The new game is a reimagining (not a remake) of the Nintendo 64 game, though it doesn’t look anything like a N64 game, and certainly the cut scenes and voiceovers have been made to suit modern hardware. But it has the spirit of games from that era in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

The levels that I played had me flying, dodging, shooting, doing flips and U turns to try and beat the bad guys. I didn’t have a lot of context for what was going on, but I had a lot of fun.

Multiplayer is where it got really interesting. There was one mode where I controlled the ship, and a friend controlled the weaponry, which was chaos, alternating between fun and frustration. And another mode that was closer to capture the flag, playing on GameChat with various avatars that mirrored our facial movements was hilarious.

While I don’t know if it’s faithful enough for longtime fans to be thrilled, for me it felt like a really good way to be introduced to Star Fox, and the preview made me want to play more and invest in the game, so I’m looking forward to the release date of 25 June. Though, is it an experience I would pay $100 to have, given how short the campaign is likely to be? I’m not sure I would, so maybe hold off on a pre-order until proper reviews are out.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

(I forgot to take a photo of the games, so please enjoy this photo from the original chip blind taste test)

Finding the right board game to play at a party requires a careful balance. It has to get everyone involved with playing the game enough that they’re having fun, but not so much that they don’t converse with the other guests. It has to be competitive enough that there’s a point to playing, but not so competitive that losers don’t have fun. Team games are usually best, because if everyone is going to gang up on each other anyway, why not provide structure for that?

With that in mind, we played three games on the weekend, two of which we’d played before, and one that I’ll write up a review of for next week, and they really demonstrated the difference between a good game and a bad game.

The highlight, surprisingly, was Blockbuster, a movie trivia game wearing the corpse of a successful video rental franchise as a hat. It struck a good balance between being challenging enough, while still allowing for whimsy.

A close second was Dumb Questions To Ask Your Friends, which relies on how well you know your friends, and is hilarious with the right group. Luckily, I had the right group.

The worst was Mind The Gap, a trivia game that asks questions about news, pop culture, etc from different generations. While I maintain that it might be ok if you were playing on teams with a member of each generation, getting stuck in Gen X music hell for 8 turns was just tedious. If you have gaps in your knowledge of certain categories, we had to create new rules to make it fun again, and this was a table of people who love trivia.

The perfect game for your friends will depend on your friends, but finding something that doesn’t feel too competitive, and doesn’t require you to remember the names of 80s hair metal bands, is always a good place to start.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

This month is the 30th anniversary of the Nintendo 64. But rather than count down the seismic big hitters we all know plenty about, I thought I’d take a look at some of the deep cut gems you may not have played, in order of their release. Today, we’re covering 1996 and 1997.

Wonder Project J2 Exclusively released in Japan, but now with a readily available fan translation, this is a gal game life sim and a rare mostly-2D outing for the 64-bit system. You play as yourself, a mysterious character who can see through the screen into the life of a girl robot who wants to become human. You answer her questions, watch how she responds to the world, and try your best to help her learn. There are some surprisingly emotional scenes, and some expected creepy weirdness, but it’s beautiful to look at and a truly interesting design that goes largely overlooked.

Mischief Makers In a list of the greatest games developed by Treasure, this one likely wouldn’t rank too highly. But in a list of deep-cut N64 games from 1997 that still play great today, it absolutely does. It’s a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer in which you can grab, shake and throw practically everything, sometimes to defeat it or get loot, sometimes to activate hidden functions. It’s a chaotic fever dream of pre-rendered sad faces, surreal boss fights and your character — a robotic maid on a mission to save her creator — screaming “Shake! Shake!” over the top of everything as she sprints and jet-packs around.

Chameleon Twist This is one of those games that, if you didn’t play back in the day, you’ll probably have a hard time believing it was a real thing. Every bit of it looks so cooked, sounds so ridiculous, and seems like it shouldn’t have been viable as a commercial product, but it exists. You’re a chameleon who follows the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland down a magical hole, somehow transforming into a humanoid that still has a lizard tongue. It’s a 3D platformer where you can stop and steer your extendible tongue out and around the space, licking up creatures to spit out or wrapping around poles to swing from. It’s clearly designed for kids, but it’s such a wild concept that it’s worth a look.

Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 AKI’s WCW and WWF games for the system are legendary, but this Japan-only entry is underappreciated by many fans. Mechanically it sits between the WCW game World Tour and Revenge, but the real reason to play this one is for the roster. There are so many big names from 90s Japanese promotions, mixed in with wrestlers from WCW and even legends like Terry Funk, Andre the Giant and Abdullah the Butcher. While you’re grabbing an English translation patch, you can also grab a save file that gives all the wrestlers their proper English names, for a truly nostalgic all-star roster.