More Fallout! Kinda…

Plus Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Ticket To Ride Germany and Mario Builder 64

Welcome back Button Buddies! Congratulations on surviving yet another week.

In this issue of Press Any Button, Alice is deep in the rumour mines for the new season of Fortnite, and has visited Germany (in board game form). Meanwhile, Tim played a new old Mario game that’s new again, as well as an old old Mario game with new features. Plus, all the games you should be playing this weekend.

Enjoy!

When we said we wanted more Fallout, this is not what we meant

By Alice

Since the success of the truly excellent Fallout TV series on Amazon Prime, gamers have been crying out for a new Fallout game to wash away the bad taste left by Fallout 76. A Fallout-themed season of Fortnite is probably not what they meant, but I’m psyched anyway.

The previous season of Fortnite was all about Greek Gods, and I mostly really loved it, despite noticing how much Epic is moving away from focussing on Battle Royale in favour of all the other, newer modes (now I know how Save The World players feel). I have no idea how the writers are going to shift from Greek Gods to Fallout, but I’m sure it won’t make any sense and everyone will love/hate is anyway.

Judging by the teaser released today, the season is going to have a focus on cars, and strong “we have Mad Max at home” vibes (just in time for the release of Furiosa in cinemas this week).

The Fallout of it all comes in the form of the Brotherhood of Steel Power Armour likely appearing in the battle pass (if the teasers are anything to go by).

In the fine print of the teaser trailer, there was also a mention of Marvel, which is weird because I could not pick out any Marvel content in the trailer. Some say this is because Season 4 will be Marvel themed, others think it’s because there will be a Marvel themed character this season. It’s all mysterious.

Another strongly rumoured thing for this season is a Pirates of the Caribbean collaboration. Given the Johnny Depp of it all, I kinda hate that. But as a die-hard Keira Knightly fan, I could also potentially very love this. Could go either way.

Other rumoured collars include My Hero Academic and Jujutsu Kaisen, which is continuing on the theme of the last year.

The new season goes live tonight, so I’ll guess we’ll find out then.

What to play

• New on Game Pass this week is Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, and I (Tim) highly suggest you play it if you’re a subscriber (so does Alice). At around eight hours long it’s a lot like bingeing a TV miniseries and, though I have some niggles with the gamier aspects, the story and presentation are absolutely incredible. I think the representation of Senua’s psychosis — and especially the game’s rollercoaster ending — would be the subject of discussion across the internet right now, had it been attached to a Sony first-party game that was actively marketed and widely played.

• There’s actually a pair of additional brand new games on Game Pass this week too. Galacticare is a hospital management sim set in space, while Hauntii is a very cute hand-drawn monochromatic ghost adventure.

• It’s a big week on PlayStation Plus as well, with Red Dead Redemption II joining the Extra catalogue (technically it’s returning, since it was there for a few months in 2022 before being reneged). Also returning is the original Watch Dogs, along with fresh additions Deceive Inc., Crime Boss: Rockay City, Stranded: Alien Dawn, Cat Quest II and more. As for classics, there’s the very strange PS1 trio of 2Xtreme, G-Police and Worms Pinball. I ordinarily don’t comment on the games that are leaving PS Plus on a given month, but this time the list includes Horizon: Zero Dawn. WTH? There’s hopefully a good reason for removing a Sony-published game from the service.

• Free on the Epic Games Store today is Farming Simulator 22. It is just such a good, chill game that I (Alice) think you should absolutely try it. Fun fact: the game is so popular in Germany that there is a $200,000 esports scene built around it. I had the random pleasure of watching Angela Merkel playing Farming Simulator at Gamescom a few years ago, and witness the childlike joy she was experiencing. She’d looked absolutely annoyed to be there during her presentation about Minecraft in schools (as you can see from the header image on this section of the newsletter), and later snuck off to try the new version of Farming Simulator because she’s a fan. Anyway, be like Angela Merkel this weekend and get Farming Simulator 22 for free.

Paper Mario is completely re-printed

By Tim

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is out now for Switch, releasing what is arguably the finest Mario RPG from the prison of the Gamecube, to be enjoyed by millions. But though I am far from finished with the game, I thought it would be worthwhile to give some thoughts here, because this is far more than a port of the 2004 original. In fact, I think this remake goes further even than the versions of Mario Sunshine and Metroid Prime Nintendo has previously released.

There were a lot of Salty Sallies on Twitter when it was revealed this new game would run at 30 frames per second on Switch, where the original was 60 frames per second on Gamecube. But aside from this technical issue being trivial in a turn-based RPG, the reason is clear: this is not the Gamecube game. Absolutely everything from the characters to the backgrounds to the effects have been entirely rebuilt for the Switch version and are gorgeous. Paper people are razor sharp, the cobblestones of Rogueport shine with reflective smoothness and there is complex lighting absolutely everywhere. It looks every bit of two decades removed from the original.

The same is true of the music, with the iconic but relatively low-fi tunes of the original replaced by new orchestrations that are a bit jazzier, a bit less bleepy and bloopy. I love it, but it does also make the score a bit more homogenous within the wider Paper Mario series. Cutely, you can buy and equip a little Gamecube badge that makes all the music like it used to be.

The game’s script has been tuned up too, giving some characters more to say (and with new goofy babble sound effects) while adjusting for cultural expectations 20 years on from the original. The big one that will likely cause the most headlines regards Vivian. In the original Japanese script she more or less described herself as a trans woman, but was brutally mocked throughout the game. In English there was no element of trans-ness, she was a woman who was mocked for being ugly. In the new script she is explicitly trans in English, and is still mocked by her siblings (though not in a transphobic way), but is addressed kindly and respectfully by the game and the good guy characters.

So far none of the changes I’ve seen have taken away from the brilliant combat, great world and hilarious writing of the original game, but have improved the presentation across the board to truly bring it up to 2024 Switch standards.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings 

by Alice

The quest to play through every version of Ticket to Ride has brought us to a new-to-me classic: Ticket To Ride Germany. Germany is clearly a game where the makers felt comfortable iterating on the formula a bit more, and had learned lessons from the other more traditional versions.

Germany has all the usual characteristics of a Ticket To Ride game - you collect route cards and train cards, and you place train cards to get to your destinations and earn points. What’s new is that there are now passengers to be collected at some stations, and you have a new goal to collect as many of the passengers in certain colours as possible, as there are bonus points to be had for whomever has the most of each colour.

German TTR fans will be familiar with the board, because it was first released as a German and Austrian exclusive Zug um Zug: Deutschland. It’s essentially been mashed up with that, Zug um Zug: Deutschland 1912, and uses some of the passenger mechanic from the 2006 branded version of the game: Ticket to Ride: Märklin (which was actually the third version released), but with some tweaks.

Fun facts aside, it plays extremely well. It feels more polished than the base TTR. I just wish the board was a bit bigger so it could be enjoyed longer (which I know is not a popular feeling). I’d love to see the passenger mechanic utilised on the Europe and American boards. It’s a shame it wasn’t used in the Legacy version of the game.

It’s easy enough to pick up and play that I think it would work as an introduction to the franchise, and it’s a must play for both fans of TTR and of Germany more broadly.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

I’m constantly in awe of the retro modding community. The talent and dedication that goes into making new ways to play beloved old games, at a professional quality and essentially for free, is incredible. But I was especially bowled over this week with the release of Mario Builder 64; an effort that brings Mario Maker style level creation to the iconic 1996 3D game, and works either in emulators or on a real Nintendo 64.

From prolific Super Mario 64 hackers Rovertronic and Arthurtilly, the new hack gives players the ability to place and define essentially every element from the game, remixing them into their own levels. You can hide red coins, design a footrace with Koopa the Quick, build boss battles, craft athletic challenges or just dump a bunch of skeeters in a gross watery pit. Building is intuitive and the levels feel great to play, even if the bigger ones run quite slowly on original hardware.

Beyond what was included in SM64 though, this hack provides “new” content like music ported from other 64 games or recreated from orchestrations on later consoles, and elements built for Rovertronic’s previous Mario 64 adventure Beyond the Cursed Mirror, so some creations feel genuinely fresh.

Of course the N64 does not have Wi-Fi, so it’s not as easy to share your levels or play through other people’s creations, but the solution in place is impressive nonetheless. On the console you need a dev cart that supports SD cards (like the Everdrive 64 X7), and Mario Builder 64 will create its own folder where your levels live and other levels downloaded from the internet can be placed. It works the same in emulators, but you have to set up a virtual SD card.
Most excitingly this mod means people can create new Mario 64 levels without needing to know how to code an entire mod on their own, and players can access them without needing to source and patch new mods constantly. More than 300 levels have already been shared to the website Level Share Square.