More video game food, please
Plus Tony Hawk on roller skates with a gun, playing games on planes and reliving the joys of the PlayStation One
Hello Button Buddies,
It’s a new week with lots of new games to look forward to. Plus, I’m (Alice) fresh back from New York and pleased to let you know that summer is real and may eventually come for us all. Maybe.
In this week’s newsletter you can read about the latest edible brand tie-ins, Tim’s adventures with a skater-shooter, my adventure in trying to find the perfect game to play on a plane, and the best ways to rediscover PS1 games.
Delicious, delicious games
By Alice
I love a food gimmick, it must be said. I have no idea what bubble tea has to do with The Elder Scrolls online, but Bethesda and Sharetea have teamed up to offer five different flavours of bubble tea to mark The Elder Scrolls Online Free Play Event. The flavours of tea look very nice, and they’re all caffeinated to keep you awake when you inevitably become addicted to TESO and need to know what happens next/build your house.
That’s not the only edible video game thing this week. Moon Dog Brewery is releasing a beer for the new Saints Row game. If you’re in Melbourne on Thursday. You can even go to a launch party for the game at the brewery in Preston.
In the past, food gimmicks have been hit and miss. Usually there is some kind of disgusting energy drink involved. Sometimes you can order a barely edible Dominos pizza to get an Xbox Game Pass code, sometimes there’s a branded Mountain Dew for fans of corn syrup and whatever Mountain Dew is supposed to taste like.
Branded tie-ins are always going to be a thing, so I’m kinda pleased that some brands are raising their sights to smaller companies like Moon Dog, and things people actually enjoy, like bubble tea.
What I would like to see next is a delicious chip flavour, or a Nando’s brand partnership, or perhaps an elaborate mocktail.
If you’re into bubble tea and TESO, you can get your fix on Menulog now, and the Moon Dog beer can be ordered online.
What to play
The PlayStation Winter Sale ends tomorrow, which means you only have one more day to get The Last of Us Part II for $29.97 before the remaster of the original comes out soon (though, the therapy to process your feelings about the game afterwards will be an added cost). Other picks are The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt for $15.59 and Dragon Age Inquisition for $10.38.
Coming up on Apple Arcade this week is Jetpack Joyride 2, which I (Alice) did not know when I wrote this week’s Bricks Boards and Beginnings and am now super chuffed about. I remember playing a bit of it when it first launched and then got distracted by something shiny, so I’m looking forward to jumping back in.
The PlayStation Plus library adds 11 games today for Extra and Premium subscribers. Unfortunately no PS1 or PS2 classics to speak of, but the most interesting additions are beautiful 2019 Shooter Metro Exodus, JRPG remake Trials of Mana, bizarre muppet collect-em-up Bugsnax and the first three canonical stories in the Yakuza franchise.
New to Game Pass this week is Coffee Talk, an incredible visual novel in which you run a coffee shop in a version of Seattle populated by magical creatures. You make coffee, put on some chill beats, listen to people’s problems and make some good friends.
There are some interesting sales on Switch, beyond the usual suspects. Namely Octodad: Dadliest Catch, which is a hilarious wobbly physics adventure about an octopus successfully passing himself off as human, including having human kids, which is $5 until tomorrow. Then, if you grew up on Fighting Fantasy books like I did, you might be interested in Warlock of Firetop Mountain. It’s an excellent single player digital board game, and it’s currently down to $1.
Tony Hawk Pro Slayer
By Tim
If you’ve ever wished that Roll7 — the team behind the super-slick 2D skateboarding series OlliOlli — would make a full-on 3D Tony Hawk clone, your prayers have been answered. But, in what could be an unsolicited extra dose of awesome or a monkey paw caveat depending on your levels of bloodlust, Rollerdrome isn’t just a flashy skating game; it’s a third-person shooter as well.
Set in a dystopian retro future, the game sees an evil mega-corporation take over the world’s most popular and most lethal televised sport, à la Running Man. Competitors need to shoot and kill waves of dangerous enemies while entertaining the crowd with their acrobatic skating prowess. Judges on the sidelines award points for every trick and flourish, which also magically refills the runner’s ammo, so the most efficient way to play is also the snazziest; shoot and kill your enemies in mid-air, while twisting and upside-down.
As rookie skater Kara you zoom around a variety of arenas in a way that will feel very familiar to Pro Skater fans. You charge and release one button to jump, hit another to grind, and hold a third in mid-air for grab tricks. But since you’re on rollerskates and not a board there are no flip tricks, instead you get a dedicated dodge button that comes in handy for avoiding snipers. You also have a somersault button, which you should use liberally because Kara always lands on her skates, and a limited bullet-time slow-mo ability.
Some of the elements here are so similar to Pro Skater that it took me a while to click with how the game is supposed to be played. I’d be trying to collect the five hidden items, hit a high score or a specific trick to check challenges off my checklist, but be constantly derailed by rocket fire. The key is to understand not just the level layout but also the enemy wave formations, and how best to take out each type of goon. As with THPS you need to complete a certain number of challenges to unlock new levels, but a run only ends when you take out all the bad guys, so you need to plan your lines equally for skating and homicide.
Aside from the shooting Rollerdrome does have plenty of elements to call its own. Namely its wonderful line art style, a shady narrative to uncover, and boss battles against robots so big you can skate on them.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Packing for a long plane trip after years of not doing it is weird. Back in 2019, I went overseas more than a dozen times and had it down to a science. But, until last Saturday, I hadn’t been on a long-haul flight since February 2020, which was another life.
As always, I massively overpacked on the essentials: 10 pairs of headphones (three for the plane, seven in case I needed to do a comparative review of something), 300 episodes of television (what if I suddenly decide I hate my favourite show and want to end my rewatch early and I don’t like any of the movies on the plane?), 20 ebooks (I like options), five phones (my job is weird), and a puzzle book.
But the hardest thing to pick for the plane was, surprisingly, the right mobile games. In the past, I’ve used flights to review apps that I needed to do for work. I used to review two games and three apps (including mobile games) every single week, and I haven’t flown overseas at a time when I didn’t need to be checking out an app for work.
What made it so hard is that now basically all the fun games that I’ve come to truly enjoy want some kind of connectivity. Even single player games supposedly need some kind of connection to “sync progress”. Why does a digital jigsaw puzzle need constant connectivity?
It’s made me come to extra appreciate Apple Arcade. I can overload my iPhone with heaps of games, half of which don’t need an internet connection, and there’s no pressure if I don’t like them. I did the same with Netflix games on my Galaxy Z Fold3. There’s comfort in knowing that there’s no pressure to love these games and I won’t miss anything just because I’m in airplane mode.
However, after all the loading of longer, more in-depth games like Wyld Flowers, Monument Valley and The Oregon Trail, I ended up just playing an unhealthy quantity of Jetpack Joy Ride. It’s still exactly how you remember it and was a complete, glorious waste of time. Half Brick unleashed Jetpack Joyride into the iTunes Store back in 2011. The world has changed so much since then, and yet Jetpack Joyride remains unchanged.
The thing I forgot about being trapped in a metal tube for 20 hours is that it’s the right time for something simple and unchallenging, like playing a familiar game in front of my favourite TV show. It’s about rest, relaxation, and being just distracted enough that I forget I don’t know how the tube stays in the air. It’s a space outside of time, and you should just do whatever feels right in the moment.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
The original PlayStation is an iconic console. Originally a disruptor that undercut Sega and Nintendo on price while marketing aggressively to an audience the incumbents were overlooking in the West, these days it’s an important repository of early 3D adventures, killer soundtracks and incredibly wonky voice acting.
It’s disappointing that Sony seems so determined to roll out classics from the era to its PlayStation Plus Premium service so incredibly slowly, but luckily there are several fun and interesting ways to revisit the platform.
A PS3 is probably the most straightforward. It will play any PS1 disc, and you can also buy digital PS1 games from the online store, plus it has HDMI so connecting it to your TV is trivial.
The ultimate nostalgic experience though is to grab yourself an actual PS1. These start at less than $100 and generally still work fine, though disc drives are beginning to die; it’s best to buy from trustworthy sellers who you can believe know how to test consoles properly.
There are an impressive number of different PS1 models floating around, from the earliest ones that had separate RCA connectors and are still sought after for their excellent CD fidelity, to later models that streamlined some components but also produced slightly superior graphics and performance. But any of them will be tough to plug and play 30 years on.
At the very least you’ll need a scaler or line doubler to get the composite video to your HD TV without garbling it, but there are also high-end mods to give the PS1 HDMI output, make it region free to play American or Japanese games, or replace the disc drive with a digital solution.
My personal PS1 also uses a good quality RGB cable from Retro Access, a Bluetooth controller receiver from Brook (paired with the sweet PS1-themed DualShock 4) and original Sony memory cards. I know the MemCard Pro exists, and can do incredible things like transferring saves to and from a PC via Wi-Fi, but it’s also more than $100 versus the $12 originals go for.