People who would be weird at parties make the best art
Plus new games coming to Game Pass, Lego freebies, and playing GameBoy games on the TV
Hello Button Buddies,
Congratulations on making it halfway through game season. Soon game and tech season will wind down and you’ll actually have time to play all these games that we’re all being bombarded with.
Until then, though, there’s a new Press Any Button. This week Alice waxes philosophical about how people with special interests make the coolest stuff, and gives you a heads up about Lego VIP weekend, while Tim tells you what’s on Game Pass from today and puts GameBoy games on the big screen.
A red letter game
By Alice
One of the best things in life is seeing something made by someone who is clearly extremely invested in the source material. A good example is The Lord of the Rings movies for which the costume designers included thousands of extra little details that would never be seen on screen, even on the costumes of extras who had minimal screen time. Or the early seasons of The Great British Bake Off when Mel and Sue would find food historians to explain how and why English food is the way it is. You can just tell when someone has found an unusual hobby that they love and are excited to create something that truly honours that passion (or obsession).
Seeing the makers of Pentiment talk about their game was like that. In a half hour presentation a few months back, I heard game director Josh Sawyer talk in detail about the game and the history of the 1500s, which is when the game is set. As he spoke about the different levels of education people in the village would have, how Catholicism played into their lives, and different forms of writing and creating manuscripts, you could just tell that this guy was born to make this game.
That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with games that treat historical accuracy as optional in the interests of fun, I love games that subvert timelines and expectations in interesting ways. But there’s something special about art made by people who would probably be weird at parties*, but who clearly love the details of the story they’re telling. (*Sawyer might be great at parties, I don’t know him. Probably depends on the party.)
While Pentiment is absolutely not a game for everyone because of how slow and detailed it is, it’s a game I’m really enjoying taking my time with and one I’d recommend to anyone with an interest in post-classical/early modern history.
What to play
Another week, another Apple Arcade game to intend to play, and this week’s title is Old Man’s Journey. It looks like a quiet puzzle solving game that takes you through significant moments of an old guy’s life to help you appreciate the little moments or old people or something along those lines. The art looks nice and it seems to be a chill game.
Coming to Xbox/PC Game Pass this week (in addition to what Tim calls out below) is Dune: Spice Wars, Ghostlore, Lapin and Norco.
For mobile players, Game Pass Ultimate has just added touch controls to a bunch more games, with the standouts being Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed Origins, DC League of Super Pets: The Adventures of Krypto and Ace and Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Sticking with Game Pass, here is your reminder that sometimes games leave the service, and you only have two weeks left to play Archvale, Deeeer Simulator, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Mind Scanners, Mortal Shell, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, Undungeon, and Warhammer 40,000 Battlesector.
This is the week prospective Pokemon masters have been waiting for, as generation 9 begins on Friday with Violet and Scarlet. Hands on impressions will have to wait until next week, but for now we can all agree that Quaxly is the only correct choice of starter.
Also arriving on Friday is The Devil in Me, which like the other three Dark Pictures Anthology games (plus Until Dawn and The Quarry) promises a very entertaining interactive horror experience that’s perfect for movie nights. This one’s about surviving a murder house.
A lot of games were freshly added to PlayStation Plus Extra this week, headlined by timeless classic Skyrim in its Special Edition form. There's also beloved 5v5 Rainbow Six Siege, every Kingdom Hearts, a couple of Tom Clancy and Earth Defence Force games, and highly recommended indies What Remains of Edith Finch and The Gardens Between. Unsurprisingly at this point, there are absolutely zero PS1, PS2 or PSP games to add to the Deluxe library.
Theology and frustration
By Tim
On the Xbox Game Pass front, two new games have been added this week. And while I would generally just summarise them in the section above, these two games in particular come from such pedigrees that I’ve been anticipating them both for a long time. And having now played them I can report that one is far better than I expected, and one is something of a disappointment.
Pentiment is a project from a small team inside Obsidian Entertainment, led by Josh Sawyer, who is known for directing Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. It's essentially a visual novel detective story, set in mediaeval Bavaria and rendered in a wonderful art style inspired by the illustrated manuscripts of the time.
If you love those side-quests in RPGs where you don't do any combat but instead spend a lot of time persuading people, comparing their statements for inaccuracies, deciding who to believe and wrapping your head around moral dilemmas, this is a whole game of that. But it's also incredibly well written, filled with tragedy, looks and sounds like a love letter to the 1500s and is generally a hand-wringing delight.
On the other hand Somerville comes from the new studio of Dino Patti, previously producer on the incomparable Limbo and Inside. Unfortunately, the game misunderstands or learns some wrong lessons from the success of Inside, and struggles to do its own thing as well.
Opening on a young family separated during a violent alien invasion, the minimalist visual art and wordless storytelling set a mood, as we learn our protagonist has gained some kind of otherworldly power. Like Inside it’s mysterious and ambiguous, and has a lot of pushing and pulling puzzles, but there’s little of the intrigue, tension or foreboding. Little of the horror, or dark revelations. Little of the imagination.
Without that, the action is somewhat directionless and boring. Questions raised during the adventure are generally uninteresting and also go unanswered. Paired with a hard-to-parse 3D structure, performance issues and some very wobbly physics, it all adds up to a great looking game that promises more than it can deliver.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
There are some things in life we simply must accept as being inevitable: death, taxes and Australia adopting American cultural things even if they make no sense and the name is bad. Yes, I’m talking about Black Friday. Yes, the event has a name we associate most with horrific bushfires. Yes, it probably reminds thousands of people of recent trauma. Yes, we have our own sales traditions, and no we don’t have Thanksgiving so it makes even less sense to have a ‘day after Thanksgiving’-themed sale. But, because we’ve seen it on enough TV shows to be vaguely familiar with the concept it, it looks like it’s going to happen to us whether we like it or not.
We’ll get into the good actual Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Capitalist Dystopia deals next week. But one thing Lego does that I like and am also confused by is have a Lego VIP weekend event the weekend before Black Friday. This is a slightly odd choice, because some people will not know whether or not to wait for Cyber Monday deals (which are traditionally quite good), or go for the double VIP points and good freebies, but whatever.
This year sees not one, not two, but three free gifts if you spend certain amounts, and two of them are great.
Purchases over $139 will get you a Lego Baking set with cookie cutters and mini-fig face tray. Purchases over $259 get a Winter Elves Scene with some elves on a frozen lake near a Christmas tree (372 pieces). The special one, however, comes with purchase over $309, and is the Tribute to Lego House and contains five mini-builds based on sets that are exclusive to Lego House in Billund, including the dinosaurs, Brick moulding machine and wooden duck (583 pieces). Those deals stack, so you can get all 3 with a $309 purchase, along with free shipping. And Lego is once again trying those 100-point coupons that give you large discounts on certain sets.
Will this be a better deal than the Cyber Monday ones? No idea. Couldn’t tell you. I can’t work that out either. But, if you want these freebies, and there is a 100-point coupon for a set you want, it’s worth checking out the VIP weekend.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
For almost as long as there have been game consoles there have also been hardware add-ons, which expand capabilities with new processing tech, or give the ability to play different media.
There was the Famicom Disk System, which gave the Japanese version of the NES the ability to play games from floppies, or Sega’s 32X which let the Mega Drive play special high-powered cartridges. Several cart-based systems got add-ons to enable CD games, or even rudimentary online features over satellite or cable.
But probably my favourite of all is the Game Boy Player; a big flat bit of plastic that sticks to the underside of a Gamecube and lets you play your Game Boy Advance games on the big screen. It's a trick Nintendo had pulled off once before with the Super Game Boy, but the 32-bit GBA tech is just so much better suited for TV play, and the GBP works with Game Boy and Game Boy Color games as well.
Hardware-wise the GBP is essentially a Game Boy Advance with no screen or speakers, plus an interface that plugs into a high-speed port underneath the Cube. It even has a port for a link cable on the front, so you can play multiplayer Game Boy games with a combination of Game Boys and Gamecubes.
One weakness of the GBP is the software disc it originally came with. It doesn't scale the graphics especially well, meaning a poor and blurry look on modern displays, plus it's somewhat rare and expensive these days. Thankfully, if you have a way to run homebrew software on your Cube, an excellent program called Game Boy Interface exists and produces amazing results.
Are there easier ways to play Game Boy on your TV in 2022? Absolutely. But in addition to letting you use your original cartridges, the GBP has one more advantage; it makes the Gamecube look sick as hell. The slot and eject switch adds to the early 2000s plastic future vibe, while the extra height brings the whole unit closer to being a literal cube.