Hello there! This week’s issue is unintentionally filled with dad energy, for which I make no apology. We’re checking in with the Playdate as it gets its highest-profile game to date, sailing some Australian warships, building Lego F1 machines and reminiscing about Guitar Hero.
Recently I visited a nerdy collectible store and it had some Arcade 1-Up machines set up and running. My kids loved it, not only because they’ve never really played physical arcade machines before, but because these ones were shrunk down by essentially the same factor that the kids are shrunk down from regular adult humans. It all made me realise something I’d totally overlooked. Running out of lives and getting Game Over is a huge hurdle for getting kids to stick at retro games (and even retro-style games, which still have limited lives these days for essentially no reason), but emulated arcade games where you can press a button to add virtual coins are perfect! I won’t be paying $1000 for a machine with two Turtles games to cram into my house, but the same thing as part of the Cowabunga Collection on Xbox went down a treat.
Paranormals, Please
By Tim
I love my Playdate, and I use it all the time, but the little yellow crank-toting handheld hasn’t always been easy to recommend to people over the past two years. For starters, it’s been constantly on backorder which means waiting months to get one after placing an order. And secondly, there isn’t often a game released for it you can point to as a “must play”.
Well, as of recently Playdates are in stock and shipping straight after you order them (even if thanks to a price increase, taxes and the exchange rate they are now around $370 delivered to Australia). And this week saw the release of Mars After Midnight, a game that has been highly anticipated since it was teased way back when the console was first revealed. So, is the time right to take the plunge?
Mars After Midnight comes from solo developer Lucas Pope, known for Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, and to be honest it isn’t going to tear mainstream gamers away from their consoles and AAA shooters. But it is a perfect distillation of why the Playdate rules, and a demonstration of the kind of games that work best on the system.
You play as a weird little three-eyed beak person who runs a support centre on off-colony Mars. Your eventual goal is to help all sixty-something aliens with their various problems, but your day-to-day tasks are planning the sessions, admitting only the aliens with the appropriate afflictions, and maintaining the cleanliness of the refreshments table in hope of earning some tips.
Pope’s art shines on the little reflective LCD screen, with weirdo aliens rendered in faux-3D parallax, and the game makes inspired use of the crank controller; you rotate it to open and close a peephole on the community centre door, through which you judge whether each alien belongs in the group. For example only grumpy aliens with one eye should be let in for Cyclops Anger Management, and only unflinching starers for the Non-blinker Roundtable. Admitting the wrong people means they won’t get helped, you won’t get paid, and it will be tough to spend money on the upgrades and amenities needed for further sessions.
Like many of the other best Playdate games it’s funny, quirky, refreshing and tuned for short sporadic play sessions. Is it worth getting the machine just for this game? No. But if this sounds like the kind of play you’re into, there’s a whole lot more of it available for Panic’s cute little system.
What to play
March's additions to the PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue are now live, and as usual it's a decently sized list. My (Tim's) top pick here is Marvel's Midnight Suns, which is a really enjoyable superhero strategy game from the creators of X-COM, blending deep customisation and card-based combat with a decent story and not-quite-romanceable comic book characters.There's also NBA 2K24, the Resident Evil 3 remake, Lego DC Supervillains and more. For those paying more of the Classics catalogue, you get the PSP Jak and Daxter, PS1's Cool Boarders and the PS4 version of the original Ace Attorney trilogy from the Nintendo DS.
New to Game Pass this week is Lightyear Frontier, an early access farming sim set on an alien planet, where you and your friends get around in honkin’ big agricultural mechs. There’s no combat, as your mech’s “weapons” have all been adjusted for peaceful crop-growing purposes, such as blasting saplings into the earth or machine-gunning seeds over a vast area. Also new on the service is excellent cinematic pulp horror adventure The Quarry, stylish shooter Evil West and baseball sim MLB The Show 24.
Good news! The new Stardew Valley update is out on PC, and you can drink mayonnaise now! If you haven’t played Stardew Valley before, that won’t make sense to you, but trust me (Alice), it’s a thing that I have wanted for a while. There’s also a new Meadowlands farm, new events and 8-player multiplayer on PC, which is arguably bigger news. The update is currently only available for PC, with console and mobile updates in the works, but with no ETA. On a related note, it looks like I’m buying Stardew Valley on yet another platform.
World of Warships embraces a certain type of Australian dad
By Alice
In day-to-day life, being 35 doesn’t seem so old. Like, sure, I make noises if I have to get up off a bean bag chair, and my knees feel like cursed artefacts, but I know what the word “rizz” means and I still play with Lego, so it balances. But in the world of esports, I am considered a wizened old crone on par with the visage of the Evil Queen when she poisoned Snow White with that apple. I might be the exact age of the average gamer, but the average esports athlete was born after 9/11. This is true of almost all games, except three: World of Tanks, World of Warships and World of Warplanes, where athletes and the player base skew much older than, say, Fortnite.
I talk a lot about diversity and inclusion in games, and normally these conversations revolve around queers, people with disabilities, and people of colour, but including older people is important, too.
Because the games don’t rely on twitch reflexes, esports competitors and just regular players can still succeed at older ages.
The extreme level of detail in these games also mean that they really appeal to certain demographics: namely autistic people with a special interest in modes of transport, and dads who watch those WWII documentaries on SBS. There is also a disproportionate number of Australian players, which is why, in honour of ANZAC day, World of Warships is launching a new Commonwealth track, including Australian ships. The update brings several real-world accurate ships, as well as some level X more fanciful ships based on real ships/blueprints (and some creative licence). Australian ships currently in the game include the HMAS Vampire, which is a real boat you can visit in Sydney. The newest Australian ship is Cerberus, based on 1920s blueprints. As part of this Commonwealth update, Wargaming has donated $10,000 to the Australian National Maritime Museum, which is a nice gesture.
So, if that sounds like something you’re into, you should check it out. Otherwise, call your dad and tell him, it’s probably his jam.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
It’s the Melbourne Grand Prix this weekend, and while I have a lot of complicated feelings about the Albert Park event, I do enjoy some of the pageantry surrounding it. But one thing I do always love about this time of year is the increase in car Lego sets. For some reason, building medium-large cars and large buildings out of Lego just scratches a particular itch in my brain, they’re just so satisfying. Lego was kind enough to send me the latest Mercedes-AMG F1 W14 E Performance Technic and McLaren MP4/4 Lego set. The McLaren comes with a little minifig of Ayrton Senna, and while I’m unfamiliar with his work as a driver, I did greatly enjoyed driving the car named after him a while back (and also it was a Forza Horizon cover car), so I have a bit of a soft spot.
The McLaren is a nice, approachable build with 693 pieces. At $99.99, it is very expensive for what’s included, but given Lego is always 20% off somewhere, and the number of licenced parts, I think it’s a fair starting price.
I started building it last night, and even with just two bags down, I can already tell that it is a good, solid, classic Lego car build. It’s not too fiddly, or too simple. Building the chassis struck a nice balance, and I had such a good time that I ended up staying up way past my bedtime.
The big 1642 Mercedes-AMG Technic set will wait until I’m feeling more mental fortitude to tackle Technic, but with a realistic 6-cylinder engine and differential, not to mention working steering, it’s something I’m really looking forward to digging into over a weekend. It looks like an ace set. At $299.99, the price is starting to stray into an unreasonable territory, but that puts it in line with every other officially licenced F1 thing ever, so I’m not as mad at it as I would be otherwise.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Guitar Hero was a legitimate phenomenon more than 20 years ago, but were the games actually good, or was it all just novelty? I hadn’t played any in a very long time, but when I discovered I still had a guitar from 2015’s (awful) Guitar Hero Live, I sold it and bought a wired PS2 guitar from 2006, ready to revisit the originals.
Something I had forgotten is that almost all the songs from the first two games are covers, with the only exceptions being four tracks from Guitar Hero II. This was of course by necessity — neither developer Harmonix or publisher RedOctane were huge proven names at the time, and would have needed to negotiate for artists’ master recordings so they could break them down to adapt them for the game — but the effect is a pleasingly grungy vibe that matches the games’ dive bar aesthetic.
These two games are framed very simply, in that you play as an aspiring rock star doing covers in gig halls, and your reward is unlocking more songs in free play to perfect with your friends. My old arthritic hands immediately rejected the faux fretboard fingering gameplay, but after some practice I managed to adjust my muscle memory for a more comfortable style (and lowered the difficulty) and it all came flooding back. The rhythmic button presses and cathartic star power solos still rule, and the audio feedback that mutes the guitars when you stuff up still convinces your brain you are somehow producing the tasty licks with your plastic buttons when you hit them at the right time.
Everything after the first two games was produced after Activision took over the franchise, and it all goes quickly downhill. At the time, interest was maintained because of the changing paradigms: the franchise introduced real recordings from some of the biggest rock artists in the world, then Harmonix created the rival Rock Band franchise, and Guitar Hero expanded its lineup of plastic instruments to compete, ushering in an unprecedented era of local party play. But played in retrospect this rapid fire of releases (nine Guitar Hero games in the space of three years) is extraordinarily samey, and replacing all of the aspirational charm of the original with shiny cameos, outdated documentary features and multiplayer.