Puzzler? I hardly even know her!
Plus Fortnite nostalgia, Magic the Gathering, and Warcraft II nostalgia
Hello Button Buddies!
The weather is warm now. How do we feel about that?
The good news is that we can all spend the weekend inside in the air con with a bunch of games, so that’s something to look forward to.
This week Tim played some puzzle games and mused about Warcraft II. Meanwhile I (Alice) played too much Fortnite and finally convinced Tim to learn how to play Magic the Gathering. It was a good time. Plus there are sales on!
Enjoy!
What even is a puzzle anyway
By Tim
This week I’ve been enjoying two very different puzzle experiences. In fact they’re so different you might question the use of the word puzzle to describe either or both of them. But I don’t make the genre rules.
Rise of the Golden Idol tasks you with solving 20 crimes, each presented as a beautifully painted moment in time, set during or after the act. These range from grotesque and bloody murders, to jail breaks and robberies. You analyse the scene to collect clues, words and names, then use those to fill in the blanks and uncover the truth. They start as fairly simple “X hit Y with Z” formulations, but soon you’ll need to map multiple pages of details before you all have the information you need to work things out.
If you played 2022’s Case of the Golden Idol you’ll recognise the click-and-drag gameplay here, and will be able to pick up on some narrative threads. But this game is also set 200 years later in the late 20th century, has moved from the grotesque pixel style into high resolution art and is substantially more involved. Many cases have you solve multiple layers in a row (work out the names of the characters in the film so you can discover who the suspects are dressed like, in order to gauge the significance of a bet between a pair of movie-goers, before you can work out what happened), and each chapter has a meta-puzzle you can only solve after you’ve connected the dots between each crime.
And the other puzzle is Tetris!
Tetris Forever is one more incredible interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse, with heaps of great new interviews to watch and old games to play through. Sure, some of the commentary from the current owners of the Tetris licence is very cringey, but hearing from the folks who were there at the time rules. The one downside is that the game wasn’t able to get the rights to include the Game Boy version of Tetris, which is arguably the most iconic one. Still, if you play the brand new time-warping version Digital Eclipse is included, there’s a sneaky method to get pretty much the exact same thing, green graphics and wonderful music included.
What to play
Black Friday is coming soon! No, I don’t mean the anniversary of the horrific deadly bushfires, but the sales event Australia has appropriated from the US without considering whether the name works here. The PlayStation sale is going to run from 22/11-2/12, Xbox started today and runs until 2/12 and Steam goes from 27/11-4/12. Turns out “Friday” is more of a state of mind. Some highlights include Alan Wake 2 at 50% off, BioShock Collection at 80% off, Borderlands 3 90% off, The Quarry (which I, Alice, loved) at 85% off and Dredge is another good one to look out for. What those percentages translate to will depend on your platform of choice, but it’s still pretty decent.
Free on the Epic Games Store this week are Castlevania Collection and Snakebird Complete. The Castlevania Collection is a must-have classic, and Snakebird is a puzzle game like snake, but you’re a bird, and there’s more going on than just that.
Fortnite is up to nonsense again (affectionate)
By Alice
Last year’s month-long Fortnite OG season was a complete hit. Everyone who had played the original Fortnite map was keen to revisit their childhood and try to recapture the feeling of 2017, back when the Nintendo Switch was first launched and the UK started the Brexit negotiations (probably unrelated). People who had missed the original map wanted to see what the fuss was all about. It was so popular that it spawned the Fortnite Reload game mode, and Epic decided to make the nostalgic jaunt an annual tradition. Epic even just permanently reintroduced Fortnite OG as a mode.
But this year’s walk down memory lane takes us to Chapter 2. Again, it’s great for people who were first introduced to the game during that map (I gently mock now, but when the Chapter 5 map returns I am going to be thrilled), and it scratches a curious itch for newer players. However, “the second map” lacks the same cache as the first, so Epic has stuffed it full of celebrity cameo appearances which are just kinda odd.
This week, Eminem joins the fray. If you kill his character at the “Mom’s Spaghetti” silo in the mountains, his resurrected corpse will become your ally, and you can use his mini gun to fire bullets and cartoonish rhymes. I am not making this up. Snoop Dogg is also there for some reason. Ice Spice will be coming soon, and there will be a tribute to Juice WRLD.
People who are fans of those musicians are likely having a great, if not slightly bewildering, time with this season. For me, I’m glad this is only going to be a month.
Still, it’s fascinating to see how all these things are woven together in a way that wouldn’t make sense in any other context, but kind of works here. It’s a testament to both the delightful absurdity of Fortnite, and what can happen when nostalgia and brand recognition are weaponised.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Magic The Gathering was first released 31 years ago and for a lot of that time the best ways to learn were to go to a game shop to get a free deck and a quick lesson, or have a friend teach you. There’s also Magic Arena on iPad and PC, but it’s a different sort of introduction which can get you playing digitally rather than socially, face to face, and so you lose some of the Magic magic.
With the latest Magic The Gathering set, Foundations, the game is stripped back to make it easier for two people who have never played before, to work out how to play on their own. This is important, given how many game shops have been closing down in recent years.
Tim and I got to play with the Beginner Box at an event recently, and I was really impressed with how it took newer players through the mechanics. You start with two, single-colour decks in a predetermined order, and an instruction book that takes you through the first few turns step by step, explaining the cards, making suggestions for which actions you should take, and explaining why. Then, it lets go of your hand and allows you to finish the game yourself.
After that, there’s 8 Jumpstart boosters in the box so you can shuffle up a deck and have another game to try out the other colours and types of mechanics. It’s a nice, gentle introduction to what can be quite a complicated game.
I’ve been playing MTG for around 12 years, and I can still remember my first game, and still prefer the first colours I tried. It brings home how important that first game is.
Also in the new set are a Starter Collection and a Bundle Of Magic, which are essentially just big boxes of cards so you can start deck building. I particularly liked the Life Counter in the Starter Collection, as well as the Deck Builder’s guide. With people coming back to TCGs, it’s nice to see MTG remembering that new players need a little more support.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Warcraft II is one of the first games I can remember playing on CD, when we’d finally upgraded our computer to one with an optical drive. I was drawn to it because I recognised the Blizzard logo from Blackhawk (aka Blackthorne), one of my favourite Super Nintendo games. But I stuck with it because it was more or less fantasy Age of Empires, with blood and bones and magic, and none of that boring historical stuff. I played repeatedly through the two campaigns, and even got some LAN matches going on the few occasions we had two computers handy. (You could do it with only one copy of the game!)
In more recent times I’ve tried to go back to it to check out the expansion I never knew existed in the 90s, but it’s hard to go back to on a modern machine. So I was excited to see Blizzard’s refreshed War Chest shadow dropped this week, which contains remasters of Warcraft and Warcraft II with their expansions, plus the old-school original versions of the games, and a revamped version of the much-maligned Warcraft III Reforged.
The new remasters are simply joyful, though they are very faithful, so don’t go in expecting a fully modernised experiences. The hammy voiceover and intentionally derpy unit responses (“yes m’lord?” “job’s done!”) are unchanged, as are many of the cutscenes, and it remains a simple but punishing RTS design. But the world and interface is sharp and clean in widescreen, and the pixelated units have been replaced with fine line sprites that do a great job of capturing what I thought the game looked like on an early 90s CRT. You can switch back to the original look whenever you like, but you’ll only do so for a point of comparison.
I dove straight into Warcraft II’s Beyond the Dark Portal expansion, which it turns out is wildly difficult so I’ve gone back to the main game to retrain. Mostly I’m appreciating the silly nostalgic small things, like the bloody disembodied hand of the Orc cursor, or the great music (you can choose from orchestrated or the original uncompressed chip tunes), but it’s also fun to see how the game progressed from the original to the sequel the Dark Portal, with the grandeur of the plot and the focus on named heroes leading directly to WoW via Warcraft III.
And speaking of which, while I only dabbled with the new version of Reforged briefly, it seems like it’s doing a good job. A large part of the original outcry was the moving of Warcraft III to the main Battle.net launcher (which is also where the new War Chest lives), and we’re sort of used to that now. Reforged seems to run great, and gives you options of the original art style, a cleaned up version of the original art style, and the glossier visuals from the original remaster.