Rejoice! It’s New (Old) Sonic Time
Plus, the new season of Fortnite, Lord of the Rings meets Magic The Gathering, and Tim talks old old Sonic.
Happy Thursday Button Buddies!
This week Nintendo gave us everything we could want in a Nintendo Direct: new 2D Mario, a Mario RPG, a game about Princess Peach, elephant Mario, and probably also other stuff. Plus there were some Final Fantasy XVI reviews. But mostly there’s going to be a new 2D Mario game.
In today’s newsletter for your delectation and delight, Alice talks about the new Fortnite season and the new Magic the Gathering/Lord of the Rings crossover, and Tim talks about Sonic. On top of that, there are all the recommendations you need for a fun weekend. Enjoy!
Fortnite goes wild
By Alice
Season three of Chapter four of Fortnite dropped two weeks ago, with the rebalancing patch landing this week, and it’s completely bucked my expectations of what I thought would happen to the island.
Season one was all misc mediaeval Europe-themed, but with bowling alleys and also sometimes in the Antarctic. Season two kept most of that, but added futuristic Tokyo and some ye olde Japan areas.
So, my expectation for season three was either more futuristic orientalism, or perhaps another stereotyped urban area from a different continent. Instead, it has added The Wilds, an area with high tree tops, sticky mud, bitey velociraptors, and what could be an artist’s interpretation of Mayan or Aztec ruins.
Instead of travelling around by sword, ODM or Spidey hands, traversal is purely velociraptors, wolves and boars. All the character locations have been shaken up, with some now only accessible at landing or if you systematically demolish an entire building. There’s also an augment that gives you really subpar heat vision when riding an animal, which is definitely… something.
I want to love it. I really do. I’m not a Transformers fan, but I love dinosaurs, and I’m used to disappointing skins in battle passes. But the things I wanted to change, didn’t, and the things I didn’t want to change, did.
Perhaps I’m just disappointed because my favourite landing site (Royal Ruins) was effectively nerfed, or perhaps it’s because you now only get three milestone quests at a time, they’re worth less XP, and they’re not as fun as they used to be. But this season is lacking the spark that the previous two had.
That said, the one constant in Fortnite is change, so it’s likely to only stay like this for two weeks before the developers throw in some ridiculous licenced crossover to amuse and delight. It’s worth checking out, but set you expectations to “medium”.
What to play
New on Apple Arcade this week is Retro Bowl, an American football game with 8-bit graphics that looks really cute.
For a super limited time (until 1am tonight), you can get Guacamelee 1 and Guacamelee 2 for free on the Epic Games Store. They’re fun and free, what more could you want?
The PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue has been topped up with another big helping of games, so let’s just shout out the exceptional ones. Far Cry 6 is a great time if you can excuse the usual hodge-podge of tones (it’s a goofy sandbox shooter AND a politically charged fight against a fascist dictator in what is more or less Cuba), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is an excellent old-school brawler, Rogue Legacy 2 is a top-tier rougelite, Inscryption is a surprise-filled horror deck-builder, Tacoma is an engrossing walking simulator set on an abandoned AI-controlled space station, and A Hat in Time is a modern take on the N64-style 3D collectathon. Those paying extra for the retro catalogue get four random but welcome additions; the original Worms and the brilliant Herc’s Adventures from PS1, plus shooter Killzone: Liberation and action-RPG Coded Soul from PSP.
The Bookwalker is a day one release on Game Pass this week. Looks like a bit of a weird one, as you’re a thief with the ability to dive into books and steal priceless literary artefacts, but it appears to play out from an isometric perspective like a classic C-RPG. Also new to Game Pass this week is last year’s Need for Speed Unbound, at least if you’re paying extra for Ultimate.
On Friday Nintendo is adding a single Game Boy Advance game to its Switch Online Expansion Pack subscription: Fire Emblem! This excellent strategy game is also known as Blazing Blade, but since it was the very first in the series to be released in English, it didn’t get a subtitle here.
A rather rosy retcon
By Tim
One year ago we welcomed Sonic Origins, a compilation of all four Mega Drive adventures, rebalanced and rebuilt in widescreen with a bunch of new content. It wasn’t perfect, but it did make some of the best 2D platformers ever made accessible and palatable to a lot more people, and this Friday it gets better with the expanded Sonic Origins Plus.
It’s available in a physical box or as add-on content to the original, and I’ve been playing the latter on PS5.
The main draw is that Plus adds Amy Rose as a playable character to every game, and she’s a delight. Her look is based on her appearance in Sonic CD, but it’s incredible to have this fan-favourite character — fully animated and complete — added seamlessly to 30-year-old games. She can use her hammer for extra offensive reach while spin-jumping, and has a drop dash à la Sonic Mania.
Knuckles can now also be played in Sonic CD, which was not the case originally. His floating and climbing is a great inclusion given how much exploring you do in that game, and the developers have even included a few new paths to specifically reward this.
The games are also more stable overall, though this was probably fixed in earlier updates. Tails is no longer as erratic and prone to getting lost when controlled by the CPU, and the ring collection sound has its proper stereo mix (a minor point but it annoyed me).
Also part of Plus is the full complement of twelve 8-bit games. These aren’t presented in a perfectly ideal way (they’re the Game Gear versions rather than Master System, the sound is slightly off, there are no graphical filters), but they’re still neat games, especially the five Sonic side-scrollers. The racing games and Mean Bean Machine even have two-player modes intact; showing two square screens side-by-side as though you had two Game Gears and a link cable. Overall, it’s a really cool package.
One thing I’m not sure about is that the physical version of the game reportedly just has Sonic Origins on the disc or cartridge, with the Plus content added by way of a download code. I won’t know for sure until Friday, but that would be unfortunate if true. The only real advantage to getting a physical copy (besides the nice paper) is that you can share it with friends and family. If only one of us can access Amy and the rest of the additions, that’s pretty poor.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
By Alice
It’s here. After months of anticipation by nerds of most flavours, the Magic The Gathering Lord of the Rings set drops this week. Of course, most of the talk about the set isn’t about the cards people will actually play with, but the one card to rule them all, the one card that will probably be worth a lot of money and go into some rich kid’s collection: The One Ring. There is only one One Ring card that’s been printed, which makes sense both from a thematic standpoint, and also a ‘most of our game is based around people buying and opening blind bags’ commercial position.
But the thing that I’m the most interested in is, unsurprisingly, the new pre-con commander decks. It used to be that the pre-made decks just kinda sucked, they were there to be a canvas for you to then improve and make your own. But now that developer, Wizards of the Coast, ha a dedicated team working on Commander decks (and Commander has become the most popular Magic format), these boxed decks are really strong, and my favourite way to get the feel of a new set.
The deck I played last night was themed all around Hobbits and food, with green/white/black cards. The Bilbo Baggins card was probably the most powerful in that deck – it gives the player an extra life any time they would gain life (and sacrificing food tokens can give you three life at a time). That’s powerful enough, but then if you hit 111 life you can search for every single creature card in your library and put them in the battlefield under your control.
The game I played had all four commander decks represented, and all were so well balanced, that I did not get a chance to reach my 111 life. You can really tell that the designers knew that this set was going to be an onboarding set for a lot of players, and it seems like they’ve achieved their goal of making it friendly and approachable for new and old players alike. If you’ve been wondering about Magic the Gathering or Commander, now is a great time to jump in.
Retro Esoterica
By Tim
Since this is already a Sonic-y issue, I’m going back to discuss an era and format that often gets overlooked in hedgehog-related discussions; the Sonics of the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.
These six sidescrollers were not made primarily by Sega but by Dimps, a workmanlike Japanese port studio. On the whole these are tough games without much give, and without the signature multi-path speed lanes of the previous games. They also have a tendency towards maddening spike traps or bottomless pits that sap your lives.
And yet, these are also bright and irrepressibly funky games that contain some of the best Sonic energy of this time period, considering the nonsense that was happening on consoles at the time.
Sonic Advance is quite traditional, acting as a seven-years-later followup to Sonic & Knuckles but with a sharp new style. The three boys are joined by Amy, who can’t spin but can whack things with her hammer, and the game saves your progress with the four characters separately.
Advance 2 tweaks this setup by starting you with Sonic only and making you unlock the others (plus Cream the Rabbit), while Advance 3 lets you pair any two characters you’ve unlocked, and you play as a duo just like Sonic 2.
Moving over to the DS necessitated a name change, but Sonic Rush feels very much like an evolution of Advance. The game uses both screens for a tall vertical display that Sonic zips between, and Sonic can access super-speed with a meter that fills over time. His friends don’t return, but he’s joined by fire-powered princess badass from another dimension Blaze the Cat. This game is also notable for its incredible soundtrack by DJ Hideki Naganuma (Jet Set Radio), which at one point samples Malcolm X to surprisingly great effect.
Sonic Rush Adventure would be a straightforward sequel, if not for the robot pirate antagonists, bloaty missions and the archipelago setting that weirdly necessitates Wind Waker style sailing between levels. And the DS version of Sonic Colors is a strange epilogue to the series; a continuation of the same ideas, but with the narrative and themes of the Wii game smooshed in. Unfortunately it’s also apparent Dimps was not given enough time with this one.