Remakes all the way down for Switch
Plus The Sims get excavating, Tomb Raider comes full circle and Ticket to Ride Legacy
Hello there! This week we’re evaluating some recent Nintendo remakes, checking in to see if The Sims are okay, feeling immensly satisfied with a Legacy board game and finishing up our retrospective of the first eight TomB raiders.
But first, we’ve now seen the full extent of Xbox’s secret plans, a leak of which resulted in historical headlines and social media psychopathy in recent weeks. Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush are coming to PS5, while Pentiment and Grounded are coming to both PlayStation and Switch. The horror! Honestly though Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush are both very good (in very different ways) so you should check them out if you haven’t already, and I’m happy for fans of the other two games that a hoard of new players may be about to file in via cross-play.
Regarding the remakes
By Tim
The Switch is in a bit of a holding pattern in terms of releases, amid rumours that a next-gen Nintendo reveal is just around the corner. The big N’s final game of 2023 was a remake of Super Mario RPG, and its first two games of 2024 have been remakes too. Not that I’m complaining, I’ve been loving it.
Another Code: Two Memories was one of my earliest DS games and it rules, but I was honestly stunned to hear a remake was coming for such a niche title. The now defunct developer Cing — also responsible for Hotel Dusk and Little King’s Story — was underrated in general, so it’s great more people get to enjoy this visual novel / adventure game on Switch as part of Another Code: Recollection.
It loses a little something in translation since the original very much made use of the specific functions of the DS, but the new fully 3D exploration makes up for that, and the teen angst / ghost / murder / reunion narrative holds up. This package also includes the sequel, which I never gave enough time to on Wii but am excited to give another shot.
Remake number two for 2024 was Mario vs Donkey Kong which, inspired by the superlative Game Boy version of Donkey Kong, was a bit of a weird one on Game Boy Advance. Each level is a puzzle where you need to find keys, rescue mini Mario toys and collect presents, with our moustachioed hero being able to handstand and backlip but generally moving slower and more methodically than you'd usually expect.
The game benefits greatly from the move to a bigger screen though, and this remake adds two new worlds, an easy mode where you're not kicked out of the level if you die, and a fun co-op mode that adds some extra objectives. It's still weird, but this time it looks, sounds and feels like a polished puzzle platformer.
If the game calendar is to be believed, we still have at least two more remakes from Nintendo to look forward to this year as the Switch takes it victory lap. Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD will attempt to modernise the least good spooky adventure starring Mario’s braver brother, while Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door will revisit the absolute height of the various Mario RPG series’.
What to play
Nintendo’s Partner Direct had some shadow drops to offer this week. Five games from Microsoft-owned Rare have been added to Nintendo Switch Online; RC Pro-Am and Snake Rattle n Roll for NES, Battle Toads in Battlemaniacs and Killer Instinct for SNES, and Blast Corps for N64. Also live now are the excellent 3D platformer Penny’s Big Breakaway, and a demo for the upcoming strategy RPG Unicorn Overlord.
It’s another bulky monthly drop for the PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue in Feb, with Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Need for Speed Unbound, The Outer Worlds, Lego Jurassic Park, Tales of Arise, Tales of Zestiria and more going live today. And RPG fans looking to dive into Tales have even more waiting for them if they pay for the Deluxe tier, with classics Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Vesperia, as well as PSP shooter Resistance: Retribution.
Tales of Arise also hits Game Pass today, alongside space archeology / AI overlord walking simulator Return to Grace. Later this week the service will also get Bluey: The Videogame.
Free on the Epic Games Store today is Super Meat Boy Forever, and if you don’t already have it, you should get it. Perhaps not quite as good as the original, but still pretty darn good. I think. I (Alice) have not played it for a long time, but I remember it being delightfully difficult. Well worth claiming it for free while you can.
Even The Sims are getting into the mineral extraction business
By Alice
Mining is the backbone of our economy. Sure, it’s also ensuring that the climate is destroyed and millions of people will die because of it, but successive governments and billionaire mining magnates have been ok with making that sacrifice, so who am I to argue? The thing is that while mining is unquestionably bad in real life, the children yearn for the mines as evidenced by the popularity of Minecraft and Fortnite builds mode. So, it makes sense that EA has just announced a new Crystal Creations Stuff Pack for The Sims 4. In it, Sims can unlock a new Gemology skill to allow them to collect an “assortment of colourful Crystals and Metals” for customisation purposes.
It's not clear how the Sims will come across these gems, I don’t know if they’re going to have to start a quarry in town, or if the gems will just appear in the garden as if the Easter Bunny had kidney stones. But it sounds kinda fun.
What’s more fun is that apparently the crystals will have different properties in the moonlight. That does make it unclear whether these gems are the result of mining (meaning we might end up with Sims Sea Level Rise), the Sims discovering spirituality like every 19-year-old lesbian poised to accidentally join a cult, or just that they’ve joined a multi-level marketing scheme (that may also be a cult).
Either way, I am here for it. Bring on the gems. I hope they can be used for evil.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
My friends and I recently finished the Ticket To Ride: Legends of the West legacy game, and while I’m still digesting it to form a proper review, I have come to a conclusion: I really like legacy games. They’re the ultimate tool to make sure you frequently hang out with your friends in your 30s, because even if life gets busy and your schedules don’t properly line up, you’re all invested in this game and you have to find out what happens next (I say, as though I haven’t accidentally neglected one of my ongoing legacy games for four months, but you get the gist).
It also means that when you all get together to play games, you can all play the game that you all already know the rules to. Getting together to play the same vanilla version of Ticket to Ride for 13 full games would be fun for me, but my companions enjoy some variety, a legacy game whose rules change in response to your actions means you get familiarity that evolves and stays fresh. Everybody wins.
Plus, it’s just fun to become invested in a game where your choices make a difference beyond the next hour. I won our Ticket to Ride Legacy game by two points. Every choice I made in every game got me to that result, whereas you don’t get that kind of payoff or weight of choice in a regular board game that only lasts 90 minutes or so.
The problem, of course, is that it also raises the stakes on your choice of legacy game. They’re expensive, they take a long time and you can’t just resell if you don’t like it because you permanently alter the game while you play, so you have more to lose if it sucks.
Still, I look forward to diving in deeper to the world of legacy games this year.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Tomb Raider reflections, part 2
Chronicles - 2000: The developers may have literally killed Lara Croft at the end of the last game, but that barely stopped the momentum at all; here we have, incredibly, the fifth game for PlayStation in as many years. A group of Lara’s friends gather to remember her life, with each anecdote playing out as a discrete level, which is a narrative concept borrowed from the most desperate of TV shows and movie series. It fares no better in Chronicles, which has some fun with level-specific gimmicks (young Lara with no weapons, a stealth level, an underwater level), but is largely rote and unremarkable.
Angel of Darkness - 2003: The PlayStation 2 presented an opportunity to reset the series, take a bit more time, and put Lara in a much better place going forward. But none of that ended up happening. A troubled development meant the game amounted to a confused half-step away from prior entries, with a story that jumps the shark while failing to explain Lara’s survival, gameplay that modernises but still doesn’t reach anywhere near 2003 character action standards, and a version of Lara that wants to be darker while also being more cartoonishly sexualised and hardened than ever.
Legend - 2006: A decade after the original, this game finally takes a step back and gives Tomb Raider a proper reappraisal. The messy narrative of the previous games is swept away and replaced with a fleshed-out backstory for Lara, while a modern control scheme and cohesive visual design complements the new adventure and settings. Physics puzzles, lots of banter, motorcycle minigames and solid gunfights make this feel several generations ahead of Angel of Darkness, and it remains the strongest game of the series before the current Survivor trilogy.
Underworld - 2008: Old habits die hard, and publisher Eidos couldn’t help itself from wanting a follow-up to the popular Legend immediately. A remake of the original Tomb Raider utilising Legend’s engine was produced at breakneck speed and released in 2007, while the developers also made a complete sequel — powered by a new engine — for 2008. Yet somehow, despite some technical hiccups, Underworld is great. A narrative involving Norse myth and an evil doppelganger works because it’s tied smartly to Lara’s history, while refinements to the traversal and combat (shooting two targets at once!) are welcome. Plus Lara gets visibly wet and dirty, which was a technological achievement at the time, and is now quite funny.