Remember Indiana Jones? That thing you like?

Plus TimeSplitters, Stars Wars Unlimited, Ticket to Ride Paris and 2000s consoles

Hello there! Are you all Gamescomed out? Are you very excited for Infinity Nikki, Directive 8020 and Civ 7 but extraordinarily uninterested in Borderlands 4? Am I using questions as a rhetorical device to express my feelings without really considering yours at all? The answer to all of the above is yes. This week in the newsletter we’re talking Indiana Jones, Star Wars Unlimited, Ticket to Ride and much more, so let’s get on with it!

Indiana Jones and The Great Nostalgia Play

By Alice

More details have been revealed for Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, (which, as an aside, is a somewhat uninspiring name, but whatever) and it’s looking like a swashbuckling adventure of Nazi punching and doing the kinds of things archeologists wish were part of their job description.

Indiana Jones has been a pop culture mainstay for decades, as evidenced by the fact that people keep dragging out the perpetually grumpy Harrison Ford and asking him to hold a whip well into his 80s.

The previews and trailer have the game looking like your typical Bethesda first person game, with the hands out and the camera just shaky enough to make you feel like you’re on a rocky boat. I hope they have better accessibility options this time to make the game more enjoyable for those who get motion sickness.

There’s also lots of puzzles to be solved with relics in the quest to uncover the mysteries of The Great Circle. That’s always an area that Bethesda really excels at, and Indiana Jones is a franchise that really lends itself to a good puzzle, so I have high hopes.

For fans of the movies, the game is set in 1937, smack bang between Raisers of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade and, crucially, 85 years before Stuff The British Stole.

There’s going to be three editions of the game when it’s launched on December 9:

• Standard edition (available in both digital and physical flavours)

• Premium edition (which includes the Order of the Giants DLC, and is available in digital and physical, and also as an upgrade for those who bought standard and then had regrets)

• Collectors edition (I am obsessed with this one. It comes with a little globe with a secret hiding place and I want it a lot)

Usually, I’m cautious about movie tie-in games, because I’ve been burned too many times before. But everything I’ve seen about The Great Circle suggests it’s more of a love letter to the movies than just a cheap cash grab hoping to milk people’s nostalgia. Instead, it has milked the nostalgia of the creatives involved to make something that will hopefully be as good as it looks.

What to play

• The monthly dump of games onto the PlayStation Plus Extra library has brought a few good options, including The Witcher 3 (with its PS5-specific improvements) Monster-Hunter-like Wildhearts, Cult of the Lamb, and a huge heaping of Sword Art Online RPGs. If you’re paying for the Deluxe catalogue you also get the delightful Vacation Simulator for PSVR 2, and all three TimeSplitters games. For the uninitiated, these are brilliant PS2 shooters built by a team primarily made up of ex-Rare staffers, so they’re sort of spiritual successors to GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. The behind-the-scenes story of the series is a sad and complicated one, and at this point a TimeSplitters 4 seems unlikely, but be sure to enjoy the goofy story modes and incredible splitscreen deathmatch if you’re a subscriber. To take just one example of the inspired brilliance here, a deathmatch mode in the second and third games is called Monkey Assistant, and it spawns gun-toting chimps at regular intervals who attempt to even the playing field by swarming whoever’s winning. Two-player co-op in the third game is also a particularly fond GameCube-era memory of mine.

• New to Game Pass this week is open-world action-RPG Atlas Fallen. This is also a very rare week where some new games are coming to the smaller Game Pass Core library (which is an $11-per-month sub for people who want online multiplayer but don’t want to fork out for Game Pass Ultimate). The new games are Control, Cities: Skylines and Snowrunner.

• From this weekend you can get two games free on the Epic Games store: the 5v5 hero shooter MOBA Gigantic: Rampage Edition, and Callisto Protocol. The latter was hailed as a survival horror successor to Dead Space and ended up being a little disappointing, but still worth checking out.

Baby Yoda is OP, as he should be

By Tim

I never really got into Magic the Gathering. I’ve had Pokemon cards, but I have no idea how the TCG is actually played. My biggest trading card game obsession to date has been Marvel Snap, an entirely digital game that I loved for its quick-fire sessions, simple rules and familiar characters, which were all missing from previous digital card games I’d played like Hearthstone and Elder Scrolls Legends.

So when a bundle of Star Wars Unlimited cards arrived at my house, presumably because my details had migrated onto yet another “dork journalist” list, I wasn’t sure what to make of them. I love Star Wars, but can my brain even hold the kind of rules need for a game like this without an app enforcing them? Are these games even fun in real life? Does it work if I don’t send myself broke buying boosters?

Turns out, though, that I’m having a great time with it. Matches can easily be half an hour long, which isn’t ideal, but there’s a lot of tactical depth considering the actual play is quite simple.

I’ve mostly stuck to the cards in the $50 starter pack, which gives you a full deck themed on The Mandalorian and his friends, plus another on Moff Gideon and the Imperial Remnant, and even as a repeatable two-player game it’s a lot of fun. Mando works by synergising upgrades between some units while using others to shut down the enemy, while Giddeon is all about building forces and using them to overwhelm, and I love seeing all the familiar faces from the big screen.

That said I am also intrigued by the deck-building. There are six “aspects” that work like MTG’s mana, with your leader and base card defining the three aspects your deck will focus on. That said, building a deck of 50 cards that work on the aspects you like is sure to get very expensive, especially if you absolutely must have Rey or Maul or other favourites, and I am a bit intimidated by how quickly new cards are rolling out (this is the second set after the original trilogy set in March, and four more sets are planned between now and the end of next year).

For someone like me who is likely to only play at home with friends rather than in a competitive context, I may just get another starter pack at some point in the future for some sneaky mix-and-match.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings 

by Alice

Jumping back into the Ticket To Ride games, the latest mini version of the game is Paris, which is appropriate given the Olympics. As with all the smaller versions of the game, it’s a quick play - lasting only around 15-20 minutes, with a maximum of four players. When setting up the game, it’s easy to tell that the makers were loathe to add the fourth player, as the piece colours are red, white, blue and… green, which kinda goes against the whole thing they were going for.

The red, white and blue theme continues through the gameplay. When placing a red, white or blue route, you can keep back one of the cards and when you get a set of France’s flag colours, you get bonus points.

It’s a simple addition, but means that players will make adjustments to their usual strategy to try and swing through more routes of those colours. It’s not as fiddly as the passenger mechanic from Germany, and not as cheap as the landmark mechanic from New York. Though, it does mean that you have to score as you go, rather than scoring at the end, which I find a bit of a pain. It’s so easy to accidentally bump the score marker on the board that I usually just do all the scoring in one go, lest things get confused. But that doesn’t work at all with the flag mechanic. It’s enough to make me wish that there was some kind of plastic board overlay with ridges that you could get that made it harder to bump the pieces, like in the expansions for Azul.

While I still prefer the larger versions of Ticket To Ride, because I like to spend more time in the game, I have come around to the idea that these bite-sized games are a better way to introduce new players to the TTR format. So, if you’ve been curious to check out Ticket To Ride, but don’t want to commit to one of the larger versions, Paris is a great place to start.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

In this third and final part in our series on console aesthetics, we’ve chosen the three best-looking machines of the 2000s for evaluation.

PlayStation 2 Sony’s second console being the best-selling game machine of all time has little to do with its looks. And yet, it’s a masterful extension of the first PlayStation’s design as well as a totemic image for a whole generation of players. The two-tiered floating sillhouette made the black device appear slimmer than it really was, while the blue accents on the logo, USB ports and optional wedged vertical stand lent it a futuristic vibe. The colourful PS logo taken straight from the original PlayStation is embedded on a swivel, so it can be right way up whether the machine is standing or lying down, which is just an incredible detail.

Gamecube Nintendo’s designers were on a separate planet to everyone else throughout the 2000s, with the GBA, GBA SP and Wii all immediately deserving of a spot in an art gallery. But you can’t go past the Gamecube, which looks like nothing else before or since. The deep purple of its most iconic colourway actively resists blending into its surroundings like almost all other game consoles have been designed to do (as did the orange variant, my personal favourite). It’s compact, playful, covered in squares and circles. It has a handle! Is it functional? Not really. But a handle suggests portability and sharing, bringing the console with you to parties, and the four controller ports on the front reinforce that. The Gamecube is more of a rectangular prism than a cube, but it still gets massive aesthetic points for being the only console ever to take on such a bold shape that the company had to reflect it in the name.

Xbox 360 I like the original Xbox, but it’s hardly a pretty console. For the follow-up, Microsoft seemed to intentionally prioritise aesthetics to produce a stunning machine that looked like a mature and powerful game machine. You could argue that wasn’t the best priority given how many of these devices ended up dying from heat-related hardware failures, but this isn’t a list of the most thermally stable consoles. There are a lot of good ideas here. I like how the USBs and card slots are hidden behind little spring doors, and how the main storage is plugged in up top for easy swapping. I love the huge power button and the concave sides that make it look like the console is sucking in its gut. And I especially like the removable faceplate, which let you buy and attach new panels for a fresh look.