RIP console Xbox games
Plus Ball x Pit, Plants vs Zombies and evaluating board games with apps
Hello there! It’s been a weird week of gaming for me, as I’ve been bouncing around between the ROG Xbox Ally X and Apple’s new M5-powered Vision Pro. I can tell you that one is good for running Windows on a device that feels like an Xbox controller with a touchscreen, and one is good for playing on an impossibly large screen while sitting on a moon of Jupiter, and that both of those ideas are equally appealing to me. Luckily the games themselves have been good.
This week we’re extrapolating the Xbox Ally to Microsoft’s wider gaming plans, discussing whether apps are ok in board games, remembering Plants vs Zombies and loving Ball x Pit.
The Xbox PC era begins in earnest
By Tim
My first impressions of the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X were not overwhelmingly positive.
It may make strides to improve usability for Windows-based handhelds, but it still forces you to deal with a desktop-style presentation far too often.
It may be a major step in the transition from console to PC for the Xbox brand, but the messiness of that transition is immediately apparent when you’re trying to discern which games you own, which you can access through Game Pass, which you can stream, which support Play Anywhere and which you might own through a non-Microsoft storefront.
It’s certainly a step up from some other Windows PC handhelds, which is great because making Windows more accessible for gaming is a worthwhile goal. (People crowing this week that the Xbox Ally is more efficient when running Linux are either intentionally missing the point, or don’t care to think about it.) But right now I’m not sure the machine has enough going for it to counter some significant awkwardness.
A big part of the issue is the Xbox branding, which to me promises a turnkey console-like experience, and while Microsoft’s working on that it’s not particularly close yet. You can stream the console versions of games from the cloud, and that works great. But if you install a game locally it’s the PC version, and those are just never going to consistently analyse the hardware and apply the settings you need, meaning that for every game you’ll be adjusting sliders and ticking boxes to get to a tradeoff between image quality and framerate you’re happy with.
Coming from a Steam Deck OLED I also feel like the controls, screen and overall experience of the Xbox Ally are sub-par, with sticky buttons and no support for HDR. A 120Hz display is nice, but not an appreciable upgrade over 90Hz for most games. There’s the beginning of a system to highlight games that will perform very well (Microsoft’s “Handheld Optimised” certification), but it’s basically invisible except for in the Game Pass tab.
People who like PC gaming may like the ROG Xbox Ally. But people who like Xbox gaming may hate it. It’s no secret that this device represents the blueprint Microsoft wants all its future game hardware to follow, effectively consolising the Windows Store. But if that’s a worse experience than what we’ve had for 25 years on Xbox consoles, where games just work from the moment you buy them, it’s going to be a tough sell.
What to play
On Game Pass Ultimate this week is a quartet of brand new releases: the hyper-bloody action of Ninja Gaiden 4; the hyper-cleanly (?) action of PowerWash Simulator 2; the mech-combat-meets-Harvest-Moon of Bounty Star, and; the rougelite city-building of Super Fantasy Kingdom. If you’re on the middle-tier Game Pass Premium you’ll notice some less-new additions, namely Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Commandos: Origins and Evil West.
PlayStation Plus Extra is getting a pair of spookies just in time for Halloween, with the Silent Hill 2 and Until Dawn remakes both hitting the service this week. And also Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which isn’t really spooky. If you’re paying for Deluxe you also get PS1’s Tekken 3, which is pretty good! I (Tim) have fond memories of getting every single character’s CGI ending
Free on the Epic Games Store this week is horror game Fear the Spotlight. It looks pretty good, but I (Alice) am too much of a chicken to play it.
Ball x Pit Is better than it has any right to be
By Alice
I have a new addiction, friends. Ball x Pit is a roguelike that’s taking over my life in a way that I am powerless to stop. I love a good brick breaking game, and Ball x Pit is that and more. You descend into the pits of hell/the ruins of some ancient city (it doesn’t really matter which) and have to shoot balls at enemies to kill them, and while I wish the enemies had numbers on them so I could judge how many more hits they require to die, everything else is great.
As you kill the demons, they drop gems that allow you to upgrade your equipment/get new balls that can do new things. Then you can fuse and evolve those balls to give them different properties. There are characters to unlock which have special powers.
Then, in between jaunts into the depths of hell, you farm and harvest crops to upgrade your abilities and farm.
If this game were on mobile with a different aesthetic and micro transactions, it would make one billion dollars and overtake Candy Crush in terms of popularity. However, it’s on PC and console, has no micro transactions, costs $22.45 (or is on Xbox Game Pass) and is gorgeously dark. It also means it’s easier to put down and walk away from it, so there’s less of a dark pattern going on there.
I really enjoy that I can bounce between runs with optimised strategies trying to get the most out of the attempt to kill the boss, and runs where I just try to farm resources and see what different balls can do in weird combinations. It scratches so many itches that I can see it appealing to a wide variety of different places, and also specifically me.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
There is a trend in board games towards getting players to interact with their phones as they play, and I can’t work out how I feel about it. I think I hate it, but it also opens up so many new avenues of play that I don’t feel like I can completely dismiss it.
Take Hitster for example - scanning a QR code to play snippets of the songs on Spotify makes a lot more sense than including some kind of electronic contraption that plays hundreds of songs, because that would be prohibitively expensive. It also makes sense in a game like Alice is Missing, where you have to communicate with your fellow players without speaking out loud. It feels more real world than handwriting everything.
And yet, one of the big reasons why I play board games is because I want to put technology aside for a while and just in the the moment. My phone is full of distractions and constant notifications, and it’s easy to get sucked into something else for “just a sec”.
That’s why I am extra annoyed when the instructions for a board game are poorly laid out, or badly explained. Sure, I could just jump on my phone to watch a video to learn better in ten minutes, but a board game shouldn’t require anything that doesn’t come in the box.
However, I really enjoy Hitster, I’m glad it exists and I want to play it more. I just also want board game designers to ensure that any forays into technology are unavoidable (like Hitster), and not just cutting a corner (like in those crime solving board games I mostly enjoy).
Phones are now required for everything from ordering food in person at a restaurant, to gaining access to places like the aquarium. I don’t want them to be essential for board games, too.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Why is Plants vs Zombies so beloved? That’s a complicated question, but to understand why it made such an impact in the first place, you need to understand 2009. We were on the precipise of a huge expansion of video games into a glorious new casual-friendly form, after years of gritty pandering to a market of teenage boys with consoles. The Nintendo DS was booming, the App Store was just taking off, and on PC we were still in a golden era of Flash games, tower defence clickers and assorted browser goodness (Farmville, the zenith, was just about to appear).
The timing was perfect for PopCap, an indie studio in touch with the trends but also experienced enough (they had already done Bejewelled, Peggle, Bookworm, Zuma and many others) to make a genuinely good game, filled with light tactics but also kitcshy art and music that made it instantly appealing, not to mention a genuinely oddball premise that the game refuses to explain. Plants vs Zombies was the kind of thing the App Store would be filled with inside a year, but at the time it felt fresh.
Unfortunately the game’s success led to EA aquiring PopCap, and since then the intention to monetise has been front and center of every single game the studio has released, which is why I’m honestly surprised people still care about PvZ. I played this week’s Plants vs Zombies: Replanted, hoping to feel some love and care for the game or at least the intention to preserve it, but it’s not there.
I’m not sure how the PC controls are, but on Switch 2 the mouse and touch controls are broken. The “new” modes are uninspired or exactly as they were on Xbox 360. The dynamic music system is gone. The graphics are upscaled awkwardly. And the only archival content is a set of production illustrations that the game’s original artist has claimed did not come from him.