RIP Fortnite Crew
Plus Steam sale hauls, Uno Teams, and remembering the original PlayStation 30 years on
Hello friends!
Boy, the weather sure is happenings aggressively now, huh? Seems like a good time to sit inside in the air conditioning and play some games.
This week, I’m (Alice) reminiscing about when Fortnite Crew was good (last week), and giving Uno Teams a go. While Tim is opening up his Steam Sale haul up to judgement and fondly remembering the PS1. Plus, all the recommendations you need for the weekend.
Enjoy!
Column headline
By Alice
There once was an amazing hack to get Fortnite Battle Royale Battle Passes at a huge discount, while also getting other fun perks. It was called Fortnite Crew, and it was glorious. The trick was that at the last week of a season, you would sign up for the $17 a month subscription service, which would then grant you access to that battle pass, in addition to giving you a skin, 1000 V-Bucks (and an extra 950 V-Bucks if you’d already bought the pass outside of a Crew subscription). Then, when the new season started, you’d automatically be granted the next pass and you could cancel your subscription. Roughly $40 of value for $17. It was wonderful.
But then people started to ask for the other passes to be included in Crew, like the Lego pass, Music pass and new OG pass, giving Epic the perfect opportunity to overhaul the whole system. And they did. As of this new Fortnite season you now get all the passes included, but you only get access to the premium perks while you have an active Crew subscription. All the passes end at different times of the cycle, so you can’t just sign up at the end of the season to collect everything and then cancel. It’s clever, but extremely inconvenient for me, personally. It’s technically more perks, and encourages people to use the subscription service as intended, but it still just kinda sucks. This move comes at the same time as the price of the battle pass has been increased from 950 V-Bucks (around $9.50) to 1000. It’s not a huge leap, however every little bit counts.
In other news, the Fortnite OG mode launches today, with the original Fortnite map and a dedicated OG battle pass with new takes on the original cosmetics. There’s also a new map and season loosely themed around Ronin, which is quite fun (though those boss battles are the hardest I’ve encountered in Fortnite).
What to play
I’m still working out how to list additions to Game Pass now there are three separate tiers. This week Activision’s excellent kart remaster Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is new to the service and will appear across all tiers. Meanwhile Forza Motorsport, cute ghost adventure Hauntii and action puzzler Humanity arrive on the Standard tier after previously being locked to the top tier, and Ultimate gets rally racer EA Sports WRC and early access co-op city builder Overthrown. Indiana Jones is coming to Ultimate early next week, so now could be a good time to re-subscribe if you’ve lapsed.
On PlayStation Plus, the monthly games for December are now available for all subscribers. There’s It Takes Two, which blends genuinely fascinating co-op gameplay vignettes with just an upsettingly strange story of domestic problems, plus Pokemon imitator Temtem and Xenomorph RTS Aliens: Dark Descent.
Evaluating my Steam sale haul
By Tim
I tried to be organised for the Steam sale this time. Usually I’m conned by some massive game with a huge discount that I already have on another platform, which isn’t great value. So I gave myself a budget of $40, spreadsheeted and sorted my Wishlist and ended up with eight additions to my library. So, how did I do?
Mail Mole: $10.75
A 2000s-style 3D platformer, this is like all the speedrun levels from a random (good) licensed game condensed into one experience. Looks great, controls are tight and the Mole is very cute, though if you’re playing right you hardly see him.
ElecHead $8.70
Just a great puzzle platformer with an NES look. No complaints so far. You’re a robot whose head powers stuff and you have to figure out how to progress. It’s oddly committed to never putting text on the screen.
Lunistice $5.02
If there was a good Sonic game on the Saturn it would have been exactly like this. I can’t think of any other way to describe what’s going on here, but this is the game I’m most keen to keep playing.
Alwa’s Legacy $4.34
A promising Metroidvania that I haven’t actually played yet, but I loved Alwa’s Awakening, and this looks like a bigger and more complex version, with detailed PC-style pixel graphics rather than 8-bit.
Indivisible $3.95
I kept thinking I had this on Switch already because the Steam page art looks very similar to Iconoclasts. But nope, this is a hand-drawn side scrolling RPG that’s really cute. Will need to dig in but seems like it rules.
Carmageddon Max Pack $3.29
This was a risk. I loved Carmageddon way back when, but the Steam page here gave me no confidence this version would play nice with modern hardware. Turns out it’s the old game in a DOSBox emulation wrapper that the Steam Deck hates. Maybe I’ll try it on Windows at some point.
Time on Frog Island $1.58
Not sure what I was expecting here. I think I just liked the name. It’s a cooked slow life sim based around trading items, and I think I’ll put it away for when I need a cozy game on a plane trip.
Monster Harvest $1.31
It came as a bundle with Frog Island. Looks like Stardew x Pokemon, but at this point I’m not sure I’ll give it a shot. Welcome to the wasteland of my Steam library, Monster Harvest.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
The problem with all the big “standard” board games is that everyone already has a copy, so it’s harder to keep pushing for the infinite growth the big companies crave. Sure, they could release new games, but that takes a lot of work, and success isn’t assured. Cashing in on an existing IP guarantees a built-in audience. Monopoly has a good system of themes and hoping people like collecting more than they realise the game absolutely sucks.
However, one incredibly popular game that’s been harder to scale is Uno. Everyone already has Uno. It’s a staple of every after school care in the country.
So, this Christmas, Hasbro has released a new version of Uno. One they claim will reduce family arguments and create harmony. I have major doubts about the reduction in arguments and the harmony, but it is a darn good time.
Uno Teams is essentially a Two Headed Giant version of the game (for those familiar with Magic the Gathering). You’re in a team with another player, you both have separate hands, but you take turns at the same time and you’re both trying to get your hands down to zero while forcing your opponents to hold many cards.
There are a couple of differences in the decks, though nothing too major. If your family already enjoys Uno, and maybe you’re wanting to include grandma or a little kid in the game and they’re not too familiar with it, Teams might be a good way to introduce newer players.
However, I don’t see how it would reduce conflict, it would just change the conflict to have more people ganging up on each other. Seems like a weird way to promote it, rather than focussing on the fun of teamwork and the new challenge.
Either way, for $12, it’s worth trying this Christmas.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Sony’s first console has just turned 30, so there’s been a lot of reflecting on what was likely the most disruptive and successful debut of a new platform in gaming history.
But the question has to be asked: why was the PlayStation so popular? It doubled the combined sales of the Saturn and N64, and these were from companies that had both been in the home console business for a decade prior. Was it cheaper? Were the games better? Is it because it could play audio CDs? There are some insights to be drawn from following these questions but, to be honest, I think it mostly came down to culture and other semi-undefineables that would be hard to clock just by looking at the games and the ephemera we can access in 2024.
Thirty years ago, everyday life wasn’t documented the way it is now. We barely had the internet. We had no smartphones. We had digital cameras, but the only one I had access to belonged to a friend of mine and you had to insert full floppy disks into it to record a dozen very ordinary photos. So you have to rely on intangible memories like mine.
I had Sega consoles and had just got a SNES, but most kids I knew didn’t play games. Until one day, when I was 8, when it was suddenly extremely cool. The kids that always had the new shoes or hats, or whatever the fad was, suddenly had PlayStations. Looking back now you might assume they were dining out on Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy VII, but no. It was all FIFA, racing games and Crash Bandicoot.
Through some miracle of marketing, Sony had turned its newness into a huge positive, and PlayStation was received as a pop culture revelation.
It’s true that games on discs were cheaper than the likes of Mario 64, but in my memory a major appeal of the PS1 was that games were virtually free. The console was so popular that markets were filled with stacks of pirated games, and there were guys in booths that would chip your console while you waited. It’s one thing to compare the system’s libraries now, when we can freely access basically all of it, but back then only one of the consoles had that kind of freedom. Not that Sony would fondly recall that fact.