Roller Champions is on the roof
Plus, retro anniversaries, board games for a secluded cabin, and the problem with making old games new again.
Hello Button Pressers!
Welcome back to another issue of Press Any Button! How’s your day been? Good?
This has been a big week for publishers delaying games and updates, with Roller Champions, Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, the Avatar sequel games and The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum. Just imagine the Hunger Games cannon as you read each name. For the last two on that list, being delayed is a good thing, they’ll get more time to bake. For the first two, however…
You can read more on that in this newsletter, plus Tim celebrates some anniversaries, Alice went into the wilderness, plus our recommendations to end your week right.
Roller Champions isn’t dead, just bleeding
By Alice
There is an old joke my mum used to tell me when I was little. It’s very long, but I’ll sum it up: a man went away to a conference and had a friend look after his cat. After a few days he called to ask about the cat, and the friend told him the cat died. The man was angry and said he should have broken it to him more gently by saying on the first day that the cat was on the roof, and then adding a bit each day to build up to the bad news. After that he asked how his mother was and the friend said “well, mum’s on the roof”.
On a related note, after a weekend flurry of rumours that Ubisoft’s long-awaited and quickly forgotten roller derby-ish game, Roller Champions, was dead, the developers issued a statement aiming to reassure its fans.
The statement said that Roller Champions is not being cancelled, but merely that the next (paid) season of the game is being indefinitely delayed while the team work on fixes for the irritants I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters.
The statement started with this line “Let’s clear it out of the way first, Roller Champions isn’t getting cancelled, and Ubisoft fully supports it.” For the uninitiated, “it’s not getting cancelled, [publisher] fully supports it” is the way publishers say the game’s on the roof.
Perhaps I’m wrong though. Maybe people will hear that they have extra time to finish this most recent season and jump in to see what the fuss is all about. Maybe these fixes will come and make the game great. I hope so, it’s a good idea for a game that’s just hampered by lots of little bad ideas. I would love to play what Roller Champions could be. Until then, it’s on the roof.
What to play
The PlayStation Winter Sale is almost over, but there are still a couple of days to pick up Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order for $13.95, It Takes Two for $29.97, and the Batman Arkham Collection (two extremely good Batman games, plus one more) for $25.48.
If Power Wash Simulator has you looking for more chill games, LawnMowing Simulator: Landmark Edition is out on PlayStation this week. I’m (Alice) not saying you should pay money for it, but this is the world The Simpsons promised us and the regular version is currently included in Xbox GamePass. So, enjoy that, I guess.
On Apple Arcade this week is Kingdom Rush Vengeance TD+, which has a name like a game developer threw darts at a board with cliched titles. It looks like a relatively adorable single-player tower defence game.
New to Game Pass is 2016’s excellent isometric RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera and bike racing sim MotoGP 22. This weekend the service gets one of my (Tim’s) favourite games of all time, Inside. If you haven’t played it, set aside three hours and dive in. The less you know the better, but I’ll say it’s a beautiful and unsettling puzzle platformer.
WB’s Smash-like MultiVersus is now in open beta and free for everyone. If you ever dreamed of making Batman team up with Bugs Bunny to fight Shaggy from Scooby Doo and, for some reason, Arya Stark, now’s your chance.
Switch Online subscribers have two new Super Nintendo offerings in their libraries; puzzle game Kirby's Avalanche (which is a modified version of the Japanese Super Puyo Puyo) and Street-Fighter-like Fighter's History. There's also a single new NES game in Daiva Story 6. Originally released only in Japan, it's a surprisingly complex strategy game where you fly through the galaxy and choose planets to dominate. Space combat is a methodical turn-based affair, while planet-side battles are side-scrolling shooters.
Everything old is new again
By Tim
Remaking older games with a fresh coat of paint is nothing new; it’s a practice that’s been common for at least 30 years. But while refining and repackaging titles from a generation or two ago is generally straightforward — more complex visuals, better performance, integrate content that used to be DLC — it can be a bit trickier to revisit older stuff.
Just take a look at the output of venerable Japanese publisher Square Enix and you’ll see there are dozens of ways to approach decades-old content. You can use filters and algorithms to make old pixelly graphics look smooth, completely remake everything from the ground up in 3D, completely remake everything from the ground up so it looks the same but has awful text, or employ a mix of all three approaches.
But the company’s most recent approach may just have cracked the formula, as the new Switch version of Live A Live is by far the most attractive Square remake yet, and I hope it becomes the standard going forward.
It helps that the game itself is inherently exciting for a western audience, after years of Square trying to sell us wonkily resurrected Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games for $30 a pop. Live A Live is a 1994 RPG from the director of Chrono Trigger, composed by the legendary Yoko Shimomura and featuring art from seven prominent Manga artists, which was only ever released in Japan and never saw an English translation. It’s like finding a lost masterpiece.
But it hasn’t merely been translated and plonked into a Super Nintendo emulator. The visuals have been completely rebuilt in the HD-2D engine, the same one that powers Octopath Traveller and Triangle Strategy. It’s a beautiful look that uses 2D pixel art for the characters, 3D objects covered in retro-style textures for the environments and plenty of shimmery depth of field effects to tie it all together.
It’s a modern HD presentation that in no way represents something a Super Nintendo or PS1 could handle, but it does somehow convey the way those games felt to us in our mid-90s imaginations and dreams, which is something you can’t say about authentic pixel remasters or fully 3D reimaginings.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Over the weekend, my wife and I went to stay in an off-grid cabin in the middle of nowhere with no phone reception, minimal electricity, and a significant number of sheep. This is not my typical weekend. I’m not good at relaxing and always like to have a goal, activity, or something to be worried about, not to mention be constantly looking at a screen. So, naturally, I massively overpacked.
This was a mistake, given we had to carry everything 500m+ up a hill through deep mud in pitch darkness when we arrived. I had puzzle books, crafts, a soccer ball, a spare frying pan, Kobo Libras, two dozen comic books, an old board game we both knew we loved, and a brand new one we hadn’t played yet, as well as clothes and enough food for a week (we were there two nights).
Now, one might think that a weekend like this would be the perfect time to learn how to weave intricate friendship bracelets and play a new game, but it turned out relaxation requires limiting the number of things you attempt to achieve. I limited it to learning how to make a truly massive campfire with wet wood, transporting large logs over wide patches of brambles, and not freaking out at the sight of half a sheep outside the kitchen window.
The magic and relaxation was stored in familiarity, like playing far too many games of the hard copy of Hardback. We changed up some of the rules to make it more chill, didn’t even try to include any of the expansion cards (which I’ll write about another time).
What that brought home was the different ways board games can be enjoyed. They can be a new challenge to conquer, a way to bond with new people, or just a familiar way to pass the time in a new place. In short, your pile of shame is nothing to be ashamed about, it just might not be where the relaxation is this week.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Somehow we’re at the end of another month, and that means it’s time to look back on some games that recently celebrated a big anniversary.
Now 20: Super Mario Sunshine Once considered a black sheep, or even an outright flawed game, Mario’s vacation adventure is now often fondly remembered thanks to Gamecube kids becoming nostalgic adults. On one hand you could argue the game is unfinished, partially broken, and profoundly weird. Its cinematic presentation, tropical setting and water jet mechanics all became evolutionary dead ends in the series, meaning it contributed little to Mario overall. But on the other hand all this makes it charmingly unique, and in certain isolated ideas it’s inspired. These days you can get it in HD on Switch, but only as part of the 3D All-Stars collection Nintendo stopped selling in March 2021 for no reason. Off to eBay you go.
Now 30: Ecco the Dolphin Atmospheric, ponderous and elaborate, Ecco was the polar opposite of so many edgy and in-your-face Sega success stories. What begins as a laid back dolphin simulator in the beautiful blue ocean unexpectedly becomes a mystery when Ecco’s pod is abducted, and eventually turns into a harrowing sci-fi adventure. The original’s languid synth soundtrack is unforgettable, though the foreboding of the CD version has its moments too. What sticks in my mind most (besides the frequent stress of being caught in the deep and needing to surface for air) are the various surprising twists; exploring Atlantis, being transported to the past where you’re grabbed by a pteradon, and finally fighting to survive on an alien mothership.
Now 35: Metal Gear Hideo Kojima’s directorial debut, this game for the Japanese MSX2 computer set the stage for the blockbuster Metal Gear Solid series years later. Taking clear inspiration from American military movies, Metal Gear sees a lone operative infiltrating an enemy base, and is one of the earliest examples of stealth as a video game mechanic. Unfortunately the game was changed and redesigned significantly, for the worse, in its port to Nintendo’s Famicom. And then that version was poorly translated into English for the NES, meaning those of us in the West have had little opportunity to play it as Kojima intended. A faithful English port was included in 2004’s Metal Gear Solid 3, and retained in the 2011 HD port to Xbox 360 and PS3. Unfortunately Konami no longer sells it digitally, so off to eBay once more!