Hello there! Welcome back to Press Any Button, where this week we’re being disappointed by Saints Row, excited by Gamescom announcements, and reminded of our respective childhoods spent playing Monopoly and Master System.
Gamescom is officially in full swing, and you should see below for some choice announcements from opening night. But as for the rest of the week, events to look out for include the Future Games Show early tomorrow morning, Xbox Booth Live on Friday and the "Awesome Indies Show" on the weekend. Nintendo is also hosting a Treehouse Live stream in the early hours of Friday, which isn't strictly Gamescom related but likely isn't a coincidence.
As usual Gamescom isn't likely to be a huge show for news and reveals; typically it's where you'll see new trailers and details for games set to release in the very near future. Opening night for example had a lot to look at in terms of Sonic Frontiers and Gotham Knights, while Nintendo plans to centre most of its stream around Splatoon 3.
Retrograde Row
By Tim
I was a fan of the original Saints Row in 2006, and then gradually lost interest in the series as it became sillier and more bombastic with each entry. I was optimistic the new reboot would be a return to what spoke to me in the first place — customisation, a fun open world, interesting missions, a winky riff on GTA — but while that stuff is all kinda there the new game is still disappointing.
I suspected things were going awry from the start, when a lengthy cutscene showed a cringey millennial party before time-jumping back to a dated private military action scenario. Shooting is straightforward and without a cover system or any like considerations, bullet sponge goons come in samey waves, failure comes because of an errant grenade or because you strayed too far from the objective, and your character makes an endless stream of contextless profanity and unfunny satirical observations.
The whole sequence ends with many more cutscenes showing a battle on a fighter jet and your character’s tension with their ranking officers before you eventually make it to the game’s open world. And while there are moments of fun to be had in the various missions and side-hustles, overall that opening mission set my expectations perfectly.
Combat is boring in this game, and there’s a lot of it. I like the idea of health-restoring melee executions, and the upgrade system is also good in theory, but in practice it’s mindless repetition. The open world is vast, but it all feels remarkably non-interactive. By the time I was establishing some criminal businesses and discovered that every mission required to do so was a rinse-and-repeat A–B affair, I was pretty much done.
One thing I did enjoy was the depth of customisation for your character’s appearance, which extends to your vehicles, weapons and home base. But for all that focus on identity the game just forgets to have one of its own. The script is an embarrassing impersonation of faux-offensive young person banter, the design is too outdated to have anything to say about its contemporaries in the way the original did and, worst of all, it doesn’t feel like it had any ambition to be greater.
What to play
It's been a great week for PC Game Pass subscribers. The annual QuakeCon brought with it the announcement of more classic Bethesda titles for the catalogue, including Quake 4 and some fantastically old Elder Scrolls and Wolfenstein games. And yesterday Hideo Kojima's acclaimed Death Stranding was added. Console Game Pass subscribers aren't completely left out, with brand new and much-anticipated brawler Midnight Fight Express hitting the service.
Also on Xbox, there are some good deals going on compatible OG and 360 games. I recommend Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy or Prince of Persia Forgotten Sands at around $5 a pop, or Beyond Good & Evil at $3. Or, you could pick up all three remastered BioShock games 80 per cent off on all platforms, so around $20.
And speaking of old games, Switch Online Expansion Pack members now have access to Wave Race in the N64 app. Originally notable for its impressive water effects, it's still a fun and fast Jet Ski game to mess around with. Manoeuvre around buoys to maintain your top speed, hit some sweet flips off the ramps and maybe even unlock the ability to ride a dolphin.
Coming to Apple Arcade this week is Love You To Bits, which is an absolutely darling puzzle game with vibrant art and universe exploration. I’ve (Alice) never played it, but I love it already.
Cult of the Lamb is still extremely good, folks. Join us. I know Tim wrote about it last week, but I jumped in this week and I’m in love. “What if Stardew Valley was evil?” is a brilliant concept and you need it in your life.
Some of the big stuff announced at Gamescom
By Alice
Gamescom is one of my favourite gaming events. In previous years I enjoyed the feeling of being moved by such a huge crowd of people brought together by a shared hobby. Now, being in a heaving crowd of 400,000 people sounds like a nightmare, but 2018 was another life.
Last night was the big Gamescom opening ceremony where so much stuff was announced that it was hard to keep up. Here are a few of the things that really stuck out to me.
The PlayStation 5 is getting an official pro controller called DualSense Edge. It kinda looks like what would happen if the original DualSense controller got old-school-style braces. It’s got everything you’d expect from a pro controller, including sticks you can switch out, back paddles, and more customization options. There’s no price or release date announced at this point, so be prepared for it to be expensive and probably in stores around Christmas if the shipping gods are on their side. I am very keen for it.
Dune Awakening looks like a cool survival MMO game with huge sandworms that I am already feeling anxious about stepping on.
Killer Klowns From Outer Space, based on a movie from the 1980s, sounds like the worst possible kind of horror game I could imagine. No thank you on so many levels. If you like being scared, it might be your jam. But no thank you.
Gotham Knights got a gameplay trailer revealing Harley Quin, who looks kinda off in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s because she’s about 65% legs? Could be that her voice sounds like getting a papercut? Either way, the game looks great and I want to play it. Warner Bros also announced that the game is now getting released four days early on the 21st of October, which raises questions, but I like it.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Monopoly gets a bad rap, mostly because it’s a bad game with the power to end families. I can’t think of a single game that’s caused more divorces, and I don’t even know how many divorces it’s caused. Probably more than one.
But, you also have to admit that it kinda slaps. Maybe I’m just saying this because I win most of the time and the games don’t last too long, but I like Monopoly. It’s earned its extreme cultural influence by being a game people want to play until they know better games exist. Some of the newer versions have better structures that only last an hour-ish.
It’s also completely altered the way we talk about games.
Over the weekend I played a game of Carcassonne with my parents, and dad kept talking about getting hotels and everyone referred to me as banker because I was keeping score.
Friends, if you’re not familiar with Carcassonne, there are no hotels or bankers (because there is no money). And yet, dad knows he’s going to get the most bang for his buck out of a monastery, so that will always be a hotel in his mind. As the person who always controls the currency and scoring (because I’m usually the only one that remembers all the rules), I am the banker in all games, because of all that time we spent playing Monopoly.
You can either take this as a beautiful heart-warming story about how our early days of board games stuck with us and permeated our other hobbies. Or you can take it as a warning to be careful what you introduce your kids to first, because it will be seared into their memory and colour literally every vaguely similar thing they do for the rest of their lives.
Either way, I’ll always be banker.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
I’ve been playing a lot of Sega Master System games recently, mostly because support for community cores has been added to the Analogue Pocket, turning it from an expensive Game Boy replica into an all-in-one FPGA-powered portable retro machine.
Anyway, the Master System doesn’t get much love in the nostalgia business, not least because it was never popular in America. But it and its Japanese-only predecessor the SG-1000 are wonderful machines, and the library is a fascinating counterpart to that of the more readily remembered NES.
First of all you have to realise that the Master System was popular in Europe right through to the mid-90s (and through to the 2000s in Brazil), despite the SG family having its origins in 1983. So while Sega was making cutting-edge new games for its Mega Drive, it was also commissioning wholly unique 8-bit versions, like Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2 and Chaos, Streets of Rage 1 and 2, and Eccho the Dolphin. Sega also followed up on its popular Mickey Mouse Mega Drive game, Castle of Illusion, with an excellent take on the same idea for Master System in Land of Illusion. These are all charmingly primitive games but they really hold their own against their more advanced 16-bit siblings.
And of course, while the system was host to many good arcade conversions (including Sega’s own Shinobi, OutRun and After Burner), some of the best games on the system are completely original and demand to be played on Master system; the likes of transforming side-scroller Psycho Fox, sci-fi fantasy RPG Phantasy Star, top-down action adventure Golden Axe Warrior, Castlevania-like Master of Darkness and colourful mascot platformer Alex Kidd.
SG-1000 specific games are a bit harder to love given their fantastic age, and mostly offer bizarrely compressed arcade experiences including platformer Wonder Boy, bird-collector Flicky, space shooter Galaga and shameless Donkey Kong ripoff Congo Bongo.