Should I go for a Drow Half-Elf or Dragonborn?
Plus Lego insects, film festival VR and Quake II returns
Hello there! I hope you’re all soaking up your last few weeks of relaxed gaming before an absolutely brutal September and October, so filled with big releases they will either take up all your time or make you feel bad for playing Marvel’s Midnight Suns instead. (Or is that just me?) This week we get roughly twenty minutes into Baldur’s Gate 3 before becoming overwhelmed, brave the VR headsets at Melbourne International Film Festival, build some Lego critters and rediscover Quake II!
And don’t forget to reach out in the comments / replies / social media to let us know your thoughts and what you’re playing. We like hearing from you!
Blindly building badasses
By Tim
Character creators are one of the great joys of video games. Who doesn't love defining a backstory, weighing up stats and abilities, and of course chiselling away at body types and jawbones to create your in-universe doppelganger, an aspirational beauty, a total abomination or (most frequently in my case) an androgynous and ethereal murder-elf?
But as I took my opening steps into Baldur's Gate 3 this week, I was reminded that character creators are also often torturous bullshit, which fill me as much with anxiety as with awe and respect for the people who build these extraordinarily complicated systems.
Character creators owe a lot to Dungeons & Dragons and other pen and paper RPGs, but players of those games tend to have a grasp of how the various attributes are going to be applied. The same is true of video games too, if you stick with the same RPG and play it over and over. Since I don’t, I generally have absolutely no idea what the implications of my decisions will be; and I'm asked to make them at the very start of what may be a 100+ hour journey.
I might be choosing between a mage and a sword-and-board character when I have no concept of how those systems work in this particular game. I’m instinctively drawn to magic users, but spell systems suck in roughly 50 per cent of all games. Ditto stealth systems, despite the inherent coolness of bow-and-daggers types. And similarly I'm creating the character's looks in a very specific context, where they could end up looking like a spectacularly conspicuous idiot once in the game.
For Baldur’s Gate specifically there are races, sub-races, classes and then sub-class options that differ wildly in format from class to class. For example a fighter has different specialisations while a paladin has taken different oaths. The exact type of Drow you are could affect how people perceive you. All of this is indicative of an impressively humongous and wonderfully open world, but I expect I’ll be diving into it and abandoning characters several times before I understand it enough to successfully navigate its opening minutes.
What to play
Out now on Game Pass is spaceship RPG shooter Everspace 2, and also Firewatch, which like Celeste last week is a 2018 indie revelation that has been in and out of Game Pass before and is now back. Firewatch is a first-person narrative adventure about a man running from his problems by volunteering as a park ranger. There’s a mystery to solve, and also an emotional bond to form with the person at the next tower over, with whom you communicate through your hand-held radio. Later this week we get a day one release in asymmetrical multiplayer horror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
As flagged last week there are a bunch of new games slated for PlayStation Plus Extra, and they’re available now. My (Tim’s) pick of the bunch are wacky sports roguelite Cursed to Golf, massive game creation suite Dreams and management sim Two Point Hospital. But also included are brand new release Moving Out 2 plus big names Lost Judgement and Destiny 2: The Witch Queen.
New to Apple Arcade this week is Kingdoms Merge and Build. I’m (Alice) kind of intrigued by this, because it looks exactly like those games that are made entirely out of microtransactions and serve no purpose other than to part people from their money in exchange for small doses of dopamine. How will they work as transaction-free Arcade games? That said, I have a very long flight next week and plan on playing an unhealthy amount along with some more Stardew, so I shall report back.
Free on the Epic Games Store this week are Europa Universalis IV and Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You. Orwell is the best of the two, a fascinating way to tell a story and make you understand things about privacy. I (Alice) strongly recommend it. It’s not super polished, but you’ll think about it for years.
VR beyond games
By Alice
VR is one of those technologies that has promised so much, but VR gaming just really isn’t yet viable for most people, due to motion sickness. It sounds very cool, and I would live in Beat Saber if I could, but without major changes to how VR works it’s not going to be something that cracks the mainstream, or becomes anyone’s main gaming device.
However, this week I went to the Melbourne International Film Festival and saw a fascinating documentary about women in prison in Italy who are allowed to have their children with them until the children turn 10. Surfacing was a quiet documentary, with no narrator, just women and children telling snippets of their stories, along with explorations of their spaces.
On its own, it would have been fascinating. But what made this doco different is that it was a VR short film, and that feeling of claustrophobia from wearing a headset, N95 mask and headphones that normally makes me hate using VR in public added to the immersion of this beautiful and incredible film.
I was in their cell with them as they talked about their excitement over being able to see sky for the first time after moving prisons, I ran around the yard while the children played superheroes, I sat on the bed with them while they talked about having to bail water out of their cell when it rained in Venice.
It was an unforgettable experience. But also a somewhat flawed one. VR does not lend itself to films with subtitles, because you can’t just look around when the subtitles don’t move with you. Also, the definition of the HTC headset (and also the film itself) wasn’t enough to stop me from feeling sick. The sound didn’t move effortlessly in a 3D space when I turned my head around, breaking immersion. It’s also not especially scalable for a film festival.
But it’s also a film that’s going to stay with me in a way that it wouldn’t have if it had been on a cinema screen. So, I’m interested to see how VR finds its hold in spaces other than gaming, because its potential in other artistic mediums is huge.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Lego just won’t stop announcing new sets that I want and I am tired. The hero theme for Lego Icons the last few years has been Botanicals. Everyone loves plants, especially ones that they can’t kill, so being able to build them out of Lego bricks seemed like a great idea.
However, when you get plants, you get bugs, so it’s really the only logical conclusion that Lego now has an extremely cool insects range.
I’m going to go so far as to say that The Insect Collection ($79.99) is even cooler than the Botanicals. The Bonsai wishes it could be a giant Chinese Mantis. The Succulents wish they could be the Hercules Beetle. We all wish we could be a Blue Morpho Butterfly.
What’s more is that this is the first set I’ve seen in ages that actually passes my 10c per piece rule of Lego value! It’s 1111 pieces for $79.99.
Plus, and this is possibly the most important thing, it’s not huge. It’s not a 1.5m tall Eifel Tower, or a big building, it’s just some insects. They’ll fit on a shelf. They’re designed for an adult who only has bite-sized chunks of leisure time and not enough display space. They were made for me. Probably you, too.
I haven’t been able to go hands on with them yet, they’re not out until September 7th, so I can’t comment on the build quality or techniques or anything. But they just look so cool. And they also have their own little ASMR playlist, which you can find on the Lego website.
Frankly, the Lego Insects are delightful, and I would like more of this, please.
Update: Unfortunately, the joys of international currencies and website redirects have meant that I’ve made a terrible error, and it turns out this set is $124.99 Australian dollars, which is more than $80. The value per piece is now merely “fine”, but it’s still pretty. Sorry about the mixup!
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
My strongest memory from playing Quake II for the first time is the music. It’s nothing special by today’s standards — lots of crunchy industrial guitar riffs and wails — but the original Quake had no music at all, and Quake II was one of the first PC games I’d played that streamed tunes directly from the CD. That meant it also doubled as a soundtrack I could throw in the stereo. The tracks are burned into my brain to this day, mixed with the ambient game sounds of military radio babble, alien grunts and your PDA saying “computer: updated”.
This sequel swapped out gothic Lovecraftian nightmares for a gruesome cybernetic space alien aesthetic, but DNA from Quake is definitely apparent. The game is fast, full of secrets, absolutely unforgiving on higher difficulty settings, and has a love of turning enemies into bloody chunks that trail blood as they fly through the air. But it was also remarkably forward thinking. Levels are made up of multiple objectives that are a bit more varied than getting keys or finding the exit. And the enemy animations blew my mind at the time; the guards will sometimes take one last shot at you as they lay dying for example.
Last week id released a full Quake II remaster for current systems, and it’s absolutely impeccable. It looks and sounds amazing with up to 4K 120hz graphics and a surround sound mix (and the soundtrack intact), while the controls have also been properly adapted to gamepads. I very much prefer it on systems with motion controls for those quick-moving berserkers.
This game was unrivalled in its time, but somehow its characteristic flourishes — like the lighting effects on the slow-moving blaster bolts — still impress to this day. The remaster not only includes the full original game but both official expansions, an all one, the levels from the quite different Nintendo 64 version, and a full multiplayer suite with split screen and online crossplay. Those with Game Pass — or who already own a digital copy of Quake II on PC — already have the remaster in their library and should absolutely play it.