Stardew Valley is on Apple Arcade now (yay)

Plus the Nintendo Switch successor, video game Lego and video games that are old now

Hello Button Buddies!

Another week has come and gone, and now it is time to brace ourselves for the overwhelming bounty that August, September and (gulp) October will bring.

But first, there are all kinds of exciting things on the horizon. Read on to learn more…

Stardew Valley Plus On Apple Arcade

By Alice

Last Friday, the day I had been anticipating for so very long finally came: Stardew Valley Plus became available on Apple Arcade.

I already have Stardew Valley on Xbox, PC and mobile already. The game is pretty cheap, so access is easy. However, on mobile, there was no cloud saves, so if you had a farm on iPhone, it lived there and couldn’t be transferred to iPad (or Mac) without using some frankly ridiculous workarounds. It also had some less-than-ideal controls which caused me great consternation.

I must admit, that I did expect there to be some updates or additions for Apple Arcade. The notes say that there are new town upgrades, dating events, crops, fishing ponds and hats, but it’s not clear whether these are specific to Apple Arcade or just the upgrades that came in the 1.5 update, and I’m still only towards the end of Spring in year 1, so I can’t confirm. The developer, ConcernedApe, had said that he’s not working on the game anymore to focus on his new game, Haunted Chocolatier, but, in truly wonderful news, on July 18 he said in a tweet that update 1.6 was coming, so I guess Apple money can be convincing. Huzzah!

Sadly, one thing that was introduced in the 1.5 update did not come to Apple Arcade – multiplayer. That’s still restricted to PC and console for now. Hopefully it makes the jump to the Plus edition with the 1.6 updates (but I won’t hold my breath).

However, the two most important things did come with Stardew Valley Plus – slightly improved controls (judging by my own experience) and cloud saves. It also means that Apple Arcade subscribers who haven’t wanted to risk buying Stardew Valley before can jump in and experience the game for the first time, and they’re really the people I’m most excited for. It’s got all the relaxation of Animal Crossing, but with none of the real-world time pressures, and with added secrets, mystery and adventure. There is no such thing as the ‘perfect game’, but Stardew Valley gets pretty close to it.

What to play

• Sony has just announced the latest games coming to all tiers of PlayStation Plus in August. The games will be golfing sim PGA Tour 2K23, darkly comedic game Death’s Door, and Media Molecule’s brilliant game-building game Dreams. Dreams in particular is a must-have, and a damn good get, but all of them are pretty good. This also means that you only have a few days left to claim last month’s PlayStation Plus free titles - Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Alan Wake Remastered, and Ending - Extinction is Forever (a title that feels a little on the nose this week, during a one in 7 million year sea ice melting event).

• Coming to Apple Arcade tomorrow is one of possibly the most anticipated Apple Arcade games of all time. Buckle up buttercup, it’s Hello Kitty Island Adventure time. We have been training for this moment (or, at least, I (Alice) have). The premise is basically ‘what if Animal Crossing was somehow cuter and almost entirely focussed on buying the friendship of others through an elaborate bartering system?’ I’ll have a full review for you next week, but it should be awesome.

• The Sims 4 Horse Ranch expansion came out recently! Fun fact: I (Alice) am deathly allergic to horses, and thus very afraid of them IRL (I touched one once and then rubbed my eye, and then my eye socket swelled so much my eye came out of the socket, which really livens up a day). However, in Sims form they are utterly adorable and you should have that in your life. The Sims 4 base game is free basically everywhere, so if you want to play with the horses, the barrier to entry is lower now.

• The incredible indies will just not let up this year, and I (Tim) am struggling to keep up and loving it. I mentioned some of the best of them in the GOTY issue a few weeks back, but since then I’ve been absorbed in three that are arguably even better. Viewfinder is a first-person puzzler on PC and PS5 with a mind-blowing central trick to rival Portal; you hold up photos in front of you and when you let them go they seem to hang in the air, but actually they’ve been converted to fully 3D objects you can then explore. Gravity Circuit is on PC/PS/Switch and is a slick blend of Mega Man and Mega Man X but with melee combat and a grappling hook. And Dave the Diver is an all-round chill time for PC only, in which you go spear-fishing and then help manage a sushi restaurant that sells your catches, with brilliant characters and multiple super-satisfying mini gameplay loops.

• New to Game Pass in the last week is Figment 2, a musical adventure set in a human mind, as well as The Wandering Village, a city-building sim that takes place on the back of a massive beast. Plus there’s Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem, the latest in a first-person shooter series that somehow still exists.

• Nintendo sneakily added a pair of all-time-greats to the Switch Online Game Boy app today; The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. These are old-school screen-by-screen Zeldas released in 2001 (Majora’s Mask was already out!), and they have a wonderful strange vibe and some incredible dungeons. They are two distinct adventures (in one you get time powers, in the other mastery over weather), but if you play one all the way through you get a code to input into the other, making it play out as a sequel.

Will Nintendo’s Switch successor be backwards compatible?

By Tim

A new Nintendo console is coming sometime soon. It’s inevitable. Between rumours from manufacturers in China, the very slim games lineup announced for the Switch, and the fact this system will be seven years old next year, it seems the only thing holding Nintendo back is that their current machine keeps selling.

We can all-but guarantee the new machine will be a hybrid home/portable system again, but personally I think there are no other details we can take for granted. The obvious play would seem to be an iterative upgrade that gives the Switch significantly more processing power and graphical capabilities, but I literally can’t think of a time that Nintendo has gone for the obvious play. Which is scary, because it feels like continuity is vital for the next Nintendo console in a way it hasn’t been before. 

People have invested heavily in the Switch, not just in physical and digital games but in a huge range of controllers — from Joy-Con to Pro Controllers to third party solutions — as well as Amiibo and oddities like Labo, Ring Fit and that remote control Mario Kart. Asking players to sweep all that aside and start fresh with something new will be a big ask. The ideal scenario will be that everything you already own will work, and your existing games will benefit from any hardware improvements.

On the other hand, Nintendo will be looking to avoid a Wii U situation at all costs. The Wii was a phenomenally successful system, almost as big as the Switch, but its sequel failed utterly despite full backwards compatibility. In fact, you could argue that the prominence of that compatibility — the Wii Remotes, for example — contributed to mainstream confusion about the Wii U. Is it just a tablet controller for the Wii? A machine that plays Wii games in HD? Why do we need that?

All of Nintendo’s handheld systems have featured backwards compatibility with the previous generation, but that’s only been true of two home consoles, and is not true of the Switch itself. True compatibility would require the new machine to use a very similar processor structure, maintain all the same wireless and sensor tech it needs to communicate with peripherals, and work with the same online services and store. To accommodate Joy-Con compatibility, the new system would also need to be a similar size and shape to the current Switch.

All this could prove too much of a limitation if Nintendo wants to go in a different direction, as it frequently does. We could potentially end up with a partial compatibility solution, where certain games and devices work but not others, or where Switch games only work in a siloed “Switch mode” emulation layer.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings 

by Alice

Lego has really been hitting it out of the park on video game crossovers these last few years. Starting with the Lego Nintendo Entertainment System in 2020, which was one of my favourite builds ever, Lego has doubled down on the retro nostalgia with a Mario Question Block, an Atari, and now a Pac-Man retro arcade machine.

I’ve started building the Pac-Man Arcade machine for review, and while it’s slow going (I currently have a family member fresh from quintuple-bypass surgery staying with me), I’m enchanted by the experience so far. Through the first section I’ve just built a box full of cogs that will presumably be the brain for the machine, with decorative items on top, but even here the love and respect for Pac-Man is evident. I’ll keep you updated on how things go from here.

But what this experience has me considering is what games I want Lego to tackle next. Tetris seems almost purpose designed to work as a Lego set, so it almost feels like cheating, but it could be cool to make a working-ish Tetris arcade machine. Obviously, a Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing island would be easy enough to make out of Lego. Technically, there’s already been a Speed Champions Forza Horizon 4 expansion, so there is already a bunch of Forza Lego sets, but I’d love to see a racing sled set up built out of bricks.

A PlayStation 2 with Guitar Hero instruments would be fun, as would a PlayStation 1 with Bushido Blade. Perhaps, and I realise this might be pushing it, a GameBoy Color with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game?

Most likely, it’s going to be something from either Nintendo or Atari, or perhaps an Icons set of Sonic, given how the company is going all-in on Sonic sets this year. But it’s still fun to imagine all the sets that could exist, were licensing and profitability no issue.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

As another month comes to a close, it’s time to look back on some of the games that have just celebrated a significant birthday in July.

Now 20: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic This game is legendary not only for popularising the time period 4000 years before the original Star Wars movies — with an excellent story and a great if predictable late-game twist — but also for laying the foundation of BioWare epics to come. The developer was already known for Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, but KotOR had a much more action video game presentation, hid those D&D dice rolls behind flashy combat animations, and brought the developer’s RPGs to console for the first time. Without this game, there’d be no Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

Now 30: Super Mario All-Stars I tend to think of this one as a SNES launch title, but nope it followed the system by several years. Proving that remasters are not purely a modern phenomenon, All-Stars collected all four Famicom / NES Super Mario Bros games and improved them to take advantage of the new powerful hardware; more colours, greater detail, actual backgrounds and a new soundtrack filled with those sweet SNES orchestra hits. Plus a save system! Some purists are still grumpy about these versions because they changed the physics and removed some glitches, but they remain a fun alternative, and the All-Stars version of Mario 1 remains my favourite way to play.

Now 40: Bomberman This strange game, originally released for Japanese home computers, is practically unrecognisable as part of the Bomberman series we know today. Except, that is, for the characteristic cross-shaped explosions. The game was ported to the Famicom two years later, which is when we first saw Bomberman’s ninja-like design, and that version was ported back to home computers as Bomberman Special. But the 1990 PC Engine game is where multiplayer was implemented, which lead directly to what remains one of the best local party series around. Saturn Bomberman is a personal favourite of mine, but the recent Super Bomberman R for current systems is also a hoot.