Strike up the Rock Band

Plus Resident Evil reviewed, get hype for Lego, and revisiting Virtual Boy.

Hello there! It’s another fairly big week ahead for new releases, including Pokopia, Marathon, Planet of Lana 2 and Monster Hunter Stories 3. But then we have a few very quiet weeks during which we can actually chill and digest some of the games. Unless tomorrow’s Nintendo Direct brings some imminent news!

Today in the newsletter we’re looking at the upcoming Guitar Hero spiritual successor, reviewing Resident Evil Requiem, recapping recent Lego announcements and re-evaluating the Virtual Boy. Let’s go!

There’s a good chance we might be so back

By Alice

The new, back from the dead, Red Octane Studios just revealed its new game. Red Octane was legendary for making Guitar Hero back in the day, and now it’s back with a game that is legally distinct from Guitar Hero. It’s called Studio Tour and it promises a lot of customisation features, and a set list filled with rock, metal, and unnamed other genres of music. It looks a bit janky, as you’d expect from a AA game, and the website has a section where you can suggest including music from your own band.

The big questions we all had when the studio was first revived remain: Will this game end up being free-to-play? Obviously it will have to be very DLC based to cover the inclusion of new songs, or will it be subscription-based? Going for a subscription makes the most sense given the evolution of music licensing, it’ll be easier for songs to cycle in and out that way without people getting up in arms about losing what they’d paid for, or having to delist the game. But then that creates other problems, because so many people have such subscription fatigue.

Also, what is this going to have that games like Clone Hero and Fortnite Festival don’t already offer? Is it going to be more mainstream than Clone Hero, or will it be available across all consoles? Will it take an anti-gen AI stance to differentiate it from Fortnite Festival?

I am cautiously optimistic that it’s going to be good. The team behind it obviously had the chops. But so much is going to come down to the set list, the price, and which kinds of accessories are going to be released to go with the game. I want a key tar and electric drum kit compatibility.

What’s on our radar

• Tim: I’ve been playing a lot of Resident Evil Requiem, and also Virtual Boy, both of which you can read about below. I was also sick a lot of last week, so I reached for a comfort game and that ended up being Breath of the Wild. Exactly nine years after I first experienced it the game remains astounding, and I blasted through dozens of shrines and three divine beasts. You never get back that same feeling of playing for the first time, where every new rule you understand shifts your entire perception of what’s possible in the world. But on the other hand, playing on Switch 2 in a solid 60 fps is transformative in its own way. I’ve realised that I avoided certain areas (the Great Forest, the peaks, the marshy woodlands) because the performance was so poor on the original Switch, and now I’m finding stuff I’m not sure I ever saw way back then.

• Alice: All I have played this week is Pikmin Bloom. All hail Pikmin Bloom.

Requiem for a dream team

By Tim

Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7 are my favourite two entries in the series. So you’d think that Requiem, which smooshes the styles of those two games together, would be exactly my cup of tea. But going in, I had some reservations.

The last time Capcom tried to collide multiple threads and styles together in this franchise we got Resident Evil 6, one of the most viscerally disappointing games I can bring to mind. Having now finished Requiem I can assure you that it is nowhere near what could be considered a failure. But it’s not a slam dunk either.

A follow-up to the Ethan story with RE7 gameplay set in a creepy intensive care facility, where the zombies are all patients who hold on to aspects of their former lives and memories and maladies, sounds incredible. And revisiting the original Raccoon City narrative, with an older Leon playing like RE4 but in nuked RE2 environments, also receives a big tick from me. We get both of those things in this game, but joining them leaves each underdeveloped, and the connective tissue between them provides the game’s few iffy moments.

To be clear, the game rules. The moment-to-moment will thrill any RE fan, whether you’re willing a hulking brute not to see you as you lurk around as Grace, or going chainsaw-to-chainsaw against decrepit zombies in an exploding gas station as Leon. For most of my twelve hours in the game I was just living the moments, and there was a nice mix of modern design, old-school throwbacks and pure weirdness.

But both of these gameplay styles really deserve to eventually reach an unfolding puzzle box moment. For Grace’s half of the game, I wanted to fully become the master of the space, to know every nook and cranny and collect every bit of upgrade material, discovering shortcuts and secrets. For Leon’s half, which is paced like a miniaturised hub-and-spoke design in the style of RE Village, I wanted to express my playstyle with cool weapons and custom upgrades.

In Requiem, each part has a flavour of these designs, but can’t fully commit because the game needs to move you through a linear narrative that takes you from place to place and between protagonists. It’s like a rollercoaster themed after those earlier games, rather than a proper sequel to them.

But the upside to all of this is variety, and on that front the game stands out ahead of any other entry in the series.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings

by Alice

This past week has been a huge month for Lego releases. Unusually huge for nerds in particular.

• First up, there’s the release of the new Pokemon sets. I absolutely love the massive Charizard, Venusaur and Blastoise 6838 piece set, but the more affordable Eevee set is also great.

• For Tim, specifically, but also other people, there’s the Zelda: Ocarina of Time - The Final Battle set, which is expensive at $200, given its 1003 pieces, but just looks so damn good. I love Link just absolutely yeeting himself off that building.

• The Model T Ford looks really cool, but is a bit controversial due to using illegal building techniques (an illegal building technique is one that puts undue strain on a piece, which may cause it to break).

• More importantly, though, there are 8 Smart Play Star Wars sets, which is 5 more than were announced at CES. I’m getting my hands on some this week, and will have a review for you next week, but I really can’t wait to see what people do with the Smart Play system. It’s expensive, which will likely hold some people back from jumping in at the beginning, but I think it represents something special for Lego, and I want it to last long enough that the company feels comfortable to get a bit weird with it.

• I’m pleased to see a smaller and more affordable London Double Decker Bus, and that Maersk ship sure is a blast from the past.

• I am obsessed with how beautiful those Magnolia branches are.

• The big Winnie The Pooh will give me nightmares for the rest of my days.

But, perhaps most importantly, these Brick Clogs which I think would be the perfect beach shoes and I would have already bought them were they not $320.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

The legacy of the Virtual Boy is that it’s become known as Nintendo’s biggest ever flop, and potentially the most prominent flop in all of video game hardware. It lasted less than half a year in the Japanese market before the company pulled the plug, and around one year in America. So, in retrospect, was it unfairly maligned? Or did it deserve to fail?

By all accounts, the system was doomed before it was even released. Design mastermind Gunpei Yokoi was not happy with it, as for regulatory and safety reasons the original lightweight head-tracking design had shifted to a heavy, table-mounted console you had to peer into. Nintendo’s decision to release it at all seems to have been a shot in the dark, since it wanted to cease development and move all focus to the Nintendo 64.

The red-and-black screen of the Virtual Boy isn’t actually a weakness, I would argue. For 1995, the fast-flickering LED array provided a vector-like contrast where the backgrounds were truly black, which paired with the 32-bit processor provided some impressive sights and sounds, like a supercharged original Game Boy. Were it in a more comfortable form factor, and supported by many more games, it might have been a hit.

But of course that never happened. It gave people headaches. The controller, which you can tell was an attempt to enable simultaneous movement across multiple axes, didn’t really make sense for the available games. It wasn’t at all portable, and yet wasn’t comparable in quality to a home console. The stereoscopic graphics worked very well, but you couldn’t really appreciate that unless you had one.

Ultimately, the strengths of the Virtual Boy are all hypothetical. I’ve played the new $130 replica of the device, and I bought the $30 cardboard version, and it’s a fun way to shine a light on what could have been. The graphics look great, though not as high contrast as they really should if you’re using an LCD Switch, and games like Wario Land show how creative teams could make excellent experiences you played 20 minutes at a time, which were unlike anything you could get on handhelds or consoles at the time.

But the accuracy of the new versions extend to the fact that there are barely any games to play on it, and that it’s essentially impossible to find a comfortable way to enjoy it. It’s disappointing that there’s no official controller to go with it. The new device is a fun history lesson, but still not a great experience.