Summer Games Fest Is Over And Now We Can Sleep
Plus, we went hands on with the Apple Vision Pro, Tim has fond memories of Duke Nukem, and what to play this weekend
Happy Wednesday, Friends!
The past few days have been big for people who like to get up in the middle of the night to watch carefully curated trailers for video games that will be released sometime between “soon” and “delayed to death”.
In this week’s issue of Press Any Button, we both talk about our picks from the major press conferences, while Alice muses on the future of Apple gaming and Tim reminds us that Duke Nukem is a thing that exists. Plus, all the recommendations you need for a game-filled weekend.
Long live the mid-year game reveal
By Tim
E3 may be dead, but you’d hardly know it looking at all the games revealed and hyped up at various showcases over the last week. We’ve seen a lot of fresh details for big games we’ll be playing soon (Spider-man! Starfield! Alan Wake!) and tasty updates on projects a little further down the track (Fable! Avowed! Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth!). But my favourite announcements are always the surprise introductions of games we’ve never heard of before, and we got a surprisingly large amount of them this year. Here are my favourite three:
Star Wars Outlaws
In just two trailers (and a bit of a cheeky behind closed doors briefing), Ubisoft has assuaged my fears about its long-rumoured open-world Star Wars game being just an Assassin’s Creed or Division with a Lucasfilm theme. No shade on those games, but I need a bit more narrative, warmth and deep lore with my Star Wars, and it looks like we’re getting it here. This is a huge game being worked on by 10 Ubisoft studios around the world, but if it can stick to its clear strengths (syndicate underworld stuff, a coming of age story, very expensive looking space explosions) and avoid maps full of busywork it could be very special.
Sonic Superstars
This one was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. A classic-style 2D Sonic with a brand new and adorable aesthetic, with up to four simultaneous players? It’s a great concept but each new bit of subsequent information raised more questions than it answered. Why does the trailer mention “skins'' with no other context? Why does the PR talk about packages and future content, when it also says this will be a $100 boxed game? It’s being made by who? Uh-oh! But hands-on previews have been positive enough that I’m willing to stay optimistic if sceptical. It looks so good.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve had a Prince of Persia side-scroller that was both new (i.e. not a remake) and used buttons to control it (i.e. not a touchscreen)? Thirty years! I’m so glad this game is going back to the series roots somewhat, but I also think fast combat and a Metroidvania layout was the right call versus the plodding old-school cinematic platforming. Sargon’s time powers look sick, and I have full confidence in this team (who made Rayman Legends) to pull it off.
Also special mention to Pokemon / volleyball hybrid Beastieball, and to bluesy magical realism adventure South of Midnight, which both look incredible but very early.
What to play
New to Game Pass this week is brand new heartfelt narrative adventure Dordogne, which is rendered in watercolours and tells a nostalgic story of a childhood in the southwest of France.
Free-to-play naval combat game World of Warships has this month added new content based on … um … Popeye the sailor man? I (Tim) am not going to recommend you go and play this game, because if it’s the kind of thing you’re into you’re already playing it. But Wargaming legitimately sent me a can of spinach in the post to promote this update, and I guess I don’t know what to do with any of this information. Or indeed the spinach itself. (Alice also got a can of the Popeye spinach and is considering whether or not it would be a good idea to add to a pot of calde verde in lieu of kale.)
It’s a new Fortnite season, and this time it seems to be jungle, furry and Transformers themed. I’ll (Alice) have a story on what to look out for in this season next week, but in the mean time, jump in and raid some temples/talk to the ripped cat.
NBA 2K23 is free this month for all PlayStation Plus subscribers. I (Alice) have conflicting feelings about NBA 2K23, given that it’s the best basketball simulator out there, and I love it, but it’s also the best ‘money-grubbing microtransaction hell disguised as a AAA game’ simulator out there, and that’s not great. But, given it plays like a free-to-play game, free is the right price to pay if you were paying for PlayStation Plus anyway, and it’s going to be the best way to get your NBA fix now that the season’s ended.
Coming to Apple Arcade this Friday is Jet Dragon, which appears to be a dragon racing simulator, which is literally all I need to know about it to be excited to play it.
To get you in the mood for Pay Day 3, Pay Day 2 is currently free on the Epic Games Store until Friday.
Xbox announced lots of things in the middle of the night
By Alice
This past weekend of ‘not E3’ events, including Summer Games Fest and eleventeen billion press conference by almost every publisher was a veritable smorgasbord of games that looked really slick in 90-second trailers. As part of the festival of games you can’t play yet, I headed to the in-person Xbox Fan Fest event at Fortress in Melbourne, which started at 11pm and went until 5:30am and included a watch party for the Xbox Showcase and Starfield Direct.
Obviously, my main highlight of the show was finally getting the release date for the much-delayed Forza Motorsport (10 October, two days after PAX Aus). But there were also several others that I’m really keen for:
South of Midnight was low on details but heavy on vibes of other-worldly creatures singing the blues in Louisiana, and I am here for that.
Clockwork Revolution reminded me a lot of Bioshock Infinite in aesthetic, but promised a really interesting time travel-theme which I look forward to exploring.
Fable had a hilarious trailer, which really focussed on the personality of the game and made me even more keen to play it ASAP.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will allow people to play as search and rescue helicopter pilots, and a range of other aviation-related jobs.
33 Immortals promises 33-player co-op, which will be either incredible or a complete disaster, and nothing in between.
Cities: Skylines II is here to steal all my free time forever.
What surprised me the most about the Starfield Direct is how much it actually made me want to play the game and go deep. Starfield seems so much more ambitious than originally expected, ambitious to the point that it almost seems implausible. It also seems to have so much more light-hearted personality than I thought it would. The developer who played the game as a sandwich pirate and had a secret hold on her ship to store all the sandwiches oddly enough was the person who made me the most interested in the game. It came off as a game that will be completely and utterly broken at launch, and then still have a huge and passionate player base in ten years’ time.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Last week I went to the US as a guest of Apple to cover the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and, while there was just so much stuff announced during the keynote (an unusually large amount, tbh), there were a couple of things that stood out for gamers.
The first is that Apple is finally going hard on bringing Mac gaming back from the dead. In the last decade the company has focussed on games for iPhone, iPad and (later) Apple TV. Sure, you can play Apple Arcade games on Mac, but Mac never seemed to be the star of that show.
However, in the keynote (which was pitched directly at developers), Tom Cook brought Hideo Kojima on stage to announce that the Director’s Cut of Death Stranding is coming to Mac later this year, alongside a bunch of other games. There were also several toolkits announced to help developers port their existing games over to Mac. It makes sense, given more people have Macs now, and the M2 chip is more than capable of running games. It remains to be seen whether developers will rush to do that, but given how much easier it’ll now be to port games, it seems we’re only a year away from seeing more AAA and AA games release for Mac, too.
The other big thing was, of course, the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s long awaited VR headset. I have done a lot of VR gaming reviews in my time, but all those headsets were held back by causing motion sickness, or just not being as realistic as their makers promised.
When I went hands on with the Vision Pro, I was astounded by how immersive and realistic it was. It was the experience every other VR headset maker had originally promised without any of the usual drawbacks.
There was no gameplay in the extremely controlled tech demo I did, but the example of NBA 2K23 was brought up in the keynote, so the company clearly has some gaming plans for the $3499USD headset. It’s not something that will be relevant to Australians until at least late 2024 (and even then, probably not until 2025 when the cheaper second gen headset is released), but I’m much more excited about it than I thought I would be.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
I like Duke Nukem. I was first introduced to the character through Duke 3D, a technological marvel but also a fun shooter with what I accepted at the time as a playfully satirical take on the Hollywood beefcake. It didn’t dawn on me that anyone might take the character at face value, or aspire to be like him, or create future games that missed the point entirely and doubled down on his most mean-spirited and offensive tendencies. So when I say I like Duke, I’m more or less referring to the version of him preserved by my 10-year-old brain in 1998.
In fact I liked him enough that when I discovered there were Duke Nukem games from before Duke 3D, while browsing the selection of bootleg games on floppy disk at Croydon market, I bought them immediately (and likely overpaid). I was surprised to find they were very similar to the Crystal Caves and Secret agent games, which I had previously played on bootlegs, and I loved them.
PC platformers filled with keycards and powerups, which felt like ancient artefacts to me even then, were briefly one of my favourite things. You can’t easily replicate the sound of a PC speaker, let alone the grind of a floppy disk, these days. And it’s a bit of work to get them running at all on modern machines. But I feel these games have a lot of merit, intrinsically and historically.
Why am I thinking about Duke right now? Blaze entertainment, creator of the Evercade consoles and handhelds, announced earlier this month it was producing two physical Duke cartridges. One is filled with (pardon my language) a load of absolute filthy dross from the late 90s and early 2000s. But the other has Duke 3D and newly remastered widescreen versions of the side-scrolling Duke 1 and Duke 2. The jury’s out on whether it’s a good idea to add smooth scrolling and other new fangled features to games of this vintage, but I’m sure as hell going to find out in November.