Switch farewelled with mountain of remasters
Plus Star Wars Outlaws, Pan Am and retro anniversaries
Hello there! Another packed Friday newsletter for you, as we’ve been playing Star Wars Outlaws and Pan Am, drinking in the announcements from Nintendo’s double-broadcast, pondering our mortality as we think about when Arkham Asylum came out, and more! Let’s get into it!
Switch’s remaster apocalypse
By Tim
Nintendo’s double-direct this week was an interesting one, pairing fresh-faced and excited indie devs presenting their fresh ideas with a “Partner Showcase” filled almost exclusively with waifus and remasters.
The Switch is getting long in the tooth and, given it’s very close to the most popular system of all time, it’s no surprise that publishers continue to shower it with anything they can. But something about seeing EA jump on the remaster bandwagon with MySims made my stomach turn inexplicably.
It was already a pretty cynical move to make The Sims appealing to a younger audience on the child-friendly Wii console in 2007. I most associate the series with filling huge bargain bins alongside Carnival Games. Now you’re just going to re-release those exact same games on Switch for $60, with a big bubbly label that says “Retro Re-release” as though that is a selling point in itself? Wild times.
I love revisiting old games and I have no problem generally with people being able to access games they loved years ago on a new system by re-purchasing them, so if that’s you with MySims I’m glad it’s there for you. But while there are exceptions (like Tetris Forever, with its documentary content, and Dragon Quest III with its all new art), so many of the games from the partner direct feel like they’re just being opportunistically lifted and dropped on Switch in hopes that its huge playerbase will drop some coin on it.
We saw a trio of DS games in the Castlevania Dominus Collection, a collection of weirdo titles that weren’t good enough for the first time around in Capcom Fighting Collection 2 (sorry Power Stone), and yet another look at Epic Mickey, which I just can’t imagine anyone buying a second time around.
A port of 2016’s Yakuza Kiwami, a new version of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Worms Armaggedon, three STALKERs, Suikoden 1 & 2, Tales of Graces f. These are all fine games but I have to wonder how many people have been hanging out to replay them on Switch.
The eShop is absolutely littered with junk and shovelware at the best of times, and it seems like as the system heads towards the sunset the only “new” and premium-priced offerings it’s going to have are moderately updated versions of Wii games and mid-tier RPGs.
What to play
Two games from Indie World with given surprise immediate releases. Pizza Tower is an incredible Wario Land like and was one of my favourite games of last year. Grab it on Switch if you haven’t played it on PC. Then there’s Peglin, a pachinko roguelite and obvious love letter to Peggle.
New to Game Pass this week is 1-8 player sandbox mining adventure Core Keeper.
Over on the Epic Games store you can get a trio of wasteland CRPG classics for free, with Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics. You can also get some arcade gridiron action in Wild Card Football.
Star Wars Outlaws is OK
By Alice
I came to Star Wars Outlaws as someone who is Star Wars curious, but not really a fan. I’ve seen the newest two trilogies, and some of the TV shows, but the series long ago became merely a vehicle for selling that thing you liked as a kid, rather than anything with real substance. But who can resist a story of a plucky gang of rebels and the beauty of galaxies far far away?
Star Wars Outlaws is beautiful, has the classic Disney requirement of an adorable creature sidekick and has some genuinely enjoyable gameplay moments.
But the reason why I’ve had trouble persisting with it is that the story is too thin. There’s nothing to hold onto to make me want to invest my spare time into it for too long. It falls into the same problem that the Marvel movies have, which is that it wants to surprise and delight you based on that thing you remember, without having anything that could even potentially be related to the real world, or say something at all. The problem with a story that’s afraid of making any kind of statement, is that it’s entirely devoid of meaning. In the moment it feels like a jolly good time, but in a couple of years time you’re not going to remember anything meaningful from it. That’s disappointing coming from a franchise that originally had so much to say, and had a story that people loved so much they made it a core part of their personality.
My other annoyance with Star Wars Outlaws is that it couldn’t decide whether it would be a linear path game, or an open world game, and so it didn’t really do either all that well.
All up, I am having a good time with Star Wars Outlaws, but only in the same way that I would have a good time eating my fourth choice of chip flavour - it’s junk food that is merely OK, when it could have been something so much better.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
It must be said that I do like a good board game about a mode of transportation. Hell, I’ll even enjoy a kinda OK board game about transportation so long as it comes with adorable minis.
Pan Am is a game that I’m still not 100% sure I actually enjoyed, but at the same time I want a copy to call my own and I want to play it about 3-4 times to find out how I feel about it, which is probably a good sign.
In the game, you play as a fledgling airline at the start of Pan Am’s dominance. Your quest is not to have a successful airline, but to have as much Pan Am stock as possible by the end of the game so you can at least be rich while standing in the ruins of your once successful business.
You can only do 5 actions per round, and there are a limited number of rounds. 5 actions didn’t quite feel like enough for me, which was a little frustrating. But, at the same time, it means that you have to be more strategic with the airports and planes you place and acquire.
While the game was a little dry, it’s the aesthetic of the board and pieces I particularly enjoyed. It really leaned into that 1960s transatlantic look, and the plane pieces were so perfectly moulded, you could just tell the designer was the kind of person who would park near the airport to watch the planes take off as a teenager.
It’s the kind of game that would appeal to the kind of person who has a model train set in their basement. It’s also a game that, with enough time, you could get really strategic with. All up, it’s not a must play for everyone, but the sorts of people who would enjoy it will be absolutely obsessed.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
It’s the end of another month, which means we’re looking back at some of the games that have just celebrated a major anniversary.
Now 15: Batman Arkham Asylum A good superhero game in 2009 would have been noteworthy enough, but here was an outstanding, groundbreaking game in its own right that just happened to be tied to DC Comics. With a labyrinthine, Metroid-y design, an innovative and flowing one-versus-many combat system and the ability to toggle a Detective Vision mode to efficiently plan your assaults and escapes, it was a hugely influential game. Not to mention the best of the series.
Now 30: Earthbound Originally released in Japan as Mother 2, Earthbound is a game you might not have much nostalgia for given the English version was only ever released for Super Nintendo in North America. But you’ve surely heard of it thanks to the feverish fanbase that formed around it well after the fact, even if you’ve never played it. This is a kooky and satirical RPG where children set off on a variously lonely, lighthearted, bizarre and poignant adventure through Americana, fighting dogs, hippies, vomit and aliens as they head towards an unforgettable fourth-wall-breaking finale. The number of indie game’s it’s influenced is potentially higher than the number of American players it reached at release.
Now 45: Lunar Lander Atari didn’t come up with the concept for Lunar Lander. In fact, games where you control thrusters to land safely on the moon’s surface were one of the first video game genres, with several programmers making them in BASIC or FOCAL from the 1960s. But, Atari made the definitive and ultimately most popular version with its 1979 arcade machine, featuring vector graphics and a big mechanical handle to control thrust. Players could put in more money to buy more fuel, so it wasn’t entirely unlike modern casual games.