Taking the fall for platform expansion

Plus World of Goo 2, Lorcana and the best-looking 80s consoles.

Hello there! I hope you’ve had a great week, and are ready to absorb some takes. This week we’re covering the gaping maw of Fortnite chomping for more IP to assimilate, the anti-consumerism weirdness of World of Goo 2, Disney’s Lorcana and the best-looking 80s consoles Japan has to offer.

Let’s get to it!

Is Fortnite about to absorb Fall Guys?

By Alice

Fall Guys was an absolute breakout game when it first released in 2020. Playing it at E3 2019 is still one of my highlights from that show, and Fall Guys became a defining lockdown game for many people. It was huge. So huge that Epic Games bought the developer, and turned the game free to play, changed the culture of it, and then everyone completely forgot it existed. Be honest, was this the first time you’ve thought about Fall Guys in years? Aside, of course, from when Epic Games laid off a huge number of people from developer Mediatonic last year?

So, it was a surprise to see a Fall Guys event suddenly launch in Fortnite this week. Right now, if you head down to Classy Courts you can use a statue to teleport into a Fall Guys-like level above the world and earn rewards based on your performance.

The hopeful side of me likes to think that this is a way to encourage players to get a taste of Fall Guys and then try the full game.

The more sceptical, realistic side of me thinks that Epic is getting ready to just fold Fall Guys into Fortnite proper and have it as another mode in the game that they’re trying to turn into a whole platform. We’ve seen it with the recent launches of Lego Fortnite (Minecraft, but with Lego), Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival (Rock Band, but more expensive). Those were new modes based on other games to try and expand the platform, absorbing Fall Guys would fit well. Epic has already shown that there can be three simultaneous season passes available in Fortnite for different modes, so adding a fourth wouldn’t be a stretch.

Absorbing Fall Guys into Fortnite feels bad, like when Trek buys a bespoke cycling brand, keeps the name around for a while, and then just absorbs it like it never existed. But, it means that more people might be able to play one of my favourite games, because it’ll be put in front of them. It has positives and negatives, but mostly negatives.

We’ll see what happens. I hope I’m wrong. Yet I am burdened by being right so often.

What to play

• It’s a new month, which means some new freebies for PlayStation Plus subscribers to add to their library. For August you get Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which is not a collection of the old 2000s games but a 2022 representation of all nine core films in lighthearted brick form. There’s also 2D souls-like Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights and Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach.

• This week on Game Pass we have day one release Creatures of Ava, a cosy 3D Pokemon-like with narrative themes of ecology and empathy. Also new to the service is Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, which is an incredible remaster of the original three games that looks and plays much better than before, but is still super difficult.

• Over on the Epic Games store from Thursday, you can get brand new Konami-published top-down shooter CYGNI for free.

• New versions of shooter classics Doom and Doom II are here, with more content than ever, and both are available free if you have either of the existing versions in your library already!

• It’s another good week for smaller offbeat releases, with hardcore platformer Volgaar the Viking II, the turn-based SteamWorld Heist II and RPG Cat Quest III all making a splash. But if you have a PC I can also recommend Crush House, a bizarre voyeuristic first-person reality TV simulator with Sims vibes and some dark undertones. Even if you’ve never been interested in producing your own take on Love Island, it’s an interesting and kooky game that has you catering to the whims of various audiences each minute to the next, from bored soccer mums to butt-obsessed weirdos.

Goo Too: Electric Boogaloo

By Tim

When Nintendo first dove into the world of digital distribution with WiiWare in 2008, it opened the door for the same kind of weirdo indies that were making a splash in the console space over on Xbox Live Arcade. Not indies in the literal sense of course, I guess it was more of a toe-dip than a dive, but it brought us all-time-greats like LostWinds, Bit.Trip and World of Goo. Arguably the greatest of the bunch, World of Goo was unlike anything I'd played before. Mechanically a pointer-controlled physics puzzle game about building, it was also a savagely anti-consumerism black comedy with wild animations, a gross gooey setting and a lot more to say than your regular downloadable puzzle experience.

The world's a very different place 16 years later, both in terms of our access to indies on console (it's better) and the state of consumerism and its related environmental impacts (it's much worse), so I wasn't sure what to expect from the brand new World of Goo 2. As it turns out, it’s a tad less focused as an experience and I still think it expects a high degree of precision from your actions, which the controls just don’t afford you. But both the building and the humour is as silly and brutal as ever.

The first couple of chapters feel like a throwback to the original game, good for some nostalgia and also to fill newcomers in on the kind of world this is. Goo exists as a kind of natural ecological phenomenon and a power source, harvested and utilised by a corporation, and you can stretch them around to build wobbly structures. I suck at understanding physics so playing the original did not help me at all when it came to making bridges that don't fall over, but the friendly rewind options remain.

There are several new species of goo ball that add some weird and funny wrinkles, and some creative settings along the way, interspersed with a weird story that seems to be about greenwashing? Or consumption sold as sustainability? To be honest the story goes completely off the rails in the fourth chapter in an unexpectedly big swing that I loved playing through, but which doesn't exactly suit the rest of the game and its arcadey score chase focus. I expect that players like me who loved the original for its sinister nonsense and weird vibes will be on board, but people who liked the physics and OCD collection aspects will be enraged.

Bricks, Boards and Beginnings 

by Alice

The time has come, Lorcana is finally going wide. If you haven’t heard of the game before, it’s essentially a simplified love child of Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone with Disney characters.

Lorcana was released properly in the US in late 2023. The plan had always been for publisher Ravensburger to release the game in Australia towards the end of 2024, but then players started paying inflated scalper prices online to get their hands on starter decks, and Ravensburger’s hand was forced. There were quiet launches of the first four sets in Australia, with very little fanfare, and not much player interest due to a lack of game store support.

Next week all of that changes. Well, at least some of that changes. With the release of the 5th Lorcana expansion, Australia will finally catch up to America on card releases, and full store and tournament support begins.

I’m really interested to see how this goes. Appropriately, Lorcana currently plays like a “my first TCG”, and I’m not sure whether that’s because it’s a Disney game and so it’s more accessible, or simply because it’s a young TCG and it hasn’t had time to get weird yet. Magic the Gathering has 31 years of lore and mechanics to draw from, Lorcana doesn’t even have a full year yet.

My favourite thing about Lorcana is how easy it is to deck build. You can put almost any cards together and have a good time. Where things get interesting is in how you can make different cards interact with each other (like all TCGs), and the meta is already heating up. I don’t know if that’s going to be enough to sustain a full tournament scene while the game builds, but I hope it is. I would like to see Lorcana last for years, and be spoken about in the same breath as Pokemon.

Retro Esoterica

by Tim

This month I'm taking a break from writing about old games to write about old home consoles, and specifically their physical design rather than whatever they might have going on inside. In this first of three parts, I'm looking exclusively at a trio of machines of the 1980s.

SG-1000 There’s something joyful about the white plastic and primary blue and red fanfare of the original toylike SG-1000, but just one year afterwards Sega released the beautiful SG-1000 II (pictured). Clean and minimalist, with a little dock to store an equally sparse controller, its white top is furnished with some sick vents and wonderfully weird cool English flavour text. The similar Mark-III was a little busy, and Sega went wild with text and diagrams when bringing that machine to the West as the Master System. Still, Sega’s 80s machines made Nintendo’s Family Computer look hideous by comparison; beige, dark red and gold, it looked like something a seedy restaurant from the 1980s would use to steal your credit card details.

PC Engine NEC’s first console had a lot of character, setting itself apart from its contemporaries by being very small and using flat cards as games rather than cartridges, with the art on full display when inserted. But while this first white model is cute, later redesigns adopted a grey and blue look that I think is phenomenal. This colour scheme was applied to the bizarre SuperGrafx which looks like some kind of warship, and the PC Engine shuttle that’s shaped as a UFO to amuse children. But the Core Grafx (pictured) is the most aesthetic one; essentially it’s the original design but with the updated colours. All systems look ridiculous with the CD-ROM attached, and the less said about the Western version — the TurboGrafx-16 — the better.

Mega Drive There are many models of Mega Drive (or Genesis, in the US), but for pure looks it’s hard to go past the original 1988 Japanese model. It keeps the slotted vents and text-heavy elements of early Sega consoles, but modernises it with black plastic and a circular central unit. This first model had a headphone jack at the front for personal stereo audio, which also necessitated a slick volume slider next to the chunky power switch and textured reset button. The maroon and blue accents, plus the prominent “16-bit” text pulls it all together for a system that exudes late 80s cool.