Video game makers discover women play sports
Plus Meta Quest Pro, Lego discounts, and how Tim came to love the Nintendo DS
Hello Button Buddies and welcome to Wednesday!
I hope you’ve all recovered from PAX. I’ve gained much inspiration from Fat Bear Week and am considering eating my weight in salmon and then hibernating for a few months to recover from the exhaustion of such an epic event.
Before we get into the week of games news and musing, I thought I might let you know about a competition you can win if your name is Max, because it’s just weird enough to be entertaining. If you want a new Turtle Beach headset and your name is Max, fill out this Google form, I guess.
OK, this week Alice has a look at the current state of women in sports games (they exist now, which is nice), and the Lego sales on now. Plus, Tim checks out the Meta Quest Pro and tells about how his love affair with the Nintendo DS started.
Enjoy!
The current state of women in sports video games
By Alice
If you asked me last year how women’s representation in sports video games was, I would have told you “it’s better than nothing, I guess”. This year the makers of both NBA 2K23 and FIFA 23 both talked big games about upping the female inclusions in their titles. And it is better! It really is! But it’s better in the way that some people think the Lemon and Herb basting at Nandos is spicy, which is to say that for some people it might be, some people will think it goes way too far, and everyone else knows it’s not really in any truly meaningful way.
And, here’s the thing. I understand that they’re trying when they don’t really have to, and that the entire point of these games is to make Scrooge McDuck-sized pools of money the stake holders can dive into while fans are bled dry from microtransactions. Women’s sports aren’t as popular as the men’s versions yet and they don’t get the same investment as men’s sports, turning into an ouroboros of systemic sexism. But, I guess it’s fine, because women are a relatively recent invention and broader society still needs time to adjust to their presence.
However, I love sports games. Booting up FIFA 23 and playing through the women’s half of the intro/tutorial (led by the lovely Sam Kerr) is the most excited I have ever felt to play FIFA. I was ready to finally consider soccer an actual sport and fully play through a women’s career mode. But, despite all the fanfare given to finally having a woman on the global cover and the inclusion of two women’s club leagues, there is still no women’s career mode. There is a token gesture towards “oh yeah, I guess women play soccer too”, but it lacks the depth of, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this, NBA 2K23.
While the NBA 2K series still hasn’t put a female player on the global cover, there is a women’s career mode. It has the depth of a thimble compared to the men’s career mode, but it exists, it’s fun, and you can play it without ever having to consider real money, which is glorious.
So, yeah, it’s still only better than nothing, and I’m getting impatient.
What to play
Stop everything. This week’s Apple Arcade game is The Gardens Between+ and you need to play it if you haven’t already. It is an utterly glorious puzzle game with beautiful art and a really creative time-control mechanic. It was one of my (Alice) games of the year in 2018, so if you’re a subscriber, you should absolutely check this out.
Overwatch 2 is free to play now, which is… not great news because it’s now all going to be geared around microtransactions and season pass stuff. However, if you can get through the queue, it’s still worth checking out what all the fuss is about. Don’t get addicted, but grab some friends and have a game because it’s still really fun.
You thought we’d managed to avoid Forza Horizon 5 in this newsletter for a while, but sadly it is as inevitable as my (Alice) misuse of commas. October marks the 10th anniversary of the Forza Horizon series, and I’m going to have more on that next week, but for now, jump in and give it a go on Xbox Game Pass if you’ve ever played any of the other titles.
In time for the Halloween season, Game Pass adds some spoopy goodness this week, starting with classic comedy role-playing game Costume Quest. There's also the brand new Eville, which is a take on multiplayer social deduction games like Ultimate Werewolf. Later this week will see gross Giger-style bio horror adventure Scorn.
Amazon has some pretty sweet deals on physical Switch games right now. Including Immortals Fenyx Rising for $19, Metroid Dread or Skyward Sword for $45, Pokemon Legends Arceus or Mario Odyssey for $60.
Meta’s new headset is all work and no play
By Tim
Meta has revealed its long-anticipated followup to the extremely popular Quest 2 VR headset. So, will this new piece of hardware be a boon to all you VR gamers or fence-sitters out there? Probably not, at least any time soon.
The Meta Quest Pro looks like when someone takes a fast consumer car and modifies it for high-level racing; it’s recognisable as a Quest but it’s been slimmed or improved or powered up at every opportunity.
It’s smaller and more comfortable. It has full colour pass-through for augmented reality. It has a processor twice as powerful as the Quest 2, with twice the RAM. It has inward-facing sensors now that can track your eyes and face, which could mean that your avatar more realistically reflects your reactions in social spaces, or could enable foveated rendering which lets games put more detail in the specific places you're looking. It has new rechargeable hand-tracking controllers. It’s backwards compatible with all Quest 2 games, and they’ll likely run better, especially once they’ve been patched.
But it’s also $2450, which should be a deal-breaker for pretty much everybody. For that amount of money, you could almost buy four Quest 2 units.
The other turn-off is that the battery life is advertised as between one and two hours, which is probably enough for most VR gaming sessions but is cutting it close, and could get really annoying if it also takes two hours to charge up.
The silver lining here is that many of these technologies will very likely be folded into a Quest 3 at some point in the future. Meta knows the current device makes much more sense for tethered use, and is promoting it as a business or creativity tool. It did also announce a partnership with Microsoft to bring its software to the platform, from which we can make two gaming-related assumptions: when the Quest 3 does arrive we’ll be streaming Game Pass games to it, and we shouldn’t hold our breath for an Xbox-branded VR headset anytime soon.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
A few weeks ago I wrote how weird it was that Lego had a bunch of discounted good sets on the website. As I said then, this is not Lego’s usual MO, and I don’t know what this means. Are the sets doing poorly? Is Lego trying a new brand strategy? Did the recent price rise not go to plan?
Whatever it means, there’s currently a freebie and double VIP points on all purchases until the 16th, so here are my picks from the sale:
The Globe is such a cool Lego Ideas project. It’s a working, spinning globe with labels for the continents and oceans that glow in the dark. It has 2585 pieces, and at 20% off it comes down to $271.99, so not too bad.
The Lunar New Year sets used to be hugely sort after and sold out immediately on release, so I guess Lego made too many this time which is why they’re now being sold off at a 30% discount. I particularly love the Lunar New Year Traditions set, which is filled with gorgeous mini-figures, has a piece count of 1066 and is on sale for $76.99. It’s an actual bargain, which is a Lego Store miracle.
For the Jurassic World Dominion fans (both of you), the sets are normally absolutely pathetic value. At 20% off they’re just the regular kind of bad value. $127.99 for T.Rex & Atrociraptor Dinosaur Breakout at 466 pieces is definitely well over my usual “10c per piece” value limit. That said, the moulded dinosaurs are so cool I kinda want them anyway? But no.
The one people will be most interested in is the McLaren Formula 1 Race Car, with 20% off for $239.99. It’s definitely better than $299.99, but Lego is clearly getting gouged on the licensing, because that still sucks for 1434 pieces. Unless you really want the points and freebie with free shipping, get it from Kmart for $199.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
A little more than 16 years ago I was a reporter at a newspaper in rural Victoria, and every evening I waited for my dad to finish work nearby so we could go home together, sometimes hanging out at the local bowling alley. Like a lot of alleys it had a handful of arcade machines and skill testers that I didn’t really bother spending money in, but one time on my way out — for whatever reason — I glanced at a skill tester and saw it had been restocked with prizes, including iPods and a Nintendo DS.
I was a somewhat lapsed gamer at that point, with only a Gamecube and some retro stuff to my name, and I barely had any concept of what the DS was. But I put in a dollar and watched the little needle go around, hitting the button and stopping it — inconceivably — right in the middle of the skinny “jackpot” wedge. The owner of the bowling alley was even more surprised than I was, and that was the start of my love affair with the Nintendo DS.
It was a chunky silver clamshell with a dull screen and a lot of weird gimmicks, but I was hitting up the only source of video games in that small town (a Target Country) every week for new stuff and they were all bangers. Mario Kart, Castlevania, Partners in Time, Sonic Rush, Another Code, New Super Mario Bros, Final Fantasy III, the list goes on.
In 2007 I got a used DS Lite, which is still one of the nicest handheld consoles there is, and in 2008 I traded it for a DSi; the first time in my life I had a new system on day one.
By that time the DS was wildly popular and a lot of garbage games were being put out for it, but it also seemed like there was something incredible every single month. From traditional games like Chrono Trigger and Kirby Super Star, to gimmick-focused goodness like Phantom Hourglass and Nintendogs, to straight up weirdness like Henry Hatsworth and Rhythm Heaven.
These days I don't tend to play DS on the go, so I primarily use a heavy but beautiful DSi XL. But the best bits of the those five or so years of are still absolutely worth playing today, and the system’s still unlike anything else.