Hello!
Welcome to a new addition of Press Any Button. This week Tim and I got to hang out in the real world and play video games, which is always nice.
I also got to play board games with friends, Tim played a time travelling dating sim, and a game that harkens back to the days of GoldenEye.
Enjoy!
Wolverine sure is a lot
By Alice
I really love Insomniac’s Spider-Man games. They truly make you feel like you are Spider-Man, flying through the air using webs, beating up the bad guys, and then being sweet and dopey. I’ve been a Spider-Man fan since the Tobey Maguire movies, and Insomniac so perfectly nailed the quirky underdog tone that it feels like canon.
I’m also an enjoyer of the X-Men. Truly, give me a queer allegory with an interesting societal struggle and I’m there. But I’ve never connected with Wolverine as a character. He’s interesting, to be sure; he has a horrific affliction, bad things have happened to him and that’s made him the gruffest, most violent macho man you’ve ever seen with ridiculous facial hair. I’m just not his target audience.
So, going into the Wolverine preview for the new Insomniac game, I was ready for the game to help me understand and empathise with Logan.
However, it was plagued by the problem that’s so common in previews - I have no proper context for anything that’s happening, I have no reason to like or root for most of these people, and in a narrative-focussed game with repetitive gameplay (in the parts I played), that makes it difficult to love.
It is cartoonishly violent. Logan is just straight up killing everything that moves, with blood splattering everywhere. If you told me that this was a new Mortal Kombat action RPG, I would believe it. There’s nothing wrong with that in a game, it’s often a good time. It was just jarring going from 0-100 with little context. It hits harder in a game with a strong story than in a game like Mortal Kombat where you expect it from the get go.
The violence plays out similarly to how it does in Spider-Man, with a lot of button mashing, just without the balletic aspect of the webs and with a lot more straight up murder and gore.
Because of how truncated the preview session was, my grasp of the plot is pretty much:
Trask says mutants are violent and evil and must be stopped.
The mutants then tear everyone limb from limb seemingly proving his point.
Then the mutants stand around (still covered in blood) saying (paraphrased) “we will show the world how normal and healthy we are. How dare he call us violent”.
In a way it reminds me of those episodes of The Ultimatum: Queer Love, where the cast members talk about how important it is to show their homophobic parents that queer relationships are as normal and healthy as straight ones. That’s before they then enter a reality dating contest where they constantly cheat on the spouse they originally came into “the experiment” with the intention to marry. The point they want to make can be valid, they’re just the absolute worst example and have chosen a terrible way to demonstrate it.
Because the combat was so repetitive (and each bit dragged on slightly longer than felt necessary), it felt like it was taking me away from the story that I wanted to learn more about, rather than being the meat and potatoes of the game. So, I’m really hoping they flesh that out more in the full game, because I want this to be good.
In good news, at least, it’s confirmed that Mystique and Destiny are both in the game and remain married, and so that’s going to guarantee I play through the whole game regardless of how irritated I get by Grufferine and the combat.
We’ll find out more when Wolverine comes out on PS5 on the 15th of September.
What’s on our radar
Tim: In addition to the games I’m discussing below I’ve been playing the hilarious Australiana-infused NBA Jam like Pro Jank Footy, and Hotline Miami like Kusan: City of Wolves. I was also lucky to get an early look at Star Wars Zero Company, which is shaping up to be an excellent tactical time, so I’m looking forward to the full thing next week.
Alice: This week I got to play Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls in a tournament on the big screen at Marvel Stadium. While I still have no idea how to play it or what was happening, I remain undefeated due to having to forfeit after my first round win because it was taking too long and I have a toddler who wanted to read a book about Judy Garland before bed. But it was a damn good game, and I’m looking forward to playing more. I love a good button-masher.
Round table time loops
By Tim
It’s been a good three weeks since a big AAA game of particular interest to me was released, which is time I might have used to revisit old favourites, see my family or go outside. But no! Because the stream of good indies never dries up, my time is always spoken for. There has been one in particular that has kept me absorbed, so I thought I’d shout it out here in a mini review. It’s Sovereign Tower.
If a game with dating sim elements, lots of data to analyse, and great hand-drawn art ticks all your boxes, this is one for you. But then, half of the Steam catalogue is also for you. So, what makes this game different? Through magical means, you’re a monarch who was not noble born, thrust onto the throne to answer endless questions and pleas for help from the people of your region and the leaders of neighbouring ones. You recruit and upgrade knights, who you assign to various tasks, which all have multiple skill checks Dispatch-style to determine success or failure. And yes, this is a “your choices matter” game.
But! The depth of the branching paths here is the kicker. Knights have secret attributes that can create unexpected outcomes for certain tasks, which you can learn about by asking your maid to snoop. Various knights and others are romanceable, and keep track of your words and deeds. And a demon living in your tower can rewind time for you in case you want a do-over, which means you arrive at many situations already knowing what will happen, and that’s reflected in your options for dialogue and action. You can even Groundhog Day the dateables by learning about them first and then turning back time to impress them.
Sure, there are negative effects to time travel too, not least of which is that people tend to get freaked out if you develop the ability to point out assassins as soon as you see them. And the sexy living statue in your room (who you can also romance), really doesn’t like you doing it. But if the option is there to ensure that the tame wolf you appointed as a knight, and who you’ve spent so much time upgrading and outfitting, doesn’t ultimately get killed in a duelling mission you should never have sent him on in the first place, are you really going to ignore demonic time travel?
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
The best party games are the simple ones. The ones that give you a framework for fun, rather than 20 pages of rules you need to memorise. Qork absolutely nailed this assignment. The concept is very simple: each player has a cork on a string, and each person takes it in turns to try and catch everyone else’s cork in a cup.
The mechanic is that the catcher has to roll a pair of dice, and then only catch the corks if they roll doubles or a 7. The players need to have quick reflexes to move their cork based on the roll, but if they move unnecessarily then you’ll be hit with points (and, like golf, lowest score wins). There’s lots of fake outs, a reveal of who can and can’t do basic addition, and (in the right group) a lot of laughter.
It’s the kind of game that you can learn how to play in two minutes, but have fun playing for hours. I would watch competitive Qork tournaments. I would play Qork at Easter. I would play Qork at a birthday party. This is a game I’ll probably add to my collection at some point. It’s the epitome of ‘less is more’ and I love that for us.
The only thing that I don’t love about it is that this incredibly simple set up retails for more than $40. How? How is this not just $20? It’s 7 corks on strings, a cup, a pair of dice, and a coaster. Back in my day, a Paddlepop was 80c, etc.
However, even at $40, I reckon you’ll get your money’s worth of fun.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Just about everyone recognises that GoldenEye 007 was a watershed moment for console first-person shooters. Before it, you only had less-good versions of games from PC. But after it you got the likes of Perfect Dark, and even Halo. Something that’s talked about less often, though, are the good things GoldenEye has that modern shooters do not. After 2001, the genre headed off in pursuit of realism, complexity and online multiplayer, shaping the FPS into something very different to what it was in 1997.
I’ve been thinking about this while playing the new Agent 64: Spies Never Die. The game does an outstanding job of rendering a GoldenEye-style world but in modern fidelity and with contemporary controls (and of course, the smeary visuals, awful performance and single-stick layout of the original is part of the reason few go back), but it does more than that. It feels like GoldenEye, and GoldenEye does some things better than most.
There’s no real concession to realism here, meaning your character strafes insanely fast, auto-aims like John Wick and has guns sort of just float in front of them even if they’re massive assault rifles. The loud sounds, massive barrel flare and big recoil gives the guns a sense of impact, and something about the result on the less complex bodies of the enemy characters — twitching and ragdolling and flying around — is more satisfying and gleeful than the shouting, bleeding, realististically-rendered avatars of the present day.
There’s more comedy to these older style games too, which is intentionally evoked in Agent 64 but was largely a side effect of the tech in the original. Nothing is funnier in GoldenEye than loading a guard with bullets while he’s performing an unnecessary tactical roll, only for all of the damage to hit him once the animation is complete.
Outside of pure game-feel, I love the differing objectives in each level depending on difficulty, and the focus on time trials and other challenges. It brings a touch of the arcade, which is not as effective when applied to Call of Duty for example. When it comes to multiplayer, Agent 64 also has a full suite including four-player splitscreen deathmatch and campaign co-op, plus Perfect Dark style challenges against bots, which remains surprisingly scary. It has online too, but without the ability to screen-look it doesn’t feel the same.