What? Pokémon is evolving!
Plus Aussie Flight Simulator, remembering Vita, and much ado about Stardew.
Welcome back to Press Any Button! This week we take a look at the good and bad of radically reinventing an iconic franchise, how not to adapt your video game to the tabletop, whether six years is too soon to go for the remaster treatment, and how to get a brand new PS5 game for less than half price.
An experimental evolution
By Tim
Have you ever loved a starter pokémon, worked hard to make them strong, then suffered that intense anxiety as they're evolving because you don't know if you're still going to like them on the other side? They might be cute, or they might be a muscly weirdo, or a clown. Or a muscly clown.
That's what's happening on a larger scale with the release of Pokémon Legends Arceus. Series fans campaign tirelessly for the games to change things up, to move with the times, to evolve. But now they've seen what that looks like, will they embrace it like a graceful Bayleef? Or shun it like a hideous Brionne?
Those looking for open world Pokémon will be disappointed, as Arceus is more in the style of Monster Hunter than Breath of the Wild. Lands are extraordinarily sparse (and somewhat ugly) save for the pokémon, with little scope for delightful discoveries or surprising secrets. It’s all about chasing specific creatures and objectives.
The more active methods of finding, catching and battling creatures are welcome and I love the extra personality these changes allow. But at the same time it makes for a fundamentally different kind of game, and one that can be at odds with Game Freak’s frustratingly verbose, bizarrely convoluted narrative style it’s kept in place here.
In isolation Arceus is a lot of fun, and a brand new way to collect and grow more than 200 familiar pocket monsters. But when fans demand a game that keeps what's great about Pokémon, while expanding to be more of a modern open-world RPG, they may be asking for something that can't exist. At least not right away. If this game is Brionne, it could be the awkward first steps before the majesty of Primarina. Or, it could be an evolutionary dead end.
What to play
The latest Microsoft Flight Simulator update is out, and this time it focuses on Australia. More landmarks have been added, including the Big Prawn, and Australia generally looks better and more Australia-y. Flight Simulator was already well worth checking out because it’s such a chill way to explore the world (and maybe learn a new skill), and now it has more of a local flavour so foreigners can see how much we love big stuff.
The first big remaster of 2022 is here, with updated versions of two incredible Uncharted games hitting PS5. Seasoned treasure hunters might not need to double dip (read more below), but these were some of the finest cinematic action games on PS4 and remain thrilling. $80 is a big chunk of change for these two older games, even if you can now run them at 4K or 120Hz, but what if I said you could get them for $35? Sony is offering anybody who owns either of the originals an upgrade to the new collection for just $15, and a used Uncharted 4 disc will cost no more than $20. Just put the disc in, head to the PS store, and pay $15 for the upgrade.
It's a new month, which means time to check out the free games that come with Xbox Gold and/or PlayStation Plus. I say free, but you are of course paying so do grab them! Easy recs this month are: 2010 survival action game Hyrdophobia on Xbox, which was notable for its water physics back in the day bit is a bit quaint now; Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep on PS4, which is a standalone D&D themed Borderlands 2 campaign, and; Planet Coaster on PS5, a Tycoon-style park-building game.
If you enjoy Wordle, Typeshift on Apple Arcade is a completely different game that has a similar enough vibe that people who like one will enjoy the other. You’re given 3-ish rows of different letters and need to find words for each letter. The letters can only stay on their columns, and you move each column up and down, kind of like a combination lock. It’s good, clean, nerdy fun.
If you’re wanting dirtier nerdy fun there’s always Wordle clone Lewdle, which is exactly the same as Wordle, but only allows the kinds of words you wouldn’t say in front of grandma.
Serving too many (re)masters
By Alice
Uncharted: Legacy Of Thieves Collection is out on PS5, and it’s a beautiful example of how challenging it is to remaster relatively recent games in a way people notice.
Made by Naughty Dog (the folks behind The Last Of Us, which has a vastly different vibe), Uncharted is a series about relic hunter Nathan Drake, a kind of Indiana Jones but with more upper body strength and childhood trauma from being raised in a Catholic orphanage. He travels the world in search of treasures for money. The gameplay and story are both well-crafted fun, focusing on climbing, jumping and uncomplicated gun combat.
Legacy Of Thieves has Uncharted 4, where we unlock extra tragic backstory, and The Lost Legacy, the one where Chloe and Nadine go on an adventure.
The problem with remastering two games that are so recent (2016 and 2017) is that they look exactly the same as I remember them looking on PS4. Our memories remaster everything into the best possible quality, because at the time they were released they were on the cutting edge and we all thought they looked extra super realistic because we didn’t know any better yet. It’s not like remastering, say, Xena Talisman of Fate from Nintendo 64 where it looked and played terribly. These games only really look improved if you see a side-by-side comparison.
The biggest upgrade comes from being able to decide whether you want to prioritise 4K pictures, or high frame rates for performance. That’s something that only works if you have a newer, fancy TV, but finding the right choice for you makes a huge difference.
A more impressive feat would have been a remastered collection of all five games, but we might have to wait for the PS6 and second Uncharted movie for that one.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
There have been many incredible board games based on video games. I can’t think of any right now, but they probably exist.
A lot of the things that make video games great (complex combat, multiple currencies, an immersive world created by music and movement) just don’t translate to the board. You often need the internal systems to keep track of how all the currencies operate, including time and movement speed, lest it get in the way of the easy flow of the game. There is a maths-to-fun ratio that’s hard to get right on boardgames that try to emulate other mediums.
That said, I recently got the Stardew Valley board game and I’m into it. My wife and I started playing 30-60 minutes of the Stardew Valley video game a day when lockdown 4 began, and continued well past the end of lockdown 6. It’s a comforting game where you farm, fish, mine, explore and befriend.
Now that we’ve transitioned to playing at least one board game a day, it only made sense to get the Stardew board game.
Unfortunately, at first glance, the Stardew board game doesn’t make sense. It takes a beautiful, simple, adorable game and turns it into an extremely long journey of exploration and maths that I still don’t entirely understand.
The problem is that they tried to include all the activities of the video game into the board game. We’re well over 100 hours into the video game and aren’t close to 100 per cent. The boardgame tried to shove all of that into less than 3 hours and has a punishing difficulty because of it.
Once it clicks enough to be fun, it’s beautiful. But few will have the patience to get to that point.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the PlayStation Vita, officially making Sony's most beautiful handheld "retro". Regretfully it also marks more or less the sixth anniversary of Sony giving two shits about the Vita, as it stopped publishing its own games for the system by the end of 2015 after years of half-hearted support.
If you're not familiar, Vita is a compact and powerful elliptic marvel, offering PS3-quality graphics on a brilliant OLED screen. The popularity of Nintendo's Switch years later would prove Vita could have been huge, but it also provided insights into the mistakes Sony made.
Vita has a lot of unnecessary gimmickry nobody wanted, including two cameras, a microphone, a touch-sensitive rear panel and optional GPS and 3G. It also skipped any kind of video out capability for connecting to a TV, and relied on incredibly expensive proprietary memory cards.
But the most vital difference between the Vita and Switch is first party support. Both systems are beloved by the indie community, but Sony and its big-budget partners treated Vita as far less important than the PS4, feeding it mainly scraps.
So how is Vita in 2022? It's still tremendous and offers a library 1300 strong, although many of its greatest first party games ended up on PS4 (Gravity Rush, Tearaway, Sound Shapes), and its biggest indie and third party hits are arguably better on Switch (Velocity 2X, Guacamelee, Fez) or PC (Persona 4 Golden).
It remains an excellent way to play PSP and PS1 games, though Sony will no doubt end online functionality soon. The memory card issue has grown worse with time as they’re now long discontinued. Hacking the system to overcome these issues is trivial but, although I've loved my Vita since launch day, there are vanishingly few reasons to recommend one now.