Why you shouldn’t preorder Hogwarts Legacy
Plus Forza Rewards, playing with guitars, and rediscovering Sonic
Hello Button Pushers! Press Anyers? Specific Buttons? We’ll work on the collective noun.
This past week has seen the cancellation of this year’s E3 conference, an avalanche of vaguely amusing corporate April Fools “jokes” and rumours that Sony might be looking into adding PS3 emulation to the PS5. It was truly a rollercoaster of emotions.
This week is another fairly quiet one for new game releases, with the standouts being MLB: The Show 22 and Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. I (Alice) will have thoughts on Lego Star Wars next week.
As for today’s newsletter, it’s chock full of news about the next nail in the coffin of Forza Rewards, why you shouldn’t play Hogwarts Legacy, building a (Lego) guitar, and rediscovering the joys of Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as our recommendations for what to play.
Farewell, Forza Rewards
By Alice
Once upon a time Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon games had ways of rewarding loyalty called Forza Rewards. Players would earn points for the number of hours they spent in each game, how many achievements they got, and some other arbitrary metrics. Different numbers of points moved you up the tiers, and each week you could redeem in-game credits from the Forza Hub app in a quantity dictated by your level. For example, I’m tier 10 with a Forza score a little over 15,000 points (out of a possible 25,000 – I don’t play enough Motorsport) and get 300,000 credits each for Motorsports 5-7 and Horizons 2-4. Over the years that’s equalled tens of millions of credits, which really helps in games like Forza Motorsport 7 because so much of your success is tied to the size of your garage and credits are hard to come by.
While that’s great for people like me, who have been playing since Forza Motorsport 2 came bundled with the Xbox 360, that’s less helpful for newer players who don’t have such advantages. So, it was decided last year that Forza Horizon 5 would be the first game to be excluded from the program and Forza Hub was removed from the app store. Today it was announced that rewards will no longer be available after the 5th of May, bringing this era to an end. Players knew this day was coming, but it’s still disappointing.
There are new ways to reward loyalty – Horizon 5 players were gifted the cover car for each Forza game they’d previously played on their gamer tag when they first loaded up the game. These cars were available to everyone in the Autoshow and couldn’t be sold, so it was a nice gesture, but nowhere near as rewarding as the old system.
This also gives less incentive for player of one branch of Forza to persist with games in the other if they’re not instantly hooked. It’ll be interesting to see what evolves from here.
What to play
The entire Metro trilogy is currently on sale on Steam for $28, or you can pick up the games and DLC individually for 75% off. I (Alice) greatly enjoyed Metro Exodus, so it’s a bargain if you’re looking for a first person, open world, post apocalyptic game to sink your teeth into. Just watch out for the mutant spiders.
It’s a new month, time for another rundown of what’s included with your console’s online subscription. Unsurprisingly for anyone who’s been keeping score in 2022, it’s a weird lineup. Xbox Live Gold subscribers get Another Sight, a terribly mediocre platformer despite the interesting premise of a sightless protagonist, and Outpost Kaloki X, a 2004 strategy game I (Tim) have never heard of and can’t find out much about. For PlayStation Plus there’s the uninspiring online heist fest Hood: Outlaws & Legends, the nostalgic SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, and the incredible deck-building roguelike Slay the Spire which is hands down the pick of the bunch.
Nintendo has also added three more retro games to its Nintendo Switch Online service that are just good enough to make you go “... okay?” For NES there are two baffling sequels, Mappy-Land and Dig Dug II, and for SNES there’s the beautiful yet infuriating Earthworm Jim 2.
Good news for fans of hitting balls with bats; Xbox Game Pass has just added MLB The Show 22 and Cricket 22.
PlayStation is having its annual Easter sale, and for the most part it's a big meh of still-expensive games you probably own if you’re interested. I did pull out some cheapo highlights though. Murdered: Soul Suspect, which is a scruffy but lovable ghost detective story that fans of B movie kitsch should check out, is down to $2.50. An EA "family bundle" that includes Need for Speed, Plants v Zombies Garden Warfare 2 and Unravel is $4.79. Apocalyptic shooter two-pack Metro Redux is $6. And finally the wonderful tactical strategy anthology X-Com 2 Collection is $9, which is better than 90% off.
Don’t forget, Harry Potter is Rowling’s personal Horcrux
By Tim
The upcoming Hogwarts Legacy has been in the news a lot following a whole heap of new details dropping recently. But as much as you may be intrigued by an open world wizarding adventure that looks legitimately like the first ever good Harry Potter game, there's a catch. Like all Wizarding World products, it's tarnished by the series creator's awful agenda.
I'd encourage you to read the very detailed breakdown of JK Rowling's anti-transgender rhetoric over at GameSpot. But the upshot, as far as I'm concerned, is that buying and playing this game will be a morally problematic decision.
Harry Potter's ongoing popularity is the sole reason Rowling has any sway or influence, and it's that platform which gives her the power to put any statement or argument into newspapers and websites around the world with a mere tweet, spreading disinformation and hate.
This alone is enough to counter the idea that the game can be enjoyed uncritically because Rowling's not directly involved, and it separates this case from other moral issues where a particular game developer or publisher has treated its workers like crap or is run by a bastard CEO. Try as it might, Hogwarts Legacy publisher WB (like unfortunate fans) can't do anything to separate Potter from Rowling. To support it is to support her, and that should be given some weighty consideration when it comes to buying the game.
Another flawed argument I've seen is a desire to “support the devs”; i.e. that refusing to purchase the game unfairly punishes the people who worked on it. I have sympathy for the developers at Avalanche who would have been surprised by the full awfulness of Rowling's rhetoric mid-project. But devs are paid for doing good work; their pay and prospects are generally not affected by the total dollar amount eventually raised from sales.
Instead of “supporting” the developers with money they’ll never see, it makes much more moral sense to support the people who will be hurt as the creations of the world's most prominent anti-trans figure continue to be embraced.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Recently, my guitar collection was decimated in an unfortunate robot accident. Given my current guitar skills are a bit rusty, I decided to commemorate the fallen by getting the Lego Ideas Fender Stratocaster set. Because, really, any excuse to buy more Lego is a good excuse and I have the impulse control of Winnie the Pooh in an apiary.
While I haven’t quite finished building it yet (I had to put it aside for a different set I’m reviewing), the love and care put into the creation of the set and the instruction booklet has me torn in two fun and time-consuming directions:
1. I want to make a Lego drum kit and submit it to Lego Ideas.
2. I want to build my guitar skills back up again so I can one day own a real Fender Strat.
Like, how cool would it be to have an officially licenced Lego set of a Mapex Orion with Zildjian A Custom cymbals? It’s one of those dreams that will stay dreams, because getting two different companies to licence on a set wouldn’t be profitable, and people would be more likely to buy a Pearl Export kit than a Mapex Orion. But I can dream.
The second direction is a lot more realistic, and brings this whole thing back to being relevant to games: Rocksmith Remastered may have first been released in 2014, but it is still a darn good way to learn to play bass or guitar for the first time, or brush up on your skills. It gamifies all the boring stuff, like learning scales. It’s the kind of thing I wish existed for all instruments, so it was easy for everyone to get a taste of different skills and find their passion (plus I want rudiments to be fun again). The Rocksmith+ subscription service is coming to Australia at some point in the near future, but it’s worth picking up a copy of the original on disc second-hand (it is a bit overpriced on digital storefronts at the moment).
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
I've been on a Sonic bender of late, inspired by my (belated) discovery of an excellent podcast chronicling the issues of 90s British magazine Sonic the Comic. Having just played them all again I can reconfirm I adore virtually all 2D Sonic games, even the weird 8-bit adaptations and the 2000s era handheld games, though I acknowledge it has become popular to rubbish them.
Many modern players approach them like a Mario game, and complain the platforming is imprecise, that the levels play themselves, or that moving at speed makes hazards unavoidable.
Those people are wrong of course. Sonic is all about playing with momentum — building, utilising or cancelling speed — while exploring tiered and multi-path levels. In no small part it's also about presentation; the original is incomparable to any other 1991 game for animation or music.
But what really stood out to me this time was the optional challenges, which I’d never really gone after before. In the original you need to collect six Chaos Emeralds before finishing the game if you want to avoid being taunted, each of which requires finishing a level with more than 50 rings (harder than it seems if you flub your early chances) and completing an unfair rotating puzzle.
In Sonic 2 there are more emeralds, harder puzzles and the prize of a Dragon Ball Z style transformation to Super Sonic. Sonic CD adds a time travelling twist, where finding items in the past can affect the future.
Things hit their apex in Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. Playing either on its own presents a familiar setup with puzzles, chaos emeralds and Super transformations, but collecting all the gems in Sonic 3 and then progressing to S&K unlocks the Master Emeralds, where collecting the lot summons Hyper Sonic, Hyper Tails or Hyper Knuckles.
None of it’s revolutionary by today’s standards, but it’s wild to me how much extra juice I squeezed out of these 30-year-old games, and I highly recommend a revisit if you have access to them.