WWelcome back to Push Buttons! First, last week’s newsletter had some errors. Most obviously, I referred to the Meta Quest 2 headset as the now-discontinued Oculus Go (even though I’d only been playing with the Quest 2, to compare it with PSVR2 – good job, brain). I also gave some incorrect pricing information. A corrected version is on the Guardian site. Apologies for the mistakes.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how bringing back games from the 1990s can be a difficult exercise, given the technological difficulty for developers in the early 3D era. Playing games from that period today requires a kind eye and a willingness to accept compromising quirks. But sometimes, you play a game from a few decades ago and you think, this could really hit better now. Metroid Prime Remastered is one of those games. I haven’t been able to play anything else for weeks, downloading it on a whim after the Nintendo Direct in February. This game was amazingly ahead of its time. In fact, I didn’t appreciate it in 2003, when I was a teenager, as much as I do now.
For the uninitiated, Metroid Prime is a Nintendo game made by an American developer, Retro Studios, and it has a totally different atmosphere to the 2D Metroids that you might more easily associate with the name. After encountering some genetically engineered horrors on a derelict spaceship, which then explodes in a memorable time-trial escape prelude, bounty hunter Samus Aran lands on Tallon IV, a beautiful but abandoned planet infected and poisoned by a meteorite-carried contaminant.
The experience that follows defies easy categorization, but I’d call it a first-person adventure game. We slowly map this planet, figuring out how it fits together, collecting power-ups for Samus’ outfit that allow us to explore it further. We can scan our surroundings to become familiar with its ecology and look for clues as to what precipitated its downfall. You shoot things with his arm cannon, sure, but you spend most of your time using your brain and his slowly restored abilities to navigate this planet and figure out what happened here. Samus is more of an archaeologist than a warrior, though she faces extremely spooky places and creatures without fear. It’s a game about exploring more than shooting; discover, instead of conquer.
I definitely do No face Tallon IV without fear: Metroid Prime scares the hell out of me. Because the enemies don’t come fast and dense, and most of them aren’t very dangerous, when something aggressive starts attacking me, I let out a silent but sustained scream until it’s defeated. There’s an extraordinarily atmospheric section where Samus investigates a space pirate research lab, filled with questionable things floating in glass tanks, only to have power cut to its innermost chambers, leaving you in total darkness. You have to fight your way out using infrared vision, as all those things on all those tanks make a bid for freedom. My heart rate shot up, I’m telling you. The moment you see the sunlight again is a great relief.
Metroid Prime is fascinating because it is so minimalist. There’s no one blabbering into your headphones, giving you instructions. Samus herself is silent. There are no objective markers cluttering up your screen; The scenes are weird, but shocking. What you hear is the restrained but hauntingly beautiful soundtrack, the creatures, and the ambient vibe. This is partly because it was 2003 and there wasn’t infinite space on a tiny GameCube drive for dialogue and cinematics, but in 2023 it’s so unusual that it feels like a refreshing design choice. There is so little set design or direction; I spent a few hours lost and wandering, scanning and turning the map for somewhere I might not have explored yet. Me too enjoyment Those Hours Too many modern games view even five minutes of interruption in a player’s progress as an unacceptable failure, urging you on rather than letting you figure things out for yourself.
The 2000s were an incredible decade for single player first-person shooters. It gave us Halo, Portal, Half-Life 2, Far Cry 2, BioShock, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. These are all games that had something to say, that used their perspective (pointing the barrel of a gun) to immerse you in a place and tell you a story in a way you haven’t seen before. But since then, shooters have become dominated by competitive multiplayer games, and single-player campaigns, if they exist at all, often appear as an afterthought (mention the notable exception of Titanfall 2, easily the best campaign ever). single player FPS from the 2010s). This is why Metroid Prime retains so much magic: people don’t make games like it anymore. Perversely, it has such an impact today because it was not influential. No one really took this staff and ran with it.
I see the influence of Metroid Prime more in Dark Souls and Returnal than anywhere else: games with a similar respect for player skill and curiosity, and a similar talent for presenting an irresistibly intriguing world that slowly reveals its secrets to you. There’s a bit of that in first-person RPGs from Bethesda, Skyrim, and Fallout 3. But really, this is a one-of-a-kind sci-fi classic that could launch today to similar acclaim.
what to play
I am a big fan of the works of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who creates strange and beautiful synesthetic works of art about music and wonder. (Rez, Space Channel 5, Child of Eden, and Tetris Effect are all by him.) A demo of a recently announced puzzle game named after him, Humanity, arrived on PC and PlayStation last week. Playing as a luminescent shiba inu, you place commands to guide streams of people wandering through strange and abstract levels, leading them toward pillars of light. It’s like a cross between Lemmings and the brain-bending robot puzzle interludes in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. The demo levels show the breadth and flexibility of the concept; you can make your humans as light as a feather and send them flying over gaps, have them push blocks to create paths, jump inside their bodies and slide between them, and you won’t be punished if they fall over the edge into the nothing .
Available in: PC, PS4/5/PlayStationVR/VR2
Approximate playing time: one hour
what to read
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The New Yorker reports (£) at an esports-focused school in Japan that accidentally ended up attracting and retaining many high school dropouts.
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I asked comedian Ellie Gibson to play and write about the Tomb Raider/PowerWash Simulator link for laughs, and she became so obsessed with it that it got out of hand.
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Nintendo is the last major game company to will not attend this year’s revamped E3 convention in Los Angeles. So that’s not Nintendo, or Microsoft, or Sony, which leaves me wondering if E3 can maintain its status as the biggest news event of the gaming year. Big game companies, if you’re reading: having a single focal point for the news of the year is very useful for the press and Players.
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Shinji Mikami is leaving Tango Gameworks, the studio he founded in 2010 after leaving Capcom, where he was one of the defining forces behind Resident Evil. Tango has released some really interesting games, like Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush, along with the horror Evil Within, and I hope they continue to do so without it.
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Atomic Heart launched last week and has been attracting attention due to its alleged links to Russia: its development was reportedly financed largely by Russian interests. He The Ukrainian government urged the holders of the platform to withdraw it from sale, saying that it “has Russian roots and romanticizes communist ideology,” adding: “We also urge limiting distribution of this game in other countries due to its toxicity, potential user data collection, and potential use of money raised from the purchase of games to carry out a war against Ukraine”.
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I’m not the only person who’s been quietly waiting for news about the Pokémon Sleep wellness app ever since it was announced in *checknotes* 2019. The Pokémon Company has finally provided more details on when you can sleep with a Snorlax during its Pokemon Day Live Stream. It will be available on smartphones this summer.
what to click
I was an App Store Games Editor, that’s how I know Apple doesn’t care about games –Neil Long
after newsletter promotion
Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe review: All-too-familiar fun for friends and families
Dead Space at 15: “We wanted to make one of the most terrifying games in history”
After decades, I finally found a game that moved me emotionally: Dominik Diamond
Ellie Gibson on how she became obsessed with pressure washing Lara Croft’s house
block of questions
Reader Sam asks: When do you know you’re done with games that could effectively go on forever, with no obvious resolution point? Can you do endless farming seasons or laps of Los Santos, or can you Do you know when to call it a day?
I’m a novelty seeker and get bored with these types of “forever games” long before I’ve exhausted them, so this is easy for me. Over the years, I’ve been in and out of Monster Hunter, Animal Crossing, and Destiny and have racked up hundreds of hours on each, occasionally going back for a new update, but rarely getting sucked in for very long. So I asked my friend Tom, who has played League of Legends and Destiny for years, when he knows it’s time to quit.
“Many people struggle to stop playing games for good, even when they stop being fun. I see this a lot with FIFA, in particular,” she says. “They are so absorbing and become an enriching source of friendship and community. And even when they do run out, or get too frustrating due to gameplay imbalances (hello FIFA), or the quality drops, it’s hard to quit because so much of the behavior around the game has become habitual. (It’s more dangerous with things like Fifa Ultimate Team, where you can spend money on packs. Fortunately, Destiny doesn’t have loot boxes.) Basically, when the fun stops, stop. But make sure you support yourself at that time, because it can take a lot of changes!”
