In this week’s newsletter: farming, city planning, even golf – I admit I find games about unbelievably boring activities addictive
Last modified on Tue 1 Feb 2022 07.47 EST
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Despite the hundreds of happy hours I spent playing Guitar Hero in the late 00s, I feel slightly resentful towards it. In my late teens I was a decent player of the actual guitar, but Guitar Hero was so much more fun that I ended up ditching my actual instrument and playing that instead. I became superhumanly good at it, and meanwhile I remain an average player of the real guitar to this day. What might have happened if I’d spent all those hours learning my real instrument? Obviously Guitar Hero is the sole reason I’m not currently embarking on my seventh stadium tour.
It’s rare that video game and real-world interests conflict. Most of the time the things we happily do in video games would be unbelievably boring in real life. Actual farming is arduous and complex and involves horribly early mornings; Stardew Valley or Minecraft farming is soothing and simple and can be done in bed at 1am when you can’t sleep. I would rather defenestrate myself than be an urban planner, and yet SimCity is ridiculously compelling. (Check out Dorfromantik if you liked those old city-planning games, by the way – it’s a similar principle but much more chill, getting you to create and expand idyllic rural landscapes.) This feels weird to admit in regular society, but I’ve built up a significant knowledge base of some sports and interests without ever having done them in the real world.
I have an abiding love of golf that is confined exclusively to video games, for instance. It began with Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64 and continued through to Everybody’s Golf on various PlayStation consoles, via the fab little role-playing Mario golf games on the Game Boy (low-key some of the best sports games in history, if you ask me, because they let you write your own wee rags-to-riches story). I even became briefly obsessed with a Korean online golf game called PangYa in the early days of broadband internet, largely because my caddie was a paper bag with a cat face drawn on it.
What I love about golf games is their calming predictability. You can make your calculations, know your drive distance, check the wind direction, add spin with a deft touch of an analogue stick, and send the ball rolling beautifully on to the green or into the hole. You rarely, if ever, mess up your swing. If you get into trouble in a bunker, you can usually get out of it without entirely ruining your round. I feel like I’m amazing at virtual golf. Oh, and the courses have interesting novelties like floating islands or moving platforms or piranha plants that gobble up your ball. Things are rarely boring.
In real life? None of that holds true. Golf is awful in real life. I know because my dad loves it, and for my entire life he has come home on a Saturday afternoon after five pitiless hours on Scottish golf courses in a raging mood that morphed slowly into despair by Sunday morning. Unless, presumably, you are extremely good at it, real golf is boring, unpredictable and dispiriting. Even people who like golf know this to be true.
See also: skateboarding. I met the directors behind the excellent new skateboarding game OlliOlli World last week – two guys in their 40s who’ve spent 15 years making skating games based around their experiences in their late teens. Making the first couple of OlliOlli games in 2014 and 2015 inspired them to get back into skating in real life, which is absolutely lovely. I, meanwhile, love skateboarding in video games but possess absolutely none of the coordination or flair to attempt it ever in real life. I am more than happy to stick to mad ten-thousand-point combos in Tony Hawk’s, where I can experience the thrill of pulling off a laser flip without repeatedly humiliating in myself in front of teenagers at a skate park or breaking any bones.
OlliOlli World isn’t out until 8 February, but I’ve been playing it for a week and this seems like the ideal time to recommend it. I was really looking forward to this surreal skateboarding game, and yet I was not expecting it to be as welcoming and fun as it is – the previous two OlliOlli games were quite punishing, if also mega rewarding once you got into the flow.
In OlliOlli World you create a little cartoon skater avatar and explore these far-out fantastical levels, flipping the board with the analogue stick to pull off beautifully animated tricks and clear huge gaps. There’s so much delightful visual detail in here – in the background of a beach-themed level I spotted a bunch of buff seagulls hanging out in sunglasses. It’s so cute, and yet also so rad. (Yes, I’m from the 90s.)
Available on: Xbox, PlayStation 4/5, PC, Nintendo Switch
Approximate playtime: 10+ hours
A huge piece of news that I’ll have to get into properly next week: Sony has bought Bungie, makers of Destiny and formerly Halo, for $3.6bn. This marks an escalation of the acquisitions arms race kicked off by Microsoft in recent years.
Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle, has decided to hand it over to the New York Times, having been overwhelmed by its rapid spread. This seems like a good conclusion all round; it’s highly unlikely that the NYT will ruin it.
Hello Games, known best for space exploration game No Man’s Sky and the saga around its development and release, has remastered its first ever game, a little stunt-bike puzzler called Joe Danger, and rereleased it on the App Store. This is nice, but what’s lovely about the story is what prompted them to get moving on updating the game: a plea from the dad of an 8-year-old with autism who really loves the game. A beautiful reminder of the significance that games can hold in people’s lives, and of the fact that pretty much any game out there will be hugely important to someone.
Remember those Activision-Blizzard employees trying to form a union? The company has refused to recognise it, triggering a studio-wide election that has slim chances of success. I wish I could say I’m surprised.
Oh god, British developer Team17 is launching a series of NFTs to commemorate the Worms games. They are called MetaWorms. I truly hope that nobody wants them; gamers have proven extremely resistant to attempts to inveigle NFTs into video games so far (though these digital collectibles won’t actually be used in games, it seems). Incidentally, since I wrote this despairing editorial about the hollowness of the “metaverse” idea last week, I have started receiving more press releases about soul-sapping crypto, blockchain and metaverse “initiatives”. I don’t want it. Please, video games industry, don’t make it my entire job to rage about this nonsense.
Sony to buy video game maker Bungie for $3.6bn as takeovers continue
Now that I’ve finally played The Last of Us, who wants to talk about that ending?
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection review – victory tour for feelgood blockbusters
Something a little different for Question Block today from reader Joe Murray, who wants to know if anyone remembers a particular game from the mists of time:
I would absolutely love to see a remaster of the PlayStation 1 game Pandemonium (also the sequel). When I was younger, I borrowed my uncle’s PlayStation 2 off him and found this PS1 game, popped it on and played it all night. I didn’t have a memory card, so to save my progress I had to write down the unique code given at the end of the level … This game was stressful and difficult, but also fun, vibrant and rewarding, with incredible bosses that used to scare the life out of me (see the Shroom Lord) and great dialogue that I still quote today, even if no one ever gets the references. I’d love if you could have a look through the game yourself and see if you can recall it. I’ve not seen it available anywhere and I don’t own any generation of PlayStation any more so I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again; I imagine the graphics do not hold up at all either, but it was a huge part of my childhood.”
This is a game I never played, but I’ve just spent twenty minutes fascinated by clips of it on YouTube. Good news, Joe – you can play it on Steam, though apparently the port is terrible. And Toys for Bob, the original developer, is owned by Activision, which is now owned by Microsoft, which has brought back obscure games like BattleToads – so is it totally out of the question that it might be rereleased?
If you, like Joe, have fond memories of Pandemonium, email me on pushingbuttons@guardian.co.uk and tell me about it. He can’t be alone, can he?
