Leah's Gaming Digest, 21st November

I'll try and keep this one brief...

• League of Legends Worlds - what is it and why do I care?

• The Last of Us Part 2 gets… a remaster?

• A very small update on Silent Hill: Ascension

• Eurogamer pay homage to one of my favourite weird games of the late 90’s and I’ll be surprised if you manage to guess what it is…

Truly a League of their own

How many times do you think that header has been used in reference to a League of Legends competition? If i’m stunningly unoriginal I can at least be aware of it. Now bear with me here - I know you may be thinking ‘but Leah, I don’t care about that toxic cesspit of a game’, which is very fair, it’s certainly an acquired taste, but bear with me here, because I feel like the experience of Worlds is in a whole category of its own that you can easily enjoy even if you’re not a fan of the game itself.

What is Worlds? Worlds is the yearly World Championship for League of Legends, held in a different country every year. Throughout the year teams will compete for a spot to qualify for worlds during the seasons, and when Worlds begins it’s quite a spectacle - Riot know how to put on a show and keep people thoroughly engaged. I had exactly zero interest in League of Legends until a few years ago I tuned into a Worlds broadcast on a whim and was drawn in by the sheer energy of the whole thing. The hype is off the charts. We’re seeing players from all over the world at the absolute top of their game competing to win a huge multi-million dollar prize pool, and thought the nitty gritty of the game can be complex once you get down to it, a curious mind will have much to discover just by tuning in and watching with no background knowledge at all. It’s pretty dang fun, is what I used a bunch of words to say.

Anyway, 2023 Worlds finals happened on Sunday, fairly early in the morning for me due to this years being set in Korea, but I somehow accidentally woke up in time anyway. The funny thing about esports events like this is that they’re usually set in a best of five format. Which sometimes means thrilling games where wins are passed back and forth right up until the last tiebreaker game… and sometimes that means one team sweeps the board as a clear winner taking 3/5 from the get go. League games can vary too - some might go on for 45 minutes or more, but typically they last around 25 minutes. You really don’t know what you’re going to get.

This year the finals saw Weibo Gaming hailing from China come up against T1 from South Korea - and T1 had something to prove, having lost out the previous year 2-3 to DRX who secured the World Champion Title. T1 were no strangers to winning, having three world titles under their belt already, and to be honest there isn’t too much to say - T1 absolutely rinsed WBG with a 3-0 sweep, securing their fourth world title. In fact, throughout the whole series, they lost only one game of twelve. One!

What I really wanted to highlight here is a player within T1 known as ‘Faker’, widely regarded as one of the best LoL Players/midlaners in the world. He joined T1 at the teams inception in 2013 and has been with them ever since - meaning he now has 4 world titles under his belt. I feel a little bit of context might be worthwhile here - in the world of esports, a person competing at a high level for that long is incredibly rare. A person competing at that level for the SAME TEAM for that long is basically unheard of, there is often an exchanging of money in esports much like in football for players to transfer to different teams, with eye watering sums being offered to persuade them to switch over (in 2015 Faker was offered $1million to switch teams and declined, and more recently was offered $20million to switch to a Chinese team). His journey hasn’t been all smooth sailing but the way he has managed to stay top of his game for 10 years and counting is a truly unique historical story in the world of esports. Anyway I said this would be a short one. That’s all.

Oh no wait it isn’t all - next year Worlds is coming to London! They’re holding Worlds 2024 at the London 02 Arena and I sure as hell hope I can get tickets because the atmosphere is sure to be electrifying.

A 3 year old game gets a remaster?

The Last of Us Part 2, the sequel to the highly awarded and acclaimed The Last of Us (duh) released in June of 2020, had it’s own set of controversies and dramas, but was largely enjoyed by fans. Don’t come for me if you hated it, I haven’t played either of them and quite frankly don’t care.

Last week developers Naughty Dog announced The Last of Us 2 would be receiving a remaster, supposedly pulling it forward to improve the quality for the PS5 and also adding more content, like ‘Guitar Free Play’, some ‘Lost Levels’ with Dev commentary, a roguelike mode called ‘No Return’ and graphical enhancements. Calling it a remaster just feels weird, though not out of character for the studio that remastered The Last of Us (1) and then remade it later anyway as a full price game.

Gamers are, of course, angry. Anything TLOU2 seems to bring out an unbridled rage in gamers in the first instance, and there’s no doubt many of the loudest opponents of the game aren’t even interested in playing anyway, but it feels like what’s happening here is truly a failure to market this update properly. If you have the PS4 edition of the game, you can upgrade to this ‘remaster’ for $10, getting all the content along with it. When you put it like that, it doesn’t seem like a terrible deal.

But making a big deal of a remaster barely three years after the games release in what feels like an attempt to milk more money from the franchise feels pretty damn tone deaf right now.

Unfortuantely this news came from leaks as opposed to an actual announcement, which has surely stoked the flames of unease, but Naughty Dog did confirm and announce the remaster not long after the leaks… leaked.

I don’t know. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, but I certainly don’t like this remaster trend - even if it were for a franchise I adored… imagine a Final Fantasy 7 remake remaster now? I’d hate that just as much.

Silent Hill Ascension: Still hasn’t ascended

Yeeeeeeeah, that community driven Silent Hill app-experience being drip fed once a week episodically? Still hasn’t impressed fans any. With each passing week I see less and less of it on social media, not even any memes which can’t be a good sign. The first episode released to much derision and it doesn’t seem to be improving sadly. Just another… 13 weeks to go!

One of my fav games is now 25 years old!

If you managed to guess what it is I’ll be very impressed.

I’ll give some hints: Space ship. Sheep. Microchip. Puzzles. Rocket dogs.

That’s right! It’s Space Station Silicon Valley!

The wonderfully unique and weird-ass game that just never quite got the cult following it deserved, except for myself and my mum who would help me through the scary bits (mechanical bears are no joke). I’d love to see a remake of THIS game, though… actually, maybe saying that, I don’t think I would. Most of the charm of SSSV was in it’s janky N64 state that I don’t think could be replicated in a faithful way now that would appeal to gamers at all. I supposed I’d love an official port to the switch, but I doubt that’ll ever happen, and I’m sure the game wouldn’t hold my attention as well as it did back when I was 10.

Everytime I mention this game to somebody I get weird looks, it certainly feels like a hallucinatory fever dream but I remember it being innovative and interesting and very unique, and seeing this article by Eurogamer gave me both a pang of nostalgia AND a sense of pride and satisfaction - that’s right! I didn’t make it up! It was real and deserved more love. I didn’t get to play many N64 games, most of them were second hand or hand-me-downs, so I did treasure the gems that caught my eye, like this and Mischief Makers, and I’m struck at just how far gaming has come along in my lifetime.

Other things I didn’t get chance to look into properly…

Fortnite introduced a new age rating system that left people scratching their heads - some skins were crossed out and unavailable for a younger audience to use because of the accessories they carried - the female Marshmello skin carried a sidearm so was age gated. When you’ve paid EXTORTIONATE amounts of money for skins, being unable to use them is kind of crazy. Especially so when you consider the popularity of Fortnite stems from the Battle Royale game mode, in which you use… guns! And other violent means! To despatch enemies and win. Epic claim this is in preparation for more child friendly, gun-free iterations of the game, or game modes, to release.

The Steam Deck OLED version has been reviewed ahead of release, is it worth buying if you already have a steam deck? Probably not, and as the years go by I remember keeping ‘up to date’ with tech is largely a waste of money - get what you enjoy and use the hell out of it, but don’t update just because you feel you have to get the next shiny new toy to keep up.

There’s another Super Mario game! A fresh new installment or reimagining of the Super Mario RPG, which makes for two Mario games in quite a short space of time, but I am consistently impressed by the Mario games and if I wasn’t knees deep in writing and pretending to be a cowboy in Red Dead Redemption RP, I’d be picking both Super Mario RPG and Super Mario: Wonder up straight away, as I’ve never been disappointed in a Mario game (Super Mario: Odyssey was a surprise joy).

Alright - this one is a bit rushed, sorry! I had an eventful week visiting Monza for the day and spending some time on the track as part of a promotion for Lenovo’s competitor for the Steam Deck, where usually I will collect and write this throughout the week, alas, this was written in barely an hour. If I missed anything major let me know and I’ll write about it next time! Until then… see you next time!

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