Games Inbox: What’s the best video game to play when it’s sunny?

The Monday letters page hopes for some Star Wars Day reveals, as a reader shares footage of a cancelled third Maximo game.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Summer gaming
Every December we get people talking about what games they think best celebrate the season, and it’s always Christmas NiGHTS or something, but what about the game that’s best to play when the weather is good?

The first one that always comes to mind for me is Super Mario Sunshine, which is easily the worst 3D Mario but I still have fond memories of playing because it reminds me of the summer holidays. So imagine my shock that when I looked up the release date it did come out in the summer in Japan and the US but didn’t make it to Europe until October!

Maybe I only played it the next summer, but I don’t think so. I think I got it when it came out and it was so bright and sunny, with its beaches and water pistol backpack, that I just associate it with summer and holidays. I actually think that’s kind of neat.
Primer

Dark tidings
Happy Star Wars Day, everyone (assuming this gets shown on Monday). I’m hoping we might get a tease of Star Wars Jedi 3 today, as I don’t think there’s a Star Wars Celebration until next year now. Not sure how likely that is but it seems a long time since the last one, even if they were set back by the director leaving.

I’ve really enjoyed the last two games, even if I don’t really like the grey Jedi theme going on with Cal. I feel the movies made it very clear that ‘once you start down the dark path forever will it dominate your destiny’, so the idea of switching it on when you get to a hard part seems wrong to me.

But I guess that’s the problem with Star Wars nowadays, everyone has their own view of it and there’s no way everything, or maybe even anything, is going to match up with that.
Lonni

GC: There is no Star Wars Celebration this year so it’s not impossible there could be some kind of annoucement today, although something at Summer Game Fest is more likely.

Bored of the Rings
I don’t know how I feel about Warhorse maybe working on a new Lord of the Rings game. Although I would like to see a big budget role-playing game, I don’t know that Warhorse are quite big enough to do it the way I imagine. The scale would have to be a lot bigger than Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and that’s going to cost so much I’m not sure it’s feasible for anyone.

I’d much rather see them make something new. Whether it’s a new historical setting or something completely different I’m not bothered, but Kingdom Come was great at ignoring what other companies were doing and going with what the developers were passionate about. As much as I love Lord of the Rings that’s what we need more of, not more licensed games.
Scooter

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Aging gracelessly
I really like the look of those Commodore 64 and Spectrum portables, but I feel like we’re dancing round the problem at the moment. It’s all very easy to recreate the hardware – you could just run it as an emulator on any PC or phone – but the games themselves are in need of a major update.

I know remasters of such old, UK-centric games are unlikely but as good as The Great Escape and Head Over Heels seemed to anyone at the time I just don’t think they can entertain anyone new nowadays, and I can tell you I’ve tried with my kids.

You could say the same for NES games but of course they get constant remasters and remakes to keep them playable. Maybe there’s something that can be done as a fan project or a Kickstarter but I think the more likely option is that these games will just fade from memory and never be played again, at least within the next decade or so.
Blanko

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Sunny with a chance of snowdrift
In terms of the debate over the new Resident Evil movie trailer I’m happy for it to ignore the characters and even monsters, to a degree, as what works in a game does not necessarily work in a movie, as we’ve seen multiple times with Resident Evil itself.

What I don’t get though is why is it snowing in the film? This is set in Raccoon City, before it gets nuked, and not once has it ever been portrayed as snowing during that time. I don’t think it was ever implied to be winter and I seem to remember everyone having light clothing. Heck, Jill was wearing a boob tube in Resident Evil 3!

Some details like that do annoy me for some reason, as it doesn’t seem to add anything and yet it makes it clear that they don’t care about directly contradicting the games.
Kubrak

Exclusive U-turn
I think it’s obvious that Microsoft’s campaign against exclusives was not coming from an honest place. On one hand it was coming from Satya Nadella, who doesn’t understand games and doesn’t like the concept of exclusives. But most of it was coming from Xbox in general realising they didn’t have any exclusives anyone cared about so the obvious thing to do was try and pretend exclusives were anti-consumer and shame Sony for having them.

The weird thing is it kind of worked. I don’t know that any normal person really believed it, but all of a sudden Sony were releasing games on PC and Switch, despite the obvious dangers of undermining the PlayStation and the fact that they weren’t very good ports and were making Sony look bad.

This isn’t the first time they’ve done this though. I’ve never understood why they gave in and allowed console cross-play. I don’t really play multiplayer, so I don’t care either way, but why treat Xbox as an equal when before they were forcing people to make a choice.

I’m more than prepared to accept I’m wrong for some kind of business reason but here we are and they’re reversing the exclusive policy, or at least that’s what all the rumours say.

It seems to have taken them a very long time to realise what everyone else knew before they even started, wasting who knows how much time and money in the meantime. Seems about typical for this generation.
Focus

The kids are alright
I am actually very surprised that Roblox fans have turned against the new AI graphics mode. It’s probably only a vocal minority but well done to those kids.

It’s not quite NFT levels but there does seem to be a turn against AI in games, that pleases me greatly. Just like NFT we can make a stand and stop companies from using it, if we just close our wallets to them. This is going to be a tougher fight, but I feel we can still win it.
Tacle

Join the queue
Nice to see a call for a new Maximo from Terry Gold this weekend, there are dozens of us!

I first played Ghosts To Glory digitally on PlayStation 3, which nowadays is only a slightly less archaic means than plugging in a PlayStation 2, and it quickly became one of my favourites alongside Contra: Shattered Soldier (I like hard games).

As Terry pointed out, there was a sequel, the Army Of Zin, which sadly toned down the intricate level design and difficulty to focus more on combat.

There was also plans for a third game, footage of which you can see here, but sadly it was cancelled due to poor sales of Army Of Zin and poor everything from Capcom Studio 8’s next and final game, Final Fight Streetwise.

After all these years I’m quietly optimistic we could get a new Maximo, considering Capcom’s can’t miss, fan-pleasing form of late. Although they haven’t made any new Dino Crisis and that seems like a no-brainer.
ANON

GC: Like you, we’d assume Dino Crisis is next in line but after that we’d think there’s a reasonable chance of some kind of new Ghosts ‘N Goblins game.

Inbox also-rans
At this point I’d settle for a low budget XCOM 3 but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I hate to say it but I think 2K has bigger fish to fry.
Loki

After reading that Aphelion review I’ve got to wonder how long has it been since Don’t Nod had a hit? Maybe Square Enix can get them in to try and revive Life Is Strange but if not I’m not sure they’re going to last long.
Klump

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