BY EZRI BRAID-GRIZZEL ’23
“Sonic doesn’t need a car!” Hayley Emmons ’23 said. “Sonic in a car is the equivalent of the Flash taking the bus.”
“Sonic Racing” is a new game offered exclusively on Apple’s new video game subscription service, Apple Arcade. In all forms, “Sonic Racing” appears to be “Mario Kart” populated by Sonic characters and with rings instead of coins. The game does grow on you, albeit slowly, but its only immediate appeal is the opportunity to play an equivalent of “Mario Kart” without shelling out money for a Nintendo console.
Just $5 will bring you “Sonic Racing” and the entirety of Apple Arcade’s growing library. That’s half the price of an Apple Music or Spotify subscription. A subscription can also be shared with up to six Apple ID accounts using the same credit card and is compatible with both Apple TV and MacOS. It’s an insanely cheap and incredibly ambitious new pitch for the gaming industry.
So why haven’t you heard about Apple Arcade? It’s the tech giant’s response to console subscription services such as PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live, right?
Apple chose strange timing for Arcade’s release, potentially risking a lot of money. Arcade and iOS 13 were released for iPhone on Sept. 19, while iPad and Apple TV were both updated on Sept. 24 — the same day that PlayStation and Xbox held huge livestream events to announce major plans for the rest of the year. Not only have these coinciding release dates likely heavily overshadowed Arcade’s arrival, but “Mario Tour” came out on Sept. 25 and has quickly become all the rage in phone gaming.
If Apple Arcade has been so overshadowed, are its games even that good? Well, yes and no. Since Arcade’s release, I’ve downloaded a number of games including “Sonic Racing,” “Where Cards Fall,” “The Get Out Kids,” “Oceanhorn 2,” “Projection,” “Stranded Sails” and “Shinsekai: Into the Depths.” Some of the games, such as “The Get Out Kids” and “Shinsekai” are legitimately inspiring.
“The Get Out Kids” takes the growing genre of ’80s kids summer horror and flips it in extremely refreshing ways. Instead of following a cast of mainly white male tweens cast out as ‘nerds,’ like “Stranger Things” and “IT,” the game follows a girl with a severe allergy and her Pakistani Muslim best friend. The game is simultaneously one of the darkest and most lighthearted I’ve ever played.
“Shinsekai,” one of the main titles used for Arcade advertising, situates the player as a lonely human living underwater in futuristic ruins quickly being consumed by ice. The game is innovative and has quickly become one of my favorites.
But all the other games, even “Sonic Racing,” have frustrating issues with controls. “Where Cards Fall” requires you to pinch and drag your fingers to change the sizes of card structures, but the system is infuriatingly sensitive. The story wants to give the player some large insight on the tragedy of being a teenager, but the game is repetitive and boring.
Another major problem with Arcade is how it transfers saves between devices. You have to be logged into the same Game Center account on the devices, but you should be able to pick up where you left off. This worked perfectly with “Sonic Racing,” but I could only get “Projection” to share saves up to the third level.
Except for games such as “Hot Lava,” in which you and your friends traverse courses where the ground is literally lava and “LEGO Brawl,” what looks to be a “Smash Brothers” rip-off combined with platformer mechanics, Arcade doesn’t have a lot of multiplayer games. However, other than the “Game Pigeon” mini games in iMessage, iPhones have never been viewed as multiplayer gaming devices.
When the words “portable,” “multiplayer” and “video games” come together people probably think of the Nintendo Switch. The Switch has now been out for over two years, and the Switch Lite was released Sept. 20, the day after Apple Arcade. According to the video game magazine “Venture Beat,” the Switch Lite sold 177,936 consoles in its first five days alone. Comparatively, there was no available information on the number of Apple Arcade subscribers.
Arcade banks on the fact that those interested in playing the offered video games will have Apple devices. This is a big assumption, considering that many people don’t have iPhones, let alone Macs.
According to gaming magazine “Digital Trends,” Steam, a service that enables customers to purchase a large variety of PC games, only three percent of its users were on Macs in 2018. While Steam, Apple and other companies still offer exceptional games on Mac, the majority only run on Windows. Microsoft, the manufacturer of Windows and the creator of Xbox, has been a longtime rival to Apple and a giant in the gaming industry.
All in all, Apple Arcade isn’t a service for everyone. If you’re a gamer in college, it is admittedly nice to have high quality games you can pick up and put down at a moment’s notice. The games it offers differ greatly in genre and type. But if you’re looking for the next big thing in gaming, Apple Arcade probably isn’t it. I myself will cancel my subscription when schoolwork starts to pile up.