I don’t see this week’s new releases as much of a wallet threat. If I had to pick one to play myself, it would likely be Project Motor Racing, though I continue to be perplexed that from the almost infinite possibilities of how to make a driving game, so many games seem to want to crowd into this very narrow niche of making games based on realistic race cars going around well known tracks.
On the other hand, I appreciate the break. It’s Thanksgiving week for those of us who celebrate it. I’m grateful and thankful that this community is here and we can talk about games, movies, TV shows, books, music, politics and the oxford comma.
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So this is a thing.
Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is out tomorrow onSteam, and even on theNintendo Switch. It’s a sidescrolling beat-’em-up — I think that’s what you call them — where you play Art the Clown, the sadistic Chaplin-esque killer from Damien Leone’s Grand Guignol horror movies. Leone’s trilogy starts out disgustingly effective, but gets increasingly lore-obssessed and commercially successful as it progresses. For various reasons, I don’t recommend them to anyone but the serious horror aficianado. As for this ARTcade Game, the developer, Relovo, has a history ofitch.io releases that implies they might actually know what they’re doing! Could this unseat indie darlingAbsolum and perhaps upstage the December 1st release ofMarvel: Cosmic Invasion? Will we one day get an Art the Clown kart racer? And will Art the Clown plushies be all the rage this Christmas?
Although I often think about going back to play Brian Reynold’s Alpha Centauri, lo, these many years later, I’m not sure I could. There are probably too many issues that would bother me. I probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy it the way I did way back in 1999. My rose-colored lenses might cloud over and fog up. Fortunately, I don’t need to replay Alpha Centauri because Proxy Studios has made Zephon.
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A new Kirby Air Ride game arrives this week, along with a couple of exciting remasters, a few potentially cool indies, and some VR games.
Let’s start with the remasters.
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It’s not a formula that’s in vogue these days: a protagonist doing horrible things, forcing the viewer into the uncomfortable paradox of rooting for his comeuppance, but simultaneously dreading it because, after all, this is the main character. It reminds me of 70s cinema, and specifically something like French Connection, where Popeye Doyle does terrible things and is brought low by his choices. Or Sorcerer, where the men’s quiet desperation, a result of their misdeeds, turns explosive. Surely it’s no coincidence that the brothers in Black Rabbit are named Friedkin.
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Quite a busy week in the realm of AAA releases and ports. There’s a new Lumines release. A Sacred 2 Remaster. A Fallout 4 anniversary release. A new Anno game! (I’m still yet to actually play one of those myself, but I do still get excited about each one myself for some reason). Sega is porting Yakuza 1 and 2’s remasters to Switch 2. Square Enix is porting Monster Hunter Stories 1 and 2 to Xbox. A new Call of Duty is coming out! And one of those big action-adventure Chinese games we’ve been seeing trailers for is finally coming out: Where Winds Meet.
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It’s 2005 and it’s been 20 years since Christoper Reeve’s final Superman movie, the astonishingly cheap made-for-TV-quality Quest for Peace. Reeves’ fall from a horse and eventual death from complications has cast a sad shadow over Superman in the wider world beyond comics. The Man of Steel lived his final years as a ghastly near-cadaver, having to blow into a tube to trundle onstage and show us his resolve. He was an inspiration to people with disabilities and his gradual recovery was a miracle of modern medicine, but it seems he inadvertently humanized Superman in the public consciousness. It turns out the Man of Steel was only ever a man of flesh, no more steel than any of us.
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I’ve personally never checked out the Europa Universalis series because I’ve always been afraid to, thinking it would be too tough and hard-to-learn. Maybe with the fifth game in the series that has changed? A lot of people at Quarter to Three are pretty excited over that one. Since traditional point-and-click adventure games died a long time ago, I suspect that Syberia — Remastered will be threatening few wallets this week. I personally loved the original. Tom hasalready quit, but he’s confessed that he’s not much of an adventure gamer.
A few years ago, I started wondering about this burgeoning “factory” genre. On the forum, I asked which game would be ideal to start getting into these games. Factorio? Satisfactory? Dyson Sphere? Shapez 2? The answer from most seemed to be to wait for 1.0 release of Satisfactory. And then when it was released, I started waiting for the console release. And this week I’ll have no more excuse to wait any longer, since the console release of Satisfactory is finally here.
So what is it that what I’m most excited about among this week’s releases? Maybe it has to do with how much I’ve been enjoying Farthest Frontier, a recent village building game, but the games that seem the most exciting to me are of the calmer zen variety, focusing on charm over challenge. There’s a charming adventure game called A Pizza Delivery out this week. A coop sequel in Biped 2 about two robot having an adventure where each player controls both of the charming biped robots’ limbs individually. A charming puzzle game called Puzzle Depot about pushing boxes. A charming platformer where you play as an egg in Egging On. And a lovely looking charming simulation about creating tiny, Japanese inspired garden dioramas in Dream Garden. What is threatening your wallets this week?
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I fuss a lot about interface and documentation and how videogames teach themselves to us. When I play a game, it’s important for me to eventually know what’s going on, to understand the systems, to wrap my head around the design. I want to know enough to make informed decisions, to fully appreciate what I’m seeing, to share a perspective with the designer and better appreciate what he’s done.
But sometimes, I just have to let go of that. Xenotilt, like Demon’s Tilt before it but absurdly moreso, is one of those times.
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Doesn’t it feel as if the big releases have been relentless lately? The trend continues this week with big releases like Arc Raiders, the big extraction shooter de jour. The Outer Worlds 2 is a sequel to what I lovingly referred to as my gaming comfort food, and this one is reportedly the same but slightly better in every way. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is Digital Eclipse doing their thing of being gaming historians, and preserving old games by putting together presentations of how they were made while having you play the games themselves. On the JRPG front, we have a couple of remakes and remasters: Tales of Xillia was originally a PS3 exclusive, so most people probably missed it, and Dragon Quest 1 & 2 get the HD-2D remake treatment from Square Enix. My own personal time, attention and money is under the greatest potential threat this week from a game created by ex-Criterion employees that looks like a combination of Trackmania and Burnout, and is a game called Wreckreation.
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In Love and Death on Long Island, John Hurt plays a reclusive author named Giles De’Ath. Convinced by his agent to finally come out of his self-imposed cultural shell and experience modern entertainment, he ventures to a local cinema to see an E.M. Forster adaptation. But not being hip to the modern multiplex, he instead stumbles into a teenage sex comedy called Hotpants College II. He watches patiently for a time, aggrieved at the inanity of it all, before finally realizing his mistake and drolly noting, “This isn’t E.M. Forster.”
That’s how I felt coming into this game: “This isn’t Painkiller.”
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[Editor’s note:Please welcome longtime forum member Rock8manback to the front page! Every week, he’ll be detailing the threats posedto our metaphorical wallets by the upcoming week’s new releases. Note that wallet threats don’t just pose a financial danger! Perhaps more importantly, they pose a danger to those far more precious currencies such as time, attention span, spouse tolerance, fear of missing out, and all the various elements that determine what we play and when we play it.]
How many revivals, remakes and sequels are out this week? Well, we have a new Ninja Gaiden, a new Painkiller, a new Jurassic World Evolution, a new Double Dragon, a port of Persona 3 Reload to the Switch 2, a remake of the original Plants vs Zombies, a sequel to Powerwash Simulator, a new Katamari, and a remake of House of the Dead 2. There’s also a sequel to Vampire Bloodlines coming that’s reportedly less of an RPG than the original. Crate is finally releasing their follow up to Grim Dawn, Farthest Frontier, which is not another ARPG but a city builder that’s been in early access for a few years. The now standard indie game practice of cross-pollinating genres of games continues this week with Bounty Star, which combines Mech fighting with farming and base building.
Personally speaking, I’ve got my fingers crossed that the new Painkiller recaptures the magic of the original game this week and I’ll gladly let it drain my wallet.
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Oceans not being what they once were, neither are lighthouses. The lighthouse has become, to modern audiences, a place of loneliness, isolation, and evenmadness andmonsters. Imagine being cooped up on some rocky promontory far from civilization, cut off for months, even years at a time.
Yet imagine you’re protecting the brave men who ply the vast uncaring oceans, stitching the world together across their impossible expanse. This is the lighthouse of the aptly named Keeper. This is the sagging stone edifice that somehow revives itself and walks precariously on crab legs made from roots. This is the faithful companion for our dragon gull thing that opens the story. This is the entry point for Double Fine’s latest creation, a mere “adventure” game, but also a staggeringly weird and imaginative journey through a place you’ve never been.
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As you may have noticed, the forums are currently borked. If you were on your way to post something, hold that thought! And thanks for your patience while we figure out what broke and how to fix it.
I’ll update this space as more information is available.
UPDATE: And we’re back up! Turns out the server ran out of disk space, most likely as a result of all my posts about the Switch 2.
Now that Tom is back to liking Robert Eggers movies, listen as he tries in vain to remember the man’s first name. Meanwhile, Kellywand wants listeners to weigh in on their opinion of Nosferatu’s longer term plans with Ellen. What kind of marriage did he have in mind? And where will they be registered? It’s the latest Qt3 Movie Podcast and another classic -opsis for our new favorite classic horror movie!
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