Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is out tomorrow on Steam, and even on the Nintendo 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 of itch.io releases that implies they might actually know what they’re doing! Could this unseat indie darling Absolum and perhaps upstage the December 1st release of Marvel: 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.
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.
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 has already 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?
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.
[Editor’s note: Please welcome longtime forum member Rock8man back to the front page! Every week, he’ll be detailing the threats posed to 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.
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.
Old World is out today on Steam! Bruce Geryk and I have an ongoing game underway and we’ll be posting an update every ten turns. Here is our starting situation.
The above video comes courtesy of the John Burroughs High School Powerhouse choir group. The group wrote and performed this mini-play about Andrew Ryan and his tragicomic dystopia set to some catchy tunes. Rapture might’ve been a heck of a lot less scary with Proud Mary piping through the PA system. Thanks to Eurogamer for the pointer!
Bethesda Softworks has announced Tales of Tribute, a collectible card game that will be playable from within The Elder Scrolls Online. It’s coming with the High Isle expansion for the MMO, although it’s unclear if ownership of the expansion will be required to play the CCG. According to Bethesda, Tales of Tribute will feature leaderboards, tons of cards, a campaign story, and you’ll be able to challenge other live players and NPCs to a game while out and about in Tamriel. Rich Lambert, Creative Director for ESO, said Tales of Tribute is a deck-building game with the goal of out-producing your opponent as opposed to being focused on direct card combat. As if collecting pets, mounts, and furniture wasn’t enough.
High Isle’s first chapter, Ascending Tide, launches on March 14 for PC and March 29 for consoles.
What does GLaDOS have to do with car insurance? Nothing, but Geico apparently thinks a commercial tie-in to an old game will sell more coverage agreements. At least there wasn’t a cake joke in the ad.
Sunless Skies is a great game. Some are saying it’s literally the greatest game of 2019. Developer Failbetter Games has been working on an update, called the Sovereign Edition, which includes an overhaul of character progression, a reworking of some of the endgame areas, and a not inconsiderable amount of new content. The update was announced on October 19, 2019 and scheduled for an August or September 2020 release alongside the console port of the game.
After the announcement, there was no word until September 16, 2020, when Failbetter conceded that console ports are “more complex than they expected” so they didn’t have a release date anymore. Then on December 2nd, they said the Sovereign Edition had been submitted for certification (since it was also going to coincide with the console release). This tends to take a couple of weeks, tops.
Unless something goes wrong. Which we can infer from Failbetter’s silence for another two months. Today, Failbetter conceded the Sovereign Edition is “still seeing some challenging performance problems” and they still don’t have a release date to announce.
This isn’t really a review of Raiders of Scythia because there’s a pandemic going. That means I’m pretty much limited to solitaire gaming until vaccines are rolled out widely enough to cover “people who really want to get back to playing boardgames with their friends”. That’s a lower priority than, say, front-line health care workers, teachers, and grocery store employees. But it’s a higher priority than hermits, firewatchers, and seamen doing multi-year tours of duty on nuclear submarines. So, fingers crossed. Until then, there are a ton of games I can’t review, much less play.
But this is a short analysis of why I think Raiders of Scythia is so good, including why it’s better than worker placement games in general, and why it’s better than its predecessor, Raiders of the North Sea, in specific. I’ll spend about fifteen minutes explaining why I like it so much, and then run through a solitaire game so you can see how it plays. Also, there will be some Bible talk.
The latest update for Wreckfest adds a winter track with snow on the road. Which is slippery, sure. But in a racing game like Wreckfest, slippery isn’t enough. Slippery is just the means to the end, and the end is Wreckfest’s glorious damage model. What good is losing control of your car and banging into a wall if you can’t crumple fenders, smash radiators, and twist axels? Wreckfest loves how cars break.
Which is where the giant snowballs come into play. Now cars can be crushed by giant snowballs during the demotion derby events. It’s all part of today’s free Winter Fest update.
