http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYkuZ9zf18A
The new XCOM comes out this week, as well as Arkane Studio’s Thiefly RPG, Dishonored. Could this week be the peak of 2012’s holiday wallet threat?
But wait, there’s more! Atlus releases what looks like an ambitious JARPG — Japanese action RPG — for the Nintendo 3DS called Code of Princess. It’s about time I offload some of my recent action RPG habit to the DS. Cyanide transitions from Blood Bowl and Game of Thrones to Of Orcs and Men, an RPG in which you play an orc with a goblin sidekick. Kalypso releases a pirates and merchants strategy game called Port Royale 3. Fable and Harry Potter show up for the Kinect, if you’re into Fable, Harry Potter, or the Kinect as much as the actual people in the above video. All this and yet there are still only 24 hours in the day, some of which have to be spent sleeping, eating, and working?
If you’re into playing anthropomorphic panda bears, this is the week for you! World of Warcraft’s Mists of Pandaria adds playable pandas, even if the timing is a bit awkward. Also, something something soccer something PES 13 something something FIFA 13 something.
Maybe you’re not getting enough loot in Diablo III and Guild Wars 2. Maybe you need more. Because that’s the thing about loot. You never have enough. So this week, you’re in luck. Borderlands 2 and Torchlight II arrive, bearing even more loot.
I won’t know anything about Borderlands 2 until I pick up a copy (i.e. midnight tonight for the Xbox 360), but I have it on good authority that Torchlight II is pretty much exactly as good as you think it will be (i.e. even better than Torchlight I). I’m not too keen on what my 24th level liked Outlander (pictured) is wearing, but gear in Torchlight II is like the weather in the South. If you don’t like it, just wait fifteen minutes. It’s also nice to play an action RPG that I can make as difficult as I want whenever I want. It lets me get ambitious by starting out on veteran and then having to dial it down a notch half way into Act II. What a nice contrast to Diablo III, which forces you through an obligatory easy playthrough before it starts getting interesting.
The HD version of Jet Set Radio will be available on Xbox Live and the Playstation Store. I have no idea whether Jet Set Radio holds up in the real world as well as it holds up in my imagination, where it’s a timeless classic. But if it doesn’t hold up — hi, Tony Hawk HD! — I’ll at least have the soundtrack.
NHL13, which stands for the National Hokey League 13, is out this week. In this sport, you hit a round thing with a stick, which means hokey is very similar to the sports of golf, baseball, and jai alai. If you’re into hokey, this is your lucky week.
The other game out this week is Tekken Tag Tournament 2, which is a lot more fun that NHL 13 when it comes to saying the names of a game out loud. Go ahead, try it. Saying NHL 13 makes it sound like you’re ready to take a nap. Saying Tekken Tag Tournament 2 makes it sound like you’re announcing the impending arrival of something at least snappy, if not downright exciting.
Madden NFL 13 (pictured) is out this week. Nothing but net!
Guild Wars 2 is technically out this week, but any real Guild Wars aficionado has been playing since Friday night. Can Sony interest you in PS3 collections of the God of War, Infamous, and Ratchet & Clank series? Paradox is releasing an RTS called Starvoid, which I honestly thought was about a very hungry creature. It wasn’t until I was actually typing the word just now that I thought, “Oh, star and void…”. I would have gone with Voidstar.
There’s another Transformers game out this week, if you’re into that sort of thing. This one apparently has robo-dinosaurs in it. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for robo-dinosaurs to find their way into a Transformers game. There’s also a new iteration of Counter-Strike, called Global Operations, made by the folks who made Defense Grid. And Dark Souls is out for the PC. Please. Anyone who cares enough about Dark Souls bought a console system to play it on.
The real wallet threat this week is the pre-launch launch of Guild Wars 2 on Friday.
Unfortunately, the Hong Kong action movie open-world game Sleeping Dogs is no real threat to your wallet. More specifics tomorrow. As for Darksiders II, after a few hours of play, I’m a bit worried about some of the choices developer Vigil Games has made. Can the first game’s novelty of “holy cats, it’s Zelda’s gameplay meets God of War’s gritty combat but with World of Warcraft’s graphics!” sustain itself for a second game with “also Diablo!” bolted on? But to be fair, the original Darksiders took a while to reveal its charms. More on Darksiders II later in the week.
So what’s the real potential wallet threat this week? A JRPG on the Wii.
I never would have thought a JRPG on the Wii would be a wallet threat, much less my favorite game of 2012 so far. But The Last Story, a JRPG on the Wii, comes out this week. This is the eagerly awaited North American localization of a game by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s studio, Mistwalker. Mistwalker’s previous games, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, were mostly by-the-numbers old-school designs. But my understanding of The Last Story — I haven’t actually played it yet — is that it has a few tricks up its sleeve, and may very well be one of those weirdly unique RPGs a la Dragon’s Dogma.
