By Nelson Schneider - 03/31/13 at 01:44 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. April is for fools, and it looks like they will have plenty of new games to buy for full price this month!
The initial Spring bloom of licensed drek is still trickling on this month, though at a significantly diminished rate. While site member Jonzor left a comment expressing his disappointment about the oversight of “LEGO City: Undercover” releasing for WiiU last month, this month we’re making it up to him and announcing the immanent release of the 3DS tie-in-for-the-tie-in game, “LEGO City: Undercover – The Chase Begins.” With all these tie-ins-for-tie-ins, spinoffs, and excessively-appellated game titles, the Fat Cats at the top of Big Gaming aren’t really doing a whole lot to prove they still make products worth caring about. Outside of LEGO Land, the other big licensed April releases are both multi-platform and rated T for Teen. The rebooted “Star Trek” movie franchise is getting a rebooted “Star Trek” videogame tie-in, while the evergreen mound of comic book superhero rubbish is getting scraped-together into a mash-up fighting game.
The dark, gritty shooters of the non-licensed multi-platform kingdom are continuing unabated this month, with two first-person shooters in the form of a new “Painkiller” game and a new “Dead Island” game, and two third-person shooters in the form of “Fuse” and “Defiance.” “Defiance” has a unique gimmick in that it will be tied-into a TV show airing on SyFy and will merge the universal MMORPG mechanics with the traditional TPS form-factor. It honestly looks mildly intriguing, and if it had been a FPS and Free-to-Play, the MeltedJoystick crew might have considered it for our online multi-player nights… but as it is, it’s just too reliant on SyFy not cancelling the show or making some other boneheaded move. Outside of shooters, the PS3 and Xbox 360 are getting a port of the WiiU port of “Ninja Gaiden 3” (Isn’t this becoming a little tough to keep track of?) and a DLC-included, add-on pack for the Japanese Sandbox game “Dragon’s Dogma.” I was interested in “Dragon’s Dogma” when it first launched, but knowing Capcom’s vile DLC practices, I knew I should wait for a GotY Edition or something… but they never released a GotY, INSTEAD they are releasing an expansion pack to the base game that INCLUDES the base game! I’m detecting motes of “White Knight Chronicles 2” in this situation. Maybe it’s just the way Japanese publishers are choosing to handle expansion packs? I can’t say I’m annoyed or offended by this, but I would expect the people who bought the un-expanded original version of “Dragon’s Dogma” to be pissed.
Between multi-platform releases and exclusives, there exist ports. And this month the Xbox 360 and PS3 are each getting their own exclusive port of a game that was formerly exclusive in another platform. The Xbox 360 is getting “Minecraft” (I can’t imagine this will be popular amongst the “Halo” lovers who make up that console’s primary demographic, but serves as an added reminder that the Xbox 360 is just a crappy, fake gaming PC that really has no reason to exist as hardware), while the PS3 is getting a director’s cut of “Deadly Premonition.”
The only non-handhelds getting real exclusives in April are Steam and the Wii. Not the WiiU, but the original! Steam is getting “Cities in Motion 2,” “Don’t Starve,” and “Sacred Citadel,” none of which look interesting in the slightest. But the Wii is FINALLY getting what is destined to be the 2013 GotY, “Pandora’s Tower,” which was pushed back yet another month for release in North America. Seriously, Xseed, the entire game is translated, voiced, and balanced for you. There is NOTHING for you to do to this game besides slap it on Region 1 DVDs (sorry, ‘Wii Discs’). WHAT IS THE HOLD-UP?!
Finally, there are the handhelds. While the Vita is barely struggling along with a single new game (that just so happens to be an exclusive), “Soul Sacrifice” looks both very weird and like something that would NOT be fun to play on-the-go, on-the-toilet, or on-a-handheld. The 3DS has three exclusives, two of which are borderline shovelware (but perfectly appropriate for handheld gaming the way it was meant to be), “Super Black Bass 3D” and “Puzzler World 2013” (Oh, dear God, that means they plan to make MORE ‘Puzzler World’ games and release one every year from now until eternity!). The third and final 3DS game is the excessively-appellated “Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor – Soul Hackers.” The first three words in that title should be enough to determine whether or not to buy it, as the ‘MegaTen’ series is extremely niche, even among staunch RPG fans. The good news in all of this? No new releases on the DS or PSP! Maybe those two corpses will finally stay in their graves?
April looks like another run-of-the-mill month of game releases. The only noticeable thing missing is ANY noteworthy releases for the WiiU. I thought the N64 library was awful at launch and stayed awful for a really, REALLY long time (okay, I think it never became non-awful), but the WiiU looks to be giving its great-grandfather some serious competition. Of the crap that IS being released in April, the only thing that interests me is “Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen.” Of course, with my backlog already as huge as it is, I’ll be waiting until I can find a copy on sale.
Backlog Embiggened: +1
