By Nelson Schneider - 04/24/21 at 09:12 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April showers (of watery diarrhea) bring May flowers (or maybe some sort of fungus that grows in manure), and Games Industry watchers are getting settled-in for one last month of copious releases before the onset of the annual Summer Games Drought. Though in a post-COVID world, it’s possible some of these ‘traditions’ may have been shunted out of alignment due to last year’s lockdown of… pretty much everything. Onto the crap!
We’ve got shovelware, oh yes we do! Though, thankfully, we don’t have very much… and it seems that the purveyors of such drivel are targeting Nintendo, like they think it’s still the Blue Ocean Wii era, or something. Anyway, we’ve got a crappy valet-themed party game called “Very Very Valet,” and Nintendo is resurrecting the corpse of the 3DS’s social non-game, “Miitopia” for another round on the treadmill.
And speaking of things being dragged out of storage and plopped on the treadmill again to see if they still have legs, roughly half of May’s remaining scheduled releases are ports, remasters, remakes, or otherwise re-used. And, unsurprisingly, most of those offenses are targeting the Nintendo Switch, with “Port Royale 4” (‘port’ is right there in the title, HA!), “Snowrunner,” “Raiden 4 x Mikado Remix,” “Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne,” and enhanced port “Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World” hitting that platform (though the latter two are also hitting other platforms). The only two May ports NOT being afflicted upon the Switch are the multi-platform releases of “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition” (a compilation of all three games in the original trilogy, minus some DLC for which “the source code was lost”) and PvP Survival dumpster fire, “Rust.”
In legitimate new multi-platform releases, we’ve got quite the diverse group, not all of which look terrible! “Kaze and the Wild Masks” is a throwback 16-bit 2D Platformer that hearkens back to the days before an anthropomorphic ‘funny animal’ character in a game automatically meant it was Furry porn. “Can’t Drive This” seems like a novel competitive/cooperative Driving title where one player builds the track while the other player is driving on it. “Subnautica: Below Zero” is a sequel to the 2018 diving Survival game (and the Switch version even comes with the original bundled in!). “Resident Evil Village” will no doubt appeal to Horror fans, and is supposed to be somewhat different from more recent games in that long-in-the-tooth, over-the-hill series. Lastly, there’s “BioMutant,” which I listed as one of my games to look forward to in 2021.
Exclusives are hardly even a thing anymore. With Sony relenting and beginning to port their first-party IPs to PC, Nintendo’s really the last player who thinks limiting their game audience to people who will buy specific hardware is a good idea. Thus, both Sony and Nintendo each have one miserable exclusive for their fanboys to argue over. PlayStation is getting… I’m not even going to bother typing this word-salad disaster. Meanwhile, the Switch is getting a mashup of a Visual Novel and Platformer in “World’s End Club,” which sounds like nothing but weeb bait to me.
I’ll definitely be grabbing “BioMutant” on Steam once it’s had time to marinate (and have all the DLC released, and receive a discount), but that’s it for May.
Backlog Embiggened: +1
