By Nelson Schneider - 04/28/24 at 02:30 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! April Showers bring May Flowers… but I’m not sure what April Tornados and April Hail bring… from the looks of things, they bring ports, shovelware, and yet another month of overall crappy game releases. Let’s dissect this dead frog!
The shovelware is moderately deep. I think we can get by with Wrong DeSanctis’ white boots instead of hip waders. In the Licensed Swill category, we have… ports. The Switch is getting the latest ‘Tintin’ game and ‘UFO Robot Grendizer’ game that recently hit other platforms. The PlayStation 5 is getting an old licensed ‘Dragon Ball Z’ game, while sharing another old licensed ‘Dragon Ball Z’ game with the Xbox SeX. The only all-new piece of Licensed Swill hitting all platforms is a new ‘My Little Pony’ game.
In the 2Caz2Liv category we have… two ‘NepNep’ games, one old and one new… and the new one now includes Management Sim elements instead of strictly mutilating the Role-Playing genre. There’s also a Party game called “Pool Party,” which is apparently about anthropomorphized pool tables and balls.
Lastly, there’s a lone Annualized Release: “F1 24,” which sounds like it was titled by Monty Python’s version of King Arthur, who can’t say ‘3.’
Moving on to ports, remakes, remasters, compilations, and otherwise old stuff being paraded around as though it’s the new hotness, we’ve got… Oh… oh my… we’ve got SOOOOOO many ports… just… WHY?! *sigh* Well, getting started, we’ve got the Switch on top of the dumping pile again, being drowned in excrement (with maybe a few worthwhile gems floating in the flow). There’s are enhanced ports of “Endless Ocean” and “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.” There’s “Captain Velvet Meteor,” the just-released-everywere-else “Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes,” Phil Foglio’s “Girl Genius,” “Dave the Diver,” “Potion Permit,” a compilation of puzzle games, and a compilation of horse games for little girls. The Switch is also sharing a number of ports with other platforms, including “Slave Zero X,” “Juicy Realm,” “The Last Faith,” “TEVI,” “Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes,” “Sea of Stars,” “Adam Wolfe,” and “Broadsword.”
The PlayStation Ecosystem is getting plenty of rehash action too, with “Sunnyside,” “Crossfire,” “Vertigo 2,” “Seed of Life,” and “ARK: Survival Ascended” all landing there. Then there are PlayStation and Xbox sharing a modern reboot of the ancient (and highly overrated by neckbearded grognards) “System Shock.” Lastly, portage is flowing positively in the opposite direction it usually does, with “Ghost of Tsushima” coming from PlayStation to Steam (I’ve already got my copy pre-ordered!).
With all the old crap out of the way we can finally move onto new crap… and that is indeed the operative word. We have ONE new multi-platform release… and it’s a mother-EFFing Soulslike, “Morbid: Lords of Ire.” STOP BUYING THESE!
Finally, we come to exclusives… and Nintendo is the only platform holder getting any. But they’re really not worth getting, and Nintendo should take some time to slap Return to Sender notices on this kind of trash instead of suing people in the emulation scene: “Construction Simulator 4” (which is a port of a mobile game) and a Visual Novel called “Cupid Parasite,” by Idea Factory, which is unsurprising.
Oh, my EFFing Pantheon of Nordic Deities… The ports just keep coming faster and faster, with less and less eye for quality control. But, I suppose, if you dump an entire septic tank onto a console, a couple of lost engagement rings or gold teeth are bound to get caught in the filter: Cases in point: “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door,” and “Ghost of Tsushima,” which are both justifiable ports in that ‘Paper Mario’ was still a good series back in 2004 when the original version of the game was released, and ALL of Sony’s first-party games need to find their way to PC eventually, so we can buy them once and play them indefinitely, instead of buying the game, the remaster of the game, and the re-re-master of the game over the course of a decade. That said, I won’t be picking up “Thousand-Year Door” myself, since my original Gamecube disc is still sitting here, along with a digital dump in my personal emulation archive.
Backlog Embiggened: +1
