By Nelson Schneider - 07/28/24 at 03:49 PM CT

Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer will be over soon, and all the cute little autists and gender-queers will be heading back to their Postmodernist Deconstruction Indoctrination mills. While, traditionally, Industrial Gaming bigwigs have chosen the end of Summer to start dumping tons of games onto the market, this year’s August schedule looks like a continuation of the Summer Games Drought.

We’ve only got 5 pieces of shovelware coming in August, with only two of the major subvarieties represented. In Licensed Swill, there’s “Star Wars Outlaws” (which we know Chris will buy for full price, since he’s one of, like, 4 people on Earth who enjoyed “The Acolyte”), a 4th sequel in the ‘Gundam Breaker’ series, a new officially-licensed ‘Monster Jam’ title, and “Tiebreak: The Official Game of the ATP and WTA.” I don’t know what either of those acronyms stand for, nor do I care, but based on the genre tag Chris applied in the database, I’m guessing Tennis. Outside of one-off mistakes, we have one perpetually-recurring mistake of Annualized Releases in the form of “Madden NFL 25,” which is particularly amusing, as the worthless treadmill of new ‘Madden’ titles has outlived the man himself by nearly 3 years at this point.

As usual, we have gobs and gobs of ports, remakes, remasters, compilations and other rehashes. Where shovelware used to be the greatest plague of low-effort game releases, rehashes have been the new bane for many years now, with August containing twice as many old-things-marketed-as-new than outright low-effort trash. The Switch is maintaining its position as Main Dumping Ground (and I fully expect it to stay in that position for a couple of years after the Switch 2 drops), with a compilation of Doinksoft games (which really sounds like it should be the name of an ED pill), ports of “Ugly,” “Harvest Days,” “The Stanley Parable,” “Lost Ruins,” and “Core Keeper” all coming over from PC (with several of those also landing on PlayStation this month), and a multi-platform remaster of a crappy old NES game, “Shadow of the Ninja – Reborn.” PlayStation is, as usual, in second place with ports of “Slitterhead” and “Indika” coming over from Steam. Meanwhile, Sony is increasing its efforts to shop former PlayStation exclusives around on a variety of platforms, bringing “Kena: Bridge of Spirits” to Xbox.

With 10 legitimate new multi-platform releases, there should be room for some good stuff in there. Unfortunately, while there is quite a bit of variety – and *shudder* ‘diversity’ – in the release slate, none of it floats my particular boat.

Konami has a new SHMUP coming in “Cygni: All Guns Blazing,” as if to prove that they still make games besides pachinko occasionally. “Pixelshire” is yet another Indie ‘Harvest Moon’ rip-off, the likes of which have become so commonplace we should start calling them “Stardew Valley” rip-offs. “Leo the Firefighter Cat” looks like a rip-off of ‘Paw Patrol’ for little kids who like cats more than dogs. “Tales from Toyotoki: Arrival of the Witch” is a Japanese Visual Novel… but, hey, at least the title isn’t a word-salad of punctuation and gibberish for once!

RPG fans have plenty of new releases to… be disappointed about.

“Visions of Mana” is the latest in Square-Enix’ long-running ‘Mana’ series (which started on the Game Boy Brick with “Final Fantasy Adventure”). However, I have never enjoyed the ‘Mana’ games, so the fact that the latest one looks like the same-old, same-old with more expensive production values and a plot stolen from “I Am Setsuna” makes me give zero figs… it doesn’t even have coop!

“Cat Quest 3” is already on its way… and I haven’t even gotten around to playing “Cat Quest” (which I bought) or “Cat Quest 2” (which I got for free from Epic Games). Maybe they should slow down production a little?

“Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains” is actually the third game in the ‘Xuan-Yuan’ series of ‘Dragon Quest’ knock-offs from Taiwan, but it’s finally getting an official Western localization after its original release in… 1999. Unfortunately, after playing through the spinoff side-game “The Gate of Firmament,” I’m incredibly leery about wasting time and money on anything related to the series.

For fans of weird, quirky RPGs like Nintendo’s ‘Earthbound’ series, there’s yet another spiritual successor coming: “Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game.” Unfortunately, the screenshots on the game’s Steam page don’t exactly make a great first impression, giving uncomfortable vibes of Cal-Arts, autism, and ‘modern audiences.’ That said, the trailers mitigate quite a bit of my doubt, and it might actually end up being good.

Finally, we’ve got a couple of DEI games, both of which were pushed by Sony at expos, even though only one of them is published by the House of Stations that Play. For people who want a game that’s exactly like being in Oregon, there’s “Dustborn.” Then, for those who want to play a competitive shooter but find that “Fortnite” and “Overwatch 2” just aren’t diverse and equitable enough, there’s “Concord.”

Moving on, we finally come to EXCLUSIVES! Those glorious, high-effort, system-selling titles that fuel the fires of the Console Wars… and… there aren’t any… which pretty much explains why the Console Wars have turned into a joke and the end of console gaming is nigh.

Ugh. What a miserable release schedule for my birthday month. “Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game” and “Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains” might find their way into my backlog, but I’m not super-enthusiastic about either.

Backlog Embiggened: +2? (with low enthusiasm)