By Nelson Schneider - 10/26/24 at 04:07 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! November is upon us, and our thoughts return to our obligation to be thankful for what we have and to exercise our American right to vote. Neither of those things is particularly compelling in 2024.
The Earth is still spinning, and its core is still molten, so of course there is shovelware. We’ve got all three major subcategories coming at us too. In the Licensed Swill category, there’s “LEGO Horizon Adventures,” which combines LEGO with Sony’s ‘Horizon’ IP, delving to new depths of horror. There are also a new ‘Totally Spies!’ game and a new ‘Harry Potter’ game, along with a compilation of old ‘Marvel vs. Capcom’ Fighting games, which are Licensed Swill due to the Marvel part, not the Capcom part. In the 2Cazual2Liv subcategory, we’ve got “Zero to Hero Dance,” “MySims: Cozy Bundle,” and… “Needy Streamer Overload.” Lastly, we come to the Annualized Swill subcategory, which, shockingly doesn’t include any Sports games this month, but rather Ubisoft’s ‘Let’s Sing’ and ‘Farming Simulator.
Moving on from new crap to old crap, we’ve still got ports, remakes, compilations, remasters, and the like coming out of the Industry’s wazoo. And, as it has been since about the 2nd year of the Switch’s lifespan, nearly all of the garbage is being dumped on Nintendo’s hybrid system, with 9 out of this month’s 12 ports landing there. There’s “Sky Oceans” (which just came out on other platforms), “Have a Nice Death,” Sony’s “Stray” (Sony porting first-party exclusives to Steam was one thing, but porting them to Nintendo is a desperation move), “Celestia: Chain of Fate,” “Goat Simulator 3,” “SANABI,” “DreadOut 2,” “SCHiM,” and a fancy-pants remake of “Dragon Quest 3” using the ‘Octopath’ engine. Not coming to Switch in November are “Lempo,” “Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master,” and “Shadows of Doubt,” which are instead hitting PlayStation like a moist cowpat.
Hmmm… the crap and old crap wasn’t too bad this month! Time to move onto new multi-platform releases! … Oh… dear… *sigh* “Battle of Rebels” is a PvPvE zombie game. “Touhou: Spell Carnival” is a Bullet Hell SHMUP for people who love lolis. “Petit Island” is yet another one of those so-called ‘cozy’ games featuring ‘Animal Crossing’ and “Stardew Valley” inspiration, wherein the player is an anthropomorphic chibi cat. “Slitterhead” (which was delayed from an earlier release slot (or two) this year) is an emphatically Asian horror-thing (Chriswouldlovethat). “Magical Bakery” is yet another one of those shop-running Sims, which appears to combine a knock-off ‘Harry Potter’ aesthetic with ‘Cooking Mama.’ “Empire of the Ants” is a new RTS that takes inspiration from the ancient “SimAnt” and recent ant-themed mobile wallet vacuums to create a modern and digital take on the classic ant farm. “Flint: Treasure of Oblivion” is a self-described as having a ‘strong, original narrative’ and is a turn-based RPG based on quasi-historical pirate lore… yeah, I’ll give that one a chance! “Farmagia” is some sort of weird mashup-RPG/Strategy game that looks to take core mechanics from ‘Harvest Moon’ and ‘Pikmin,’ while dumping the player into a Fantasy world reminiscent of ‘Rune Factory,” so… I’ll give that one a chance too! Lastly, there’s “Albatroz” (which was also delayed from earlier this year), which appears to be a Walking Simulator trying to pass itself off as an RPG.
At last, we come to system-selling exclusives that will just make people flock to their nearest Big Box Store to grab a console… or not. Sony had… nothing this month. Nintendo has two Visual Novels by two different companies, “Genso Menage” and “Virche Evermore” (the second one has more word salad in the title I’m just going to *snip*), so… effectively nothing. But Microsoft… yes, Microsoft! They have an exclusive coming in November that people might actually care about: “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2,” which I was interested in when they first announced it… but then I tried to play the older “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” content and decided I was NOT interested in any more of that.
Well, while it started off hopelessly, there were actually a couple of okay-looking multi-plats in this month’s release schedule that I’ll probably pick up once they’re deeply discounted: “Flint: Treasure of Oblivion” and “Farmagia” are both new IPs (not sequels) that look like they have had some effort put into them and combine existing ideas I like, so hopefully they pan out in the end.
Backlog Embiggened: +2
