By Nelson Schneider - 12/01/24 at 09:20 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It’s time to toll the ancient Yuletide carol once again, as the end of the year stares us in the face. Let’s take a look at what the constipated factories of Industrial Gaming are trying to squeeze out in a desperate attempts at generating a last-minute profit.
There are only half-a-dozen shovelware titles coming in December, and all of them are part of the Licensed Swill category. We’ve got games coming based on the ‘Indiana Jones’ movies, the ‘Fairy Tail’ anime, the ‘Rugrats’ cartoon, Funko-pop toys, and ‘Predator’ movie(s), and the scheduled holiday movie release of ‘Dog Man,’ based on the children’s comic books.
Some of that shovelware was old, but in the grand sorting scheme, being some form of Swill outranks being some form of port… and yes, there are ports. Thankfully, there are significantly fewer ports than usual, and, as a year-end twist, the Nintendo Switch is NOT the primary dumping ground for these things. Instead, the PlayStation 5 is getting the lion’s share of old stuff being marketed as though it was new, starting with a compilation of ‘A Plague Tale’ games, the physical release of “Black Myth: Wukong,” “Ravenswatch,” a remaster of a ‘90s point-and-click Adventure game in “Amerzone: The Explorer’s Legacy,” “The Thaumaturge,” “Born of Bread,” “Raging Bytes,” an anniversary release of “Worms Armageddon,” and a remake of “Little Big Adventure: Twinsen’s Quest,” the latter 4 of which are also hitting the Switch. The Switch isn’t just getting PS5 dregs, though, with other dregs coming in the form of “Toki,” a compilation of ancient games developed and/or published by Taito, and “Goblin Slayer Another Adventurer: Nightmare Feast” (which is, hopefully, in English this time).
Now that we can put our shovels and bulldozers away, it’s time to take a look at new releases, starting with multi-platform titles! ... And there really are NOT very many of them! There are only two new games coming to more than one platform: “Morkull Ragast’s Rage” is a generic-looking Indie 2D Metroidvania that tries to separate itself from the overwhelming morass of similar games released in the last decade in the same way that Deadpool tries to separate himself from the overwhelming morass of samey generic superheroes – by breaking the 4th wall and being ‘funny.’ Oh, dear. The other new multi-plat coming in December has been on my radar for a while: “Fantasian Neo Dimension,” a brand new RPG from the minds that originally created ‘Final Fantasy.’ Developed by Mistwalker and published by Square-Enix, “Fantasian Neo Dimension” might be the last gasp for the studio, the publisher, and the entire damned genre to prove that they’re all still relevant.
At last we come to exclusives… and there’s not much out there to sell systems for the holiday gift-giving season. There are only two of them! First, we have “Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age,” a times PlayStation exclusive 2D Fighting game with the gimmick of being a 2 vs. 2 experience instead of the traditional 1 vs. 1 the genre is known for. Then there’s “Behemoth,” a VR exclusive title from Skydance (who really want their studio name in the title… but they aren’t getting it here), which looks and sounds almost like an attempt at creating a spiritual successor to Sony’s “Shadow of the Colossus,” only with VR giving it the potential to be… way more interesting.
Well, that really wasn’t too bad! There’s new crap and old crap coming, yes, but those are ALWAYS coming, and at least the flow for December is light. Out of the super-slim pickings in new multi-platform and excusive releases, I’m actually interested in one game from each category, with “Fantasian Neo Dimension” and “Behemoth” both on my wishlist and waiting for an appropriately huge Steam sale to convince me to actually buy them.
Backlog Embiggened: +2
