By Nelson Schneider - 02/22/25 at 11:16 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Winter is officially “over,” but the weather didn’t get the memo. That leaves us with plenty of time to sit inside and play our backlogs instead of dealing with the cold and snow. Unfortunately, many of us aren’t exactly enamored of the giant pile of (mostly digital) games we’ve got stacked up, and are mostly looking forward to coop sessions more than anything else.
Will March come in like a lion, bringing some roaring new titles to get us fired-up and out of our doldrums? Or will it come in like a lamb… or rather a LAME, with more crap to ignore?
Keep your shovels at the ready, folks, because we’ve got some manure to move. In the Licensed Swill category, we’ve got an attempt at rebooting the ‘Carmen Sandiego’ Edutainment series with a new game called… “Carmen Sandiego.” There’s also “The First Berserker: Khazan,” based on the ‘Dungeon and Fighter’ IP, a new ‘Bleach’ game that I might have been interested in 20 years ago, and a game based on the ‘Eltrador Creatures’ toy line. No super-Casual Swill to speak of, but there is an Annualized Release in ‘WWE Wrestling’ for those who inexplicably still care about Professional Wrestling in any way. Lastly, I’ll be dumping Noteworthy Ports in this category, since I will no longer be covering the excessive number of purely trash ports, and there are two to speak of: “Suikoden 1 & 2 HD Remaster: Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars,” which is a compilation re-release of two of my favorite RPGs from the PS1 era, and “Bubble Ghost Remake,” which is a full-blown redo from the ground up of an ancient Game Boy title that looks about as good as the “A Boy and His Blob” remake from a while back.
In more-legitimate and more-new multi-platform releases, we’ve got quite a few options coming in March. The ‘Dollhouse’ sequel that Chris has been waiting for got delayed until this month. “Atomfall” is a ‘Fallout’ ripoff set in England, but with unfortunate amounts of Survival and Crafting bolted on (because that definitely isn’t overdone by Indie developers these days). ‘Killing Floor’ is getting a third entry. Gust and Tecmo-Koei are continuing to beat the dead horse of the ‘Atelier’ series of alchemy-themed (read: Crafting) RPGs with a new entry. “Assassin’s Creed: Shadows” is finally coming out of development hell to piss off all the Japanese gamers and Based Western gamers simultaneously with its Negro-Samurai main character. “Sugardew Island” is yet another ‘cozy’ Farm Sim game, only with the ‘cozy’ Item Shop Sim sub-genre grafted on for a double-dose of ‘cozy’ boredom. “Split Fiction” is the latest 2-player couch-coop-by-design title from Hazelight that Chris and I are looking forward to. Lastly, Sega is continuing its Management Sim ‘Two Point’ series with “Two Point Museum,” in which the player manages… wait for it… a… MUSEUM!
In exclusives we’ve got… oh, dear… definitely NOT system sellers! PlayStation is getting “United Assault – World War 2,” an anachronistic relic of a dreadful era of gaming I’d hoped we were well past (though if I had a choice between gaming being dominated by banal WWII FPSes or Soulslikes, I’d take WWII FPSes all day, every day). The Switch is still getting the last dregs of love it will ever get before it is unceremoniously replaced by the Switch 2… and that ‘love’ takes the form of yet another in(s)ane Visual Novel, “Despera Drops” (which sounds like something the G.I. Joe villain with the silver mask would take or a sore throat).
Well that’s embarrassing for the Games Industry. Only three ‘new’ titles coming in March look to be worthwhile, and two of them are remakes. I’ll be picking up “Suikoden 1 & 2 HD Remaster” and “Bubble Ghost Remake” to enjoy alone (or rather, I’ll grab ‘Suikoden’ just to ‘have it’ since, as much as I enjoyed those games, I don’t want to dedicate 200 hours to replaying them... and I already have backups that are perfectly playable in RetroArch), while “Split Fiction” is a no-brainer pick-up for me and Chris to coop through when the other guys are being turds.
Backlog Embiggened: +3
