Summer is starting off with a bang, bringing us one of the most anticipated games of the year, one that will likely be on many “Best of 2020” lists at year’s end, and could very well be the biggest contender for Game of the Year (unless Cyberpunk has anything to say about it). I know it’s getting hot out there and you might be thinking about diving into the pool, but I say screw that, turn up the AC and play some video games instead. The outdoors are overrated.

Hey, it’s also the Summer which means it’s GIMMICK TIME! Last year we laughed and laughed and laughed at my hilarious parody lyrics to various summertime songs, but this year I’ll be bringing you video taped excursions where I read off a list of the new games coming out. Does this mean you can ignore the rest of this column? No, I expect you to pour over every typed word like a Biblical scholar looking over the Dead Sea Scrolls, you got that! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this year’s gimmick, and who knows, if I have enough fun doing them I might just make it a permanent feature.

Top Releases:

The Last of Us Part II (PS4) – Releases Jun. 19^th

Sony and developer Naughty Dog’s latest title is probably one of the most anticipated games of 2020, if not one of the most anticipated games of this entire console generation. After a slew of delays, series protagonists Ellie and Joel are back at it again in The Last of Us Part II. Set some years after the events of the first game, Part II seems to have a bigger focus on Ellie this time, leaving us to wonder what exactly happened to her relationship with Joel, and if he’s even still around. Early reviews have been mostly positive, but there are some critics saying that the game doesn’t quite deliver on the hype, and that the focus on gratuitous violence is, well, too gratuitous. I’m not sure I need to say much more about this game, it’s going to be a smash hit and many of us are likely going to be playing it, I assume. It’s a grim and gritty tale that seems to promise a high level of drama and sadness, and while games can be an escape, they’re just like any other work of art that want to serve as a warning, or a cautionary tale. Things are getting rough out there in the real world, let’s see what The Last of Us Part II is trying to say about it, and find out what we can learn from it.

Desperados III (PC/PS4/Xbox One) – Releases Jun. 16^th

2020 has been an embarrassment of riches when it comes to tactical, isometric shooters. We’ve had two high profile releases, Gears Tactics and XCOM: Chimera Squad, that have both been phenomenal games, so can Desperados III continue the trend? Maybe!

Summer in Mara (PC/Switch) – Releases Jun. 16^th

If the dark and depressing world of The Last of Us Part II is too much for you, but you still want to play a game as a female protagonist, let me recommend Summer in Mara. Taking heavy inspiration from games like Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, and The Legend of Zelda, you play as a young girl named Koa who is spending her Summer having one hell of an adventure. Travel across a vast ocean with over 20 different islands to explore, harvest crops, make friends, and build villages. With a bountiful amount of quests to undertake you should have no problem making this one unforgettable Summer! Keep in touch! Stay cool! Call me! 555-1981.

Pokemon Sword & Shield: The Isle of Armor (Switch) – Releases Jun. 17^th

Have you already conquered every gym and explored every nook and cranny that the Galar region has to offer? Well then take a trip to the beautiful Isle of Armor, where the Pokemon are plentiful and the challenge is great. Explore several new areas, including a forest, a cave, a swamp, a desert, and a beach, each more vibrant than the last! As an added bonus, there’s even a new gym leader to take on (or I guess they’re called Dojo’s now? IDK), allowing you to show off your well trained Pokemon in hardcore fisticuffs. Kii-yah!!

 

Ports and Re-releases:

Darius Cozmic Collection: Arcade & Console (PS4/Switch) – Releases Jun. 16^th

The Darius series of horizontal shooters have been delighting and frustrating gamers for 33 years, and in that time they’ve released a TON of games (with varying degrees of quality). Having been released last year in Japan, we are now getting a digital and physical release here in the West, hooray! While the (very limited) physical edition comes with every game in the collection, digital buyers will see them separated by “Arcade” and “Console”. I can’t really tell you which is better than the other, in fact I’d wager there isn’t much difference between the two, however, the Arcade collection comes with Darius Gaiden which is, in this writers opinion, the peak of the series. Just look at that giant robot fish in the image above! IT’S AWESOME!!

Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 & 2 (PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One) – Releases Jun. 18^th

If retro horizontal SHMUPS aren’t your kind of thing, industry titans Namco are releasing yet ANOTHER collection of retro titles under their Namco Museum banner; I hope you enjoy buying Pac-Man and Galaga again. Fear not, though, as Namco promises that some of these titles are making their North American debut, including a silly Splatterhouse spin-off for the NES. Vol. 1 includes: Galaxian, Pac-Man, Xevious, Mappy, Dig Dug, The Tower of Druaga, Sky Kid, Dragon Buster, Dragon Spirit: The New Legend, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, and Pac-Man Championship Edition. While Vol. 2 includes: Galaga, Battle City, Pac-Land, Dig Dug II, Super Xevious, Mappy-Land, Legacy of the Wizard, Rolling Thunder, Dragon Buster II, Mendel Palace, and Gaplus. It would be really nice if current owners of the Switch title Namco Museum Arcade Pac could get a discount on these, or better yet, turn this fucking thing into “games as a service” thing and just release each title one at a time for $2-$3 bucks apiece. Why am I not running Bandai Namco, I have so many good ideas!!! I KNOW YOU’RE GETTING MY LETTERS!!!

Burnout Paradise Remastered (Switch) – Releases Jun. 19^th

Smash cars on your Switch while on a Summer road trip; it’s fun!

 

Expansions:

Dead by Daylight: Silent Hill (PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One) – Releases Jun. 16^th

Dead by Daylight, originally released in 2016, is an asymmetric “hide & seek” game for adults and cool teenagers who get to stay up late on school nights. In this game, one person plays a murderous psychopath while four other players work together to evade capture and survive the night. Over the years the game has had several expansions featuring licenses from popular horror films, including Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Evil Dead (to name a few), but this appears to be their first video game crossover. Silent Hill has been, well, silent for the past few years, with nothing new in the franchise aside from the famously cancelled Hideo Kojima/Guillermo Del Toro helmed Silent Hills (well, there was that pachinko machine…). Having this universe back on consoles in glorious high definition graphics is a welcome surprise,and I definitely have my fingers crossed that this leads to a full fledged new title, or, you know, another Pachinko machine. Oh, or maybe a slot machine in Vegas next to the Willy Wonka one!!

Everything else:

Disintegration (PC/PS4/Xbox One) – Releases Jun. 16^th

West of Dead (PC/Xbox One) – Releases Jun. 18^th (Coming to PS4 & Switch in August)

 

Notable Releases from 10, 20 and 30 years ago:

Let’s take a step back in time, to a place where Activision still had the license to Transformers, where it was cool to wear black trenchcoats and tiny sunglasses, and where kids across America were enthralled with the adventures of two cartoon chipmunks; IT’S NOTABLE RELEASES FROM 10, 20 AND 30 YEARS AGO!

Transformers: War For Cybertron/Cybertron Adventures (PC/PS3/NDS/Wii/Xbox 360) – Released Jun. 22^nd, 2010: Wiki Link

Developer High Moon Studios must have know that in the wake of Batman: Arkham Asylum the bar set for licensed games was high. Thankfully, for Transformers fans, they felt up to the challenge, releasing one hell of a fun game. Transformers fever was high in 2010, with two successful films on the market, and one more on the way, the public’s appetite for transforming robots was at a fever pitch. While there had been two cash-in movie tie-in games, those paled in comparison to the work that High Moon put into their title, creating the game that “they always wanted to play” according to director Matt Tieger. In a pitch meeting, Tieger and his team slid concept art for Bumblebee across the table to the Hasbro executives and asked for their feedback. From there it became a back and forth talk about setting, tone, and character motivation, and it was this passion for the property fthat inally convinced Hasbro to let High Moon do its thing. Setting the game during the Cybertron civil war, players could play through two separate storylines, one featuring the Decepticons and the other featuring the Autobots. The game allowed players to either go alone with AI partners, or team up with friends online, making their way through several stages of hardcore ‘bot on ‘bot mayhem. The story was more mature than the cartoons that most players had grown up with, but it wasn’t really, I guess, as flashy as the “grown-up” films were. A bit more rough, a bit more gritty, these robots were in a war, and war is always hell. Featuring several familiar voices, including Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, High Moon had done to Transformers what Rocksteady had done to Batman, and critics were pleased. Most of the praise was focused on the stellar voice acting as well as the strong story and writing, other critics were impressed with the new character models and the addictive multiplayer mode, receiving favorable comparisons to Unreal Championship and Team Fortress 2. Critics were less impressed with the art direction, finding the backgrounds and structures of Cybertron to be bland and uninspiring, and the difficulty at times was unnecessarily unfair with a major ammunition shortage, as well as poorly placed checkpoints. Despite the criticisms, the game was a hit with players and would spawn two sequels, and it was even considered part of the official Transformers: Prime canon. Sadly, in 2020 this game, as well as all other Activision published Transformers titles, were removed from digital storefronts due to the loss of the license, giving all of us yet another reason to hoard those plastic discs until the end of time.

Oh yeah! There were also Wii and DS versions that came out which were made by totally different teams that were not quite as universally loved, go figure.

Deus Ex (PC) – Released Jun. 17^th, 2000: Wiki Link

PC gaming in the 90’s was largely defined by one game, Doom, leading to the great FPS boom, with company after company creating their own clone of ID’s popular franchise. As the decade progressed you began to see some designers play around with the FPS genre in unique and exciting ways, such as Valve’s Half-Life and Looking Glass’ System Shock, with this latter title being made by one of the big names in the PC gaming world, Warren Spector. Stepping back a bit, in 1996, after being fired from ID, game designer John Romero would start his own game company in Dallas, Texas called Ion Storm, a kind of rowdy boys club that wanted to make sick-ass games for fucking sick-ass bro’s, bro. Across town at the Looking Glass Austin offices, Warren Spector was at a cross roads, wondering what he would do next. Looking Glass wasn’t giving him the creative freedom he wanted, and after fielding an offer from EA to work on an RPG version of Command & Conquer, Spector was contacted by John Romero with an offer to open up an Austin branch of Ion Storm and make any game he wanted, with no corporate interference. Not one to pass up an opportunity like that, Spector agreed and the PC gaming world was abuzz at the news. John Romero and his wild bunch in Dallas would make the hardcore gore-fest Daikatana, while Warren Spector and his group would make the thought-provoking and genre redefining Deus Ex.

Spector initially came up with the idea for Deus Ex in 1993 after completing work on Ultima Underworld II. The game, called Troubleshooter, would have used the first person perspective of Underworld but put in a modern real-world setting with a heavy emphasis on big-budget action sequences. When Spector and his team started work at Ion Storm they continued to pursue this idea, and eventually the game began to morph into something else. Noticing how fascinated his wife was with the program The X-Files, Spector thought it would be cool to give the game a conspiratorial tone, setting it in a futuristic world where groups like The Illuminati have gained full control of the world, and governments are merely shells, hiding the real people in power. With a target date of December, 1998, the game quickly grew in scope. Spector concedes that the initial release date was too ambitious and cited the team’s difficulty in creating believable AI, as well as a poor management structure at Ion Storm, and bad press surrounding the company and its games, as contributing factors to the game’s delay. In May of 2000 John Romero would finally release his also long delayed title Daikatana with the horrifyingly obtuse and tone deaf “John Romero’s About To Make You His Bitch…Suck It Down” ad campaign which almost assuredly cratered the game (not to mention it was terribly designed and worst of all, boring). After this debacle I’m sure that Spector and his team were more than likely very nervous about Deus Ex’s chances for success. On June 17th (or June 23rd), 2000, the public finally got a chance to see what Spector’s team had been working on, and the reception was outstanding.

Deus Ex received nearly universal praise from critics who were blown away by the amount of choice the player was given to accomplish their missions. While other recent games like Half-Life and System Shock 2 moved the FPS genre forward, they still felt like, for lack of a better term, “kid games”, or at least they still eschewed to the sensibilities laid out by Doom and its kin. Deus Ex felt mature and “grown up”, being viewed as a serious work of modern art that gamers could proudly hold up as being on the same level as supposed “high art” normally found in films, television, and novels. Critics weren’t totally in love with the game, however, and dinged it for its sometimes confusing level layout and, at times, frustrating controls. Other points of contention include the stilted dialog of main character JC Denton, the somewhat troubling and outrageous accents of foreign characters, as well as ugly graphics that didn’t quite match up to some of the other games released in the era. As far as sales go, the game did well in the U.S., selling at a slow but steady pace, however sales were on FIRE in the UK, with the game dominating the PC sales charts over the Summer, beating out both The Sims and the soon to be discussed Diablo II. By the end of the year Deus Ex would appear on just about every “Best of…” list you could find, and would be nominated by several outlets for “Game of the Year” and win just about every “Best PC Game” award it was eligible for. In 2003 a sequel, Invisible War, would come out, this time with Spector in a supervisor role, and then after a prolonged hiatus the series would return in 2011 under the guidance of a brand new team and studio with the release of Human Revolution and its follow-up Mankind Divided. Weak sales of this latest title prompted the studio to shift its focus to the more popular Tomb Raider reboot series, and they are now working on the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers, slated for release in late 2020. Despite being one of the greatest games of all time, the franchise has gone stagnant, a lost soul without a home. I don’t know how to end this so here’s a Mega64 video:

Here’s another one for good measure:

Adventures in the Magic Kingdom/Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers (NES) – Released Jun. 1990: Wiki Link: Magic Kingdom. Wiki Link: Chip ‘N Dale

It’s getting late so we’re just going to kind of breeze through these, okay? Okay. After the success of DuckTales (and to some extent Mickey Mousecapade) Capcom hit North American players with the 1-2 punch of Adventures in the Magic Kingdom and Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers. Well, more like a 1 punch, 1 super weak ass punch that failed to connect and flew straight into the garbage after slipping on a banana peel. Let’s start with the shit first, and okay, yes I’m probably being more rough on Magic Kingdom that I need to be, but it’s just bad. Set in a condensed, slapped together amalgamation of Disneyland, WDW’s Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo Disneyland, players must travel to five different rides in the park where they must complete a series challenges. Once all five are completed the player is given a key which can they use to unlock Cinderella’s castle to start the noon parade, which if you miss you’ll be forced to wait for the 12:05 one (look it up). The stages are fairly uninspired, but for Disneyland junkies it can be kind of neat seeing digital representations of Space Mountain, The Haunted Mansion, Autopia, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Big Thunder Mountain. I won’t bore you too much with the details, but each stage is at least unique in that you have a mix of racing, side scrolling platforming, and even an early first person on rails shooter. On paper this sounds like it could be a fun game, but control problems plague this (most likely rushed) game, and at the end of the day it’s just too boring to be worth your time.

Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers, on the other hand, is by far one of the strongest (and most fun) titles in Capcom’s Disney line-up. The game was produced by prolific Capcom developer Tokuro Fujiwara who had previously directed the NES port of Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and was fresh off producing Mega Man 2 and…oh geez, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. Set in the same universe as the television series, player one would take on the role of Chip, while player 2 would control Dale, on a quest to save their friend Gadget from the clutches of the evil Fat Cat. Critics at the time were enthralled with the game’s graphics and superior controls, but lamented the relative ease of the game, saying that an experienced player would be able to easily finish it in just a few minutes (and we think a game is short when it’s only 12 hours long). Despite the minor criticisms, the game would go on to sell over 1 million copies and was the recipient of the 1990 Parents’ Choice Award for Best Video Game. The game maintained a fairly stellar reputation over the years, being placed on many “Best of the NES” and “Best Disney Games” lists. The title was recently released to modern consoles and PC as part of the Disney Afternoon Collection, which also features its 1993 sequel, as well as a handful of other Capcom Disney titles…none of which are Adventures in the Magic Kingdom.

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