Well, it’s just about time to say goodbye to another year of new releases. After 49 weeks we finally get a break, thank goodness. I’m not going to give commentary this week, the holiday blues have me the color of the Na’vi. Maybe if you watch this video it will cheer me up…

Top Releases:

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Dec. 7^th

Developed by: Massive Entertainment
Published by: Ubisoft

Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising (PC/PS4/PS5) – Releases Dec. 14^th

Developed by: Arc System Works
Published by: Cygames

Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance (PC) – Releases Dec. 7^th

Developed by: Slitherine Ltd.
Published by: Slitherine Ltd.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Dec. 7^th

Developed by: Owlcat Games
Published by: Owlcat Games

Hell Well (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Dec. 13^th

Developed by: Panda Indie Studio
Published by: Eastasiasoft Limited

Outer Wilds: Archaeologist Edition (Switch) – Releases Dec. 7^th

Pokémon Scarlet/Violet: Hidden Treasures of Area Zero Part 2 – The Indigo Disk (Switch) – Releases Dec. 14^th

Everything else:

• Born of Bread (PC/Switch) – Releases Dec. 5^th
• A Highland Song (PC/Switch) – Releases Dec. 5^th
• The Day Before (PC) – Releases Dec. 7^th
• While the Iron’s Hot (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Dec. 7^th

Notable Releases from 10, 20, and 30 (and sometimes 40) years ago:

Welcome to Notable Releases, your favorite article within an article. Today we have four classic titles to talk about, so let’s not waste anymore time and dive right in.

From 2013 we have one of the most anticipated games of that year, The Walking Dead: Season Two. The first Walking Dead video game helped turn Telltale Games into a major player in the video game industry and their follow-up release, The Wolf Among Us, was getting rave reviews after it launched in October of 2013. Still, players were eager to dive back into the world of The Walking Dead and see what fate befell new series protagonist, Clementine. After being a side character in the first game, Clementine finds herself in the drivers seat for Season 2, taking the lessons she learned from her former protector/mentor, Lee, who found a tragic ending in Season 1.

While the writing team entertained the idea of either making the protagonist a new protector for Clementine, or to abandon the character altogether to tell a new story, they felt that players needed to know what happened to Clementine after the events of Season 1, and that she should be the one to tell her own story (so to speak). The writers made a strong effort to make players feel though they were a child living in a harsh world all alone. It was less about players keeping Clementine safe and more about who the player, as Clementine, could trust. One of the biggest things in the minds of the writers, their key concept, was that Clementine was an eleven year old girl living in a world where no one cares that she’s an elven year old girl, for all the good and bad that comes with that.

The critical reception to The Walking Dead: Season 2 was overwhelmingly positive, though come critics felt it lacked some of the emotional heft that Season 1 had. Critics were also dismayed to see that there were fewer hub worlds, like you had in the Season 1, and that your choices felt a lot less impactful than they had previously. It would take about eight months for the full story to be told, as the game was released episodically in five parts, with a retail version released on disc shortly after the final episode. The critics aren’t totally wrong, The Walking Dead: Season 2 isn’t as impactful as the first season, but it still tells a gripping, emotional journey, putting players into the shoes of a protagonist that you almost never see, for that, I applaud it.

Moving to 2003, we have another highly anticipated sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and, like The Walking Dead: Season 2, people liked it well enough, it just wasn’t as good as the first entry. Unlike the first Deus Ex, Invisible War was developed from the start to be both a PC game AND a console game, meaning that the game needed to be controller friendly, with less menus to navigate and a more streamlined story with less player choice in how they could accomplish their goals.

It turned out to be a double edged sword, as critics tended to like the quality of life improvements made to the game for consoles, the first Deus Ex was well known for the incredible amount of freedom that players were given. Having this scaled back made the game less unpredictable and more like, well, a generic console FPS game. Granted, Invisible War wasn’t a bad game, most critics back in 2003 really enjoyed it, with the magazine GamePro going to far as to give it a perfect score.

However, modern critics have reevaluated Invisible War and find it to be the weakest entry in the series. While the first game had its share of problems, like clunky controls and dated graphics, it was still seen as a very important and influential piece of software. Invisible War seemed to eschew the more experimental concepts of the first game in favor of mainstream appeal. Later entries, once console specs had improved, were also seen as more enjoyable entries than Invisible War and seemed to capture the spirit of both the first Deus Ex, and the more “console friendly” aspects of Invisible War.

Our notable release from 1993 is considered one of the greatest point & click adventure games of all time, Sierra’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Created by Jane Jensen, a writer at Sierra who had most recently worked with Roberta Williams on her game King’s Quest VI, Jensen took inspiration from gothic horror novels and films, particularly the 1987 film Angel Heart. Set in a world where supernatural beings exist, Gabriel Knight opens in New Orleans, where the player, as Knight, is looking for inspiration for a new novel (one that they hope will actually be a success). During his research, Knight is thrust into a world of voodoo and black magic, that leads him to seek out his family roots in Germany.

Jensen has stated that the working environment at Sierra was a positive one for creatives and artists, as the lead guy, Ken Williams, would often let one of their designers make whatever game they wanted. If it failed, it failed, and you got moved to another project. If it was a hit, though, well then you were looking at a new franchise. Gabriel Knight was, well, not so much a hit, but it wasn’t a failure either. Despite selling less than 300k copies, the game was a major critical success and, in my opinion, was the type of game that I think Sierra, Roberta Williams particularly, was looking to continue making. Soon after the release of Gabriel Knight you would get more mature titles from Sierra like Phantasmagoria, Police Quest: SWAT, and Shivers.

Sins of the Fathers would be followed up by two sequels (spawning the infamous “cat hair mustache” puzzle), while a 20th anniversary remaster would release in 2014 with updated graphics, sound, music, and puzzles (hopefully no mustache related ones). The original game is still available easily through Steam or GOG, and is worth your time, so check it out!

Our 1983 title, Space Ace, is a follow-up to a game we discussed earlier this year, the laserdisc arcade game Dragon’s Lair. Created by the same team at Don Bluth Productions, Space Ace took the same gameplay elements, a bunch of quick tie events (QTEs), and set the story in the far future, where humans have mastered space travel. Of course, with this new found exploration, comes new enemies, and an evil alien named Commander Borf is dead set on using his “Infanto Ray” to turn all humans into infants, letting him easily conquer the planet.

Space Ace had all the same problems as Dragon’s Lair, constantly breaking and being incredibly expensive to maintain. For those arcade owners that wanted to continue displaying the game, a conversion kit was sent, allowing them to swap out Dragon’s Lair, or they could purchase a new, updated cabinet that they hoped wouldn’t bankrupt them with repairs.

Critics were quick to point out that the game’s animation was spectacular, showing just how talented the team at Don Bluth Productions was. The game play, on the other hand, was just as finnicky and unresponsive as Dragon’s Lair. As a player, you were probably better off standing behind the sucker pumping quarters into the machine and watching them play. At least you wouldn’t be as frustrated and broke. Like Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace was ported to just about every CD-ROM based console on the market, and even received a release on DVD and Blu-Ray. Check it out, or just watch the full thing above, it’s only about eight minutes long.

Wow, a a great crop of games, huh? I particularly liked that one game, but didn’t really LOVE that other game. Let’s now move to films and albums, because I love movies & music about as much as I love video games. 2013 saw the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the latest films to enter the pantheon of “bro” films, where frat boys don’t learn any of the lessons from the movie and think that the main character is a good guy.

2003’s notable film is one of the greatest of all-time and capped off an incredible feat of filmmaking from director Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Now, personally, I think 2003 had a lot really great films that should have won the Oscar for Best Picture, Mystic River chief among them, but you can’t really fault the Academy too much for awarding Return of the King. What Peter Jackson and his team pulled off was incredible, and left an amazing set of films to be enjoyed by generations of movie watchers; good for them.

1993’s notable film was another Best Picture winner, Schindler’s List, which also got Steven Spielberg his first Oscar for best director. This is definitely NOT a feel good, holiday film to watch with the family, but it’s one of the most powerful pieces of film you’ll ever see. On the other side of the coin we have 1983’s Christine from horror master John Carpenter.

After the commercial failure of 1982’s The Thing, Carpenter turned himself into a hired gun, shooting whatever piece of shit script was next offered to him. That script turned out to be Christine, the Stephen King novel, about a killer car, that hadn’t even hit store shelves yet. Carpenter made a few changes to the story, condensed things, and put out a simple little thriller that didn’t really wow critics (King himself called it one of the most boring movies he’d ever seen), but audiences found it charming enough. The good news is that it kept Carpenter working in Hollywood, with his next film, Starman, being one of his biggest hits.

Moving to notable albums, Beyoncé shocked the world in 2013 when she shadow dropped her new album Beyoncé on Friday, December 13th which was almost unheard of at that point. The majority of albums in the United States came out on Tuesday, but Beyoncé bucked the trend and chose Friday, with the record industry following suit and making Friday the standard release day in February of 2015. Beyoncé was also notable for its visual component, with every song on the album receiving an accompanying video. Famously, Beyoncé would, once again, lose a major award, this time at the Grammy’s, to the artist Beck, with Kanye West faux threatening to derail the acceptance speech again.

2003 saw the release of the album Tasty by Kelis. You might think you don’t know anything about this album, but I can guarantee that you’ve heard its lead single, “Milkshake”. Yes, that song. You’re already singing it in your head. 1993 continued the string of hip-hop albums that dominated the back half of the year with Ice Cube’s Lethal Injection. I listened to this over the past week and didn’t recognize any of the songs, aside from “Bop Gun (One Nation)” which samples the Funkadelic song “One Nation Under a Groove”, and only because I know that P-Funk song.

Finally, 1983 gave us the debut album Show No Mercy from the band SLAYER! (you are legally contracted to spell it like that). Despite criticism for its poor production value, Show No Mercy was a big commercial hit for SLAYER’S! record label, Metal Blade Records. Most bands on the label were lucky to sell 5,000 albums in their lifetime, SLAYER! sold almost 20,000 copies of Show No Mercy. SLAYER’S! emergence in the early days of the heavy metal scene solidified their status as kings of the genre. Throw up those horns, metal heads, it’s fucking SLAYER!

The Walking Dead: Season Two – Released Dec. 17^th, 2013: Wiki Link

Deus Ex: Invisible War (PC/Xbox) – Released Dec. 2^nd, 2003: Wiki Link

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (PC) – Released Dec. 17^th, 1993: Wiki Link

Space Ace (Arcade) – Released Dec. 21^st, 1983: Wiki Link

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Folks, that’s going to do it, not just this week, but, for the rest of the year! 2023 is just about over and it’s time for this column to go on hiatus for a three weeks. I’ll be here next Tuesday (and Wednesday) with the 2023 Buyer’s Guide Part 1 & 2. I’ll see you then!