It’s a slow week for new releases, and I’m also about to go on vacation so let’s just call this my own little “snow day” and get right to the action.

Top Releases:

South Park: Snow Day! (PC/PS5/Switch/Series X|S) – Releases Mar. 26^th

Developed by: Question
Published by: THQ Nordic

Open Roads (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Mar. 28^th

Developed by: Open Roads Team
Published by: Annapurna Interactive

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles (PC/PS4/PS5/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Mar. 26^th

Developed by: Tomas Sala
Published by: Wired Productions

Farming Simulator Kids (Android/iOS/Switch) – Releases Mar. 26^th

Developed by: GIANTS Software
Published by: GIANTS Software

Everything else:

• Necrosmith 2 (PC) – Releases Mar. 26^th
• Felix the Cat Collection (PS4/PS5/Switch) – Releases Mar. 28^th
• Pepper Grinder (PC/Switch) – Releases Mar. 28^th

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

Moving on to notable releases, another one I’m going to try and speed through, we’ve got the 2014 title Goat Simulator. Created as a goof during an internal game jam at developer Coffee Stain Studios, a trailer for the game was released on YouTube as a joke, but the premise grabbed the attention of the internet and, soon enough, Coffee Stain was in full development on the title.

Goat Simulator is, despite what the title suggests, NOT a simulation of a goat’s life; that’s the joke. It is, for lack of a better description, an open world Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-like title but, instead of performing skateboard tricks, you take control of a goat and make it do tricks in an attempt to achieve a high score. That’s pretty much the whole game, too, with little in the way of goals to achieve, the entire point of Goat Simulator is to do outrageous things as a goat.

Despite the “internet’s” “love” for the Goat Simulator, the game turned out to be somewhat of a critical flop. While the game was left intentionally unfinished, critics didn’t realize just how frustrating it would be to play the game with most of its bugs still in place (Coffee Stain said they only focused on fixing game crashing bugs). The joke was paper thin and assumed that, after a few minutes with Goat Simulator, most players would get bored with the game. They were wrong.

While Critics almost universally hated the game, players turned Goat Simulator into a massive, MASSIVE, financial success for Coffee Stain, with the developer reportedly making the game’s entire budget back in less than six minutes. The game’s popularity was due in large part to streamers like PewDiePie and Fernanfloo making video about the game and putting them on YouTube. Goat Simulator, as well as 2013’s Surgeon Simulator (also made famous by PewDiePie) were seen as the first in a string of goofy games tailor made for YouTube and streaming, sometimes referred to as “YouTube Bait” games, which are titles designed to only appeal to an audience watching, as they contain nearly no redeeming gameplay values.

After a year in the market, Goat Simulator had sold over 2.5 million copies and made over $12 million in revenue, far outpacing the revenues generated by Coffee Stain’s earlier titles, Sanctum and Sanctum 2. Despite what critics (and some players) may think of Goat Simulator, it made Coffee Stain one of the most successful independent games studios ever and gave them an audience, one that happily picked up their next title, Satisfactory. In 2022, Goat Simulator 3 came out and, once again, had a joke right in the title because, you know, it wasn’t the third one, it was only the second!!!

Heading to 2004, we’ve got Crytek’s first game, the FPS title Far Cry. Originally conceived as a tech demo for the CryEngine, Crytek’s proprietary game engine, Fry Cry was considered one of most impressive looking games on the market and was used as a benchmark for high end PC’s in 2004. The game centers around an unnamed US Army Special Forces soldier who finds himself stranded on a chain of tropical island. The soldier is on a mission to find a kidnapped journalist named Valerie and, in the course of his search, discovers that the island is used for genetic testing on humans.

Crytek wanted to make a game that showed how dangerous it would be for governments to start weaponizing genetics, while also making a statement about the genocide of tribespeople by early settlers/colonizers. Looking back, however, I’m curious just how much of Crytek’s political message got through to the casual players of Far Cry, when all they wanted to do was blow shit up.

The critical reception to Far Cry was mostly positive, with critics calling the game impressive and gorgeous. Despite being touted as an open world game, most critics found that the linear structure of the missions kept the game feeling too constrained, with little freedom to explore the island at your own pace. The game was a big financial success and spawned ports to the Xbox and Xbox 360, before becoming a massive franchise for the game’s publisher Ubisoft. If you’re wondering why Crytek stepped away from the franchise, that is because Ubisoft acquired the full rights to the game and its assets, in a somewhat petty move after Crytek entered into a partnership with EA to make what would become Crysis.

Going back to 1994, we’ve got another first entry in a long running franchise, Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Sometime in the early 1990’s, three Bethesda employees, Ted Peterson, Julian Lefay, and Vijay Lakshman came up with the idea to create a RPG that focused on players controlling a traveling caravans of fighters, moving from city to city, in an attempt to be the greatest arena warriors on the continent of Tamriel. In-between battles, players could go on side quests to increase their stats and collect treasures to help them in their next arena battle. This is, however, not at all what the final product turned out to be.

Early on, the team began to find that they were having a lot more fun with the side quests than they were with the arena battles. Slowly, but surely, the team began to remove elements of the arena fighting aspect until it was completely removed from the game. They also found that controlling a party of characters was not really much fun, finding that having one, central character was far better. Like its later predecessors, Arena is a massive, open world RPG where players are given the freedom to explore in any direction, taking on quests and exploring dungeons. The size of Arena is impossible to determine as the game has no boundaries, it will procedurally generate environments infinitely.

In order to reach a new town or city, players must fast travel there, breaking one of the game’s early marketing promises of being able to walk, on foot, from town to town (Bethesda lying about a feature…they wouldn’t dare…). Despite the change in gameplay, the marketing team went full steam ahead on the Arena name and even put a party of characters on the front cover (featuring a woman in the most unsafe armor ever made). When PC software retailers discovered that Arena didn’t actually feature any, ya know, ARENAS, they were incensed, feeling like they were going to be lying to their customers about the content of the game.

The low orders from retailers kept Arena from being a hit out of the gate, but, players would eventually catch on to the game through word of mouth. The PC market in the early to mid-90’s was, apparently, in an RPG drought, with most companies opting to make games in the FPS and point & click adventure genre. Arena was seen as a kind of throwback to the PC RPGs of the 80’s, but with a massive facelift (well, 1994 graphics facelift), and Bethesda started to see copies of the game fly off shelves almost a year after its initial release.

Critics went gaga for Arena, praising the game’s massive size and scope, its slick, modern graphics, and the multitude of side quests to perform. Some critics, however, felt that the giant, infinite open world was boring to explore, featuring very little to actually do in it. However, they couldn’t help but be in awe that a world this size existed in video games, and hoped Bethesda would do something more worthwhile with their open worlds in the future. 30 years later, Bethesda has done so much and more with their open world formula. With a sixth Elder Scrolls entry on the horizon, the franchise just keeps getting bigger and more impressive, here’s to another 30 years.

Our last game of the week is the Atari 2600 title H.E.R.O., an acronym for “Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operation”. In H.E.R.O., players take on the role of Roderick Hero, who must explore deep caves in order to rescue trapped miners. Roderick is equipped with two weapons, a head laser that he can use to zap bats, spiders, and other creatures, and dynamite which he can use to blow up rocks blocking his path.

Players navigate through the cave using a portable helicopter that is strapped to their back. Use of the helicopter will slowly burn through energy, while using the head laser causes the energy to burn faster. If the player runs out of energy then it is game over and they must start back at the beginning of the cave. When H.E.R.O. came out in March of 1984, the video game industry was still feeling the effects of the great video game crash of 1983, so H.E.R.O. was not the hit that Activision was hoping it would be.

While a bit overlooked in its time, the game would be re-discovered by modern players, with retrospective reviews calling it one of the best Atari 2600 games of all-time. Its visuals and gameplay were very unique for the 2600 and offered a glimpse of what games in the near future would look and play like. H.E.R.O. was ahead of its time, so what are you waiting for, go check it out!

Leaving games behind, let’s talk about the notable films. 2014 saw the release of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, a bizarre movie that, at first glace, appears to be a Marvel-esque super hero film. Giant rock monsters, swords with the power to set the ground on fire, and Ray Winstone as a super villain-ish barbarian, make this look more like Iron Man and less like The Ten Commandments. However, in reading up on the film, I found that much of the movie is based on the book of Enoch, a non-canonical book of the Bible that is, well, really weird.

Going back to 2004 we’ve got Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, a film written by a future Marvel director, James Gunn. Scooby-Doo 2 was number one at the box office, knocking out the previous week’s number one film, Dawn of the Dead, also written by James Gunn. This marked the first time that a screenwriter had the number one film in consecutive weeks.

1994 saw the release of the Martin Short comedy Clifford, about a psychotic ten year old (played by Short) who tortures his uncle (played by Charles Grodin) after he breaks his promise to take Clifford to the Dinosaur World amusement park. This was one of my absolute favorite movies when I was a kid. I would rent it from the video store constantly, and I thought Martin Short was just the absolute funniest guy on the planet. I watched it again recently and I gotta say, this movie holds up! It’s available on Amazon Prime as of this writing, I urge everyone to go out and watch this movie.

Our last film is 1984’s Romancing the Stone a romantic action/comedy from Robert Zemeckis. During production of Romancing the Stone, Zemeckis was also developing the film Cocoon for 20th Century Fox but, after a disastrous test screening of Stone, he was taken off the project and told to kick rocks. His next film was for Universal, a little movie called Back to the Future.

In notable albums, 2014 saw the release of Salad Days by the king of “slacker rock” Mac DeMarco. The album was written & recorded in DeMarco’s NYC apartment after finishing up the tour for his debut album, 2. DeMarco stated in interviews that he felt bummed out, tired, and grown up after the tour and that Salad Days reflects these feelings. Critics loved the album and it appeared on many “Best of” lists at the end of 2014.

From 2004 we have Janet Jackson’s Damita Jo, the album that she was supposed to be supporting at her Super Bowl appearance. It was, of course, overshadowed by the controversy surrounding her exposed breast during her halftime show performance. Sales of the album, while strong, were far less than Jackson’s previous albums, due in large part to her blacklisting from several television networks and radio stations who had to pay millions of dollars in fines to the FCC for the Super Bowl fiasco.

1994’s notable album is This Toilet Earth by the heavy metal band Gwar. The album proved to be a moderate success and helped the band gain some minor mainstream notoriety, though it wasn’t all good. Parent’s groups and censors were particularly outraged by the song “B.D.F.” (which stands for “Baby Dick Fuck”) which features comically over the top lyrics that refer to multiple sex acts (both legal and illegal), and ultra violence towards children. Put this on at your next party when you want people to leave.

Last, but not least, is the 1984 debut album First Offense from singer Corey Hart, featuring the mega hit “Sunglasses At Night”. While Hart would have a pretty successful career in Canada, he was mostly relegated to “one hit wonder” status in the U.S., failing to recapture the success that “Sunglasses At Night” had.

Goat Simulator (PC) – Released Apr. 1^st, 2014: Wiki Link

Far Cry (PC) – Released Mar. 23^rd, 2004: Wiki Link

The Elder Scrolls: Arena (PC) – Released Mar. 25^th, 1994: Wiki Link

H.E.R.O. (Atari 2600) – Released Mar. 30^th, 1984: Wiki Link

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