New Game Releases 07/30/24 – 08/05/24

Top Releases:

There’s new games this week but they aren’t, well “new”, exactly. Well, okay, there are a few BRAND NEW titles coming out this week, like the eagerly anticipated sequel World of Goo 2, the surreal Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and the metroidvania Mars 2120, but the real stars are all of the ports.

First up is the PSX title Tomba!, an action/adventure game where you play as the titular pink haired protagonist, throwing rocks and shit at pigs. This was one of my favorite games on the PSX back when it came out and I can’t wait to check it out again!

Tomba! Special Edition (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch) – Releases Jul. 31^st

Next, we have another action/adventure game, this time from the PS2/GameCube era; Star Wars: Bounty Hunter. While not exactly beloved when it first game, receiving average review scores, there’s a nostalgia for the Star Wars prequel films that every thirty-something seems to be going through. This new version boasts enhanced graphics and tweaked controls, does that make it any better? Probably not.

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Aug. 1^st

Finally, we have a re-release for all those forty-something’s out there, Aero the Acro-Bat. This platforming title from Iguana Entertainment (eventual creators of the Turok games) also received average reviews (closer to below average). However, because we are now in a new era of re-releasing anything and everything, old review scores don’t matter. All that matters is that you remember renting this from Blockbuster when you were seven, having Pizza Hut, and drinking Coca-Cola from a 2 liter bottle. Remember sitting on the carpeted floor in your living room? Remember when your parents still loved each other? Remember when grandma used to give you Life Savers candy in church and one of those little Chick tract comics to keep you from getting bored? I’m sad now.

Aero The Acro-Bat (PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Aug. 1^st

World of Goo 2 (PC/Switch) – Releases Aug. 2^nd

Developed by: 2D Boy
Published by: Tomorrow Corporation

Mars 2120 (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Jul. 31^st

Developed by: QUByte Interactive
Published by: QUByte Interactive

Thank Goodness You’re Here! (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch) – Releases Aug. 1^st

Developed by: Coal Supper
Published by: Panic

Everything else:

We’ve got even more ports down here! My most anticipated is the very weird Pinball Quest coming out for the Switch. This is an old NES game where you don’t just play basic pinball, you there are also RPG elements with enemies to slay and a princess to rescue. Sign me up!

• Bitmap Bureau Collection (PS5/Switch) – Releases Jul. 24^th
• Death Noodle Delivery (Switch) – Releases Jul. 31^st
• Pinball Quest (Switch) – Releases Jul. 31^st

Notable Releases from 10, 20, and 30 years ago:

Alright, enough about new old games, lets talk about new old games; got it? Good.

First up, we have the hack & slash dungeon crawler, Sacred 3. While the game is technically part of the Sacred trilogy of titles, fans of the series were dismayed to find that the entire art style and tone of the game had changed. What was once a fairly serious, dark, open world RPG, had turned into a jokey, brightly colored, linear brawler with some very Avengers style, Whedon-esque dialog (it’s funny that this came out the same week as the film Guardians of the Galaxy, the new film people go to when there’s snarky dialogue in a game/movie).

Sacred 3 was developed and published by a studio called Keen Games and published by Deep Silver, following the near total closure of the original developer Ascaron Entertainment. After the lukewarm reception to Sacred 2 and its myriad bugs, Keen and Deep Silver wanted to put out a product that was polished & fun to play, and they mostly did that. Mostly.

Despite looking nice and running well, Sacred 3 was just too generic to stand out in the crowded video game market. The original fan base felt pushed away in favor of a more modern gaming audience, unfortunately for Keen and Deep Silver, that audience didn’t show up. Critics felt that Sacred 3 was an average game, made with an average budget, for an average gamer. It alienated its core fan base and didn’t give fans of the hack & slash genre anything new. Oh well.

2004’s notable title is a far better game, one that you could consider as one of the best of its year, Doom 3. It had been ten years since Doom II, and seven years since the last game in the series, Doom 64. What had once been the most dominating game franchise in the industry had new seen itself surpassed by titles like Quake and Half-Life.

The era of the 2D FPS game was over, 3D was the hot shit and Doom needed to be brought into the 20th century. No more pixel sprites, we’re talking cold, hard, 3D polygons, bay-bee. Before, Doom was faux-3D, now it was real, real 3D! Not to belabor the point any further but, back in 2004, the idea of seeing the world of Doom in true 3D was mind blowing and people couldn’t wait.

Despite the popularity of the franchise, there were some at id Software that returning to the Doom well would make the studio look desperate and nostalgic for the past. They were, instead, focused on continuing the Quake franchise demanding even more games in that very profitable series. Let that sink in; instead of returning to a franchise that was beloved, the executives wanted to, instead, continue to pumping out titles in a franchise that was starting to show weakness in the market. Gotta love executives.

However, original Doom programmer John Carmack, as well as a few other id employees, demanded that they be allowed to make Doom 3 or be fired. Not wanting to lose Carmack, the executives at id relented and allowed them to start work on Doom 3 after the launch of Quake 3 Arena (however, one guy had to be fired to teach them a lesson, that poor chap was artist Paul Steed, who has since passed away).

Despite being called Doom 3, the game is more like a remake of the first Doom, with players taking on the role of a nameless space marine who is called to a research base on Mars run by the company UAC. Once there, players get a bit of back story about odd happenings around the base, like hearing strange voices in the dark, sightings of strange creatures, and employees getting hurt in bizarre accidents.

Of course, we all know what comes next, the scientists open a portal to Hell and demons come flooding through. Players must then survive this horrific ordeal, dispatching enemies with an increasingly outlandish arsenal of weapons. Another thing that sets this apart from the original Doom is that players will often come across NPCs, both friendly and unfriendly, who advance the game’s plot.

Doom 3 was well received by critics when it released, receiving mostly positive accolades. Particular praise was given to the game’s engine, id Tech 4, which John Carmack built from the ground up. Critics felt that Doom 3 was one of the best looking games ever made (up to that point) and had superb graphics on even the lowest settings. The game’s story and atmosphere also went a long way with critics, who called it engrossing and terrifying. Doom 3 is filled with many dark rooms and corridors, with players having to choose to either hold up a flashlight, or hold up their gun, making for some very tense moments.

At the two big game award shows, Doom 3 would be nominated in several categories, losing just about all of them to Valve’s Half-Life 2. In the aftermath of Doom 3, the game would receive an expansion called Resurrection of Evil and was supposed to get a sequel, Doom 4, which would be a remake of Doom II. However, the sequel was cancelled and John Carmack left id Software shortly after. The series would return in 2016 with the title Doom, which appears to ignore the events of Doom 3 and picks up after Doom II. That still hasn’t stopped Doom 3 from getting re-released, with the game easily available today on any of your favorite modern gaming platforms.

From 1994, we’ve got the arcade fighting game Primal Rage. While 1991’s Street Fighter II kicked off the fighting game craze, it was 1992’s Mortal Kombat that appears to have had a bigger influence on Primal Rage, due to the game’s excessive violence and blood. It also, like Mortal Kombat, featured character sprites that were filmed and digitized. However, instead of human actors, the characters in Primal Rage were created using stop motion figurines.

Developed by Atari, the concept for Primal Rage was cooked up at a Time Warner Interactive developers retreat (Atari was owned by TWI at the time). Two developers, artist Jason Leong brought up the idea of a dinosaur fighting game, while another, unnamed developer, also had a similar idea, but with only T-Rex’s. Working together, Leong and this other developer came up with the final idea for Primal Rage, in which seven ancient gods are re-awakened and must fight for supremacy of a post apocalyptic Earth called, of course, Urth.

Primal Rage was considered a fairly easy game to pick up and play, with only four buttons for attacking as opposed to SF2’s six, and favored “button mashers” with many of the special moves just kind of being odd combinations of joystick movement and multiple buttons pressed at the same time. Perhaps because of its ease of play, Primal Rage was a major financial success in the arcade for Atari/TWI, being one of the highest grossing cabinets of the year.

Critics found Primal Rage’s ease of play and low price point of $0.25 cents to be incredibly enticing to players, and correctly predicted that this would lead to high revenue. However, critics did find that the game was wildly unbalanced and had reservations about its shelf life. The success of the game led it to be ported to just about every console of its era. One of the best received as a version for the Game Boy, which was praised for its graphics and stability on the handheld. However, critics were far less impressed with the SNES and Genesis ports, calling them cheap imitations with ugly graphics and terrible controls.

Atari and TWI seemed poised to go all in with Primal Rage, commissioning a comic book from the independent company Sirius Entertainment, releasing action figures of the seven characters, and greenlighting a sequel almost immediately. However, like the critics predicted, Primal Rage had a short shelf life. The game failed to retain its audience once they realized how little depth there was to the game, leading to the cancellation of Primal Rage II. However, Atari and TWI seemed to think that they had a story good enough, and a fan base rabid enough, to see that a novelization of Primal Rage II hit store shelves, giving fans closure on what was certainly one of the oddest games of the 1990’s.

Okay, on to movies. like I mentioned above, our notable film of 2014 is James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a breath of fresh air into was was starting to become a somewhat stale Marvel Cinematic Universe. The team at Marvel Studios took a big gamble with GotG, letting a somewhat unknown director make a move about an almost completely unknown set of characters. The gamble paid off, though, as Guardians became a huge hit for Marvel Studios and allowed them to take greater risks in the future.

2004 saw another film that took a major risk, Harold & Kumar go to White Castle. Now you might be wondering why a buddy comedy about two stoners would be considered a risk, these kinds of movies are a dime a dozen. However, Harold & Kumar’s big risk came with the race of its two lead actors. At the time, having Asians and Indians in your film wasn’t unheard of, but having them play the lead roles was revolutionary. By 2004, it was almost unheard of to have an Asian male or Indian male in a film without them also having some kind of ridiculous accent, which is baffling to think about, and even more baffling that it took an idiotic stoner comedy to break that mold.

Writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg came up with the idea for the film when they realized that none of the comedies they watched featured a group of friends that looked like theirs. In college, the two writers had a very diverse group of friends and wanted to see that represented on screen. Their idea was to cook up two characters, Harold (played by John Cho and based on a real friend) & Kumar (played by Kal Penn), two friends that liked to get high, and put them in wacky situations. When Hurwitz & Schlossberg started shopping their scripts around Hollywood they were adamant that the two leads be played by an Asian and Indian, going so far as to include very specific dialog and situations that would play up their heritage.

However, they writers also didn’t want these characters to be stereotypical, fish out of water types with outrageous accents. They wanted to be both fiercely American but also fiercely tied to their ethnic heritage. It’s all a lot of work for a movie that is, once again, a fucking stupid stoner comedy full of dick jokes and titties.

The reception to Harold & Kumar went beyond what its distributor New Line Cinema ever imagined. With a budget of $9 million dollars, the film went on to gross almost $25 million worldwide. Critics loved the movie, calling it smart & edgy with two incredibly likeable leads. The movie was a stoner comedy on the surface, but underneath it was a sweet story about two friends trying to navigate a world that is often confused by them, leading to comedic situation after comedic situation. I could go on and on about Harold & Kumar, it is one of my favorite movies ever made. Oh man, I didn’t even talk about Neil Patrick Harris! This movie completely resurrected his film & television career, with his How I Met Your Mother character, Barney, being created specifically because of this role. Okay, that’s it, I’m done. We gotta move on.

1994’s film, Airheads, uh, okay. Another dumb comedy, this time about three guys in a band who take over a radio station with fake guns in an effort to get their demo played on the air. It was a complete financial disaster and was hated by just about every critic, except Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. This is a completely forgettable 90’s comedy that no one ever needed, but it gave me a lot of laughs when it would play on Comedy Central, usually after another airing of the movie PCU. It’s dumb, but I like it.

Moving on to albums, 2014 saw the release of They Want My Soul by the alt-rock band Spoon. The album was highly praised by critics who called it one of the best releases of the year. It was a big financial success for the band as well, reaching the number 4 spot on the Billboard Top 200. Good for them.

From 2004, we’ve got Mr. Worldwide himself, Pitbull, with his debut album M.I.A.M.I., which stands for Money is a Major Issue. The album was mainly produced by rapper Lil Jon, and even featured work by a then unknown rapper/producer named DJ Khaled. M.I.A.M.I. did very well for Pitbull, reaching number 15 on the Billboard Top 200 and selling over 500k copies, making it certified gold.

The album was a love letter to Pitbull’s home town of Miami, and played up his extravagant lifestyle and all of the glitz & glamour that the beaches of Miami offer. There were five singles released, including “Culo” and “Toma”, which featured Lil Jon screaming things like “yeah” and “what”, shit like that.

Our last notable album of the week is 1994’s Portrait of an American Family by the shock rocker Marilyn Manson. Like Pitbull, Marilyn Manson cut their teeth in the South Florida area, specifically Fort Lauderdale, where they gained a sizeable following due to their chaotic live shows. This attracted the attention of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, who quickly signed the band his record label Nothing.

The band initially recorded the album in 1993, and intended to call it The Manson Family Album, but were unhappy with the recording and mixing. The band, along with Reznor, took the recording to LA to remix it and add new parts. Much of the drumming was replaced with electronic beats, and the album was renamed Portrait of an American Family. Parent label Interscope apparently had a hard time getting the album released, mostly due to the cover art, but it was also understood that most of the people there hated the band, particularly Manson himself.

Despite objections, Portrait was eventually released, failing to chart and being regarded as a commercial failure. Manson was upset with the label after release, blaming them for their failure to promote the band & album. The group would eventually go on a huge tour with Nine Inch Nails, increasing their exposure, and finally getting Portrait on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. Their fame would only grow after this, with the 1995 single “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and their major commercial breakthrough, 1996’s Antichrist Superstar. We’ll get into that in two years. Stay safe until then!

Sacred 3 (PC/PS3/Xbox 360) – Released Aug. 5^th, 2014: Wiki Link

Doom 3 (PC) – Released Aug. 3^rd, 2004: Wiki Link

Primal Rage (Arcade) – Released Aug. 3^rd, 1994: Wiki Link

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