Top Releases:

• Monster Hunter Wilds (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Feb. 28^th
• PGA Tour 2K25 (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Feb. 28^th
• Ninja Five-O (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch) – Releases Feb. 25^th
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection (PC/Switch) – Releases Feb. 27^th

Happy Tuesday, I hope your week is starting off well! In regards to new releases, there isn’t a lot to pick from but, I mean, are you really going to play anything aside from Monster Hunter Wilds? From the sound of it, there’s not a lot that different in Wilds when compared to the other open world Monster Hunter game, World, but does that really matter? Every Monster Hunter game is the same, basically. You team up with friends (or NPCs) and capture giant monsters all in pursuit of better gear and weapons. This is all fine, the age old adage, “if it’s not broke don’t fix it“, applies here. I’m sure this will sell millions and then be forgotten like all of its predecessors.

Monster Hunter Wilds (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Feb. 28^th

Developed by: Capcom
Published by: Capcom

Speaking of games that never change, we’ve got a new entry in the PGA Tour series with 2K25, the first new title since 2K23. Have you ever played a PGA Tour game? Heck, have you ever played a golf game before? Then you’ve played PGA Tour 2K25. Golf is golf is golf; you know? I’m sure there are some new bells & whistles, and (maybe) the game controls better; whatever. If you don’t already own a golf game, and you enjoy the sport of golf, then I would say go ahead and pick this up. If you still have PGA Tour 2K23, well, you can probably skip this.

PGA Tour 2K25 (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Feb. 28^th

Developed by: HB Studios
Published by: 2K Games

That’s pretty much it in terms of major releases, I hope you like hunting monsters and/or playing golf. I did, though, want to highlight a couple of interesting ports. First up is Ninja Five-O, a side scrolling platformer from Hudson Soft & Konami that originally released on the Game Boy Advance in 2003. Only released in North America & Europe, Ninja Five-O is one of the rarest GBA games on the planet, often going for ridiculously high prices. If you, like me, just want to play games and not “collect” them, this is great news. Reviews at the time of its 2003 release were generally positive and it has often been called one of the greatest GBA games you’ve never played. Well, now’s your chance!

Ninja Five-O (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch) – Releases Feb. 25^th

Developed by: Limited Run Games
Published by: Konami

Another big port coming this week is the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection, which gathers up the first 14 Yu-Gi-Oh! games into one package, including titles that ever got releases outside of Japan. This is a great win for game preservationists and a huge deal for hardcore Yu-Gi-Oh! fans.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection (PC/Switch) – Releases Feb. 27^th

Developed by: Digital Eclipse
Published by: Konami

Everything else:

• Debt City (PS5) – Releases Feb. 25^th
• The Little Brave (PC) – Releases Feb. 25^th
• All on Board! (PC – VR required) – Releases Feb. 27^th
• Darkest Mine (PC) – Releases Feb. 27^th
• Defying the Shadows (PC) – Releases Feb. 27^th
• Glover (PS4/PS5/Xbox One) – Releases Feb. 27^th
• Foto Boy: A New Job (PC) – Releases Feb. 28^th
• LightBreak (PC) – Releases Feb. 28^th

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

Let’s say goodbye to the new releases and hello to the notable titles! You know the drill, three old games, three old movies, and three old albums. Which one’s were rad, which one’s sucked, and which of them did you experience when they first released? Let’s find out!.

Games:

Starting things off, from 2015, we’ve got the multiplayer action game Helldivers. If you’re wondering, yes, this is the the predecessor to Helldivers 2, hence the absence of a number before the word “Helldivers”.

Created by the Swedish developer Arrowhead Games, best known at the time for the 2011 game Magicka, Helldivers followed a similar gameplay style and top down view, with players working together, online, to defeat swarms of enemies. Arrowhead’s trademark humor was also present, with Helldivers having a satirical tone in regards to war and democracy.

Helldivers was well received by critics who called it a nice throwback to other classic top down shooters. The game’s multiplayer aspect was the highlight, with critics enjoying the humorous friendly fire aspects of the game, such as crushing your allies with a landing pod. The game’s missions and overall story were criticized for being a bit generic and repetitive, but the game’s brutal difficulty, breadth of gameplay mechanics, and overall fun more than outweighed these negatives.

During the awards season, Helldivers would be recognized by the DICE Awards where it was nominated for Action Game of the Year and won Handheld Game of the Year (for the five people who played it on Vita). You can still play Helldivers today on PS4 (and PS5 through backwards compatibility), as well as PC, where it was ported in December of 2015. However, online lobbies may be a bit sparse nowadays, as I imagine most fans have moved on to 2024’s Helldivers 2 which is, of course, the sequel to Helldivers, as I explained in the opening paragraph. Did you remember?

Moving on to 2005, we’ve got another online multiplayer game, Star Wars: Republic Commando for Xbox and PC. Released only a few months before Star Wars: Ep. III – Revenge of the Sith, Republic Commando kinda/sorta takes place around (and maybe after) the events of the previous film, Attack of the Clones. For you Star Wars timeline purists out there, Republic Commando has been scrubbed from the official Star Wars canon, meaning it can take place whenever you want it to, I guess.

Anyway, Republic Commando is a squad based, tactical first person shooter, similar to the Ghost Recon series, with players taking on the role of Clone Trooper RC-1138, known as “Boss”. As Boss, players can maneuver their squad around the playfield, ordering them to perform various tasks, such as hacking doors open or taking sniper positions. If playing online, players would, instead, direct each other to do these tasks over voice chat.

Republic Commando received mostly positive reviews, not as good as 2015’s Helldivers, but still pretty good. A planned sequel, called Imperial Commandos, was cancelled with no reason given but, according to VG Chartz, Republic Commandos only sold about 650k copies worldwide, which is probably a disappointment for such a well known franchise.

Despite the game not receiving a sequel and finding itself removed from the canon, Clone Commandos in general have been a part of several official Star Wars properties, including the recent series The Bad Batch. A port for the PS4 and Switch arrived in 2021 to much fanfare and gave fans of the series a way to check out the game on a modern console.

Closing out the notable titles, from 1995, we’ve got what some critics and players consider to be the greatest 3DO game of all-time, Return Fire. My introduction to this game was from the 1996 PlayStation port, but the few 3DO owners out there were the first to get their hands on this hidden gem. Return Fire is an action game where players must destroy the enemy base in search of a flag. If the player can retrieve the flag and return it to their base, they win. That’s it, really, and it’s that simplicity that made for one hell of a good time.

To capture the flag, players can switch between four vehicle types; the nimble but fragile helicopter, the slow but durable Armored Support Vehicle, the basic but overall well rounded tank, and the jeep, which is ultra fast and the only vehicle that can capture the flag. Knowing when to use each vehicle is crucial to your success as they can only move so much distance before needing to refuel and resupply their ammo. While it is important to have a good strategy in the single player game, your vehicle choices are much more important when playing a local two player battle.

Part of what makes Return Fire so fun and charming are its use of classical orchestra songs, such as “Ride of the Valkyries” when attack with a helicopter, or “William Tell Overture” when you capture the flag and start to race back to your base. After completing a level, players will be shown a short vintage film clip to let them bask in their accomplishment, including the famous “Luckiest man on Earth” speech given by Lou Gehrig.

I can’t tell you how many hours I sunk into the PlayStation version of Return Fire over the years. I remember spending the night at a friend’s house who had just gotten a PlayStation. We played a few games, Krazy Ivan, Loaded, Battle Arena Toshinden, but the highlight was Return Fire. After getting my own PlayStation a couple years later, I tried in vain to find Return Fire, not having much luck until, one day, my video store got a shipment of clearance video games from another store. I opened the box and, right there on top, was a used rental copy of Return Fire in the original clamshell box. At that moment, the “William Tell Overture” started sounding off in my head and I knew, right then and there, that I was one of the luckiest men on the face of the Earth.

Movies:

Moving on to notable films, 2015 saw the release of the crime thriller Focus, starring Will Smith and featuring Margot Robbie in her first big starring role after appearing in The Wolf of Wall Street. While the film is mostly crowd pleasing, critics didn’t quite love the tale of two con artists who fall in love. In Empire magazine’s review, the critics stated that Focus is a film that looks dazzling and does its best to delight you with its cute sleight of hand tricks but it is, ultimately, forgettable. True, as I’m 100% certain that I saw this movie and I could not tell you a damn thing that happened in it.

From 2005, we’ve got the movie The Pacifier starring Vin Diesel. In this family comedy Diesel must, like, be some kind of nanny, I guess, because, like, national security? I don’t know, who cares, this movie is not good and we don’t need to talk about it anymore. Oh, fun fact though, The Pacifier was written by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, better known as the co-creators of Reno 911! who played the characters of Junior and Dangle.

Back in 1995 we got yet another Disney family comedy, the JTT vehicle Man of the House. In this film, Thomas plays Ben Archer, the son of a single mother (played by Farrah Fawcet), must learn to get along with his potential step-father, a lawyer named Jack (played by Chevy Chase). As you can imagine, Ben and Jack DO NOT get along at first, with Ben causing all kinds of mischief to annoy Jack and, cruelly, evokes the abandoment by his birth father to manipulate Jack; fun for the whole family!

Anyway, Jack eventually finds out he’s being manipulated and, yadda, yadda, yadda, there’s some racist stuff about Native Americans, and yadda, yadda, yadda, a crime family tries to murder Ben and Jack, and yadda, yadda, yadda, they learn to love each other and Jack marries Ben’s mom; the end.

Albums:

On to notable albums, 2015 gave us the solo debut of long time punk rocker Jeff Rosenstock, We Cool?. After spending years in bands like The Arrogant Sons of Bitches, Bomb the Music Industry!, and The Bruce Lee Band, Rosenstock’s debut was highly anticipated, making a big splash on the Billboard charts, debuting at #7 on the Heatseekers chart and #157 on the Top 200. The buzz around We Cool? helped propel each of Rosentock’s subsequent albums to reach higher and higher positions on the Billboard charts and made him one of the decade’s most well known indie musicians.

From 2005 we’ve got the album Frances the Mute by the pretentious, I mean, highly acclaimed band The Mars Volta. In line with their artsy fartsy vibe, the album was, apparently, based on the rambling diary found in a repossesd car by the band’s late sound technician Jeremy Ward (brother of former At the Drive-In guitarist and Sparta frontman Jim Ward). In this diary, the author appeared to be searching for his birth parents and was also looking to be suffering from some kind of mental illness. Fucking deep, bro.

Look, I can’t stand The Mars Volta, but I can appreciate their artistry. Still, with three songs on this album that breach the 12 minute mark, Frances the Mute is not a commercial pop record and, while that may be “hella sick” to some people, I can’t hang with that. It also doesn’t help that The Mars Volta reminds me of some of the worst, most condescending, asshole musicians I knew around this time. The band’s heavy drug use was almost certainly an inspiration on more than one of my friends/acquaintances back in 2005 and it alienated me from more than a few of them. So fuck The Mars Volta.

Putting a cap on things this week, the 1995 notable album is Jewel’s Pieces of You, her debut album that was almost exclusively recorded live at a San Diego coffee shop. Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, I remember Jewel being more popular in the late 90’s. Didn’t her singles come out in 1997?“; well, guess what, you’re right! While Pieces of You would release in 1995, the album was a commercial dud and almost universally panned by critics.

However, Jewel had one huge fan, this guy named Bob Dylan, you might have heard of him. Anyway, Dylan took Jewel on tour in 1997 and it was this exposure that got her single, “Who Will Save Your Soul” to hit radio airwaves and become an MTV staple. The album would eventually peak at #4 on the Billboard Top 200, seeing a re-release in 1997 that had re-recordings of “Soul” and another single, “Foolish Games”.

Jewel’s humble beginnings as a vagabond living in her van, playing small coffee shops up and down the West coast before settling in San Diego was a rallying cry for every young woman with a guitar. I guarantee someone you know either played acoustic guitar in a coffee shop or had a girlfriend who played guitar in a coffee shop. It felt like every girl in my high school had a Jewel phase and I gotta tell you, they weren’t very good. Anyway, Jewel did fine, earning four Grammy nominations and selling over 30 million albums around the world since her 1995 debut, not bad for a San Diego girl (who was from Alaska, but, like, we get to claim her, okay, so back off).

Helldivers (PS3/PS4/PS Vita) – Released Mar. 3^rd, 2015

Star Wars: Republic Commando (PC/Xbox) – Released Mar. 1^st, 2005

Return Fire (3DO) – Released Feb. 1995

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