Games

New Game Releases 04/15/25 – 04/21/25

Top Releases:

  • Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 2 (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 15th
  • Lunar Remastered Collection (PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One) – Releases Apr. 18th
  • I, Robot (PC/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 17th
  • Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 17th
  • Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 17th

The 2nd quarter slowdown continues for major titles. Indies, on the other hand, are releasing at breakneck pace, with dozens of titles (even stuff I don’t highlight) releasing across all platforms, though the vast majority are from Steam.

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 2 (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 15th

Developed by: DON’T NOD
Published by: DON’T NOD

Starting things off, our top game of the week is Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 2. This is the second, and final, release in the episodic series that started off back in February of this year. Reviews for Tape 1 were solid, let’s see if they can stick the landing with Tape 2.

Our other top release is the Lunar Remastered Collection, which features updated versions of PSX/Saturn games Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue which were, of course, remakes of the Sega CD games Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue; phew.

Lunar Remastered Collection (PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One) – Releases Apr. 18th

Developed by: Game Arts
Published by: GungHo Online Entertainment

If you’re looking for some smaller titles to play, Atari is releasing a remake of their arcade title, I, Robot which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the Isaac Asimov short story collection. Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree is the latest Metroidvania/Souls-like side scroller to come out; might as well throw it on the pile. Finally, Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate is here to scratch your side scrolling, chibi anime, beat ’em up itch. You should probably get that looked it.

I, Robot (PC/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 17th

Developed by: Llamasoft Ltd.
Published by: Atari

Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 17th

Developed by: Primal Game Studio
Published by: Knight’s Peak

Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Apr. 17th

Developed by: Rocket Panda Games
Published by: Rocket Panda Games

Ports and Re-releases:

Get ready for Monument Valley III by playing the first two games on Switch! ALSO! That Indiana Jones Xbox game from last December is coming to PS5 in case you don’t like buying stuff for dead consoles.

  • Monument Valley 1 & 2 (Switch) – Releases Apr. 15th
  • Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PS5) – Releases Apr. 17th

Everything else:

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

Old games! Old movies! Old music! Let’s talk about them!

Games:

Starting us off in 2015, we’ve got one of the dozen or so Assassin’s Creed games to come out in the 2010’s, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China; the first in a three part trilogy that included India and Russia. Unlike the sprawling, open word games that you typically see from the AssCreed franchise, Chronicles contains linear, side scrolling levels where players must try to make their way to goal, undetected.

In Chronicles: China, players take on the role of an assassin named Shao Jun. She is on a quest to liberate her people from Templar rule in China, and heads to Europe to meet retired assassin Ezio Auditore de Firenze (cue the Arsenio Hall Show whoop-whooping). After receiving a mysterious box from Ezio, Jun returns to China, gets caught (on purpose) and, with the help of a fellow assassin named Wang Yangming, sets off on her journey.

Critics weren’t very impressed with Assassin’s Creed Chronicles, receiving pretty low scores, though the China entry did prove to be the most well liked. Sales wise, I’m not seeing a ton of copies moved, according to VG Chartz, maybe less than 100k? There are no sales figures for XBone, though it sold about 40k copies on PS4 and less than 10k on PC. A version of the game containing all three Chronicles titles in one package was released in 2016, and we haven’t seen Ubisoft go back to this sub-franchise since, so I can only assume that the experiment was a failure.

From 2005, we’ve got one of the greatest video games of all-time, Psychonauts, from Tim Schafer and Double Fine Production. While Schafer excelled at point & click adventure games in the 1990’s, Psychonauts was a 3D platformer, allowing him and his newly formed team to stretch their creative chops a bit.

Set at a Summer camp for children with psychic abilities, players take on the role of Raz, one of the camp’s aspiring Psychonauts. While at camp, Raz discovers that an insane dentist is stealing the brains of the camp’s counselors, though no one believes him. This leaves Raz no choice but to work on his own, entering the minds of each counselor as he attempts to save their minds from the clutches of the evil Dr. Loboto.

Initially set to be published by Microsoft as an Xbox launch title, Double Fine began to miss deadlines and would fail to adequately provide Microsoft with copies of the game to test. By the time their main contact at the company, Ed Fries, left Microsoft in 2004, the game was dropped and nearly cancelled.

Luckily, publisher Majesco stepped in and Psychonauts was able to get its Xbox & PC release, followed by a PS2 version in June of 2005. The response from critics was very positive, with the game receiving high marks for its bizarre & memorable character designs, its laugh out loud dialogue & story, the voice actors’ performances, the level design, and the overall size & scope of the game. It wasn’t immune from criticism, however as some reviewers felt the game was a bit too difficult in certain sections and lacked a solid camera, while others felt the humor eventually got a bit stale and the overall gameplay became a bit repetitive.

Players, on the other hand, rejected Psychonauts en masse. The game just did not move units, only selling about 100k copies by the end of 2005. The fallout from the poor sales was so catastrophic that is destroyed Majesco, leading to the resignation of its CEO and the company saying it was moving away from publishing games for consoles.

Double Fine, on the other hand, were reaping all of the accolades and awards from the video game industry. Psychonauts was hailed as not just one of the best games of 2005, but one of the best games of all-time. Double Fine would fly under the radar for the next few years, though, releasing a few free to play Flash games, and not putting out a major title until 2009’s Brutal Legend. Psychonauts would eventually find its way to the Xbox 360, XBone, and Series X|S through backwards compatibility and, by 2015, Double Fine indicated that Psychonauts had sold almost 2 million copies. It took a while, but people were finally catching up to what critics had been telling them about all along.

Our last game, from 1995, is the side scrolling platformer, Gex, for the 3DO. Imagined as a “mascot” game for the 3DO, similar to Nintendo’s Mario and Sega’s Sonic, Gex was a wisecracking gecko (originally named Gecko X) who told bad jokes and puns while beating up enemies and exploring the game’s levels. Voiced by comedian Dana Gould, his performance was, well, polarizing, to say the least. His delivery was groan inducing to some and campy satire to others.

Development on Gex began in 1993 and was to be one of the first games released by Crystal Dynamics, however, things didn’t gel early on, and it became their. The game’s concept was changed early in development, from Gex being a stuntman going through crazy stages, to Gex being sucked into a TV and going through crazy stages. The team at Crystal Dynamics had never worked on a 32-bit game before and found that the art tools were much more difficult than those found on 16-bit platforms. What seemed like a simple, June 1994 release was now in major jeopardy.

In fact, by June of 1994, hardly any progress had been made on Gex, with the developers still figuring out the tools, and a sort of boredom and lack of direction that kept them iterating on various gameplay mechanics and secret levels that they found much more appealing than the ones assigned to them. With less then half the game completed, Gex was now shooting for a December 1994 release, but by September, it was clear that Gex wouldn’t even make that date, so it was delayed again.

After almost two years in development, Gex finally hit store shelves for a console that almost no one bought. However, critics ate the game up, with some calling it the new standard for 2D platformers. The staff at GamePro were so impressed that they predicted Gex would become just as popular as Mario & Sonic (he did not). Still, Gex was the killer app that the 3DO desperately needed, it was just far too late in the console’s life to help it survive, being discontinued in 1996.

Gex would eventually get ported to the Sony PlayStation & Sega Saturn in December of 1995, and to PC in November of 1996, where it received wider audience exposure and earned a bunch of new fans. This would lead to two sequels, 1998’s Gex: Enter the Gecko, and 1999’s Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko. In 2015, then rights holder Square Enix asked independent developers to pitch ideas for a new entry in the series, though it does not appear anything fruitful came of that (the series now appears to be owned by CDE Entertainment, a subsidiary of Embracer Group). A collection of all three Gex games is in the works from Limited Run and should be out sometime in the Summer of 2025.

Movies:

In notable films, 2015 gave us the horror flick Unfriended. In this ghost tale, a group of teens find themselves being stalked by the spirit of a girl they drove to suicide (is that a spoiler?). Critics actually liked the movie, which was shocking, even more shocking, it opened at number one, beating Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. With a budget of only $1 million, Unfriended ended up pulling in over $64 million (though it only made $17 million because Hollywood accounting is a corrupt and evil enterprise).

From 2005, we’ve got the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room from director Alex Gibney. His first big documentary, Gibney and the film were nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars (losing to March of the Penguins). The documentary is all about the meteoric rise and even bigger fall of the Texas company Enron, who gambled with money they didn’t have and wiped out billions of dollars from people’s pensions, and nearly destroyed California’s energy grid due to unprecedented greed & corruption. Enron came out at a time when everybody was doing their own “George W. Bush” take-down documentaries, fitting in nicely with the counter culture politics of the era.

1995 gave us yet another documentary, director Terry Zwigoff’s masterpiece Crumb. Considered by many critics as one of the greatest documentary films of all-time, Crumb tells the life story of cartoonist Robert Crumb, best known as the creator of Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and those “Keep on Truckin” bumper stickers. Robert Crumb is a misanthropic, pretentious bastard who is obsessed with sex and the film does a deep dive on his life, as well as the life of his two brothers, and all are quite disturbed.

For whatever reason, Robert was the only Crumb brother to make something of himself, while his brother Charles ends up living with his mother, surrounded by old books and living on disability, and his brother Maxon, a former serial groper of women, lives alone in San Francisco as a pan handler who sits on a bed of nails.

Hailed by critics as one of the best movies of 1995, you would have expected it to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary category, but it wasn’t, prompting wide spread condemnation from the film community. According to Zwigoff, he assumed most Oscar voters left the theatre after a few minutes due to the film’s graphic images of sex & violence but, instead, Zwigoff later learned that the voting bloc for documentaries were made up of film distributors. These companies would, in turn, nominate their own films as it was financially beneficial to them.

By the next Oscars, the scandal about the snubbing of Crumb, as well as the 1994 documentary Hoop Dream, forced the Academy to change the voting rules, ensuring that future ceremonies would be more reflective of the critical consensus and not the financial consensus.

Albums:

In notable albums, 2015 saw the release of Sound & Color from the group Alabama Shakes. While their debut album, Boys & Girls, was a massive it, peaking at #6 on the Billboard Top 200, Sound & Color shattered that, debuting at #1, reaching greater commercial and critical success. Critics were in awe of Brittany Howard’s stellar voice and commanding presence. The album felt authentic & weird, being one of the most critically acclaimed release of 2015.

Sound & Color would receive six Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year. By the end of the ceremony, Sound & Color would pick up three; Best Alternative Music Album, Best Engineered Album (Non-Classical), and the song “Don’t Wanna Fight” would win Best Rock Song.

Our 2005 notable album is Eating’s Not Cheating, from nerdcore rapper MC Chris. Well known to fans of Adult Swim, MC Chris was never a household name, but if you were a kind of nerdy young person in the early to mid 2000’s then you most likely heard his most popular song, “Fett’s Vette”.

With Eating’s Not Cheating, his third release and (kinda/sorta) full length debut, MC Chris continued to tackle nerdy frat-boy topics like how good he is at having sex, robots, playing Star Wars video games, and going down on one of his fans. In fact, the album’s title is (supposedly) a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger who was caught giving oral sex to another woman on a film set and his reply was “Eating’s not cheating“; classy.

The album failed to chart and was pretty much a non entity to anyone who wasn’t already a fan of MC Chris, though it’s (minor) success would help his reputation grow, allowing him to tour the country and make a living as a working musician. Since Eating’s Not Cheating, MC Chris has put out ten albums, six EP’s, and a “Best of” compilation. Check it out if you feel like returning to your early 20’s or want to know what it was like to be in your early 20’s during the year 2005.

Closing things out, from 1995, we have the album This Is How We Do It from R&B singer Montell Jordan. While the album would only peak at #12 on the Billboard Top 200, the title track, “This Is How We Do It” would shoot straight to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. A massive hit around the world, “This Is How We Do It” would top chart after chart across multiple countries.

The song would earn Montell Jordan a Grammy nomination for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, and end up as one of the top selling singles of the decade. It is also notable for being the first R&B song released by the label Def Jam Records who, up to this point, had only worked with hip-hop & rap artists. With major crossover appeal, you could put on “This Is How We Do It” at any party, in any neighborhood in America, and people would lose it. Come on, I know you’re already hearing the opening of the song in your head; don’t fight it…THIS IS HOW WE DO IT!!!

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China (PC/PS4/Xbox One) – Released Apr. 21st, 2015

Notable Film Release: Unfriended – Starring Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olstead, Will Peltz, Jacob Wysocki, and Courtney Halverson
Click here to watch the trailer
Notable Album Release: Alabama Shakes – Sound & Color
Click here to listen to the album

Psychonauts (PC/Xbox) – Released Apr. 19th, 2005

Notable Film Release: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room – Featuring Bethany McLean, Sherron Watkins, Gray Davis, and archival footage of Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow
Click here to watch the trailer
Notable Album Release: MC Chris – Eating’s Not Cheating
Click here to listen to the album

Gex (3DO) – Released Apr. 7th, 1995

Notable Film Release: Crumb – Featuring Robert Crumb, Aline-Kominsky Crumb, Charles Crumb, and Maxon Crumb
Click here to watch the trailer
Notable Album Release: Montell Jordan – This Is How We Do It
Click here to listen to album

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