I remember it like it was yesterday. March 12, 2015. One of my best friends sent me a message telling me that the Topps trading card company had just released a new app on iOS and that app was a Star Wars collectible card trading game. At that time, a mere nine months before we were about to finally have a new trilogy of Star Wars films, the two words that meant the most to me were “Star Wars” – with “collectible” being a close third.
What if the console wars (Super Nintendo versus Genesis, PlayStation versus Xbox, etc.) and the politics of game companies like Capcom or Square-Enix were played out by a bunch of feuding anime girls designed for maximum moe? That’s the genius, crackpot premise of the satirical Neptunia series of JRPG games. With its most recent release, Megadimension Neptunia VIIR, a quality of life upgrade of 2015’s Megadimension Neptunia VII with VR elements slapped onto both ends, the small development team at Compile Heart delivers a finely polished effort with deep RPG elements and a surprisingly emotional story that somehow fails to equal the sum of its impressive parts.
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit opens with a shot of a snow filled yard and a lonely house. As the opening bars of Sufjan Steven’s song Death With Dignity begin to play, you immediately get the feeling that even though you haven’t been here before – something is familiar. This is Life is Strange.
Like the previous seasons, Captain Spirit captures the essence of what makes a Life is Strange game unique and then takes that formula and makes it feel fresh again. While the marketing for the game has been a little misleading, make no mistake, this is the prologue to Life is Strange 2.
Paranautical Activity is an old school shooter with a new school twist. While it may look like your average shooter from the 90s the roguelike procedural dungeon generation keeps the game fresh playthrough after playthrough. After receiving an initial somewhat controversial release on PC, Digerati Distribution is once again reviving the game – this time on the Switch.
After last years E3 reveal, Metro Exodus has been pretty quiet. This year the game is back with a new trailer and a release window of Spring 2019. Following up the good ending of Metro Last Light, Exodus takes a bold new approach to the series with more open world style levels in the snowy Russian north.
A couple of months ago we reviewed a new comedic dating sim game currently exclusive to the Steam store. In our review we said that Monster Prom is as much a dating sim as Scary Movie is a horror film. It follows the patterns of a normal dating sim and completely flips everything upside down.
It takes a lot of balls to show a game three E3’s in a row and keep so much a secret. Each showing pulls back the curtain just a little bit more. This is a guy asking for our trust, and there is no reason not to give it. The Metal Gear series has pushed the medium forward in so many ways.
Here we are now in 2018, after years of silence and speculation, and the game will arrive early next year. As far as everything we’ve seen so far, it looks like it will be worth the wait.
Gamers would tell you that E3 is even better than Christmas, unless of course you get all the games for Christmas that you were hyped about from E3. In that case Christmas could compete with E3, but for most people E3 is the Mecca of video games.
This is by no means the sexy E3 pick. With a new mainline Assassin’s Creed game launching nine of the last eleven years, we’ve had no shortage of the Brotherhood over the last two console generations. Many fans have grown tired and left the series behind for new experiences.
