Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 – one of many new games out this summer

The evening Inbox wonders if Cyberpunk has killed the chances of a new Deus Ex, as one reader is glad that Nintendo delayed Animal Crossing.

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Busy summer

Anyone notice that there isn’t really much of a summer games drought this year. As far as I can see we’re actually over the worst of it and there’s at least something vaguely major out each week until the late summer: Super Mario Maker 2, Dragon Quest Builders 2, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and so on.

All games that would’ve got lost in the Christmas rush but should hopefully do well at this time of the year. Except… it’s been so warm today the last thing I want to talk about is playing video games. I just want to relax with a frosty cold one and sit in front of the fan (I wouldn’t mind but it’s not even sunny out!).

Assuming this won’t last though I am hoping to make some inroads into my backlog this summer and also play some of these games. I fancy all the ones I mentioned and since I haven’t got time for them all I’m going to be spoilt for choice. Which is a nice problem to have.
Danse

 



Second lap

It is surprising how well Activision has done with this PS1 era remakes, now you come to mention them. But then the Skylanders games were always surprisingly good too and I always enjoyed playing them with my boy.

I imagine a new Crash Bandicoot platformer will be the first to be announced but I hope that Crash Team Racing doesn’t get forgotten. As GC’s review pointed out it was only really the failure to follow up the original with good new sequels that stopped it from becoming as popular as Mario Kart. If they follow up the remake with a proper sequel then there’s no reason for it to go away again.
Gifford

 



Bad impressions

I think there’s probably a reason that Shenmue III was made a big thing of at E3. The few sites that do seem to have gone hands-on said it was looking pretty bad. Not only bad graphics, with very little animation, but bad combat that isn’t even as good as Shenmue II.

That’s not completely unexpected given how it’s looked up to this point but it does explain all the delays. I think the worry that they haven’t got the budget to do what people want is going to be proven true and the whole thing is going to be a disappointment. Oh well, at least Bloodstained turned out all right…
Kingo

 

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Change of scenery

I’m really enjoying Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night too but I know what you mean about the game never being able to do new ideas. We saw what happened with Iga’s games on the DDS, where they had a few new ideas each time but were basically the same game each time. The problem is they can’t really do it 3D without having a massively bigger budget, so I think the obvious ways to go are changing up the art style and setting.

I agree with GC that the art is not that great and I would much rather it looked like the Ayami Kojima artwork from the earlier games. The bland anime style stuff is presumably easier to make but I really can’t get excited about it at all.

I’d also try and get rid of the castle as much as possible. I get that Ritual Of The Night had to do it because it’s purposefully old school but the older Castlevanias weren’t always set in the castle and were actually pretty diverse in terms of location so I really don’t see why they keep restricting themselves so much. So there is stuff they can do, I guess we just have to wait and see though.
Balm

 



Change of plans

So a see a number of developers are saying that the reason for their delays is because they’re trying to avoid a crunch situation for their employees and maintain a good life/work balance. Nintendo, of all people, said it for Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Bungie also said it for their new Destiny 2 patch.

I am, of course, totally fine with that but it begs two questions: does that mean you were going to work them like dogs to make the headlines, until you saw all the negative headlines on the subject, and why can’t you predict release dates better? No game would be delayed if they just gave them sensible goals in the first place.
Mori

 



Happy balance

I too was impressed by Square Enix’s conference at E3, especially as the company had kind of gone down in my estimations in recent years and I got the impression they were on hard times. But Final Fantasy VII Remake looked a lot better than I expected and I’m at least cautiously optimistic about Marvel’s Avengers. (Felt bad about that new shooter game though, when even Americans won’t whoop and clap at something you know it’s underwhelming.)

It was also good that it was almost exactly 50/50 between Japanese and American stuff, which I think is a balance they’ve struggled with before. It does make me wonder what they’re going to do next year though and I hope to god we’re not going to see a Just Cause 5 or some other waste of hard drive space.

But what about Tomb Raider? Presumably it’s only a matter of time till that comes back? Except I don’t think the reboot trilogy was that big so are we looking at another do over? They must be hating on Cyberpunk 2077 too because that suddenly makes Deus Ex even more difficult to bring back and I think they’ll probably want to leave that alone for a long while now.
Lato3573

 



Guilt relief

RE: Royston. No lies detected when it comes to EA. They do a lot of awful stuff, and I can’t remember the last time I bought one of their games, but they’re not really much different to any other publisher – especially big ones like Activision and Warner.

They’ve just become a convenient scapegoat for everyone to complain about, so if we think we’re clever enough to have a go at them we can conveniently ignore or the rest and just consume their products without any feeling of guilt.
Jaegar

 

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Different worlds

In regards to re-usable landscapes in gaming, though not exactly the same, I’d like to mention a minor irritation I have with many Zelda games – a lot of them are set in the same place, the Hyrule Kingdom, and its environs, yet in a fair few of the games the maps are completely different!

I’m not meaning like how Twilight Princess’ map was flipped for the Wii, but how some of them will have, for example, the Gerudo Desert. Then in the next in the canonical timeline, it’s renamed to the Lanayru Desert.

That’s fine. Places can get renamed. But then in the game that comes after that, it’s back to being the Gerudo Desert! What is going on?!
Joseph Dowland

GC: Just as it’s not always the same Link we imagine it’s not always meant to be the same Hyrule. But don’t ask us, the Zelda timeline is scarily convoluted and we gave up understanding it a long time ago.

 



Inbox also-rans

I think a console is crying out for a game like Starcraft, it has a massive following. Surprised no one’s done it yet.
Anon

GC: We wish, real-time strategies barely get made on PC nowadays let alone on consoles – where the controls are not well suited to them. Starcraft was released on the N64 though.

Bulba-SAUR… Ivy-SAUR… Venu-SAUR… it’s a dinosaur init?
big boy bent

GC: Saur is from the Latin for lizard.

 

This week’s Hot Topic
The subject for this weekend’s Inbox was suggested by reader Tully and asks what would you make the launch title for the PlayStation 5 and/or Project Scarlett?

Despite E3 having just taken place we still have no clear idea about what’s happening with the next gen formats, even though they’re due to launch next year. But if you were in charge what game or games would you ensure were available on the new consoles from day one?

Would it be part of an established franchise or something brand new? If it is new, what kind of game would it be and how would it take advantage of the more powerful hardware? Are there particular types of game that either company are currently missing? And if Nintendo announces a new format soon what would you advise for them?

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