JANUARY
J
anuary is never the
time of year gamers enjoy most, largely
because they’re busy
sleeping off Christmas
excess. But it was with
a heavy heart this year
that Zombie Studios
closed on January 7th.
Theirs wasn’t a hugely
well known name in
the industry, but their
one big hit, Spec Ops:
The Line, proved to the
world that a shooter
could be clever, tricky
and well told as
well as exciting
and actionpacked.
Releases
in January
are
usually as dry
as the leftover Christmas
turkey and about
as exciting. This year,
to continue the theme,
the most interesting additions to the release
line-up were rehashed
versions of older games.
First up was Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy
Remastered, since it’s always interesting to take
a peek behind the curtain and see what David
Cage has been up to in
his lair. The story
hasn’t got any
more coherent or any
less ridiculous since
2005, and
all they’ve
done is made
the graphics a
bit shinier. It still looks
like a PS2 game though,
and since approximately four of those looked
anything other than awful, we’re not hugely im-
pressed.
The second rerelease warmed the
cockles far more, as the
adventures of Manny
Calavera swept across
our screens in the glorious Grim Fandango: Remastered. Replete with
witty dialogue, superb
characters,
genuine
drama and emotional
engagement, GF:R from
Double Fine Productions
deployed copious icing on a delicious cake
with a rousing noir
soundtrack
from Peter
McConnell.
T o wards the
month’s
end,
we
also had the
chance to sample
something new in interactive fiction, in the form
of the first episode of Life
is Strange. It had all the
makings of a game few
would like - teenage girl
protagonists, dialogue
trees, and The Walking
Dead style enduring
choices but in a story
with seemingly small
stakes. What followed
was an intriguing, yearspanning walk
through
a
world
of
time travel,
duplicity
and raw
emotion.
While the
ending was
disappointing,
the opening bars
which hit us in January
were that most wonderful of combinations - unexpected and excellent.
FEBRUARY
F
ebruary is basically
only known for being the shortest month
and this year time being short was very much
the theme. Unless you
were into the diabetically sweet Kirby and
the Rainbow Curse, or
were itching to play The
Sims 4 on your Mac,
the release schedule
was about as dry as last
Christmas’ turkey and
about half as fun.
The major release,
following months of fevered speculation from
exactly the sort of tiresome fanboys you’d
expect to be excited by
it, was The Legend of
Zelda: Majora’s Mask
3D.
The Nintendo 64
Zeldas captured the imagination of players in
ways the earlier and later installments - perhaps
with the exception of
Link to the Past - haven’t.
It can be put down to
the then-contemporary
excitement over new
hardware with Ocarina
of Time, but Majora’s
Mask’s polarising nature deserves more consideration.
I suppose it’s a bit
of a leap to see a normally fairly contemporary fantasy game
series plonk the player
in a world about to be
smashed by a high-velocity moon, and then
to pour time travel and
species-bending ele-
MARCH
M
axis - creators of
Spore and SimCity - were shut down
at the start of March, in
a move which seemed
to disappoint many. It’s
only when you realise
that Spore and SimCity
were two incredibly disappointing failures that
you begin to fix an idea
on why that happened.
Nintendo
ceased
to put off the inevitable and officially announced their next console, the NX, as well as
a partnership with mobile developer DeNA.
Rather than heralding
the end of Ninty as a
manufacturer, it seemed
to open up the prospect
of more mobile integration with their consoles.
Whether the NX succeeds may be a matter
for next year’s review.
GDC focused on VR
headsets, as did the rest
of the world, as the battle heated up between
Oculus and Everyone
Else. Even though everyone’s favourite company that sounds like an
opticians really brought
the idea to public consciousness, at year’s
end it seems as though
Everyone Else might be
winning.
It was a big month for
fan service in releases.
Cities Skylines showed
SimCity how it should
be done, Bloodborne
threw a (homeward)
bone to fans of the
Dark Souls games and
Ori and the Blind Forest blew our minds with
how beautiful it was for
a 2D indie game.
ments into the mix until
the resultant concoction
resembles something
you could use to stick
together bricks. But
that’s what’s so good
about it - it adds an oppressive atmosphere of
doom to Zelda in a way
few of its titles before or
since have managed.
On this side of the
industry, we lost two
long-standing giants as
Joystiq closed and CVG
was rolled into GamesRadar. Competition is
the root of good journalism, because you
can’t take an industry
full of backstabbing,
corner-cutting egotists
like us and make us do
good things unless we
get to win somehow.
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