THE NEW YEAR IN
GAMING
ROBIN WILDE
I
4
t’s hardly surprising that
2016’s been anticipated with such excitement
from all quarters. Assuming all goes well and the
Combine don’t invade in
mid-February, we’re in
for a heck of a year, with
new installments of classic franchises, updates in
the hardware race and
very likely some fantastic
new IP we haven’t heard
of yet. But let’s start with
what we know.
We open with a ramming together of two of
Nintendo’s most consistently outstanding franchises in Mario & Luigi:
Paper Jam, then a couple of months in which
nostalgia returns to haunt
us like a late winter. Both
the Mario and Luigi and
Paper Mario series have
been cursed with slightly
dull installments recently
so it’ll be exciting to see
whether they can pool
their resources or act
as lead weights dragging one another down.
Heavy Rain is coming
to PS4 at last (say what
you like about it, it looks
pretty) and three days
later the GameCube’s
swansong comes back
ten years later with The
Legend of Zelda: Twilight
Princess HD.
The literal ancient past
is brought to us around
the same time, with Far
Cry: Primal hitting consoles and the PC. For
all the brutality of the
time, the Stone Age
is sorely underrepresented in gaming, and
it’s shaping up to be a
promising piece of mammoth-murdering, sabre
tooth-stabbing sandbox
action. If the villains hit
with critics the same way
the bad guys in Far Cry
3 and Far Cry 4 did, it
might well be in for some
high scores, although the
setting might not be able
to save it from the recent
trend towards the one
‘Ubisoft game’.
The middle of the year
will see players get their
teeth kicked in by more
medieval, morose monstrosities in Dark Souls
III, after a brief recent
divergence this year
from From Software with
Bloodborne. Total War:
Warhammer then attempts to capture whatever mad appeal there
ever was in Warhammer without the need
for playing pretend with
the violence and receiving pocket money that
would shame the child of
an oil baron. Whether it
can marry the tiresome
history nerds who play
Total War with the tiresome fantasy nerds who
like Warhammer remains
to be seen. Can one
marry a clone of oneself?
In the grand tradition
of rebooting famous series with no change to
the name, Ratchet and
Clank and the game formerly known simply as
Mirror’s Edge (now appended with Catalyst)
are coming to a shelf
near you, but if rumours
are correct they won’t be
the biggest news of Q2.
According to research
from DigiTimes, the Nintendo NX - their longawaited new console
to replace the flagging
Wii U - should see “mass
shipments” around the
same time. Summer
launches haven’t quite
been in vogue since the
Sega Saturn tried to get
a head start, tripped
over its shoelaces and
hit its head on a rock, but
nonetheless the base are
a bit excited. If Nintendo
can pull themselves out
of their current morass
with a new console, they
might be on for an exciting Christmas period
- particularly with that
new Zelda coming out.
Yooka-Laylee is a
quirky indie platformer
slated for release towards the end of 2016.
It features a chameleon
with a quirky bat partner
who rides around on his
head, and is a collectathon 3D action-adventure set in several unique
worlds. If that’s sounding
suspiciously like a certain
bird and bear combo
from the late 90s, you’re
right. It’s being produced
by several former Rare
personnel in an attempt
to capture the old BanjoKazooie magic.
Other fan appeasing
attempts include the entirely fanmade sequel to
the superb and underappreciated Mother 3,
cheekily entitled Mother 4 despite no input
from the game’s creator Shigesato Itoi (who
seems more content to
spend his days on Twitter and making diaries).
Nintendo have a bit of
an unfortunate history
of coming down like a
Thwomp on such fanled efforts, but provided
they take the hint from
the implicit nod Itoi once
made, then several fingers may be able to be
uncrossed.
Whether you’ve already blown any Christmas gift money on Steam
sales, or are saving up
for a new console or
gaming PC, the next
twelve months should
provide some great opportunities to get further
in debt. And of course,
we’ll be covering as
many of them as possible
right here in these pages.
Get excited.