December 12 – December 18

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This week I want to get into the seasonal spirit and enjoy playing in the best possible kind of snow: the kind I don’t have to shovel.

Snowball is a 2-D pinball game that takes place in a neighborhood set up by all the local children to be the largest pinball table the world has ever seen. I know I’m usually a sucker for pixel art, but this one in particular reminds me all those shareware games I played on my LCII. I’m still not sure where most of them came from. I feel like once I owned them, they had always been there. It’s like Ambrosia Software employed a team of magic elves to distribute a bunch of diskettes with game titles hand-written in blue Bic on Maxell labels.

And it wasn’t even my handwriting!

So this week I’ll sit back and enjoy a nostalgia-tweaking winter wonderland with Snowball.

Felix “Annie are you OK?” Threepaper

Geez, I thought taking the “ant game” beat for 2016 would be a bludge, but here comes another one. Ant-gravity: Tiny's Adventure is a puzzle platformer about an ant who can inexplicably swivel the room and its gravity around, while exploring underground levels which inexplicably have spikes, cannons and candy canes in them.

Don Bradman Cricket 17 (by Big Ant studios) adds in a career mode, so you can play your favourite cricketer all the way through his career: from early beginnings wowing the Academy scouts with a hat-trick at District under-16s, to debuting for Australia, setting drinking records on the plane to England, assault allegations, abandoning the Test team to play IPL, right through to becoming a commentator and having stocking-stuffer books for Dad ghostwritten. It also adds in some of those wacky 20/20 shots so you, too, can get out trying them in Test matches.

Speaking of stocking-stuffers, the long PC list is filled with indie cracker toys from a variety of genres for anyone who still needs something new: Gone Home-alike Elena, literal god-game Gods and Idols, the “I’ve got no idea what you’re supposed to do” competitive game BOTOLO, classic-90s-RTS-emulator reconquest, the shopping-n-murder-simulator Crazy Oafish Ultra Blocks: Big Sale and the rest. They could be the best surprise you get for the holidays, or provide 10 minutes of intrigue before breaking.

Me? I’m still playing with my birthday toys. If I had to choose, Wild Guns Reloaded looks like silly arcade fun.

Chris "C" Cesarano

Game releases are winding down as we near the holidays. December is usually the last desperate shove of Publishers to get whatever they can in before the gift-giving holidays are officially over and done with, but now that The Last Guardian has finally released, there's not really much else to discuss.

Space Hulk: Deathwing ambushed us with a surprise push-back, so we're going to see it on the release list again. But it's okay! If you look really closely you'll see the kerning on the title is ever so slightly more polished. If you've been playing along with Telltale's Batman, then you'll be getting the final episode this week to conclude whatever grim Gotham tale they're telling. Given the lack of buzz following the more-glitchy-than-usual first episode, I'm assuming this may become one of Telltale's more forgotten and forgettable of releases.

The big news for me is Stardew Valley's release on consoles. I might still hold out for it on the Switch, but hearing about how wonky it was on PC with a controller meant I needed to wait until it was on one of the big-three's closed platforms. I've always kind of wanted to return to the SNES era of Harvest Moon, and it sounds like Stardew Valley does a phenomenal job with that.

I just want to mention VR the Anime Girls Method because, even though I have no idea what it's about, I am sure whatever concepts arise in your mind, dear reader, are horrifically delicious.

Erik "wordsmythe" Hanson

Lots of stuff without much marketing behind it this week. I'm most hopeful for the Rift menu this week. A few jump-scarers, one puke-machine, some puzzlers, and at least one that seems most concerned with making the player look silly while fighting giant robots. Fist Of Physics gets my pick this week.

This week:

EDIT: Special thanks to Meatman for sending me up-to-date corrections to the list. I've updated the list below to reflect the changes.

PC

  • 8-Bit Invaders!
  • Acro Storm
  • Alchemic Jousts
  • Ant-gravity: Tiny's Adventure
  • Bamboo EP
  • Batman: The Telltale Series Episode 5
  • Blue Tear
  • BOTOLO
  • Brain In My Head
  • Caretaker Retribution
  • Crazy Oafish Ultra Blocks: Big Sale
  • Damage: Sadistic Butchering of Humanity
  • Earth Liberation
  • Elena
  • Endless Fables: The Minotaur's Curse
  • Filthy Lucre
  • FISH LAKE
  • Gods and Idols
  • Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-
  • iREC Bumped to next year
  • Minimal
  • Mobile Astro
  • Moekuri: Adorable + Tactical SRPG
  • Mountain Trap 2: Under the Cloak of Fear
  • Mountain Trap: The Manor of Memories
  • Nother
  • Operation: New Earth
  • Pandarama: The Lost Toys
  • Pixel bomb! bomb!!
  • Quantum Chess
  • reconquest
  • Red Haze Bumped to next year
  • Satellite Command
  • Snowball!
  • Space Hulk: Deathwing
  • Space Jammers
  • Strategy & Tactics: Dark Ages
  • SugarMill
  • Super Dungeon Tactics
  • The Little Acre
  • Time Leap Paradise SUPER LIVE!
  • Twisted Bumped to next week
  • Wild Terra Online

PS4

  • Batman: The Telltale Series Episode 5
  • Stardew Valley
  • The Little Acre
  • Wild Guns Reloaded

Xbox One

  • Batman: The Telltale Series Episode 5
  • Bridge Constructor Stunts
  • Don Bradman Cricket 17
  • Forza Horizon 3: Blizzard Mountain
  • Stardew Valley
  • The Little Acre

PS3

  • Batman: The Telltale Series Episode 5

Xbox 360

  • Batman: The Telltale Series Episode 5

RIFT

  • Alpine Ski VR
  • CoLab
  • DWVR
  • Fastigium
  • Fist of Physics
  • Lockdown: Stand Alone
  • OneManVurgeR
  • SwingStar VR
  • The Crypts of Anak Shaba VR
  • Unearthed Inc: The Lost Temple
  • VR the Anime Girls Method

Vive

  • Alpine Ski VR
  • CoLab
  • DWVR
  • Fastigium
  • Fist of Physics
  • Lockdown: Stand Alone
  • OneManVurgeR
  • SwingStar VR
  • The Crypts of Anak Shaba VR
  • Unearthed Inc: The Lost Temple
  • VR the Anime Girls Method

Comments

Not that I'll ever object to a Michael Jackson video, but I'd like to know the reference.

Ask Felix.

Spoiler:

If that's too obtuse see Felix's nickname. Then with video.

Gotcha.

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/9WBMpUK3sKiW90nkMwEbOI2Dm8DOffaUHrVE-uiRZP0MByFKWJMFTSW0DYCLW9KG2eJBCWAQ5g)

Felix's nickname this week is "Annie are you okay?" which is one of the prominent lyrics in "Smooth Criminal".

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Felix's nickname this week is "Annie are you okay?" which is one of the prominent lyrics in "Smooth Criminal".

And the 2 main playable characters in Wild Guns Reloaded are Clint and Annie.

And there aren't any good songs about men named Clint.

... and now you've sussed my lame nickname process

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/... << Still don't know why this isn't referenced more.

Additional games missing from the list:
PS4:
Bridge Constructor
Don Bradman Cricket 17
Drive!Drive!Drive!
Feist
Her Majesty's Spiffing
Magnet Knights
Maldita Castilla EX
Motor Strike: Immortal Legends
Trove

PSVR:
Fat City
I Expect You to Die
Perfect

ClockworkHouse wrote:

And there aren't any good songs about men named Clint.

kazriko wrote:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/... << Still don't know why this isn't referenced more.

Mainly because that list hasn't updated by the time I'm making mine, which is Friday morning. The reason I do it in the morning is twofold: 1) it gives everyone enough time to review it and make their picks and 2) because if I don't do it Friday before I go to work, it eats into time I have to spend with my kids. (I could do it Saturday morning before my kids get up, but that would mean I only get to sleep past five one day per week, owing to the facts that my daughter gets up at 6:45 every morning like clockwork and that the list takes between one and two hours to populate and vet.)

Also, I don't add anything to the list without two sites showing the same date, and there are no exceptions for big publisher sites because they're wrong a lot too.

Trove got a console release? Huh. Will have to download.

garion333 wrote:

Trove got a console release? Huh. Will have to download.

It's coming out on Xbox as well.

I believe Astroneer is coming out on Friday, too. I've been looking forward to it for awhile.