As we enter the final act of 1998, I wonder if lightning can strike twice. One game has already come from out of nowhere this year to rock the gaming landscape. Sure, Half-Life carried the time-worn Sierra pedigree, but these new cats called "Valve" may have just been lucky.
I'm going to go ahead and add Call of Duty: Black Ops to the list of high profile military action games like Medal of Honor and Halo: Reach that I didn't play this year. It's not that I have some fundamental disagreement with Black Ops, though the idea of trudging through yet another CoD game is not a particularly pleasant one to me.
It's around this time of year that I really start dreading putting The Week Ahead together. It's not that I don't love the onsluaght of great late fall games.
It's that week of the year. The week where you might be able to identify $200 or even $300 worth of games that you could buy. Force Unleashed II, Fable III, Lego Universe, Dragon Age Ultimate, Tony Hawk, Sims 3 and, oh yeah, Rock Band 3.
I don't want to put too much pressure on you, but what game you buy this week might say a lot about you. It's like the choice between buying a salad or McDonalds for lunch, a Prius or a Hummer. The choice is simple, Fallout: New Vegas, Kriby's Epic Yarn or a bunch of other crap.
Hyper expensive and sophisticated marketing tells me that I'm supposed to tag the new Medal of Honor for Game of the Week, and I got halfway through populating the increasingly bloated weekly release list fully expecting to do just that. But then, I got to the section on the DS, and realized that Super Scribblenauts is going to be released this week.
Tis the season for The Week Ahead to become a huge pain in the ascot. If you've been waiting all year to buy your loved one a game involving basic pet care, October will always be your month. While the release list is certainly long, it is not necessarily glittering with things worth getting enthusiastic over.
As we head into what feels in many ways like the first big game release week of the impending holiday season, there is no shortage of big games to consider for Game of the Week. Though, I have to admit in some ways that I am not as excited about this time of the year as I normally am.
Sometimes it's tough for a variety of reasons to pick the Game of the Week. I know a number of you like to ascribe all kinds of hilarious and flatly incorrect theories to the crafting of GotW. It's an inelegant process, one where I look at the list of whatever is going to be released and make a relatively knee-jerk reaction about what stands out to me. What's the standard?
I've never been terribly excited before for a Halo game. This week is not exactly different, but the thing is I always am pretty happy with the results. Hearing that this may be the best of the batch to date tells me that this is probably a game that I should pay some attention to.