Thanksgiving has come and gone once again along with it the madness of Black Friday. Like every year before it, the flood of game releases abate to a trickle, most of which are barely worth mentioning. So if I were you, I’d relax and read the up coming months worth of articles leisurely, assured that nothing I post is even worth considering.

Remember. Release dates are quite literally made at the whims of the publisher. The following are subject to change without any warning.

 

Releases To Watch For This Week

Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault (PS3)

Tuesday November 20, 2012

… or not. Where the hell did this game come from? And don’t say Insomniac. Usually Ratchet & Clank games get at least some mention in the games media, but this one barely made a blip. Did it even show up at Sony’s E3 Press Conference?

Unlike the previous Ratchet & Clank outing, which caters more to the family friendly crowd, this looks to be a return to the style that people approves of loves wherein the eponymous duo goes around the galaxy collecting incredibly powerful and wacky weapons and firing them at the nearest baddie. The last six non-spin offs (All-4-one, Secret Agent Clank, etc) can basically be boiled down to that, and Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault won’t be any different. That doesn’t mean that Insomniac hasn’t added anything new though.

Like before, the areas that R&C visits has a slightly sandbox feel to it in that they’re generally wide areas that you can re-visit, but unlike before, a portion of that map will be a sort of a base that you have to protect from oncoming enemies who follow a strict path. In other words, prepare for some tower defense in your up coming R&C game. Before the nuts and bolts R&C collects as currency can be used to upgrade armor, health, and weaponry. Now they’ll be used to buy “towers” as well. Every so often, you have to get back to the base to build towers and force fields to fend off attackers.

Fans of co-op, and who isn’t really, will be glad to hear that a second player can help out through the entire campaign mode as Captain Qwark. For people with competitive friends, Full Frontal Assault does have a versus mode. The mode is separated in rounds with each player controlling a base. Each round they have to either create base defenses or send units into the enemy base. Doing either cost nuts and bolts, which you get by scouring the battlefield and controlling specific nodes in between rounds, so you can either go all out defensive with nothing but base building, all out offensive with nothing but units to send in, or a hybrid of both.

As a quick note, Full Frontal Assault marks Sony’s second game to implement their Cross Buy wherein the game also comes on Vita and buying either one gets you the other. Also both are fully compatible with each other, meaning Vita owners will be able to team up with/go up against their friends playing the PS3 version. Unfortunately, the Vita version has been pushed back to December, but you’ll eventually get the Vita version when it does come out.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelation incorporated tower defense elements into its main gameplay too and got critically panned because of it. In the case of Assassin’s Creed, I can sort of see why, but given Insomniac’s perchance for making weird, ridiculous weaponry, I can see them pulling off the tower defense thing pretty well. I can’t wait until I build my first Sheepinator tower.

 

Coming This Week

Tuesday November 27, 2012

Under Defeat (PS3)

Can we please take a moment just to laugh at the freakin’ ridiculous title? This vertical scrolling shoot’em originally came out in Japanese arcades in 2005 and has been upressed for the PS3. Moreover, a new mode was created specifically for widescreen TVs. This mode gives you the ability to turn your ship so you don’t have to just shoot straight forward. You can shoot any direction in an 180 degree field in front of you. Under Fire also eschew the Japanese favorite “Bullet Hell” strategy and goes for a more classical enemies-fire-directly-at-you, which are a hell of a lot easier to avoid. I have to wonder if the absurdity of title is meant to weaken your reactions as to make the game harder.

American Mensa Academy (3DS)

Let’s say you want to train your brain but never got into Brain Age and its various sequels because they just felt too Japanese to you or some such nonsense. Maximum Games can easily rectify that with American Mensa Academy. As a plus, it even has a test that figures out your IQ. Your racist-ness, however, requires a different, less pleasant test.