14 DAY TRIAL // Summer is coming. High temperatures will make us long for the beach and waves or for a cool high altitude resort. And, for us gamers, a lack of high profile releases will make us long for the good old release happy days of late 2009 and early 2010. It seems that although both publishers and analysts have been talking about extending the launch schedule for AAA launches to the full year, this summer, we will be looking back at the games we missed and we might pick up some cheap ones somewhere to get through.
Red Dead Redemption arrives on May 18 and Green Day: Rock Band, which is more of a niche title but will get a big advertising campaign from MTV Games and Electronic Arts, comes on June 8, alongside World War II strategy title R.U.S.E. from Ubisoft followed by Super Mario Galaxy 2. Then, the big launches are Crackdown 2, in July, and NCAA Football 11, in the same month. The drought is ended by Madden NFL 11, which is set to arrive towards the end of August, as it does every year.
Most hardcore gamers, those who slog through important launches in one or two weeks at most, deplore these months because they offer little in the way of new experiences. I have a more ambivalent view towards them.
It would be nice to see something of the same caliber like StarCraft II or Halo: Reach launch during the summer but it's also quite nice to have a few months when the pressure of getting that cool new game slows down and people can turn their eyes to the past and just play something they missed.
I confess, with shame, that I have never finished Neverwinter Nights 2. I plan on getting on that during the summer. I have never experienced the original X-COM as well as I should have and also plan to fire it up on Steam later in the year. Let's just hope Blizzard does not decide to make a surprise launch for StarCraft II.