Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Summer Time Sorrows!

Summer is fast approaching. In fact it might have already been here for almost a week already, I’m not entirely sure. And with summer comes a doldrum of new releases, a long uneven dry spell that forces me to leave my apartment and try to develop something resembling a life. It’s unwelcome, unfortunate and unpleasant, and it leads to a frustrating clustering of interesting titles at the beginning of spring and the end of fall, a reality of marketing that makes me feel less like games are less like experiences I get the chance to enjoy and more like they’re some sort of perverse tax I pay to get my fun on once a year.

This year is a little less bleak than most. Even without Heart of the Swarm’s arrival, which now looks pretty unlikely despite the proposed annual release date that Blizzard set for Starcraft 2’s obscenely priced expansions, the summer of 2011 is shaping up to a surprisingly exciting season.

Part of this might come from my newfound focus on DLC. It took me a while to get as sold on the concept of DLC as I am now, but thanks to Fallout: New Vegas’ last two showings I’m anticipating each of Obsidian’s new releases with more fervor than most big box games. Without hard release dates it’s difficult to think of them as media events, and rightly so. The reduced amount of content and the tentative nature of the testing cycle that leads to each game’s arrival makes the sort of navel gazing normally associated with release cycles more than silly for New Vegas’ DLC. A week can make a tremendous difference in a release this small’s success, and Steam released DLC should be notorious by now for breaking out of the box and arriving in polished form shortly after. But the world that New Vegas built for me, and the fiction that expanded that world in Dead Money and, to a far lesser extent, Honest Hearts, has hooked me into whatever’s coming next. Obsidian is guaranteed my fifteen dollars when they finally decide to share what’s coming next with the world.

Even games I wasn’t particularly excited about are getting a bevy of DLC over the summer. LA Noire is getting the same monthly episodic treatment that Fallout: New Vegas has been unveiling over the last few weeks. People who want to collect more items and then hear that they can’t use them will be able to get their fill over the next few weeks. I’ve no idea what the quality of the material is, or if this is pre-generated content that Rockstar is parceling out after the game was already finished (which could very well be the case, since it doesn’t seem like there was anything resembling a development cycle between Noire’s release and the release of this DLC) but it’s encouraging to see content trickling in during a slow season, even if it might prove to be second string.

More concretely on my horizon are bigger, more conventional shooters that are moving down the pipe. Fear 3, or F.3.A.R. as I refuse to call it, has been generating middling buzz from the critical apparatus of games media, and some real positive buzz from people whose opinion of games I trust. It could be in the vein of F.E.A.R. 2, an uneven, baffling mess which is at times satisfying but reaches for scares at the expense of shooting mechanics. Or it could be like the original FEAR game: a surprisingly polished shooter with a neat sense of design, a messed up story and a deft grasp of how to work silence and emptiness into a game to raise tension. From what I’ve heard it’ll likely come off as a mix of the two: reaching scares interfering with some well polished corridor shooting gameplay. But the fact that a property I’d written off as dead is exciting, and the fact that it’s generating buzz from press that doesn’t act as little more than a media arm is encouraging. Any occasion I have to read reviews that summarize a game I actually want to play instead of laying out a set of talking points a marketing director decided upon months earlier is a welcome occasion, and FEAR 3 seems to offer just such a set of events.

Red Faction: Guerilla’s red-headed step child is showing its face as well. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about Armageddon’s lukewarm critical response, especially when I consider Guerilla’s meh reception in 2009. It could be that it’s another gem that will only really be appreciated in due time, or it could be that it’s already missed its own boat, that it was really little more than an attempt to cash in on a brilliantly executed concept of yesteryear. I’ll find out myself once it goes on sale, but right now, preparing for a move and budgeting myself to a game or two a month, I simply cannot justify it.

If I was more console or rhythm inclined, however, I’d have no trouble at all justifying the money for Child of Eden. With the pedigree of Rez, the relentless thumbs up of Penny Arcade and an attempt to actually justify that Kinect you bought, Child of Eden looks like exactly the sort of game we should hope for each summer: an original, interesting property from a visionary developer who is all too often not given their due, released into a market where it isn’t overwhelmed by competition. It’s been getting love from critics at incredible levels (remember the Metacritic adjustment rule for non-AAA releases: add about ten points on to a Child of Eden’s score if you want to compare it to Call of Duty) and I know people who rarely play indie games who have decided to make it a part of their media diet. And it’s nice to see the intellectual legacy of Rez survive, since the only people I know who are conversant in that game are drug addled DJs and gaming historians.

But it remains a painfully slow season, even with these few glimmers of hope on the horizon. So slow, in fact, that I’d consider the re-release of Ocarina of Time on the 3DS a feather in its cap, if only for the cultural and historical importance of the original title. Still, summer is coming in the midst of a very active set of spring and fall development cycles, so gamers like myself who are still playing catchup with titles like The Witcher 2: Witchier Than Ever while trying to slog through a set of indie games they bought on Steam sales that they still haven’t gotten a chance to play won’t want for things to do in the near future.

Sure, this season is nothing compared to the coming fall and winter, where games like The Old Republic , Dead Island, Assassin’s Creed: Revelation and a bevy of other titles, too many to list, are on the horizon. But it’s nice to see something, even if it is just a trickle of smaller titles, emerge during the summer for a change. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this pattern of DLC release catches on the industry, and that people follow Obsidian’s lead and work to release worthwhile content during gaming’s off season, but until it does I’ll take some comfort in the fact that some small, fun games and unexpected gems are coming out this summer, along with a bunch of really bad pieces of shovelware that have Duke Nukem in them.