Videogame Releases: Week of March 11th, 2012

No giant videogames come out this week, but plenty of cool niche titles do. There’s something for all tastes, or pretty much all tastes. Look, we’ve got a ton of new games, and if you can’t find one you’d want to play, you might just be too picky.

Silent Hill: Downpour (360, PS3)

The survival horror franchise just isn’t what it used to be, and the same can be said of the ‘Silent Hill’ franchise. Early reviews for ‘Silent Hill: Downpour‘ don’t look promising, but that’s not the sort of thing that keeps survival horror fans away from a potentially good new experience. When the pickings are slim, you take what you can get.

Tales of Graces f (PS3)

Tales of Graces f‘ is a pretty cool release. It’s the PlayStation 3 port of a game that was originally released on the Wii, but that’s not the interesting bit. The interesting part is that the Wii version was only released in Japan. It’s hard to say why this port made its way to the States while the original didn’t, but it’s fantastic to see it arrive. In fact, any decent JRPG without the words “Final” and “Fantasy” in the title is really nice to see. Not that I hate ‘Final Fantasy’, mind you, but there’s so much more to role-playing than SquareEnix.

Yakuza: Dead Souls (PS3)

The ‘Yakuza’ series is one that I’ve been meaning to play. It’s something like the Japanese ‘Grand Theft Auto’ with RPG elements, if I’ve got the vibe right. ‘Yakuza: Dead Souls‘ takes things in a different direction by adding zombies. Because that hasn’t been done to death yet.

Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations (360, PS3)

The ‘Naruto’ fighting games are all essentially the same, or at least only slightly varied from one installment to the next. It’s hard to fault them, since the combat remains incredibly fun. Balanced? Maybe not. But definitely fun. ‘Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations‘ features 72 playable and 15 support characters, for a total of 89 in all. That’s two for each letter in the title plus one to spare.

FIFA Street (360, PS3)

Street basketball games makes sense and are an absolute blast to play. Street soccer (football, if you’re foreign or a jerk) doesn’t seem quite as natural a transition. It also doesn’t seem like that big of a seller. Based on the fact that we haven’t seen a street soccer game in the last several years, that hunch is probably right. ‘FIFA Street‘ reboots the franchise with the goal of a more realistic and high-quality game than past installments.

3 comments

  1. LOL, I am starting to think there are only two makers of RPGs, and that is SquareEnix and the Tales Studio. Is your banner graphic from Tales of Grace? I LOVE the Tales series, and may have to pick this one up. Of course, I refuse to pay $60 for games – I will probably wait about a year and pick it up. I still have a couple of other Tales games to play anyways. I just got my PS3 and XBox hooked up in the new place, and might have to start gaming here again.

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