I gotta be honest with you folks, as you all know I generally am. I love doing this blog, you know that and I know it. But some nights are just harder than others because it's an ever-shifting thing and one night, you can have something to talk about and others you have to kind of reach for straws. Few things (several things, I'm lying) annoy me more than having one of those reaching nights and then there being something rather big announced after I've gone and scraped together a post of something after much searching and pondering. I welcome the challenge, of course, but sometimes it just overstays its welcome, you see. So I'm sure you can all imagine my reaction after last night's post about the Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward demo when not one, not two, not three, but eight different games either saw an unveiling, announcement or release date between last night and right this moment as I am typing this. Eight games. In a single night/day. I have to tell you that I was very, very tempted to actually upend a table earlier at around the sixth thing I noticed. Because what the fuck, man.
This is the veritable other extreme of the problem I have most times, which is usually only a problem I have around E3, TGS or a similar show: Entirely too much to speak of. You know how I roll - I pick one to a few things and usually can drum up about 3-5 paragraphs bare minimum about the topic, trying to bring in opinions, other information and the like. I don't really like just saying "Here is this thing, here is some info, bam, there's a paragraph, new topic". Yet it's on nights like this where it seems that I am almost tempted to do just that because how else am I going to cover everything aside from doing that -or- a friggin' essay-level News Dump? That's the real question here and the answer is pretty simple - I'll talk about everything else tomorrow. Mostly because I don't really care about the rest of it so much as I care about one of the things in particular, and that thing is Retro City Rampage, which finally has a release date of This Coming Friggin' Tuesday. (October 9th.)
It's been a long time since I talked about Retro City Rampage which is pretty much what's been expected so far as anything related to the game has been, apparently. Though I really can't blame anyone for it since the game is being made by one dude but for five different platforms entirely - entire teams of developers apparently can't always get the finer points of porting simple content between one system to another, so can you imagine trying to get the same game working on five different platforms by yourself? Yeah. Probably not. Still, whether or not he's actually gotten the game up and running on said five platforms is up for debate as October 9th is only the release date for three of them, specifically the PC version and the PS3/Vita versions. The PC version will be offered through three different venues alone, with Steam, GOG and the developer's website (which will give you a Steam or GOG key, your choice) but no matter where you buy it, the game will be $15. However, and this is where you would put a drumroll if you were into that sort of thing, the PS3/Vita versions will be Cross-Buy! Meaning for $15 through PSN, you'll actually be getting -two- versions, one for both PS3 and Vita no matter which you buy it through, so unless you are a super dedicated PC gamer, perhaps the wiser option would be something with a Playstation logo on it. Just...saying.
Nobody really knows why it's taken the game so long to come out (aside from the common sense answer) and similarly mysterious is why it's only releasing on about half of the platforms it was announced for. Specifically egregious is the lack of the XBLA version which, well, might just cause some problems for the game down the road. We've all had a peek into the fairly restrictive guidelines that Microsoft has on XBLA releases, particularly the ones where the game cannot have released on another platform prior unless X, Y and Z are met which has only been 'broken' a mite few times. Some whisper in the recesses of the dark corners of the internet that it's in fact Microsoft's guidelines and rigid structure that have caused the delay, where others go so far as to suggest that it's been delayed for months because they didn't want to slot it in for the Summar of Arcade (because of the exclusivity that goes along with it) which creates a problem on either side of things. I'm not one to suggest rumors where it's unnecessary, but I could very well see either scenario, though not completely at the face value with which they're presented. But still, the whole kernel of truth thing and such.
For my part, I....don't really care. Yes, yes, I'm supposed to care and blah blah, but I'm going to get to play Retro City Rampage on my Vita Tuesday so I really don't care about much else to do with the game. I certainly hope not releasing day one on XBLA won't cause problems for the dude with releasing on that platform and I similarly hope that it won't be remedied by 'platform-exclusive' content or support or the like, but that's all well in the future, I suppose. What will happen will happen, but I wouldn't really expect the XBLA version to be 'the definitive version' whenever it comes out, if any of the rumors have even the slightest bit of truth to them. That probably means that in three months, I'll be quoting this post as something awesome is announced as 360-exclusive DLC for the game or something, but whatever, I really don't care at the moment. Still getting over the fact that this game is a thing I will be playing by week's end if I can tear myself away from everything else, as well as the fact that I have to write a post tomorrow about seven games. Seriously, I said it already, but what the hell, industry?
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