Wot I’m Looking Forward To.. (part 1)

Well, we are just about 1/3rd the way through 2016. Time flies when you’re having fun, huh? But there’s a lot of games to look forward to in the next four months. Here are some personal favorites.

Total Extreme Warfare 2016: Grey Dog Software 

This kind of thing is up several alleys for me, I’m a wrestling fan, have been for most of my life, and I wonder what it would be like to be a Vince McMahon or an Eric Bischoff (or God help me, even Dixie Carter), to run my own wrestling federation. Well, I’ll never be a wrestler, or a wrestling promoter but at least in TEW I can play one on the computer screen. TEW 2016 is a rare game that offers flexibility in its play. It offers a lot more details and options to make it more “realistic” (well, as realistic as pro wrestling can be), but if you just want to sit down and play, new this year is an option to turn a bunch of the features off and play with more simplistic works. While the game comes with an indepth fictional universe (called the CornellVerse after one of the main characters in it), there also real world mods available on the forums, both current, and set in the past (my personal favorite was the “Death of The Territories” mod, where WWE (then known as the WWF), was going National, and the regional based federations were knocked out by the growing behemoth, one by one.

The game is available as a free two-month (game-time) demo already, and the full game will be released Monday.

Stellaris (Paradox Interactive):

I’ve written before about how much I’ve been waiting for this game, and this looks more and more fun every time I peak on it. Paradox Interactive is known for making great, deep historical grand strategy games and this will be the first foray into space based gaming. Usually, there’s several updates for a game that make me go. “Well, that’s ok.. I guess” or actively make me step back, but with each Developer’s diary, the good feeling I get about this game intensifies.  It’s going to be a busy few months for Paradox, this game comes out in May, Hearts of Iron IV (their World War II grand strategy game) comes out in June,  and fifteen percent of the company will be listed as an IPO on the Nasdaq First North Premier Stock Exchange starting the end of May, 2016.  Not to mention their recent acquisition of RPG publisher White Wolf Publishing and the World of Darkness. Can’t wait for this one.

Total War: Warhammer (Creative Assembly through SEGA)

Another game I’ve written plenty about. I’ve said my mantra throughout waiting for this game was “Please don’t suck. PLEASE don’t suck. PLEASE DON’T SUCK. PLEASE DON’T SUCK“. So far it isn’t looking like it’s going to suck. But we have a few more weeks to worry, as the game releases on May 24th, but the game looks like it’s very much fun, and very much in keeping with the Warhammer universe. CA games have been.. hit or miss at release with some games having horrendous bugs, but others have been very playable and fun right out of the gate.  Again, the small details will matter, For example, they asked one of the voice actors (who does the voice of the Goblin Shaman) to do an in-character reaction to the trailer. The results are hilarious.

There will be more games that are either just out or that I’m looking forward to in my next post