Two Thousand and Hatin’
What a frightful place the past is. A country we’ve all been to, full of our mistakes, regrets and missed bin days. We at NGB are not interested in this place. We’re all about the future! The future is exciting, and has electric cars and cupholders. Probably electric cupholders.
So with Game of the Year discussions all done and dusted, join us as we try to predict what scores some of the big games of 2018 are destined for, based on nothing but prejudice, guesswork and questionable knowledge.
God of War
Changing the very core of what your game is when you have an established franchise is a sketchy business; God of Wars 1-3 were an exercise in arcade-like fury, about naught but rage and fighting. Enter God of Four (not it’s official title, sadly), which trailers present so far as an introspective dad-em-up, as angry, beardy Kratos raises a decidedly less angry and less beardy son. Looks amazing, and will probably annoy a lot of the sort of people who think games are getting softer and girls shouldn’t be in Star Wars
10/10, top dadding
Days Gone
The Last Of Us meets 80s Bon Jovi as Harley dudes battle hordes of dudes. The point where people were still interested in zombies as antagonists in pop culture disappeared somewhere around the third series of turgid, despair-athon The Walking Dead, yet here we are; more zombies. In fact ‘more zombies’ seems to be the key thing here, as the game’s USP appears to be down to the sheer number of shamblers that it can throw at you at once. It also boasts some open-ended ‘emergent’ gameplay (if you’re the sort of person who uses words like that), but it’s really difficult to look at it and not feel like you’re having a visit from nostalgia’s even worse cousin; deja vu, specifically for The Last of Us.
6/10, zombie games back form the dead. Nation shrugs.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Promising to be the red-iest and dead-iest of all the redemptions, and hotly anticipated if only because it’d be nice if EA weren’t the only cowboys in gaming (ZING), barely anything is known about this sequel to a sequel yet, despite it being announced back when the Switch was. Rockstar are at a point where they can take as long as they like to release a new title and it’ll definitely be amazing, like your favourite band from when you were a teenager taking seven years to record ten songs. The visuals on this bad boy look great, and that’s pretty much all we’ve got to go on right now, so….
9/10, one damn fancy looking cowboy tale
Detroit: Become Human
Creator of Detroit, David Cage, takes quite a battering from the games press. Along with the all-out harrowing despair of The Last Of Us Part 2, Detroit added to a very odd Paris games week for Sony, featuring plenty of domestic violence, abuse and more besides. Lord knows you can get away with any number of questionable narrative choices if you actually have a decent game to throw it on to, so fingers crossed this handles a tricky subject with sensitivity and thought…
3/10, because it probably won’t
Shenmue 3
I have literally never played a Shenmue game. People seem to get excited about it but I can’t fathom any interest in it, like healthy eating or pursuing emotional growth. I think they were on Dreamcast, which explains a lot. It looks…… fine? No idea.
?/10, who knows?
Final Fantasy 7 (Remake)
Hahahahahaha! What even happened to this? Final Fantasy XV was certainly popular with the sort of people who get overly attached to fictional pretty boys, but also known as an actual ‘good game’ too. This bodes fairly well for a rebuild of the JRPG largely responsible for 99% of westerners who are interested in such things being interested in such things. Look, don’t pretend you played Final Fantasy 2 and loved it when it came out, no one did. However, nothing has been heard of Cloud’s facelift for quite a long time.
7/10, may not ever exist
Spider-Man
We’ve been overdue a decent Spidey adventure on console for bloody ages; since the mighty Spider-Man 2, in fact. In a gaming landscape where everything has to have an open-world, a dude who can swing around skyscrapers and divebomb to street level offers the greatest way of traversing such a virtual place. Early trailers are a bit too heavy on QuickTime Events for our liking, but we’ll just hope these go away in the meantime because we’re optimists.
8/8, arachnamania
Conclusion
Basically all we’ve learned here is that we don’t even know what games are coming out this year, let alone if they’ll be any good or not. I mean you know how games are for delays, they’re a bugger for it. You’ll be lucky if you see Death Stranding this side of the third world war.
Look, this isn’t Kotaku.
