June was - as we call it in the industry - quite a month. We did expect it to hit hard with over a dozen Summer Games Fest-showcases and Steam Next Fest afterwards. That's always a busy time. But the amount of titles with co-op that were announced this year? Very high.
We always love when a game is listed as "co-op" on the digital store. Sometimes, however, games with the co-op tag end up not actually having cooperative multiplayer. This can happen when the game's developer or publisher mistakenly considers all multiplayer to be co-op, or when they consider team-based competitive multiplayer to be co-op. When that happens, we'll say the game is Not So Co-op.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could chat with friends throughout your day and then take breaks to play games with them? Sure, you could use Discord for the chat part of things, but people usually play the games outside of Discord. On-Together is cozy chatroom game from GigaPuff and Future Friends (publisher of Gourdlets Together) that will let players hang out and play throughout their days. It's coming to Steam later this year.
The Nintendo Switch 2 finally launched last week, and with pretty good availability to boot. The console comes with 2 Joy-Cons, a Joy-Con holder, a dock, and a charger. It does not come with proper screen protectors, a case, and other things that are nice to have for a portable system. That's where PowerA comes in. They've got three types of accessories that might just cure what ails new Switch 2 owners like me.
You know... on the one hand, the state of the world is not looking that good right now. *waves around at everything going on* And that makes us very sad. On the other hand, we as Gamers(TM) have never had it this good, not in the history of any entertainment medium. Dozens, no, HUNDREDS of titles are released each month, catering to even the smallest niche. Yes, not all of them are worth playing, but even if you filter those out, you could still play a new game only 10 minutes, move on to a new one and repeat, and I'm sure you would never run out.
Before River City Girls became a smash hit, Shantae was WayForward's most popular game series. These games star Shantae, a half-genie hero who can cast spells and transform into animals as she battles pirates and monsters. The most recent game, Shantae and the Seven Sirens, was quite good. There is a Shantae that players have never gotten to try before: Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution, a game that was canceled in 2004. 21 years later, WayForward is finally releasing Risky Revolution and on consoles and Steam this summer.
April saw a whopping 150 new entries to our database, 15 of which are versions for the hottest new thing in town: the Nintendo Switch 2. That's a good start for a new platform and we're sure there are many, many more titles to come. For comparison, we currently have over 1,800 entries for the first Switch, and there's no sign of the new releases stopping any time soon.
Back in the good old days, baseball games were fairly simple and easy to play. One of the more popular NES baseball games was Bases Loaded from Jaleco. A sequel called Super Bases Loaded was later released for the Super NES, offering much improved graphics and sound. Rather than allow the series to be forgotten, Sickhead Games and Rock It Games have just released a collection called Jaleco Sports: Bases Loaded on PC.
Honestly? There is not much to say about March. Our release calender was filled but not overwhelming. So we got the usual mix of new releases. Like the ones entering (Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone) or leaving (Time to Morp) Early Access. The retro-inspired (The Phanom, Kemono Heroes) ones as well as re-releases of old classics (Castle of Shikigami III). The surefire hits (Split Fiction) and the ones that were expected to be hits but didn't quite make the landing (Rise of the Ronin on PC). And of course tons and tons of indie release (Party Club, Astroloot).
There are plenty of gaming controllers available for mobile phones. Folks love to play their emulators on the go, after all. How do you improve on the mobile controller solutions that are already out there? You add Hall Effect analog sticks, for starters, and then you design the controller to fold up and tuck away under the phone itself. That's what the MCON from Ohsnap! does, and it looks really sweet.
We are lucky to have our Database Manager to write these monthly reports. Otherwise, we would have no time to do it. We are after all way too busy to "catch all those mons." No, we are not talking about Pokémon. That's for little babies! *contemptuous sniffle* We only play real games here at Co-Optimus! Like Monster Hunter: Wilds, the long-awaited 27th entry in the series that finally hit store shelves yesterday.
In January, we hit another milestone for our database: We now have 15,000 entries for active co-op games. "Active" means that the game is still technically playable in co-op in some form and hasn't been fully become inoperable by a server shutdown. To give you a bit of additional perspective on that number, back in 2020, we were at around 6,000 entries. So our Database Master definitely has been busy the last few years - and we'll make sure he continues to keep busy! *whip crack*
