The Games of March, Part II

Following up on last week's post, here are my picks for the second half of March:

Week 3 brings another highly anticipated game for me: Rainbow Six Vegas 2. RSV2 brings 2-player online co-op, down from 4 in the past game but this time it's available throughout the entire single player instead of just broken up bits and pieces of each level with no story elements. I think that's for the best. The online looks to be the same as the first, just with better graphics, framerate, improved spawning and a better matchmaking system. That's pretty much all the game needed. It's not going to be a major leap in the franchise but it should be a solid entry. My excitement for this game has been tempered in the past week or so in light of the fact that it includes only 13 maps, 3 of which are taken right from Vegas 1 and many others from other previous Rainbow's. I'm fine with classic maps, but if you're going to charge full price for a game and fall back on old maps, at least give us a map count higher than 13.

Week 4, was previously home to Okami for the Wii but it recently got delayed until mid-April. Damn.

Final Fantasy VII fans finally get their hands on the in-development-forever Crisis Core for PSP. I'm a big FF fan but I've never been big on VII. I enjoyed the hell out of it back in the day but the fanboy zealotry that arose from it is nothing short of ridiculous. I'm curious to try it, but from what I've seen it looks like it has a weird battle system. Why Square didn't just make this an honest-to-god prequel and have it play like FFVII I'll never understand. Probably because it was cheaper to do it this way and they'll make just as much money.

Speaking of games that have been in development forever, Dark Sector, is best known for being the first game announced for this generation of consoles, all the way back in 2004. It's gone through some major changes since then, and no longer looks as cutting edge as it once did, but still it looks like it could be fun. Digital Extremes doesn't have the greatest track record in the world though. They made the decent Unreal Championship for Xbox as well as Pariah, one of the original Xbox's worst games.

And that about wraps it up for the notable games of March. As it stands right now, April looks pretty barren, with only the aforementioned Okami popping up mid-month and the painfully delayed Grand Theft Auto IV sneaking in at the very end. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was penciled in for the first week of April but has now been delayed until the second week of September. Not really a big surprise as there has been no hype for the game as of late. An April release just didn't make sense.