Filly's Weekly Highlights: June 17 - 23

Well, I decided I'd do this thing where I give a rundown of my personal highlights every week, and offer my humble two cents.

New Releases:  Pokémon Conquest; Quantum Conundrum (PC)

E3 2012: Nintendon't Live Up to the Hype

Well, I held off an extra day to make my comments on Nintendo's E3 2012 offerings, due to their unexpected announcement that they would have a 3DS-dedicated conference this evening.

Sadly, that was one of the only surprises Nintendo had to offer this year.

My 2012 Localization Checklist

Another post, another few months gone by.  Sorry for the delay!

The woes of being a lover of Japanese games in this day and age are often staggering.  With less and less of interest to me coming out of Western companies, these are the games I'm counting on to fill the void.  Sadly, rather than responding accordingly to the emergence of a global economy and Information Age, Japanese developers seem to be losing touch with their Western fans via an unwillingness to even localize some of their most fascinating and unique games.  Recently, we've seen the effects with social networking movements such as Operation Rainfall, the Gallian Liberation Front, and a handful of fan pages devoted to various Tales games.

The situation isn't entirely bleak.  Japanese developers have many interesting things to offer Western fans this year so far*.  These include Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, Tales of Graces f, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir, Pokémon Conquest, and Ni No Kuni:  Wrath of the White Witch.  With all that on its way, it may be hard to see what J-game lovers still have to complain about.  So without further ado, here are the rest of the games I'd love to see localized in 2012.

10 Reasons I'm Happy To Own a 3DS in 2012

The future of Nintendo's new handheld is looking even brighter with 2012 under way.  The majority of my most anticipated games for this year are on the 3DS, and I'm here to share my enthusiasm for the oft-berated little machine and its diverse upcoming line-up.  Some of these don't have release dates set for North America just yet, but that isn't going to keep me from getting hyped about them!

My 8 Must-Play Games of This Summer

I read an interesting feature in a January 2011 issue of OXM questioning why we don't see more quality games release in Summer, or Q3.  Indeed, they made some good points:  the kids are out of school; more free time equals time for seasonal jobs.  I don't know about you, but as a full-time college student, I'm lucky to even get to pick up a controller on the weekends, meaning the time to dig into my appalling backlog of shoulda-coulda-woulda-but-didn't-play games is Summertime.  Despite these facts, publishers avoid those hot months like the Plague.  The majority of quality new releases tend to grace us in the Spring or otherwise, right around the Holiday crunch.

Yet, that doesn't seem to be the case this year.  It's possible that studios are finally seeing the untapped potential of Summer months, but the more likely explanation is that 2011 is simply so jam-packed with promising software--from the conventional to the strange, sequels (and "threequels") to new IPs, East to West, there simply aren't enough months in the year to ease the inevitable blows to our wallet.  In fact, some of my most anticipated releases this year will be dropping in the Summer--thank goodness!

That said, I wanted to examine my most anticipated releases between May 10 and mid-August (these mark the duration of my Summer).  Without further ado, they are...