We are now 2 months into the 2024 Fantasy Critic Season! Congratulations, because everybody has had at least one game released by their publisher thus far. The overall table is starting to take shape!
I don’t know if you find yourself happy with where your team is at this moment (Amanda’s VaporWares comes to mind) or if you’re upset with where your team is right now. The good news is that whether you are happy or sad, there is a lot of the season left this year and a lot of time to change or further improve your positioning!
As of February 29th, this is how the league is stacking up:
By far, the biggest surprise of the month must be the game, Balatro, which Amanda picked up for MASSIVE points (22.5pts)! That was a game I personally hadn’t heard of before it was released, and then heard mentioned several times by several podcasts as being a fun and addictive rogue-lite card game which sounds pretty cool. Congrats, Amanda!
Also, this month there were a few games that debuted which weren’t exactly amazing and didn’t excite the critics or players out there. [Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (-9.6pts) / Foamstars (-10.1pts) / Skull & Bones (-9.6pts)] As FantasyCritic veterans, almost all of us were keen enough to avoid picking up these games. There was a brave individual, however, who wanted to take a chance and prove his savvy by picking up a sleeper gem Unfortunately for Nate’s DadBod Games, it resulted in a 10.1 points loss in the standings. Luckily, a very rare February 29th release saw Nate pick up the most points of the season so far with his first-round pick of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (26.6pts)! We all figured it would be a great game, but this impressive score will help carry Nate a long way this season!
The last note that I’ll make for this month is that Helldivers II was released this past month to positive reviews and way more players than Arrowhead were ever expecting! This gave Adam’s Bearded Brethren some good points in the standings, but more than that, it took 12.3 points away from Marshall’s Ranch Walker Games! There always seems to be a costly counter-pick on the season and I wonder if this will be it or is it the first of many.
Next, I’d like to talk about upcoming games in March. Right now, I see 9 (or possibly 10) games that will be releasing in March for our Deer Critics League. Instead of looking at each of the games that will be released and trying to say something about all of them, I’m just going to talk about 2 important things that will affect 6 of the March games. I think these are the titles that will have a more significant impact on our league (or maybe they’ll just be the games we want to play the most!):
Counter-pick Month! [Expeditions: A MudRunner Game / Alone in the Dark / Pepper Grinder]
Three of our 10 counter-picks will be releasing this month of March. First, Adam has counter-picked Eddie’s game: “Expeditions: A MudRunner Game”, which even though it isn’t coming out until March 5th, is starting to score well already ahead of release. If these scores keep up, it will be a good game for Eddie but a very sad release for Adam.
On March 20th we will see the second of these Counter-pick battles, this time between Josh & Nate and the game, “Alone in the Dark”. Josh will be hoping that this remake of a 1992 classic survival-horror video game will be an enormous success, on the level of the Resident Evil 2 & Resident Evil 4 remakes. Nate on the other hand will hope that his initial perceptions of the remake were correct and that this game won’t fare so well. We’ll find out soon enough.
The third of the counter-pick battles this month will be between Micah and Eddie (again!) and the Devolver Digital published, action-adventure game, “Pepper Grinder“. Eddie will be hoping that Pepper Grinder ends up being nothing very spectacular (at least he’ll feel that way for the purposes of his F.C. score) while Micah will be eagerly hoping that Pepper Grinder become another feather in the cap for Devolver like some of its past successes. (eg: “The Messenger“, “Katana Zero“, “Death’s Door“, & “Cult of the Lamb“)
Triple-Feature Release Day [Princess Peach: Showtime! / Dragon’s Dogma 2 / Rise of the Ronin]
Every now and again, there are dates that contain two big-time video game releases. Just earlier this year we saw “Tekken 8” and “Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth” which both dropped on Jan. 26th. However, three big games will be releasing on March 22nd with Nintendo’s “Princess Peach: Showtime!”, Capcom’s “Dragon’s Dogma 2”, and Team Ninja & Sony’s “Rise of the Ronin”. Each of these games are expected to sell well, score highly, and entertain millions of gamers around the world. The wild card here is, which of these games will really capture the zeitgeist? Which one will be the highest reviewed / the critical darling? Which of these games will put their stamp on the public as THE game of the spring? We will have to wait and see, but I feel like no matter which game you are rooting for, there should be lots of gaming goodness that day.
Okay! That’s all that I have for this month’s newsletter. I’m sorry that this one wasn’t ready for the 29th (as I was initially hoping) but I had a few different things going on this week, so hopefully you’ll forgive the delay. LOL
After this next month of March, we will be 1/4 of the way through the season! I am thinking about trying to get some sort of aggregated statistics for how things are going so far this season, and seeing if I could project something towards the rest of the year. If that sounds interesting to you, make sure to look back at the Ed of Year 2023 post that I put up on the site back in January.
Take care & God Bless,
Alex C.
Deer Critics League 