All right, I'll come clean: May Mastery is starting to take its toll. I think what separates Mastery and Madness most is that Mastery is built around games I genuinely want to play rather than a random grab-bag of potential crap, and that goes a long way towards keeping me invested in seeing it through. Of the fifteen games I've covered so far in this year's May Mastery, only two of them were disappointing to a degree that I bailed on them, and I've discovered at least thrice as many games that would've hit their respective GOTY lists had I played them when they were new and eligible. Even so, after twenty-eight entries and around 30,000 words, I'm about ready for it to end and for me to return to a more palatable and relaxed posting schedule. I love games and I love writing about them, but there's limits to that enthusiasm. (I'm always impressed and mystified at the few video game writers out there, like Jim Sterling, who have maintained a similar pace of near-daily coverage for years. Do they have ghost writers?)

I've also added two new games to the non-Steam backlog, which isn't quite as bad as the Steam one but still fairly indomitable. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies are two games that I've been waiting forever to drop in price, so parsimonious are Nintendo with their game pricing both online and off. For a company struggling to get the Wii U to sell, it might behoove them to take on some harsher discounts for their mostly younger and less independently wealthy audience to take advantage of, let alone old skinflints like me. At any rate, they've been added to the handful of PS4 games I have left over from the haul I bought at the end of last year, and everything else on my 2016 List of Shame. All right, weekly kvetching over. Let's get into some news!

New Games!

Mostly everyone's hiding from Overwatch this week, perhaps wisely, but there's still a handful of worthy new releases to discuss. A small handful. The only one our site has listed is Dead Island: Definitive Collection: a graphically enhanced rerelease of the first two Dead Island games that I'm sure Dead Island fans, like our own @sparky_buzzsaw, is eager to bite into. Something tells me those fans would prefer to play the long-delayed and near-mythic Dead Island 2 instead though, the future of which Deep Silver has been cagey about discussing openly. Too busy putting together risible trailers like this, no doubt. The game I'm more interested in this week isn't even a full game but DLC, but from what I'm hearing about its immense size it might as well be sold as a standalone: the Blood & Wine expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which releases this Tuesday. Almost as immense as the core game itself - I'm hearing it'll take another 30 hours to work one's way through it - and built for high-level Geralts that have been through the main campaign, it sounds like a perfect Summer companion for those itching to play more of CD Projekt Red's award-winning open-world RPG. My playthrough of The Witcher 3 is still too fresh in the mind to want to jump back in with another days-long campaign, but it's definitely something I might consider for next year.

I'm cheating with this one since it came out last week, but it hasn't received a Quick Look yet so I consider it fair game (as it were): Lumo. Like many recent Indie games, it's built to resemble and homage a specific type of antiquated game - in Lumo's case, it's the British isometric action-adventure puzzle game that were once the domain of Rare back when they were still called Ultimate Play the Game, and a frequent sight on Spectrum ZXs and Commodore 64s. If you bought that Rare compilation for Xbox One and perhaps tinkered around briefly with the likes of Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore, or played the NES/SNES duology of Solstice and Equinox, you'll have some idea of what I'm talking about. Lumo doesn't go the traditional pixel route to befit its roots, perhaps to its credit, but I'd like to find out just how indebted its gameplay is to its spiritual forebears. I really liked Equinox, you guys.

Beyond that, there's mostly dregs. Fun dregs, even dregs that might potentially be GOTY material, but nothing I'm particularly enthused about. One Piece: Burning Blood could make for another fun Quick Look from the masters of anime Jeff and Dan; Anima: Gate of Memories is a curious and potentially good anime-styled 3D action-RPG from Spain; Hitman gets its third big mission set in Marrakesh this week, so that's going to involve a lot of Moroccan Monkeyshines from Brad and his "Sherpa of Stealth" Dan; the PS Vita boob ninja game Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus hits Steam this week, which... well, XSEED gotta get paid some T&A dollars if they're going to keep chugging along with the Falcom localizations I'm far more interested in (when's Ys Seven for PC, dang it?); and then there's the sheer volume of Indie games that Steam seems to publish every day, some of which are statistically probable to be good. I count at least forty more games available on the service this week, not including those already mentioned. And that's a slow week. Yowza.

Wiki!

Welcome to September 1995! With forty-eight discrete SNES and Super Famicom games released for the first time in this thirty-day period, I can't imagine I'll be rushing through this month. It's the second busiest of the year, after the always monstrous December holiday schedule, and features a handful of pretty big names which I'll discuss briefly. First, though, we'll get the five new pages out of the way from late August and early September: Takemiya Masaki Kudan no Igo Taishou, Tenchi o Kurau: Sangokushi Gunyuuden, The Shinri Game 3, Super Jinsei Game 2 and Sakurai Shouichi no Jankiryuu Mahjong Hisshouhou. I've had to create a new "Super Also-Rans" list to accommodate them.

Let's check out some highlights from the twenty-four pages that saw the VIP wiki treatment this week:

• Majyuuou is the last August '95 game I want to talk about, a grimdark side-scrolling action game with a focus on boss rushes and an Altered Beast-style array of transformations. It saw a fan translation, though there's not a whole lot of text in the game, and it's worth delving into to witness its messed up Hell imagery.
• Big Sky Trooper is a mostly forgotten LucasArts game built with the Zombies Ate My Neighbors engine that has the player traversing the galaxy in their dog ship to destroy villainous slime aliens. Like ZAMN, it's an affectionate comedic homage to silly B-movies, though perhaps not quite as endearing.
• Some great timing saw us tackle the SNES port of Doom close to the release of its modern reboot. SNES Doom might as well be called Blurry Animated Gif: The Game, but without cheats and manual saves it's also one of the most challenging iterations of id Software's classic. Especially since you can't make out anything.
• I'd laugh at Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus - yet another health awareness game for tykes from the shovelware developer that brought us Captain Novolin - but it's so sincere in its attempts to teach all the childrens about asthma that I'd feel like a heel for doing so. I'll just say it's egregious crap and move on. That wouldn't sound overly harsh, would it?
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time is the first of many DS9 games, but the only one to make it to consoles. I think early on the TV show's creators wanted to make that show more action-oriented than the more principled and erudite The Next Generation, but fans really grew attached to its serial storylines and human (mostly), flawed characters instead. The game's not wonderful, but better than you might think from a licensed Star Trek platformer.
• The SNES didn't have much of a fighter game presence, given that the console was released around the same time as the Neo Geo, but WeaponLord is one of its few exclusives that people still hold in high esteem today. Said to have kicked off the whole weapon-focused fighter sub-genre, in particular the Soul Edge/Calibur series, WeaponLord is a brutal and bloody fighter that took a significant amount of inspiration from Robert E. Howard novels and heavy metal album covers.
• Clock Tower: The First Fear is a formative game for the survival horror genre, not least of which is due to it being the first game in the venerable Clock Tower series. It's perhaps responsible for that particular brand of survival horror in which the goal is to run and hide from the nightmare pursuing you, rather than unload a rocket launcher into its dick or whack it over the head with a "rebar bent".
• Mario no Super Picross is the unfortunately unlocalized (well, until recently in PAL regions) Super Famicom sequel to the Game Boy puzzle game Mario's Picross, and sees Nintendo pursue what would become one of their stealthier bigger selling outlets. Mario no Super Picross features both a Mario and a Wario mode: the difference is that Wario won't penalize you for mistakes, but nor will he tell you if you've made any. I actually kinda prefer that system. Way to go, Wario?

May Mastery '16!

It's the last full week of this feature - after Tuesday, it's back to a less regular posting schedule and games from outside Steam. Let's once again summarize all the Steam games I've been tackling:

Cargo Commander lost some of its sheen soon after the update last Sunday due to how it makes itself more challenging in a not-fun way as the player increases in ranks and perks, but I still consider it a pleasant surprise and is a game I'm likely to hop back into every so often to find new cargo types and unlock new permanent features. There's definitely something fun and frantic about rushing through all its containers - each of which reorients you to a different plane for maximum discombobulation - looking for anything worthwhile and quickly cheesing it if there's nothing but trash and mobs skulking around, getting the maximum gain before everything starts falling apart. It's a shame it doesn't have a higher profile, because it belongs in the same class as The Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy as a roguelike with iterative progression that's conducive to quick sessions. I hope Dutch duo Serious Brew - two former AAA developers that previously worked on the Overlord series - make another game soon.

Among the Sleep was fairly uninteresting beyond putting the player in the vulnerable booties of an ambiguously gendered toddler as they attempt to make their way through a series of nightmarish landscapes to find their missing mother with the help of their new teddy bear friend. It has some neat traversal puzzles, some "hide from the monster" spooks and a twist ending, but overall struck me as par for the course in this particular genre with the usual bunch of minor key puzzles and some gaslighting tricks. In that regard, it's not too dissimilar from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, which I played earlier this month. I suspect we'll see great things from the Norwegian Krillbite Studio in the future, though, since Among the Sleep at least shows a lot of promise.

Hammerwatch was a pleasant surprise: a slow-moving but engrossing hack-and-slash dungeon crawler very obviously styled - in retrospect - on the classic Atari Arcade game Gauntlet. Manage and kite crowds, find treasures by poking at every hidden button and illusionary wall you can find, and become a speedy death machine whenever you hit a kill combo trigger threshold. Special shout-out to what I think was a deliberate visual homage to Sensible Software games like Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer with its miniaturized characters. Hammerwatch was made by a pair of Danes from what I've been able to gather, so it's highly likely we have a lot of shared PAL-derived gaming history.

The Next Big Thing was a breezy if occasionally disconcerting (eh? See what I did there?) adventure game from Spaniards Pendulo Studios, who I'd yet to be introduced to despite them carrying the graphic adventure torch for years when the genre was in decline. Set in an alternate 1950s Hollywood where monsters are real and are in the process of gaining acceptance in society due to their roles in Universal Monster movies, it's a Down With Love/The Hudsucker Proxy-style homage to fast-talking 50s romantic comedies that has more than a surreal edge to its dialogue and puzzles. I should probably play Pendulo's other games, especially Yesterday.

It wouldn't surprise anyone to hear that Trine is an inventive and beautiful 2D puzzle-platformer with a protagonist-switching mechanic that allows the player to alternate between a durable bruiser knight, a thief with incredible traversal abilities and a ranged attack, and a wizard who can solve any problem by throwing boxes and planks at it. It's a lot of making your way past pivoting platforms, treacherous traps and scary skeletons without a huge amount of variation, but I was glued to it all day yesterday. Finnish studio Frozenbyte produced two more sequels, as well this month's Shadwen (which, sadly, I'm not hearing good things about), so I've got plenty more Trine to be trying out in the future.

(Sorry for all the developer country drops, but I'm just marveling how inadvertently continental my Steam playing has been this week.)