Welcome, everyone, to another All-New Saturday Summaries and - if you'll permit me this indulgence - May the Sixth be with you all. I'm right in the midst of several projects right now, each of which will get their own update in the usual section below, but I've realized far too late that it's given me zero writin' time for the one-off pieces that often end up being my most popular. I suspect the issue is that people generally don't want to wander into a long-running feature in-progress because of the amount of catch up reading that might be required. I'd like to think that any episode of the ongoing features I have this year works as a standalone well enough, but I'm starting to notice that I'm filling them with callbacks and other references to previously established facts or opinions, and that might be alienating to some. Of course, it might be equally alienating to explain my stance on some specific issue - my apathy with Musou games, for example - over and over for those who have been reading since the beginning. It's a tricky balance of keeping the viewers you have satisfied while always being accommodating to newcomers.

Which is similar to what Giant Bomb itself will have to worry about with its new staff members. This week introduced us all to the Benhemoth Ben Pack as the newest member of Giant Bomb West, and next will introduce Abby Russell to the GBeastie Boys, who can probably no longer be referred to as same what with the gender diversity and such. I liked Ben plenty even before the hire - dude was friendly enough to me throughout his tenure as intern back in 2011, when I was still struggling to build a brand (ugh) here with my blogging, and I'm stoked that he's back in the fold with a few years of industry experience under his belt. Then again, if most of his content involves Dota and fighter games, maybe I can just appreciate him from a distance. The infusion of fresh new talent is exciting for long time fans of Giant Bomb, especially if they can hit the ground running like Ben, but you can't please everyone. I'm sure there are a handful who have been vacillating on staying or moving on because their particular interests aren't being covered, and have determined that this was the final straw. Of course, if they choose to make a big stink about it, the mods will be there. Rather, I imagine they'll just slink quietly away to pastures new like a reasonable human being would in that situation.

Again, this is no admonition to Ben or Abby, just that this sort of thing is inevitable with a small proportion of your audience. It's far better to innovate and introduce new variables to mix things up, but losing folks to the disturbance to the status quo can be - to a lesser extent - the dark lining to that silver cloud. And that balance of introducing new subjects and maintaining familiar haunts will be something I ought to keep in mind also as the year continues.

Congrats to Abby and Ben! Sorry if this came off as sort of hostile in parts. It's just that weird excited trepidation that comes with change, and from witnessing a new Giant Bomb emerge from the ashes of the old. I'm psyched to see what you two do (but please, no more Dota. Or contain it within its own thing, at least. Wrestle Brad to the ground before he can get past the client's sign-in screen if you have to).

On to this week's content! Seis de Mayo, y'all! (Which is almost like "Seize the May" if you think about it. Be sure to seize the May this year, everyone!)

• The Top Shelf this week highlighted a bizarre occasion during the PS2's lifespan when its three biggest platformer franchises - Sly Cooper, Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter - all released games within a couple of months of one another. September (Sly 2) and November (Jak 3 and Ratchet and Clank 3), to be precise. I'm sure it was a coincidence in this particular case, because I have to imagine video games of a feather never want to directly compete with one another if they can help it. Better to spread the must-have games of a certain genre across the year, but I guess if they were all ready to launch at the same time nothing could be done. At any rate, more PS2 nostalgic goodness awaits anyone who follows that link.
• The Indie Game of the Week this time was Insomniac's Song of the Deep (not South). I had a fine enough time with this subaquatic spacewhipper, but even after writing that appraisal and playing the game to completion shortly thereafter, there was something about the game that was dissatisfying. I took a wild swing at the reason being that the game felt too familiar - that it comprised of parts of Aquaria and Insane Twisted Shadow Planet with little originality left for itself - but I think that was a misconception. I now believe it's more of a mechanical issue: the game feels imprecise and shaky on a level that only made itself evident when I was sweeping up collectibles. The game glitched me out of one item due to some weird accident that blocked off one of the puzzle elements, and other times the process of solving a puzzle - sometimes involving flashing the sub's headlights on a group of creatures in quick succession, or leading a school of fish to a silver plant blocking a treasure so they could remove it - didn't work in an accurate and/or intuitive way. Something about the way the sub's grappling hook bolted onto the environment didn't feel right either. It's one of those elusive, purely visceral quality-of-life things that's difficult to convey outside of the experience itself - and this coupled with the swimmy (comes with the territory, I get it) physics and annoying dependency on throwing wave after wave of the same hostile sea creatures in certain "arena" sections just made for an overall disappointing time. It's not a terrible game, but there are better spacewhippers out there.
• We also introduced May Maturity this week, this year's May-long feature. Every year I figure out some way to turn May into a Spring-cleaning exercise, focusing on clearing out some of my imposing Steam backlog with regular write-ups of my findings. This year incorporates GOG into the struggle and focuses on some older items in my pile of shame: this May's itinerary mostly includes classic graphic adventure games and CRPGs that, for whatever reason, I skipped over during the 1990s when they were released. Thankfully, GOG and Steam have been extra busy bringing these games back and optimizing them for modern systems through DOSBox and similar old OS emulators. It's as fine an excuse as any to do some catching up and report back to you, my adoring audience, on how well they've held up. My first subject is Burst Studios's Toonstruck, the FMV-infused paean to classic Looney Tunes shorts and other slapstick animation that's filled with great voice work, an expressive digitized Christopher Lloyd and a lot of amusing, quippy dialogue. I've been enjoying it a lot, but I'm finding it odd that it's taken me this long to see it to its conclusion. I suspect a lot of that's from my obstinate refusal to look up hints, and the puzzles have been getting trickier as it goes along and introduces more variables in the way of inventory items and screens of hotspots. I hope to have the "Outro" to that game completed sometime this weekend, and can introduce the next scheduled May game shortly thereafter.

As I'm playing nothing but May Maturity games all this month, there'll be no bonus section for the week's gaming for this and the rest of May's Saturday Summaries. When June rolls around, they'll be coming back... though I suspect I'll be playing a lot of PS2 games by then, which will also necessitate their own separate reviews. However, with my newly purchased copy of Final Fantasy XV waiting in the wings, my most anticipated game from last year, I'm sure I won't be forsaking my PS4 for long.