As has become a Summaries tradition, we celebrate the end of each year's quarter by looking at what the subsequent one has to offer. 2018's been a fairly low-key year so far, especially compared to 2017, but I already have a handful of smaller games on my wishlist that I'm meaning to delve into when the opportunity arises, including Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, Iconoclasts, Celeste, Into the Breach, Chuchel, and Subnautica. April to June is when the releases usually start to ramp up, culminating in E3 at the start of June - which usually holds a few surprise releases, as developers pull the old "announced and released on the same day" trick - and then quietening down a bit for the Summer.

I'll run down the three months individually here, but keep in mind that I'm only going to talk about the games I'm personally interested in:

April's going to be a busy month, with the highlight being the (official) release of Yakuza 6 in the west. It's not a game I'm going to be checking out any time soon - I've still got some catching up to do, namely Yakuza 5 and Yakuza 0 - but definitely something I'll come around to eventually. I'm over the moon that the Yakuza series has finally found the mainstream acceptance over here that it always deserved, and all it took was a prequel that people felt comfortable making their first Yakuza game, rather than starting somewhere in the middle of Kiryu's journey. April also sees the Attack on Titan knock-off Extinction, the promising Norse-themed God of War reboot, Super Robot Wars X which is an otaku-friendly mecha crossover RPG from a franchise that rarely sees localizations, and Nintendo's experimental cardboard playset things Nintendo Labo. The ports, meanwhile, include South Park: The Fractured But Whole for Switch and, hopefully, the PC version of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. Now that they've ironed out a lot of the issues that plagued the PS4 release, in particular a bad localization, I'm hoping the PC port comes out swinging.

May is almost entirely ports and remakes, conversely, with various games coming to Switch and other systems. They include the new remastered versions of Dark Souls and Lumines as well as Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, Hyrule Warriors, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, and yet another Street Fighter compilation. In May's handful of original games, the definite highlight for me will be Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, a pirate-y themed sequel to one of the best throwback RPGs to come along in a while. We'll also see zombie survival sim State of Decay 2, the next outing of Commander Video in Runner3, and that Detroit: Become Human thing which I'm sure won't be another embarrassing overwrought mess from Quantic Dream.

Into June, where's fewer slated releases confirmed at present. I'm guessing the release schedule is yielding to let E3 pass through, though it could just be that release dates are becoming more and more fluid as games become these continually worked on things even after ostensibly going "gold". Of June's few noteworthy releases so far, my pick would have to be Vampyr, the new neckbiter RPG from the Life is Strange and Remember Me developers DONTNOD. While I'm not particularly enthralled with shadowy worlds of fangs and bats, at least when IGA isn't involved, those developers have earned the benefit of the doubt by this point. We also have the new Mario Tennis Aces for Switch, that amusing looking Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido competitive puzzle game, and Jurassic World Evolution which I'm only curious about because the idea of a dinosaur park builder sim has a lot of potential that previous attempts couldn't capitalize on. Oh, and there's a Switch port of Ys VIII coming that month also: at that point there'd be no excuse for ignoring one of the best JRPGs this generation.

We also have a bunch of games that are rumored to have Q2 releases, but with no dates confirmed this close to E3 we could either be seeing some more slight delays or some of those surprise E3 launches I mentioned. They include IGA's Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Crackdown 3 which I hope is a return to form for the ludicrously entertaining open-world franchise that puts the "OP" in "cop", the recently announced "Re-Mars-tered" edition of the demolition-happy Red Faction: Guerrilla, Sucker Punch's Spider-Man game which at this point will conveniently be a year apart from either of the two Tom Holland "Homecoming" movies, and that long-awaited final episode of Kentucky Route Zero: I've been putting off the game for months so I could binge through the whole set for an episode of Indie Game of the Week. Maybe not the best way to play something as contemplative and odd as KR0, since it seems like the type of game that requires some absorption, but I'm not a big proponent of delayed gratification. It's that thrice-darned ADD of mine.

Finally, April will also see that Rampage movie, if that was something you felt like paying money to see. My one concern is that it won't be anything like as (deliberately) dumb as the games; if ever there was a franchise that would befit a more schlocky B-movie spin on the recent spate of semi-serious kaiju movies like Kong: Skull Island, Shin Godzilla or Pacific Rim Uprising, it would be Rampage. I can't imagine it'll be good by any stretch of the imagination, but it might still be entertaining at least.

Talking of entertaining, boy do I have some weekly blogging for you:

• The Indie Game of the Week for the end of March was Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power, which concludes the Trine trilogy I started roughly two years ago. Trine 3 is one of those "one step forward, two steps back" affairs, launching itself into a fully 3D world while sacrificing a lot in the process, including a truncated runtime and a lack of upgraded abilities for our heroes. It has a few welcome improvements scattered here and there, and its presentation is still as sterling as ever, but it's evident that we didn't get the Trine 3 that was intended. Here's hoping Frozenbyte concludes the story someday, rather than leaving it half finished.
• Meanwhile, I still haven't found what I'm looking for with Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure games, but I feel that I've learned enough to draw Rainy Days and Mundis to a close. I have other blog features I want to get around to this year, and HOPAs proved to be far more recursive than I imagined. The last episode of this series looks at Mythic Wonders: The Philosopher's Stone, from Organic 2 Digital Studio. It's probably the best of the six games I've played for this series, with plenty of puzzle variety and a neat "elemental worlds" gimmick.

Addenda

Movie: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2016)

I try to keep abreast of the goings-on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because they're all connected in a way that you start to feel left out if you've missed a few of the more "communal" movies. That is, the ones where several Avengers show up and move their respective plots along as well as whomever the movie is supposed to be focusing on. A great example of this is Captain America: Civil War, which at first blush sounds like a movie that just focuses on Cap and his former war buddy-turned-Russian super-assassin Bucky "The Winter Soldier" Barnes. Instead, Civil War redefines the Avengers team going forward as several members drop out in the face of overbearing scrutiny from the world's governments, as well as introduces Black Panther - whose solo movie is now officially the MCU's highest earner - and Tom Holland's high-school-aged Spider-Man. It's an important movie to the MCU as a whole, and missing out on it would've robbed Spider-Man: Homecoming of some much-needed context.

Starting a few months after Spider-Man's brief appearance in Civil War, wisely side-stepping yet another retelling of the Spider-Man origin story (really, how many more times do we need to see Uncle Ben die?), Spidey's alter ego Peter Parker is a regular high-school student who cannot wait to start throwing down with the Avengers again. Something the MCU does so effectively is tying its universe together by having major events - such as the Civil War airport fight or the alien invasion at the end of the first Avengers movie - continue to have repercussions in later movies. In Spider-Man's case, he's been getting antsy waiting on the bench for Tony Stark to sub him in on another fight he can't handle alone. In the Vulture's case, he planned to clean-up with a salvage operation shortly after the alien invasion and was instead foiled by Stark's and the government's interference, who both wisely decided that alien tech shouldn't be in the hands of opportunistic civilians.

Michael Keaton's Vulture is a pleasingly salt of the Earth villain; a family man who was robbed of a legal motherlode with a salvaging operation he poured all his money into and has since chosen to make his fortune illegally through alien weapon sales instead. With one exception, he doesn't kill people; he simply robs the alien tech from the government and Stark Industries that he felt he has the rights to and sells them on for profit, which is a relatively banal and understandable motivation for a villain. At any rate, Spider-Man sees his gang of high-tech thieves as a perfect opportunity to prove his worth to Stark, though this particular Spider-Man isn't quite as adept as other movie incarnations. Rather, the movie plays to the idea that he's a young superhero who frequently finds himself in over his head, and makes a lot of mistakes in the process of learning his potential. It's also a really funny movie for this reason and more. Whether it's TV comedy ringers like Hannibal Buress and Martin Starr making cameo turns as teachers in Peter Parker's highschool, his socially awkward techie best friend Ned (played with amiable charm by Jacob Batalon), Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Favreau popping by as their Iron Man characters, or the amount of physical comedy and knowing one-liners, Homecoming was consistently hilarious. The Marvel movies have always been genially quippy with frequent moments of levity, but Homecoming perhaps goes further in that direction than almost any other movie in that canon, including the comparatively off-beat Guardians of the Galaxy duo and Ant-Man.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting to like a Spider-Man movie, which is partly why I didn't bother seeing this one in theaters. I've never been the biggest Spider-Man fan in general, and this being the third reboot of the hero since the new millennium began had projected this sense of desperation around the movie before it even premiered. Yet in spite of all that, Homecoming ended up becoming one of my favorite solo MCU movies. Despite the sheer number of them and the inevitable sense that diminishing returns should be setting in any day now, the MCU movies been getting steadily better over time, with Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming being some of the best movies to come out of the Marvel engine so far. Here's hoping April's Infinity War can keep that streak going a little longer.

Game: Yoshi's Woolly World

Ys VIII was fairly intense, at least in terms of its size and pace, so I decided to slow my roll a little with Yoshi's most recent (as of writing) entry. Yoshi's Woolly World picks up where Kirby's Epic Yarn sort of left off, with a world rendered by an arts-and-crafts aesthetic that is as cute as it is intelligently factored into the game's puzzles and sense of exploration. The Yoshi games have always had a sort of affability to them that seems tailor-made (so to speak) for a younger audience, yet at the same time they're fairly challenging if you approach them with a collectathon mindset. Yoshi's Island set the precedent for Woolly World's specific brand of collectible hunting: there's twenty items hidden among the game's gem currency, five flowers which usually require completing a little challenge to coax into being, and you also have to complete the stage with full health: not always easy for later levels with more hazards, or boss levels.

The key to Yoshi's Woolly World's appeal, in my view, is the extent to which it caters to an audience. There's a much more hospitable "mellow" mode for players who don't want a massive challenge, but even on the regular "classic" setting there's no lives to worry about, Yoshis are fairly durable, and you can even spend some of your gem currency on "power badges" - one time cheats, in other words - that makes levels significantly easier. One of those power badges, which can only be used in the mellow difficulty level, will actually complete a stage for you if it proves to be too much. Conversely, it's one of the hardest first-party platformers if you're trying to find everything and make it to the end without getting hit, and it does a great job in using its yarn-based world to hide secrets. We're talking a lot of invisible ? clouds to pop, secret walls to run behind or remove with Yoshi's tongue, and you really need to pick up every little gem just in case they're one of those twenty you need for that collectible category. Collectibles save once you've found them in one run, though you still need to complete the stage to log any new ones: I've had to complete several levels twice or more to find everything. It's because of this obsessive collectathon habit that the game's taking longer than I anticipated, and I'm only halfway through its third world so far (I believe the game has six).

Still, I imagine this would be a cute and breezy game for the normies out there. I particularly like the number of Yoshi color variants it gives you, even if some are garish or nightmarish, and the way the levels are built out of photorealistic arts and crafts supplies with all these little knitted characters running around them. I'm longing for the day when Kirby or Yoshi feels comfortable enough to jump into 3D platforming again, but while Yoshi's Woolly World feels like familiar worn territory at this point, it's still effortlessly charming and fun. I can't wait to get to the end of it only to discover a Nintendo Select announcement about a new Switch remake in the works.