Summer!
For most people, summer means finally getting out and enjoying three months of beautiful weather after slogging through a cold winter and a wet spring. Summer means tending gardens and hiking trails and having cookouts under bright warm skies full of stars.
While this isn't one of the traditional summer associations, summer's really the best time of year to be a gamer. Good weather might charm you out of the house, but summer rains and hot vacation nights are going to send you right back in to while away the hours with your favorite controller.
Summer gaming has a character and flavor all its own. As day and night falls into the slow sunny rhythm of beach trips and nature hikes, you may find yourself drawn to different sorts of games... or playing your favorite games in different ways. Check out our list of the five best types of summer games and see which ones you'll be having fun with this year.
5. The Hidden Gem
The nice thing about summer is that lingering debts from the past year are usually wiped out, leaving you (or your parents) free to spend money on big vacations, new electronics, and of course new games. So you'll decide to while away a pleasant afternoon hitting the mall or a Best Buy or your favorite online shopping site, browsing around and looking for bargains, and eventually you'll find a game that's not like the others.
Maybe it's a game that you heard was really good but never actually saw a copy of in a store before. Maybe it's something you've never heard of, but you flip the back over and read reviews and find it sounds really intriguing. This game jumps off the shelf at you and demands you take it home to see what it's like. You make your purchase, get it into your house, give it a spin... and it's great, it's amazing, it's everything you didn't know you wanted a game to be.
Summer surprises like this can dissovle a June or July away into a pleasant haze. Right now my big summer surprises are Puzzle Kingdoms and Plants vs. Zombies, great mouse-clicky games I can mess around while while I'm blogging and writing and planning out the rest of my summer. DS and Wii have their fair share of these, too.
4. The Party on Vent
If you've ever been to Las Vegas, you've seen the massive never-ending buffets they have in the hotel casinos. Drop your money for a meal or, hell, a whole day's worth of food. You can stay full on the cheap while you gleefully lose and lose at the slots or the blackjack table. Whenever I think about MMO's I've played in the past, I'm always reminded of those Vegas buffet deals.
Most MMOs can be criticized in all kinds of ways when it comes to gameplay, but that's beside the point. Anything is more fun when you're doing it with friends and during the summer everyone's got more time to get together on the voice chat program of your choice and laugh your way through epic raids, quests, and screwing around in the Mission Architect.
Maybe you won't remember much of the game's storyline five years from now, but you'll remember the jokes you cracked together, how everybody was playing their class, and what it felt like when your team finally downed the boss that had wiped you twice before. That's the definition of good times.
3. The Neverending Frag-Fest
Sometimes you want to play with a bunch of friends, but you don't want to sink into the ambling pace of your average MMO. You want fast action, the adrenaline-fueled rush of a kill, the itchy tension in a finger tended on a controller's firing trigger. You want to roll in a Call of Duty or other FPS battleground, virtual gun poised for the kill.
Maybe you're fighting your way through a deathmatch alone or coordinating a pitched tactical battle with over voice chat. Maybe you're just playing your way co-op style through the game's default campaign, battling your way through hordes of virtual Nazis and zombies. It doesn't matter. Whatever the game, the point here is that it makes your heart beat faster, your blood bump harder, and gives you plenty of great stories to laugh over with your friends.
Maybe with a good beer, if you're of age. Heck, maybe you'll share that good beer with the guy you were just killing on Live, who's actually a good friend from years back that you need to do some catching up with.
2. The Hot Release
While it hasn't been quite so noticeable in the past few years, E3 is the great divide in the game release schedule. It's where the hype cycle resets and all the biggest publishers tell us what they want us to be excited about when it's time for holiday shopping and the Q3 game blitz. Sometimes this makes for irrational game delays, but it can also lead to a springtime bonanza of major (or kinda major) game releases.
Last year was probably the biggest springtime bonanza I can remember, with Smash Bros. Brawl and GTAIV hitting within weeks of each other. This year gave us a plethora of lower-selling but still awesome games like Chinatown Wars, Puzzle Quest Galactix, Pokemon Platinum, MadWorld... the list goes on and on. Wonderful games, fresh and waiting to carry you through the long six months before the big winter release window hits.
For me, the big springtime hit that's carrying me into summer is the utterly excellent Punch-Out!!, whose bite-size boxing matches are perfect for a half-hour of fun between chores and deadlines. Punch-Out!! would've been a good game at any time of year, but releasing it the week before I geared up for this year's E3 was a stroke of genius.
1. The Old Friend
When you write about games for a living, you tend to acquire games much more quickly than you can ever hope to play them. Maybe they're PR freebies, things you snapped up for your collection because you knew they'd disappear from shelves soon, games someone getting out of the hobby gave you... the point here is that you'll end up with mountains of games in your possession that you maybe never played or never got around to finishing. A lot of hardcore gamers can end up in this position, really.
There will come a lazy summer day where you find yourself picking through your collection. Some game will leap off the shelf at you, maybe something you only put down reluctantly or abandoned when another hot title came out. That game may be anywhere from a few years old to a few decades old, if you're a retro collector.
Maybe it'll go on vacation with you or occupy the TV during a wasteland of summer reruns. You'll finally have the time to savor what that game has to offer and as the summer draws to a close, you'll put it back on the shelf, satisfied. In the coming months and years, when you remember playing that game, you'll find your memories tinged with the sweetness of summers past. You'll smile. Perhaps a grey day will suddenly feel brighter.
