Weekly Multiplayer Releases: Week of April 8, 2008

You know you’re in for a slow week when the best new offering is the multiplayer component of a game from October. Oh, games industry, your weekly release schedule is an up-and-down emotional roller coaster.

Pick of the Week: Team Fortress 2 First-Person Shooter | PC A standalone version of three new (in October) games found in The Orange Box will be hitting retail this week for all of you allergic to great value and/or Steam. If you like team-based first-person shooters and wasting money, this is the game for you. To be perfectly clear: Team Fortress 2 is one of the best multiplayer games in recent memory, but for twice the price of this standalone copy you can get Portal, Half-Life 2, and Episodes One and Two in the same box.

Hit the jump for the rest of the week’s multiplayer offerings.

Also available this week:

Arcana Heart Fighting | PS2 If the mainstream media is any indication, every gamer loves creepy, pedophilic moe anime-girls. As such, Arcana Heart will almost certainly top the NPD charts next month. The arcade-PS2 fighting game port features a cast made up entirely of the sort of prepubescent cartoon girls that are corrupting America’s youth and turning a generation of young men off real women forever. Forget Grand Theft Auto IV, Arcana Heart is the greatest single threat facing our kids today.

Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2 Fighting| PS2 However, if you really must buy a PS2 fighting game this week, Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2 is the way to go. The game complies Real Bout Fatal Fury, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers into a single package, and works as a perfect companion piece to Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 1 for all you SNK Playmore fans. Bonus: It’s dirt cheap.

MiniCopter: Adventure Flight Flight Sim | Wii I can’t imagine another week will ever go by without me complaining about the Wii’s ever-expanding library of shovelware. Take this sort-of-budget-priced title, for example: It’s ugly, shallow, and preying on the legion of Wii owners who are new to gaming and just don’t know any better. Hopefully by the time the Wii’s successor rolls around all the mom n’ pop Wii owners will be gristled hardcore gamers able to deduce a game’s merits based solely on its boxart. But then, of course, they’d have my job.