1Q be damned! Pete’s fall gaming picks

This calendar year was top-heavy with the sort of big-budget, AAA titles we usually don’t see until September. GOD OF WAR III made sense as a March 2010 game — its predecessors hit retail about the same time of year — but spring releases for FINAL FANTASY XIII, SUPER STREET FIGHTER IV and other heavy-hitters prompted a lot of clucking among the gaming chattering class.

It’s a great thing. Democratizing the calendar means relief for our checking accounts. And every time a publisher moves one of its best bets away from Christmas, it helps the industry escape the popular perception that games are just toys.

But the punishing September-October-November retail corridor isn’t giving up without a fight. At least not yet, if this fall is any indication. In just the last few weeks, Bungie released its final HALO game before handing the franchise to Microsoft; Firaxis put out what appears to be the most elegant CIVILIZATION title yet (saying that with any confidence will take years of study); we got a glut of great PSP games; and Hothead put out its surprise sequel to “DeathSpank.”

The rise of the indie sector means we also get unexpected treats like AMNESIA: THE DARK DESCENT a legitimately terrifying first-person corridor-crawler. It’s a PC exclusive at the moment, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it popped up on the Xbox Live Marketplace or PlayStation Network in the not-too-distant future.

That said, here are the games I’m most anticipating as we barrel toward the holiday season:

If you played its downloadable prequel, you know that zombocalpyse-simulator DEAD RISING 2 (Sept. 29, PS3, 360, PC) promises to be as finnicky, abusive and Japanese as the first game in the series. That’s cause for cheers or groans, depending on your persuasion. You’ll still be saving your game in bathrooms, escorting dim-witted A.I. companions to safety and pounding cookies and orange juice as you battle deranged chefs. For me, it’s great news. A weapon-combining mechanic (kayak paddle plus chainsaws!) looks to be a great substitute for the first game’s photography system.

Think fast, Gabe. You've got a z-axis to worry about.

I’m cautiously optimistic about CASTLEVANIA: LORDS OF SHADOW (Oct. 3, PS3, 360) the franchise’s first three-dimensional title since a handful of unfairly maligned PlayStation 2-era games. From preview coverage so far, “Lords of Shadow” is shaping up to be a strong, occult-flavored brawler in the spirit of “God of War,” complete with all the nook-and-cranny-searching completionism of the 2-D games and with the promise of Hideo Kojima-inspired weirdness. If Konami pulls this off, it will be celebrated as the greatest reboot since “Metroid Prime.”

KIRBY’S EPIC YARN (Oct. 17, Wii) turned a lot of heads at this year’s Electronics Entertainment Expo, and for good reason. The deceptively simple cloth-map aesthetic looks great, and it plays perfectly to the Wii’s modest strengths. If it plays as well and manages to pack in as much replayable content as “Kirby’s Canvas Curse” did on the DS five years ago, I’m sold.

I wish I knew more about DONKEY KONG COUNTRY RETURNS (Nov. 21, Wii), but I’m excited about it already for these reasons: Austin-based Retro Studios is developing; Donkey and Diddy Kong (not Dixie or Kiddy) are front-and-center; and the two-dimensional perspective could bury any memory of DK’s regrettable Nintendo 64 collectathon.

I was impressed by the PS3 and PSP versions of LITTLEBIGPLANET but didn’t play either of them the way developer Media Molecule intended. The games shipped with levels of their own, but those levels were meant only to incentivize players to create their own stages, using an intuitive set of included level-creation tools. I played the developer’s levels and a few user-created ones, but I never had the courage to submit any of my own disasters. Whether LITTLEBIGPLANET 2 will change that remains to be seen, but the improvements showcased so far — a broader selection of game types, for one — are heartening.

(So this article ran in the print edition of the Dispatch today, and of course — of course — Media Molecule announces after our deadline that LBP2 has been pushed into 2011. Scratch this one, then.)

Some stray observations:

There are dozens of other promising, high-profile games about which I can’t credibly speculate. I’d tell you all about my excitement for FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS, for instance, but I haven’t finished FALLOUT 3 or even touched its bevy of downloadble content.

I’ve also neglected the first wave of motion-control games for the Kinect and PlayStation Move. I did that intentionally.

You might notice that all of the games mentioned above — every single one — is a sequel or flagship franchise title. Plenty of new intellectual properties are set to debut before the end of the year, but you might have to look beyond store shelves to find many of them. Microsoft’s four-week downloadable “Game Feast” promotion kicks off next week with HYDROPHOBIA and ends Oct. 20 with SUPER MEAT BOY. Something for everybody!