Rundown (6/07/2026) S3 2026: Let the Gorging Commence

This Week’s Topics:

Rundown Preamble Ramble:
S3 2026: Let the Gorging Commence

…It just occurred to me that I have been doing these rundowns of segmented summer gaming showcases for 15 years.

That’s right! Back when The Breaded Rump’s body was still warm and Nigma Box had a lifespan measured in days, I was doing crappy write-ups of my impressions of E3 2012. They were bad. I was 17, though mentally I was closer to a gifted yet oblivious 13-year-old. I did not know what I was doing. And did not take this blog even remotely seriously at the time, just throwing out some random thoughts on various games, too short to be substantive, and probably cranked out in two hours or whatever. However, I am glad that I still have these write-ups, for the sake of having them, and to show how much better I got at doing basic things over the years.

Nowadays, these write-ups are no sweat for me, yapping about gaming news is something I do for a hobby, and I both love and loathe this time of year. Loads of things are happening, but keeping up with everything can be a challenge.

Around the last real E3 with E3 2019, there were only a few notable showcases, with some oddball “indie showcases” like the Adult Swim skit show that Devolver did every year. However, with the rise of online showcases, the loss of the pillar of E3, and the growing industry power of Geoff Keighley, something changed and now everybody and their dog is trying to roll out a showcase. I criticized this trend earlier this year, and I think we have reached something of a critical mass. Just look at the showcases that are/were scheduled from May 27 to June 9. It’s re-ring-dang-diculous:

AG French Direct
Indie Dev Showcase
Thinky Direct 2026
Insider Gaming Showcase
Indie Quest
Shooters Fes 2026
eastasiasoft Spring / Summer 2026 Showcase
MIX Summer Showcase (Formerly Guerrilla Collective)
Midsummer Nights Scream
Best Indie Games Summer Showcase 2026
Black Voices in Gaming
State of Play
Shacknews E4 Indie Showcase
Latin American Games Showcase
Women-Led Games: SGF Edition
Summer Game Fest
Day of the Devs
Southeast Asian Games Showcase
Wholesome Direct
Story-Rich Showcase
Green Games Showcase
Future Games Show Summer Showcase
Gayming Pride Parade
Frosty Games Fest
Ñ3 2026
Xbox Games Showcase & E-Day Direct
PC Gaming Show
Deutsche Indie Showcase 2026
India Games Showcase
Access-Ability Summer Showcase 2026

That’s 30 gaming showcases and I genuinely must ask who has the time to watch all of these? WHO?

Now, I will say that I think that some of these should exist, as there should be showcases that highlight certain genres of games, highlight games from certain cultures, and games made by various minority groups. I think a horror or wholesome games showcase makes a lot of sense, as those are particular genres with dedicated audiences. I think that Black, Latin American, Indian, and Southeast Asian developers should have a place to showcase and highlight their works, to show how they, as a community, are making great art.

However, they are inherently narrow in their appeal, won’t attract much attention from the broader gaming landscape, and are unable to harness the same HYPE that has defined summer gaming events for the past 30 years. If you want to make a showcase, great, just go for it, but you need to garner more than a few thousand views to make it worth it, and you need to time the showcase well. Do it when nothing else is going on, don’t wedge it during a darn marathon of other crap going on. I don’t even think this is an opinion, I think it is just how marketing works.

This also begs a question about the merits of gaming showcases, of hype, in a stagnant/declining industry, because shit ain’t hot at the moment. You could even say it’s hella not, and here are just a few reasons why:

Gaming hardware is increasingly becoming a luxury product for the top 20% of the population.
People are not buying new games.
Live services have trained players to view games as interactive platforms unto themselves and discouraged games discovery.
Social media has been gamed to keep people on The App, not to discover new things, the share button is barely functional, killing games discovery across the board.
Telecom Gambling has swept across the American audience most of these showcases are targeting, replacing gaming with Real Boy Gaming. (No Real Boy Alley required.)
America is doing their darnedest to destroy the world and the global order that was created by America for America.
While entertainment was not hit too hard by the economic hits during 2000, 2002, 2008, and benefitted from the 2020 pandemic, we are looking at a collapse that is far worse. Housing, food, and employment are dire as fuck in The Now Now, it ain’t no Future Development.
Consumer sentiment is at an all-time low.
There are too many games being released and a third of the US games industry has been laid off!

I guess you could say that everything is burning, everything is primo defo fucked fo’ real-reals on the real, gaming is no exception, and shit’s gonna be rough until the 2030s, but depending on how the faceless masses treat the Protagonists of Reality, we are looking at a decade-plus nonstop enshittification of the real world.

Anyways, anyhaps, anywacks, time for video games!

…Also, after being MIA last year— I genuinely forgot, somehow— the customary chibi CG header art is back for my Segmented Summer Showcase coverage this year. This time pulling from Aokana – Four Rhythms Across the Blue. No, I don’t have a good reason for this. I just found the CG set one-hentai and thought it was kyute!

Natalie Does Not Like Trick Room in Pokémon
(And Apparently I Need to Explain Why In Grave Detail!)

Okay, this Rundown is already WAY too big for its own good, but I got into another argument with Missy about how I don’t like Trick Room as a mechanic in Pokémon. Rather than try to argue with her, because I’m fucking ass at arguing, or talking to people in general, I’m just going to dedicate a thousand plus words to it here.

Akumako: “Spoken like a well-adjusted person…”

Now, the core of my annoyance is the fact that the Rooms mechanic may as well not exist when playing Pokémon as a single-player experience. Very few Pokémon learn these moves, fewer learn them before level 50, and while all Rooms can be taught via TMs, just because the player has a TM does not mean they will ever bother using it. They are, to me, a competitive exclusive feature, lacking even the immediate versatility or presence of weather and terrains. And as someone who does not like competitive gaming, who [views competitive gaming as something that made gaming and gaming culture materially worse](Destiny 2), I do not like competitive exclusive features. I view them as lesser from a purely ideological perspective, in addition to several other, more nitpicky, perspectives.

This perspective is increasingly uncommon in the general community erected around the Pokémon titles, in part due to the popularity of the battle simulator Pokémon Showdown. A service that I only learned about in 2021 and only used once when Missy requested to play a couple matches with me. This popularity was only amplified by Pokémon Champions, making a gated, limited, and closed down version of competitive Pokémon more accessible. There, Trick Room teams are incredibly common, and something that needs to be built against, because in competition, you need to account for all contingencies if you want to prove you have worth, period.

I understand their importance in the “Real Game,” I just don’t like any of the Rooms on a mechanical level, and don’t think they have much depth or potential to make for particularly interesting challenges.

Let’s start with Trick Room. At its base level, it allows the player to invert the speed stats of every Pokémon for five turns. Slow is fast, and this gives a lot of Pokémon with sub-60 Speed the ability to deal damage first. My problem is that this is a weird move in the context of the series, which I say as someone who went over every single move and categorized them, twice, before rebalancing them for my own purposes… twice. It’s not like the Split, Swap, or Shift family, which are weirdly niche opportunistic moves, but are largely fair because they are functionally a type of buff or debuff. Buffs or debuffs can be lost by removing a Pokémon from the field. But Rooms cannot be removed by anything, not even any other Rooms.

Weather can be overwritten with another weather effect. Terrain can be overwritten with another terrain, and these keep the gameplay balanced by giving players many ways to counter any opponent that is using these effects. You can replace them with your own weather/terrain. You can have them work for you by changing around moves, held items, or abilities you have on a given team. If you know you are going up a Rillaboom, use grounded Pokémon and avoid certain Ground moves or roll up with a Grassy Seed. If you are going up against a Drizzle or Rain Dance user, run Thunder, Hurricane, Swift Swim, Dry Skin, loads of stuff. And if you want, and have a good enough team, you can just ignore the weather or terrain, as it only matters in situational instances. If no Pokémon in a battle know Fire or Water type moves, or have anything affected by sunlight, what is Sunny Day realistically doing?

With Trick Room however, once it gets off, you need to spend the next five turns existing in wacko bizarro world. This means the answer to any challenge that features Trick Room only has two real answers. Prevent Trick Room from being used, which is, explicitly, not using the mechanic. Or you could roll into the battle with a team of deliberately slower Pokémon. As a Trick Room user, you are assuming you are going up against Pokémon that would normally faster, allowing them to attack first with traditionally slower Pokémon. …And that’s the key reason to use it.

Yes, Speed is everything in competitive Pokémon, but as I said above, I’m not talking about competitive. I’m talking about how I do not think that, outside of this environment, where levels are capped, stats are meticulously curated, and battles are built around a narrow format, this is an interesting mechanic. It changes the rules, and I view any argument that “it’s necessary for certain Pokémon to be usable” to be a load of guff. At that point, just admit that all you care about is winning, stop wasting your time playing video games, and attain symbols of status, while depriving your soul of life, because emotions are just outdated chemical functions.

Now, you might think I also have problems with Tailwind, a buff that doubles an entire party’s speed for four turns. However, just from that brief description, I think I’ve illustrated how different it is from Trick Room. Some might say Tailwind is more powerful than Trick Room, but its power is also a lot more narrow. It is only a buff, not a debuff, and while it persists across an entire party, it can be countered in ways that Trick Room cannot, as Speed buffs and debuffs… are still buffs and debuffs.

If you want to get faster real quickly, use your own Tailwind. If you want other avenues of Speed, moves like Agility, Quiver Dance, and Dragon Dance are staple buffs. Opponent Speed can easily be lowered through a bunch of different moves, including Icy Wind, Electroweb, Bulldoze, or even bloody String Shot. And plenty of Pokémon get boosted Speed through their Abilities. Tailwind introduces a Speed war with the opponent, and I find working around that to be far more entertaining, complex, and interesting than any scenario I can imagine with Trick Room. You could try to fight them… of you could just accept going second and win anyway.

…As for the other two Rooms, Magic Room and Wonder Room… I consider them to be in the same general camp as Psycho Shift. Neat idea for a move, but also when would this be useful? Magic Room turns off held item use for five turns, which can be useful for canceling out powerful threats, like those using damage boosting held items like Life Orb or the Choice series. Or Xerneas’s herb of doom. But this effect goes both ways. Nobody gets an inherent benefit, it just turns off a mechanic for five turns, which is… okay? You can do some strategies with that, I guess, but if you are building a team, you probably want every Pokémon to have a useful held item, right? And if you want to prevent opponents from using held items… isn’t that what Knock-Off or any held item based moves are for?

Wonder Room is another quirky “I guess this is fine” situation, as it swaps the Defense and Special Defense stats of all Pokémon. Can this be useful in certain matchups? Yes. Plenty of Pokémon have good Defense and bad Special Defense or vice versa. It can befuddle an opponent, sure. But I think this is more likely to be a minor or lateral move unless the scenario is planned in great detail. …And in the context of a single player game, I don’t know what this would really add. If this is a tool used by a boss, the answer is brutally simple. Use the more effective attack and use Pokémon with the right type of bulk. As a player, it can be useful if your Pokémon have a less ideal defensive stat or offensive stat for an encounter, I suppose. I guess I don’t see why this is a Room, when it could be a more narrowly focused move that could be used on self, allies, or opponents.

Anyway, that’s why I don’t like the Rooms. Trick Room is not an interesting puzzle to me, Magic Room and Wonder Room are rarely useful, and none of them have much relevance in the main campaigns of these games.

…And that’s why I decided to cut them from my spreadsheet project for a game that will never be made.

Toy Story Games Are BACK!
(At Least The Most Noteworthy Ones Are…)

I swear, Digital Eclipse and their owners, Atari, have the ability to garner the most unusual licenses I could think of. One day they are doing a full remake of the original Wizardry, complete with an overlay of the original Apple II game to show that what they are doing is mostly a visual facelift. (A facelift that I support, as Wizardry was a one color game.) The next day, they are putting out the original run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. And now they are narrowing in on Toy Story of all things, probably because there’s a new movie coming out in a few days.

Dubbed Toy Story: Retro Roundup!, the title is a compilation of 6, or 11 games, depending on how you count, with the usual scattering of interviews, concept art, scans, cheat codes, and rewind. The PR did not list what games were specifically included, but I think it’s the following:

Toy Story (Super Nintendo)
Toy Story (Mega Drive)
Toy Story (Game Boy)
Toy Story 2 (Game Boy)
Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue (PlayStation)
Toy Story Racer (PlayStation)
Toy Story Racer (Game Boy Color)
Buzz Lightyear of Star Command (PlayStation)
Buzz Lightyear of Star Command (Game Boy Color)
A Bug’s Life (PlayStation)
A Bug’s Life (Game Boy Color)

That looks like a lot, but it’s not really a comprehensive collection. PC versions are omitted outright, and less emulation friendly consoles, like the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast, are not included. Instead, the 3D games are just using the PlayStation 1 versions of the game, likely the modern ports developed by Atari subsidiary Implicit Conversions. This unfortunately means no real engagements, and the signature PS1 wobbly models are going to be on full display. It’s not idea, and I would love to see these games get a bit of a presentational upgrade rather than feign over authenticity, but releases like this are inherently cheap. They are likely only going to make a few million bucks, and many people are content with just having A version of a game they liked as a kid if the packaging is sufficient.

ANYWAY! Here’s why these games are important!

The original Toy Story 2.5D platformer was, naturally, a pretty big game in its heyday, being a common Christmas present for the holiday of 1995, and was a noteworthy game for its time. To capture the look of the film, it used pre-rendered visuals, which were still novel to see on years-old hardware, and featured multiple gameplay modes. From standard platforming to overhead racing to first-person exploration. This could have endeared it a reputation as a cherished retro game, but it suffered from what I’m going to call Rental Difficulty.

So, the concept of game rentals is a somewhat dubious concept in game history. In Japan, video game rentals were prohibited by law, while music rentals, and even music copying services, were incredibly common. Figure that one out. While in North America, meaning America, meaning the United States, video games were very common. Blockbuster was the big one, plenty of mom and pop video shops rented games, Sega partnered with Hollywood Video to let people rent Dreamcasts before Dreamcast Day in 9/9/1999. Hell, I have heard many anecdotes about people renting games from the darn grocery store, which is kind of brilliant if you think about it!

Because of this, many games were made artificially harder when localized for the US market, and you can thank a decent chunk of gamer difficulty-loving elitism to this systemic factor. Disney looked at this system and mandated that (some of) their games be made too hard for a typical kid to clear while renting the title, giving many of their titles a rather notorious reputation for being… What was the term of art? Oh, right. Fuck Ridiculous Hard! This has always been something that capped the nostalgia potential of these games, effectively mandating that these games come equipped with cheats and save states built in. Fortunately, Digital Eclipse is doing that, so maybe this will be an actually good version through that inclusion alone.

Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue is an interesting cultural artifact in its own right, as it was a largely original title, not extensively based on the 1999 movie, and a pretty quality 3D platformer of the era. While nothing groundbreaking, it is solid throughout, has a pretty beloved soundtrack, a reputation as a speedrun game, and arguably served as more of a cultural touchstone than the first game did.

As a title that released for PS1, N64, PC, and Dreamcast, TS2BLttR spread across a pretty wide spectrum of children circa 1999, and persisted in stores for a few years, before the stock was filtered out circa 2001. The title actually escaped licensing Heck a few times, thanks to someone on Sony’s team really liking this game and getting it on every PlayStation since the PSP. However, just re-releasing a game like this on a platform, 5+ years into its life, and only on Sony systems, with few presentational improvements, won’t light the world on fire. Games like this are best on PC and Nintendo, I hate to say.

For the other games… Toy Story Racer was just a competent licensed Mario Kart clone. And I have no idea if Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is actually good or some licensed kid game mid. I didn’t even know there was a Buzz Lightyear cartoon series until a few years ago. Still, it’s more games saved from the unlicensed dustbin, and that’s not a bad thing.

Also, I have no idea why A Bug’s Life is included in this package other than it was easy to add and is mostly on-brand. Feel free to be snarky about it, but no complaining.

This would all be a fine collection, and is, but that’s not the only Toy Story announcement they had. Alongside Retro Roundup!, Atari and Digital Eclipse are releasing Toy Story 3: Complete Edition. This title is a straightforward remaster of Toy Story 3 (2010) for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, specifically one of those versions, which is a noteworthy title. Developed by Hogwash Legarthy studio, Avalanche Software, Toy Story 3 was a pretty notable kids game that offered quality action adventure set pieces. It neatly emulated many of the biggest games at the time, and doing it with a level of fidelity and polish that was uncommon for licensed games of this caliber. It was a quality time in and of itself, but it also came with a creation sandbox known as the Toy Box mode, letting players customize their own town, go on missions, and drive about. The game as a whole is often seen as a predecessor to the Disney Infinity series, also developed by Avalanche, and without the whole toys to life limitation, it might actually be better.

As a title that came out… 16 years ago, I’m sure that many bright and young twentysomethings have fond memories of Toy Story 3, and I think it’s swell that they’ll be able to revisit it. A game like this, in a series like this, really ought to be an evergreen title on every platform, and while Disney has left some of their older titles available, on platforms like Steam, a reissuing is warranted.

Toy Story: Retro Roundup! and Toy Story 3: Complete Edition will both be released on October 15th for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC.

Also, as someone born in 1994, I should probably give my thoughts on Toy Story before letting this topic drift into the ether. I’ve only seen the first three movies, have not engaged in the IP for over a decade, and I think… it’s good. I never loved the series, even as a kid. I was A Bug’s Life kid when I was real little growing up, complete with this giant playset and a framed poster of it on my wall.

Though, I do have a distinct crystallized memory of watching Toy Story 2 (1999) when I was 5, in the theater, with my mother, and the movie abruptly ending when a fire alarm went off during the plane scene at the end. We had to leave the theater, stand outside in the cold early December weather, and because I wanted to see how the movie ended, my mother and I went back in to attend a new showing, free of charge. As a 5-year-old, I thought the movie was fantastic, but that’s to be expected.

Why did I bring that Nat Fact™ up? Because when else am I going to share that story?

Also, uh, Atari, I’m glad you are pumping out these collections, but when I see you do things like this, and spend $40 million on the darn Crossy Road developer, I have to question if you’re repeating the mistakes of Embracer. Be a big fish in a small pond, and learn to be good at ONE THING.

State of Play: BIG Edition
(The S3 One!)

My enthusiasm for Sony is pretty much at an all-time low right now. I think they have homogenized their brand image far too much over the past decade, and it has eroded what PlayStation used to represent. They have become the AAA prestige game studio, not the quirky underdogs who will fund any project with enough artistic juice. I will never forgive the soulless Caucasians running the scenes at Sony Interactive Entertainment for killing Japan Studios, the second-greatest game developer of all time. Their recent move away from PC ports for single player games fills me with a strong incentive to not care about anything that they are going to put out, in addition to being… stupid. Read the room, chucklepucks, nobody can afford your console AND a gaming PC.

I think everything about the way they have tried to maintain and capitalize on their legacy has been quarter-assed, as they are not releasing games at an acceptable pace and are releasing them with pretty subpar emulation by modern standards. And I think that Astro Bot (2024) serves as a marvelous example for how PlayStation could endear the same sense of legacy that Nintendo and other Japanese game publishers enjoy. But they aren’t. Oh no, They can’t do that when they have these big mature tentpole third person cinematic action games to hock.

Sure, Sony doesn’t really need to try to win people over. They won the place as the de facto dedicated home console, beating out the Xbox Series (93 million versus 35 million), and all they need to do is maintain a level of competence, and they should be good for another hardware generation or two. Well, unless consoles start sporting an introductory price of $1,500. But at that point, I think people will just start copping this ish from… where do people buy PlayStations these days? …Kohl’s? Yeah, they’ll start stealing PlayStations from Kohl’s!

Gosh, I wish that I could steal game consoles again. Those were good times!

Anyway, on with the big State of Play announcements!

Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine Acts Like It’s 15 Years Old
(In Both Meanings of the Word!)

The showcase began with Sony’s big AAA title for this holiday season with Marvel’s Wolverine, offering a decent uninterrupted cinematic gameplay segment to give players an idea of what the game will actually play like. This is all standard stuff, but sitting through it, I could not help but remark about how… off its tone feels. X-Men is an IP that delves into all manner of serious subject matter, so child trafficking, copious gore, and characters who use the fuck word are fair game. However, something about this snippet struck me as a bit too self-serious for its own good, in a way that AAA games have been mocked for… 15+ years, if my math is right.

Wolverine is an inherently silly character due to his knife hands and bright yellow suit, so there is an expectation that there should be some levity on display. While a grump, the character of Logan “Wolverine” Whatshisname should have a sense of humor. And, per what I remember of the now ancient comics I read, he did. Here though, it seems that Insomniac was so enamored with the fact they are making an M-rated game that they went a bit too hard into the adolescent ideas of maturity. Characters spurt copious amounts of tomato sauce upon getting slashed, the bad guys are cartoonishly callous and cruel, the cursing technique is adolescent, and the violence simply does not feel quite right. It’s too grounded to be “yo, they fuckin’ straight up murked that dude!” yet just exaggerated enough to feel as if realism is not the goal.

It’s all a tone, a presentation that I found particularly common during the adolescent years of the Wii PS360 era. It’s actually something I was recently reacquainted with when I went back to play [Prototype] (2009) to gauge if it had any sauce as a TF game. (It is Natalie.TF certified sauceless.) I guess you could say that, tonally and spiritually, this game strikes me as a throwback to that generation, intentional or otherwise.

Marvel’s Wolverine, will be released on September 15, 2025 for PlayStation 5, and ONLY PlayStation 5… until it gets remastered for PlayStation 6, probably.

Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends are BACK!
(Two of My Favorite 2D Games Return*!)

I would not call myself a Rayman fan as I never got into the original run of games. (Rayman (1995) is a bit too hard, precise, and cryptic for my liking, and the PC version of Rayman 2 (1999) did not support my controller when I tried it in 2013, so I gave up and forgot about it. Rayman 3: Havoc in Da Hood (2003) was kind of a brand sequel and the HD remaster was console-only. However, I absolutely love where the series went with Rayman Origins (2011) and Rayman Legends (2013).

Rayman Origins was pure platforming perfection, and I would always be down to give the game another whirl. I love the way the characters move, the impact of every attack, and how both jumping and punching are means of dispatching enemies. I love how the glide and wall jump bleed so elegantly into the core movement of the playable characters, being so intuitive you can easily forget they are even upgrades. I think the levels are masterfully designed, with just the right level of mystique and exploration in order to find all secrets and collectibles before a stage is cleared. You might not get everything in the first run, but you’re rarely going to be stumped either.

The 2D visuals are utterly gorgeous, delivering a level of hand-animated fidelity that I have scarcely seen since, to the point where I would put it right next to Vanillaware titles. I think the art direction is a brilliant mix of everything into a style that no game has ever, or probably will ever, replicate. It can be stunning, gross, cute, evocative, creepy, and deeply imaginative.

While not an easy game, I would describe its difficulty as frictionless and incredibly light on punishment of error. While your character only has one or two hits each and can easily get creamed by spikes, baddies, or other hazards, the game has no lives system, does not ask you if you want to continue, and is pretty generous with its checkpoints. Your character blows up into a balloon, you get five seconds of loading, and bam, you’re off and trying the challenge again. It seems so goldarn simple, but it remains the gold standard in how I want games to handle difficulty as a rule. Do not ask me to continue, don’t tell me that game is over— I’m the one who decides that— just let me try until I win, because I WILL win!

I also have oodles of good memories playing Rayman Origins game with my buddy Matt— who I haven’t spoken to in 12 years. I would not call it a great co-op game, because you can accidentally slap and stun your friend when trying to hit an enemy, but that’s a relatively minor qualm. It’s loads better than what Mario was doing at the time. I still remember grabbing Rayman Origins as part of a killer Black Friday deal in 2011, playing it bit by bit week after week, and always being so happy when I got to see something new. After which, I played it two more times, and it only got better.

Then, came Rayman Legends, which is up there on my top 25 favorite games of all time. Everything Origins did, Legends did, and often did better, while having a broader, looser, definition of what this game could be. Origins kept things fixated on a few genres and locales, while Legends played around with more varied and unique worlds. Also, it had rhythm stages, and those stages OWN.

Origins delivered a gorgeous 2D world, while Legends gave everything a painterly texture that made an already gorgeous game into one of the best looking games I have ever seen— to this day. Hell, despite having a pretty hefty amount of levels, the developers went out of their way to not only add daily challenges, testing players to prove their skills in bite-sized chunks, they remastered 40 levels from Origins, with new visual assets.

I think Legends is fantastic, one of the best 2D platformers ever made on a technical and design level, and a title that should be heralded as one of the best of all time. Critically, it was lauded with oodles of 8’s and 9s, but not a whole lot of people wound up playing it. It launched in August/September 2013, right before GTA V, right before the new consoles, and right before a pretty stacked holiday season. Which is before getting to how the game’s reputation was dragged through the mud a bit by salty Nintendorks.

Rayman Legends was originally poised as a Wii U exclusive, but after Ubisoft (rightly) determined that the Wii U was a dumpster fire, they delayed it by half a year and made it a multiplatform title. This was great for me, as I didn’t need to buy a stinky Wii U to play it, and I could just buy it via UPlay, with a promotion that gave me a free copy of Rayman Origins for PC. However, other people were not quite so eager to buy a 2D platformer in this environment. Sales picked up over time as the game was ported to various systems, but as of 2019, it still hadn’t broken past 5 million units.

I would have loved to see the team at Ubisoft Montpellier continue the series, but Beyond Good and Evil 2 ate up years of resources for NOTHING, and they did not release another fully original platformer until Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024). …which I have not bought, as I do not want to deal with Ubisoft’s stinky DRM. …Or give Ubisoft-Tencent anymore.

Anyway, I reviewed Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends back in 2017, came away loving both just as much as I did when I first played them, and I would LOVE to revisit these titles again. Unfortunately, they do have a slight problem. Well, not for me, as I’m still rocking my 1080p monitors with no plans to upgrade. But for people who have transitioned to 1440p or 4K, playing these games is not a great experience, because the assets optimized made for 1080p, and there’s no great way to upscale them.

Sprites can be up-ressed by running them at a multiple of the original resolution with nearest neighbor or some similar filtering enabled. Textures filtering can be altered (ideally disabled, but you drink your pee water, Joachim). And 3D assets can be rendered at a higher resolution and smoothed over with antialiasing. But with an illustrated 2D game… you’re SOL, punk.

This makes Origins and Legends a pair of games that I think would warrant a remaster, as it would be nice to get these games with the highest quality art assets available. As a (mostly) 2D game, it should not be that intensive to run on modern machines with assets made for 4K resolutions, and once we get 4K resolutions, we should be good. …We are going to stop at 4K resolutions, right? …Right? Because I do not want to go any higher!

Akumako: “Bitch, have you even seen 4K in your life?”

Uh… I’ve seen it on the TVs at Costco and Sam’s Club.

Akumako: “…It’s 2026, how TF have you NEVER seen 4K? Do you not own a television?”

My mother does, she watches her local channels on it, maybe a Blu-ray she gets at the library, but the screen’s small enough to pass for a computer monitor, so…

Akumako: “You really seem like someone who should own retro consoles and CRTs with how out of date you are. This and how you don’t like using your phone for social media… what generation are you even?”

7th generation, born and raised, on Destructoid is where I spent most of my days. Chilling on—

Akumako: “FORGET IT! This preamble has gone one for too long. Get on with the news!”

The news is… let me just rip open this envelope—

Akumako: “Oh, for the love of CUSTARD! Gimme that! Hmm… let’s see… Oh. This isn’t what you thought it was, dumb-dumb. While Rayman Origins is being remastered for 4K and 60 fps gaming with Rayman Origins: Enhanced Edition, and looks great, Rayman Legends is not getting the same treatment.”

Uh-oh.

Akumako: “Yeah, instead Rayman Legends Retold is a full 2.5D remake of the original 2013 2D platformer, with new 3D flight sections and an expanded story, complete with voice acting and pretty lame quips.”

…Ubisoft took one of my favorite games of all time, a game that was gorgeous in every frame, and they made it 3D?

Akumako: “Y-E-S. That spells Ys.”

…What? Why? I just… NO! No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. NO!

Taking a 2D game and replace its visuals with 3D models has always been a contentious decision in my mind, and I don’t think there are many examples where I prefer how the remake looks. Even when I can tell there is objectively more detail and character in a remake, like the 2019 remake of Link’s Awakening, I often find that the deviance in aesthetic comes across as a crude dismissal of what the original did.

While Rayman Legends Retold, this remake, is clearly retaining the original art direction, that almost makes it worse. It positions the new version, the remake, as a replacement for the original, while selling itself as a new experience. Not a refinement of what was there, but a recreation to substitute the original.

A remake that changes a bunch is its own new title, but one that merely exists to transform a 2D game into a 3D version of itself is the least valuable type of remake in my mind. They rarely, if ever, replace the original as they seem so inclined to do. They often offer a handful of sparse improvements and expansions, but those could have been facilitated through a remaster that retains the game’s visual identity. The pioneer behind this approach was potentially the Sega Ages 2500 series, which were remakes of dozens of Mega Drive games created with modern circa 2002 visuals and often full 3D recreations of original Mega Drive games. None of them are deemed better or more relevant next to the originals. However, I don’t think it got bad or notable until the DS, PSP, and XBLA era.

Mega Man Maverick Hunter X (2005)
Mega Man Powered Up (2005)
Final Fantasy III (2006)
Prince of Persia Classic (2007)
Final Fantasy IV (2007)
Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (2007)
Bionic Commando Rearmed (2007)
1942: Joint Strike (2008)
Klonoa (2008)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled (2009)
R-Type Dimensions (2009)
Lode Runner (2009)
Tecmo Bowl Throwback (2010)
Cave Story 3D (2011)
Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons (2013)
Flashback (2013)

This is just a rough initial list I made through a couple minutes of wiki hopping and longplay referencing. It’s not including a bunch of stuff, like the SaGa DS remakes, remakes that I KNOW substantially changed level designs, and ones that blend 2D and 3D assets like the Arc System Works Ys remakes.

…I actually wrote this whole segment above before the game was actually revealed— it got leaked in a classic Ubisoft move— and per the trailer and press release, it is definitely one of these. It’s a recreation that aims to be largely additive, except for how they’re probably removing the Origins stages remastered in Legends. The story is expanded beyond a few nonverbal skits, now incorporating voiced pre-rendered cinematics. There’s a new final realm, flying dragon stages, four new musical stages, and new challenge modes, all of which are great adds. But this is also a game that tears away the assets used to make the original game, replacing them with something considerably different.

This is not a loose remake that uses the original as a jumping off point and switches up most of the level designs. This is a somewhat strict remake, with some level designs I recognized from the original Legends. It is being positioned as something that can substitute the original, rather than being its own thing.

If this were its own thing, I would be gushing that it looks beautiful, because it does. They did a great job of translating the original art style to 3D, and delivered something where every frame also looks like a painting. A digital painting, but a painting nevertheless.

Akumako: “HOW CAN IT BE A PAINTING… with no paint?”

I might think the English voice acting sounds pretty cheap, but I can just switch the game over to another language for that. No big deal. And… I would jump at the opportunity to play through this game again, but I really don’t want to support a title that can be seen as a replacement of the original, when it changes every single visual asset of the original game. Especially when, if you do a side-by-side of certain things, the game just looks worse, because artistic choices made in 2D do not always translate to 3D, and certain expressions are WAY harder to capture in 3D. They messed with the colors on something that was already beautiful.

So, are you going to get it to do some tear-down review of it? It’s just $40 and coming out on October 1, 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC.”

…I don’t want to give Ubisoft money…

Akumako: “It’s for two of your favorite games of all time, ya dingus.”

But…

Akumako: “Butts are for pooping. I’m adding this to your to-do list. You can do a big spiel in the review about the merits of remakes and how money influences art. It’ll be great.”

…How am I being peer pressured by my pet demon?

Akumako: “You’d know better than me!”

Tomb Raider #1 Remake #2 Looks Good
(Too Bad About the AI Drama)

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis was shown off following the reveal six months ago, and continues to look like the lowkey Tomb Raider reboot it actually is. …What? The last game came out in September 2018, this is coming out on February 12, 2027 (for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and Steam). 5 years used to be ~~fertile~~ breedable ground to launch a reboot, and as a remake of the first game, it may as well be a reboot too.

Though, I would like to comment that Legacy of Atlantis is the type of remake that I am okie dokie with, as it is just a new game. Same general setting, concepts, and characters as the original, but the game looks and plays entirely differently, with a completely redesigned world. This is not a one-to-one recreation of the original 1996 title. We just got a great remaster of that. And it’s not a remake of Tomb Raider Anniversary, which you can still buy on PC and Xbox… and PS4/PS5. Huh. It’s just a new game.

As for the game itself… it’s a modern Tomb Raider game. Full of elaborate action set pieces, climbing, shooting, brawling, and traversing through impressive high-fidelity locales while fighting off monsters. A quality self-contained action adventure title that we used to see loads of when they only cost $50 million, but now cost 5 times as much due to technical fuddyness and insatiable throbbing demand for graphics. Which, admittedly, the game does deliver.

It’s too bad that the game made use of AI generated assets, per the game’s store page. Though, in instances like this, I have to offer some degree of understanding for this game, and most games like it. Legacy of Atlantis probably started development in 2020/2021, people were messing around with AI a bunch in 2022 and 2023, back when the technology was still being understood and AI hate was nowhere it is today. I know BECAUSE I WAS THERE, you were too.

Game dev, especially with multiple studios involved, is so complex that it is hard to say that ANY game coming out today doesn’t have some AI generated assets in it. Even if you cannot see it, there’s a better than 70% chance it has some AI generated code in it. This is not me saying “there is no reason to resist,” as I think blatant, obvious, and overt uses of AI should be clowned upon for looking, sounding, or just being shit, because it is. However, it is also important to recognize that if you are using any major tech product, you are using a product created by AI. Windows? AI. Android? AI. iOS? AI. Linux? AI, primo defo.

The stink and stank of AI generated assets is everywhere and the tech is so broadly applied, so common, that any full-on boycott is as feasible as boycotting all oil products and byproducts. It’s successfully ingrained itself in everything, right down to how you search for things online. While I want this crap to go away as much as anyone, virtue signaling how “well, I’m not going to buy this game because it has AI” is not the bold stance that some people think it is. Have your principles, but 99% of people are trying to survive in a system of abuse where they have precious little power.

…Less than 50 of those 550 words were about the game itself as seen in the trailers. If you cannot tell, I am far more interested in talking about the CONTEXT of a lot of these games than the CONTENT.

Natalie Complains About Sony’s Classic Re-Releases
(Because the State of Game Releases Annoys Me…)

Next up, there is something that I just need to get off of my chest after seeing Sony hock their PS2 classics during this showcase. They love to do this, but every time they do this for their back catalog, or some licensed retro game, it annoys me because of how half-assed their execution is.

So, Sony’s PS2 emulation for PS4 and PS5 is actually pretty good. PSP is fine from what I can tell, while PS1 is limited by design. However, they have been so bad at actually supporting the service and selling them. Outside these fairly arbitrary highlights in State of Play presentations, they have not done much to promote these titles and have been releasing them at an almost nonsensical pace. Like, there were 7 PS2 re-releases in 2025, and so far ONE release in 2026. It’s not because they are upgrading these games, adding widescreen support, and making them better. No. They are throwing them in an emulator, bumping the resolution, adding rewind, and throwing in some filtering options. That may be fine if they are going for big quantity and big variety, but they ain’t!

For the PS2, Sony are putting out games they published before, Disney games, some Embracer Group games, and that’s kind of it. PS1 games have some more activity while PSP emulation looks to have been abandoned. This lack of activity, combined with Sony’s history of lacking much interest in their own legacy, makes it very hard to care about their re-releases, and I tend to view ventures like the Patapon or Freedom Wars remasters as big wins next to Sony’s half-hearted attempt at Nintendo Classics. (Nintendo Classics also suck, but 70% of the games are Nintendo owned. BIG DIFF.)

With the latest batch of three PS2 re-releases, they are clearly trying to expand the types of games offered, both in publisher and legacy. However, I cannot help but look at these and think of how much I would rather see them get re-released by another publisher, who would give them more upgrades or features, and put them out on every platform.

Gitaroo Man (2001) is a goldarn masterpiece of a rhythm game, with a soundtrack that MILLIONS of people need to experience, EVERY YEAR, FOREVER. It is a quirky as hell Japanese game that has a vibrant personality, and it should not be locked to a damn PS5, a system for live services and AAA cinematic shooters and murderge (murder games). Gitaroo Man (2001) is important enough as a work of art that it should be on everything, and Koei Tecmo should just license it out for a basic remaster. Put that crap in widescreen— you need to change like 6 numbers— change up the button textures for various systems, let people choose between Japanese or English dubs, and bam, you’re golden. We don’t need new environments, we don’t need new lighting, the original soundtrack is PERFECT, it does not need to look new. It just needs to look clean. Do that, and I’d buy it, and I am a dog’s ass at rhythmic things!

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy was a cool as heck PS2 and Xbox game that earned a status as a cult classic, and would be a neat game to see get a re-release, after being lost in the fall of Midway. But there’s no money in that, the game is not hot enough to get eyes. So, it’s just being dumped onto this service because somebody at Warner Bros. Games just rubber-stamped something that would get them a decent chunk of change. Probably not much though, because only dorks like me remember Psi-Ops.

Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams though, that one just kind of hurts. Capcom is re-releasing Onimusha 4: Dawn of Dreams (2006) via Sony’s emulation service, instead of remastering it like they did with the first two games. Sure, they could just remaster that, after they work out the Jean Reno problem with Onimusha 3: Demon Siege (2004). …But would they do that?

Akumako: “They literally can. You can do multiple re-releases of the same title, and nobody can stop you. Capcom and Sony are likely doing this to drum up hype for their new Onimusha for cheap.”

…I guess so. I just really don’t like the idea of re-releases being, one, limited, and two, kicking the can down the road. Because if something is out for PC nowadays, then it’ll be around forever. And while I don’t think all three console makers will succeed in keeping their digital libraries through the next few generations, I doubt they are all going to do a complete restart. If they do, I expect to see blood.

There is a better way to handle re-releases, but the culture is not there, the desire is not there, and the mechanisms are not there. Every game ever released should be available for every system that can run it, but that would be too hard to implement, so nobody’s doing it. Companies want quick and easy, and these subscription service re-releases are just that. They are the results of two contacts between companies chatting and deciding to broker a deal for a fixed amount. The licensee does not need to do much work, the licensor does not need to do much work, and it somewhat boosts subscription sales, or decreases the amount of cancelations. PlayStation Plus Classics and Nintendo Classics are not the best circumstance, but it is the easiest way for them to release classic games. Just ship the ROM and box art, assuming Nintendo/Sony does not have all of that, and cash the check.

When in doubt, businesses will pursue the easiest way to achieve their goals and bring in revenue. That’s not a rule 100% of the time, but it is most of the time.

Kemuri is Cool Urban Fantasy!
(So Much Better than the Multiplayer Thing It Used to Be)

Kemuri is a title I initially tuned out on, thinking it was some other multiplayer shooter, and that’s because it was! See, I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!

Akumako: “I know, you’ve got demons in your head, like any sane person!”

Instead, Kemuri was re-revealed as an urban exploration game through a grimy vertical city frothing with yokai aplenty. Playing as one of three archetypes, the player must scale and parkour their way through the skyscrapers and use the power of their fox window in order to find yokai lurking about. Once the hunt ends, the battle begins, where the game takes cues from Japanese mythology and character action game staples, delivering boss battles that imbue the protagonist with yokai powers, or rather possession. By “wear[ing] the paranormal,” the protagonists can traverse the world in news ways, use new moves in battle, and expand the game however they see fit. There’s also up to three player co-op, letting people hunt yokai and nab powers with their friends, which is a nifty feature.

Kemuri looks pretty far along and boasts a fairly striking visual style all its own, clearly the work of impassioned artists given the luxury to create what they want how they want, and it shows. Combat looks flashy yet with a good deal of variability in the rapid-fire of encounters shown. And if it’s not clear by now, I have a strong fondness for supernatural or magical city games like this. Kemuri will be released for PS5 and PC in 2027.

The Stuntman is BACK!
(…What the Heck is Stuntman?)

Saber Interactive, one of the more fascinating former assets of The Embracer Group, has been working on a LOT of wild projects over the years. Probably because they have well over a thousand employees under their mantle and walked away with some IPs. Like… why did they get Turok from this deal? I don’t know! But they apparently also got Stuntman, a pretty obscure IP that I have not heard a peep about for years.

Stuntman was a 2002 PlayStation 2 car game built around a fairly intuitive premise. Wouldn’t it be dope to play through car chase scenes from major Hollywood blockbusters? Well, the developers of the classic PS1 driving game, uh, Driver (1999), pitched the idea to their parent company, Atari, and they picked up the idea. This was back when car culture was a mainstream thing, driving games had an immediate and mass appeal, and you could destroy cars, licensed or otherwise, with the graphical power of the PS2. The idea had plenty of merit, but was slightly marred by a few things.

Nobody has uploaded a higher quality full playthrough than this. Sorry!

One, the game only had six major chapters, all featuring different vehicles and locations, but if you know what you were doing, the game could be cleared in a dedicated afternoon, making it a great rental game. Two, the game was less about off the wall bombast. This was not Split/Second: Velocity (2010) or Motorstorm: Apocalypse (2011). It was pretty grounded in what you could expect to see from a 90s action movie.

Three, the gameplay is not the most robust, as you are following directions in every level. Turning right or left, going through obstacles, avoiding weapon fire, and sliding between debris all while being timed and scored. It was NOT a racing game, it was a precision driving game. Four, this was not a licensed movie game, you just going through clear pastiches of segments from famous Hollywood movies, which made every scene feel like an unauthorized copy, or rip-off.

Still, this was early in the PS2’s life and spectacle meant a LOT back then. Having a game that looked and felt like a movie, played like one too, was a dream come true for a lot of teenage boys. Stuntman did well enough to get on the Greatest Hits label, back when those were a thing, and while it had some pretty insane range in critics’ reception, that wasn’t unheard of back in the day.

After this, the developers at Reflections went on to make Driv3r (2004), which was garbage because Atari was bleeding money, so they shipped the game half-way through beta. This worsened relationships with the two, leading Atari to sell Reflections to Ubisoft and the Stuntman IP to THQ along with Paradigm Entertainment. They made alright licensed Terminator games and SpyHunter (2001). Together, they collaborated on Stuntman: Ignition (2007), a game that I want to say is a better, more bombastic, rendition of the original game, with more fluid, more arcadey, driving controls.

That’s not to say the 2002 title was not bombastic. You were launching cars into airplanes and submarines to make them explode into teensy chunks. It was hilarious. But with better understanding of the PS2 hardware, I would say that Paradigm delivered a more impressive package, and one with clearer, less frustrating, driving sequences. Or maybe that’s just my eyes struggling to adjust to 240p video footage.

Skimming through a longplay, I would say that Ignition looks pretty awesome, while being subject to the same limitations as the first one. Game’s 2 to 3 hours long, relies on tributes over licenses, and is built around following instructions in order to get the highest score. Still, I would be lying if I said that I did not want to play it, just for the cheap thrills, after watching some gameplay. Unfortunately, the game did not do well. The Great Pre-cession of 2007 was already underway, people were a lot more selective about the games they bought, and expected a lot from any game launching on next gen consoles. If John Woo’s Stranglehold wasn’t doing well, this game didn’t have a chance. Like, Ignition has you driving a damn missile launching hovercraft through the snow. You can’t top that!

Also, I have to say that Stuntman: Ignition is a prime example to point at when illustrating how developers were struggling to make games for HD systems. The title came out on both PS2 and Xbox 360 at launch, and the difference is pretty stark. While the texture and model quality are far better in the 360/PS3 version, the lighting and effects look… bad. Fire and lava are muted, explosions lack a burst of light like they do on the PS2, and everything is just darker in an unflattering way. The visuals are easier to read on PS2, despite its fuzziness, despite the cigarette yellow bloom effect. If you put them both on a low res display, I think the PS2 version would just look better, as it has better colors. And that’s the most important thing about graphics. The colors.

…I don’t know where else to put this, but I wanted to add that Stuntman: Ignition has some of the gaudiest UI I have ever seen, so overt it’s beautiful. It makes me wish that this game was as lucky as Vin Diesel’s The Wheelman to receive a PC port, because I think this game could look P. Good with some lighting changes. Alas, that was not the style at the time.

ANYWAY, that was all preamble to how Saber Interactive got strapped with the rights to this DEAD IP and decided to make a new Stuntman. This is a curious decision in this modern climate, where car games are nowhere near as prominent as they were in the 2000s, outside of the pillars of Gran Turismo and Forza Horizons. (Sidebar, if you think Forza Horizons 6 should be a GOTY contender, you are completely ignoring everything the BDS Movement was trying to accomplish with their boycott. Sorry, them’s the breaks. Art is politics.)

So, how is Saber making a Stuntman for a new generation? Well, they are making it a licensed game for one. Stuntman: Hollywood is being made in partnership with NBCUniversal. Through this partnership, saber has access to properties like Fast & Furious, Back to the Future, Knight Rider, Miami Vice, and Death Race, letting them make stages using these iconic properties, iconic vehicles, and iconic set pieces. (Probably none of the human characters though.) This is a pretty smart way to get people invested in this game, turning Hollywood into the game where you can have car chases in a DeLorean, which I’m sure will impress plenty of 50-year-olds.

But even divorced from the IP, as I did not recognize any of the cars until I heard the Back to the Future theme, I still think the game looks like a quality high spectacle car game. Specifically a car game, not a racing game. A game like this is sold by the quality of its action and visual effects, two things that we have pretty much nailed down nowadays. With Saber’s experience, with their licensed freedom to make things go BOOM, they are delivering a type of car game that has not been seen in quite some time, and I think that’s great to see. …Or at least it will be until it is delisted.

Stuntman: Hollywood will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC… eventually!

Until Dawn 2 Announced
(Third Game; Third Developer)

What the heck is going on with this series?

Until Dawn was a huge step forward for Sony gimmick game developer Supermassive Games. It was a key first party exclusive in making the PS4 come into its own, and a prime example of a modern horror title. It sold well, earned Supermassive enough favor to be the premiere developer for Sony’s PlayStation VR peripheral, but then their relationship ended in 2018. I don’t know what happened, but it seems there was a disagreement between developers about continuing to work for Sony. Some key staff members eventually left Supermassive to establish a new studio, Ballistic Moon. Meanwhile, Supermassive buddied up with Bandai Namco, 2K Games, and even Behaviour Interactive, becoming a well regarded developer of cinematic horror games with stories shifted by player choices. While not every game has been a slam dunk, they have been doing very well for themselves and have even shifted to self-publishing a few titles.

…Then in 2024, Sony released a RE-WHATEVER of Until Dawn from developer Ballistic Moon, to tie in with a 2025 Until Dawn movie and release the game on PC. The re-whatever was fine, but patently unnecessary, changing very few things but mucking with the lighting, because some creators have no respect for COLORS. Weird how you would establish and BUY a new studio just to redo the game that some of them made a few years ago, but whatever. They shipped it, it was fine, and now they go to work on a sequel or similar game, right? …No, stupid!

The fact that Sony is making an Until Dawn sequel is not surprising. The fact that it is shifting from a “youngesters in a snowy cabin in the woods” horror setting to “sexy idiots on a remote island setting” is also not surprising. That is the most different and most interesting place they could go without adding a fussy new subgenre. But the fact they are handing the reins to Firesprite is. “Who the bloody blazes is Firesprite?” I hear you asking.

Akumako: “The developer of PS VR2 killer app Horizon: Call of the Mountain (2023)?”

It was only in the killer app that it killed the platform at launch, because it was NOT the time for a new VR headset. Now, WHY is Firesprite making this game, and not the studio founded, extensively, to make Until Dawn games? …Fuck ho’s who knows!

As a game though… this sure looks like a realistic drama with limited interactivity that cuts down development costs, narrows scope, and lets them ship a game without taking half a decade. Its fidelity is very nice, performances seemed good, and presentation was pretty slick, not being afraid to show the goopy goodness. Everything that worked about the original seemed to be largely intact based on this snippet, and I am just left wondering about how this game to be. …And why they bothered numbering it? When with a series like this, with seemingly no overarching characters, subtitles tend to be better.

God of War 4.5 Gaiden: Laufey Announced
(God of War, Faster, Slicker, and With A Woman!)

Sony’s showing ended with a 22-goldarn minute reveal of their other upcoming AAA offering, which has been kept under wraps for a surprising amount of time. Santa Monica Studio has been pretty quiet since 2022 when they shipped God of War 5: Ragnarök (2022), barring some DLC release, a PC port, and announcing God of War Trilogy Remake, of course. I assumed the worst and figured that they just had a game canceled by the higher ups and were assigned a remake to bring in some fat cash. But no, they are the God of War studio, so of course they are working on a new God of War title, and this one a side-story following Kratos’s dead wife, Faye, as she battles her way through the afterlife.

Unsurprisingly, God of War: Laufey could generally be described as more Nu God of War (a reboot that came 5 years after the last main game, nudge-nudge), but with a new protagonist. Unlike the bulky Kratos, Faye is a nimble double jumping swordswoman with access to (restricted) magic and with gameplay that’s a hard pivot toward to a typical character action game. With fast strikes, air juggling, and swift dodges that allow the player to dance on their enemies with style.

The footage shown was the full opening section of the game, with tutorials turned off, which shows Faye as she wakes up in the afterlife and gets imprisoned by some hellish guards. In her cell, she gets some help from a talking ribbon named Rue, a talking cube of goop named Phranque (pronounced FRANK), and a magical sword of enigmatic properties. Together, the three (four?) form a powerhouse team that break out, fend off some guards, fight the tutorial boss, and cut to black.

It’s all polished, refined, and optimized to the point where it feels a bit too inorganic for my liking, with Faye giving some barks that struck me as blasé given the setting. The combat looks like a good time, and I love everything about Phranque the jelly cube. However, watching this compressed stream at 720p, on YouTube, on my decade old ASUS VS239H-P monitor, the game often looks like a smear of gray.

As I have been saying for years, COLORS ARE EVERYTHING, and you can have the most detailed environment ever crafted by man, but brown still looks boring. When there is so little definition and variance in the colors, I struggle to make out what I am supposed to be looking at. It’s so common that I have genuinely wondered if there is something wrong with my eyes but… no.

I have been doing a lot of intensive color work this past week in getting header images ready for my new novel, and I’m pretty confident in my ability to distinguish colors. I am also confident in saying that, if you fill your canvas with just one color, and move it around a bunch, it’s hard to make out the details. You need variety in order for anything to stand out, and that is far truer for something that moves than a static image you can stare at. This game probably cost $300 million to make, given how this is an LA-based studio. However, they made something that can be harder to parse than some PS2 games I was looking at to prepare this Rundown.

No release date was given, but they showed us the first 20 minutes of the game, and it’s complete. So I’m guessing God of War 4.5 Gaiden: Laufey will be released sometime in 2027. Why wait six months when… the game looks damn far along? Because nothing wants to touch Grand Theft Auto VI. I swear to Christ, game publishers are trying to artificially inflate the hype of the game at this point.

Summer Game(s) Fest Happened
(And Here’s What Happened!)

Keighley! Keighley! Keighley! I can’t spell his name! Keighley! Keighley! Keighley! He’s the start of the show! He’s more than you think, he’s got maximum stink, Keighley! Keighley! Keighley’s the one! He’s the one who bought ya! He’s the one who controls ya! He sold off his soul to get maximum power, and he’s hungry, hungry, hungry for mooorrre… yeah!

Akumako: “…The hell are you on about Na-ta-lie?”

I’m just hyping myself up for the Keighley’s!

Akumako: “I think you’ve gone and lost your sanity.”

Good thing I got a money-back guarantee!

Ooooooh! Keighley! Keighley! Keighley! Ruining our day! Keighley! Keighley! Keighley! He’s here to stay! He’s only one guy, but he’s running the biggest of shows— Keighley!

Akumako: “Fuck’s sake… Keighley.”

Keeeiiighley!

Akumako: “Keighley.”

Keighley! Keighley! Keighley’s the ooonnneee!

…And I still cannot believe this dorkus went from a nepo IMAX baby who did good games reporting, then the Doritos Pope, and now he is the de facto showman for gaming events the world over.

Anyway, on with the summarization of Summer Game(s) Fest.

Akumako: “No, you can’t just begin a segment like—”

Summer Game(s) Fest Riffraff Roundup
(There are Too Many Segments Already!)

Starting off, there were a lot of little things that I feel are worth noting, but do not warrant their own segment, so it’s time for the rapid-fire riffraff roundup!

2017 indie game darling Cuphead underwent an extended development with the addition of the Delicious Last Course expansion. This DLC underwent an almost Silksong-ian development cycle, where it was announced at E3 2018 for release in 2019, but did not come out until June 30, 2022. After this, and a deal for a TV series that had… 36 episodes, it remained to be seen what developer Studio MDHR was working on. Via a puppet anchorman announcement, they revealed TWO new titles. A new Cuphead sequel game that’s early in development along with an MASTER SYSTEM throwback title with Mighty Cuphead Adventure.

How does it look? I cannot tell because they smeared an ugly CRT filter over it, as the Cuphead developers have this weird fixation on screen filters. I get that this is historical accuracy, but you’d think that a team that did actual hand-drawn 1930s-style animation would be all about film preservation and the like. As a Master System throwback, rather than an NES throwback, it’s harder for me to gauge the way it looks, how historically accurate it is trying to be, and its fixation on small sprites. I could go into talking about the Master System, but I’m not Brazilian.

After their failed Super Game endeavors and subsequent sales turned Alien: Isolation (2014) into a cult classic horror title, Creative Assembly is back to work on Alien Isolation 2. And… it sure looks like a sequel to Alien: Isolation, and I’m not saying that dismissively. Alien: Isolation was an innovative and high quality horror title that excelled in what it was trying to do and assuredly went on to influence the past decade of horror games. It was damn devoted to maintaining its artistic integrity and is one of the more distinct yet appropriate licensed games… possibly ever. It should have always received a sequel, and it finally is, coming to PS5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC… eventually.

Bandai Namco announced a flashy new AAA-ish Gundam game, Gundam Rogue Orbit. While the trailer suffered from CG overload, this is a fairly interesting concept. The Gundam series has its own complicated lineage across games, which has made it a personal blind spot for me, who looked at the sheer scale of the series and said nope. The titles always struck me as games for fans, rather than standalone experiences, so something like this, without overt ties to an existing subseries, is intriguing. I can’t gauge how it fares as a GAME, but mecha games are such a rarity nowadays that this will be welcomed… if it’s good. Gundam Rogue Orbit is coming to PS5, Xbox Series, and PC in 2027.

After the viciously negative reception to Monster Hunter Wilds (2025)— the kind you get when you severely disappoint fans, not when you make a bad game— there was a good reason to be shaky about the next step for the series. Sales fell off in a way they shouldn’t, the PC version ran like peanut butter on my balls, and smaller updates did not seem to improve the attitude of players. As such, it seems that only an expansion can really help fix the game, if it can be fixed, and Capcom is doing just that with Ascendance, a “massive expansion” coming in 2027.

What does Ascendance have to offer? Floating islands, a flying mobile bird friend, and loads of aerial monsters, as those are flashy things to sell a game, far more than more systematic and performance-based improvements. Maybe those details were added, but I am frankly too swamped to bother!

Resident Evil: Veronica Announced
(Because It’s Better to have an REV Remake Than An RE5 Remake…)

Kicking things off on a high note, the festivities began with the reveal of the much rumored Resident Evil: Code: Veronica (2000) remake, Resident Evil: Veronica. The title was revealed through its cinematic first-person opening sequence meant to fool the viewer into thinking it could be any game, before shifting over into a splattering of scenes meant to reference the main setting of Rockfort Island. Nothing too descriptive of how they are going to reimagine this game— because the Resident Evil remakes are reimagining and remakes— when I consider that to be a rather interesting angle. While the classic RE trilogy for the PS1 is beloved in its own right, and experienced a resurgence through the GOG and Steam re-releases, Code Veronica is often seen as the black sheep.

Code Veronica was a Dreamcast title, the first RE game to use 3D environments (Resident Evil Survivor does not count), and a middle ground in terms of… a lot of things. Technology, tone, and quality that was once heralded as a massive leap forward. However, retrospective looks at the game have found it more flawed, if not fraught. A significant part of the story revolves around the split personality of Alfred Ashford, the main antagonist, who has mental issues and routinely dresses up and pretends to be his sister. Which, uh, no. Just, no. That’s a bad trope that’s based on no historical evidence and is just people parroting the wrong points from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

The game’s general tone veered far more into action movie tropes and bombast, rather than reserving them for key moments. The way the game feels, how it balances enemies, and the larger resource economy have all been subjected to scrutiny. Hell, I recall a joke that Code Veronica was supposed to be the real Resident Evil 3, but Shinji Mikami would not allow that. (This almost certainly is not true, but it was emotionally true to fans.)

Still, the game is an important part of the series, at least to some. The Resident Evil community, weened on the trend of quality remakes they have been fed, has been theorizing a remake into reality for… at least five years. And… yeah, I get why. Code Veronica is important, and despite being a 3D title, it has enough contentious elements that you cannot “fix” it without changing what “it” is. So a reimagining remake it is then!

That would be it, but I have two more things I want to say. One, the choice to call this Resident Evil: Veronica is really cute, as the game can be read as REV, or Resident Evil 5. While that makes no sense release-wise, it does skirt around the issue of a Resident Evil 5 remake. If it were to get a remake, Resident Evil 5 would become THE Culture War game of a generation, so I don’t want them to remake it. The Whites would destroy the Resident Evil fandom, just like they did with Star Wars. And nobody but the Kirkpilled Epstein Class Death Cultist Evangelical Christians of MAGA would want that.

Two, the preservation fetishist in me is a bit frustrated that this is likely coming before any modern re-release of Code Veronica. The PS2 version was remastered for Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2011, but it skipped PC. While you can play it on Xbox Series systems, I cannot help but think that a game like this really should be on PC, PS, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Akumako: “They could re-release the GameCube version on NSO. And Sony could re-release the PS2 version on PS5.”

…I HATE when you make a good point by highlighting something I don’t like.

Resident Evil: Veronica is coming to PS5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC in 2027.

Akumako: “Actually, weren’t they working on a remake/reimagining of Zero and RE1? What happened to that?”

No clue!

Gen Atlas Announced
(Project Shiico is Full of Robots!)

The works of Fumito Ueda and Team Ico are a fascinating collection of titles that were unfortunately marred by technical limitations and ambition. The original Ico (2001) was meant to be a PS1 swansong, a true creative and visionary artistic title that eschewed design wisdom to make its point, while earning flack for being an escort game. While not as beloved, it is a highly influential title that has earned its place among the PS2 pantheon.

The successor, Shadow of the Colossus (2005) has a far broader appeal, but a stringently deliberate game that was only finished by relentless cutting of content and scaling back of certain ideas. However, the game was an exceptional title that did much with only a few core elements and managed to tell an emotionally gripping narrative of perverse struggle through only visuals, audio, and mechanics.

Colossus was created in a time when a game about hunting truly massive monsters in a barren desolated world with a disregard for market trends was plausible. It went on to become heralded as a masterpiece, getting a good 2011 remaster and a 2018 remake that wildly changed the vibes, helping to continue its legacy. A legacy it would hold as its own, given the turbulent development that would follow with The Last Guardian (2016). Development of The Last Guardian was one of the more notorious examples of development delays during its era, mostly due to PS3-based technical issues aplenty.

The game, initially dubbed Project Trico, was originally leaked back in 2008, where early test footage was first revealed, and I remember being pretty damn impressed by it. It was later formally revealed, with a spruced up version of the same trailer, at E3 2009, where it earned a legendary reputation. One, it was a hugely graphically impressive game for the time, featuring such a large and complex critter, known as a Trico, with so many reactive and moving elements. We did not have fur textures like this, and this looked like real life back then.

However, this was never honestly running on PS3 hardware, and the dev team kept running into technical issues. The PS3 could not handle their vision, so the game was eventually moved over to PS4. This meant they had to rebuild things to work on an x86 device, not a cell processor, which added more time to development. It finally came out after nine years in development— which was crazy at the time— and was… good. It was far from the generation defining title people thought it would be in 2009, had far less of an impact than Shadow of the Colossus, and in 2016, many of its elements were dismissed as dated. People did not like taking care of the Trico as much as they thought they would, as they behaved like a big dumb rat dog bird thing.

Nowadays, I feel that The Last Guardian has been forgotten as a key PS4 title, burdened by the delay and the fact that it lacked the same cohesive vision as Shadow of the Colossus. Hell, I don’t even know what TLG was trying to say as a statement. Colossus was very direct, and you did not need a speck of dialogue for it.

With that in mind, Fumito Ueda and many Team ico alumni formed GenDesign back in 2014, and the developer has been working, at their own pace, on a new game with the funding support of Epic-Tencent. This was previously revealed as Project Robot back in 2024, but we finally have more footage and a proper name for the game, Gen Atlas. Unsurprisingly, it’s a game about a little robot guy in a big desolated world full of other robots. The first half of the trailer depicts the supposed protagonist finding a giant robot head, turning it into a flying machine, and plopping it on a giant humanoid robot body. The giant robot, robo-colossus if you will, then uses its strength to move a giant chunk of metal, implying that this is a game about controlling colossi, which is pretty on brand.

…Then we cut forward to the protagonist robot on the back of a rapidly moving industrial vehicle, gun in hand, third-person shooting at a bunch of giant naked mole rats. This is followed by a scene where the protagonist stages a giant robot versus giant robot battle, a space shuttle launching into the sky, and the protagonist air dashing up a giant robot, shooting them in their exposed bits. Just like Colossus, but with guns and robots!

Yeah, Gen Atlas has a similar aesthetic to the prior works of Ueda and his team, with the soundscape, visual language, and sense of scale making the game feel right next to its predecessors. However, the fixation on combat, on shooting, strikes me as strange, as unlike their prior works, and makes me wonder what the impetus was. I’m sure Epic-Tencent is pretty hands-off with an “auteur” Kenji Eno protégée like Ueda, so maybe he and his team felt the game would be too limited or hands off without gunplay.

Now comes the big question: Will this work out? No idea! Nobody does! And no release dates was announced. However, Gen Atlas is currently slated to release for PS5, Xbox Series, and Epic Games Store. No Steam, because Epic exclusivity, bay-bee!

Tupac’s Corpse Confirmed for Stranger Than Heaven
(Because Hiring A Known Sexual Abuser Wasn’t Bad Enough…)

IT’S HIM! THE MAN!

After Yakuza Kiwami 3 soured RGG Studios fans, Stranger Than Heaven became a particularly highly anticipated game following its quality Xbox Direct thing showing back in May. Hell, its official theme song was one of the most popular songs on Spotify for a good while. I watched it after noticing the buzz, and saw why, as the game looks freaking DOPE.

The half-century scope of the story is ambitious and intriguing, especially considering how much Japan changed over the first half of the 20th Century. The decision to focus on the prejudice of a half-Japanese man during an era where people of multiple races were not welcomed anywhere is a bold choice that looks to not hold any punches. I love the fact that they decided to bring in goldarn Snoop Dogg of all characters as part of the game, because that’s funny. (Side note, my mother actually has a side job for a company that produces Snoop Dogg’s weed brand, Death Row Cannabis.) While the fixation on music is a bold choice that has a lot of potential.

The Xbox thing was so comprehensive, it did not seem like an SGF showing was needed, especially when it was just a cast trailer. …But then the trailer ended on revealing a new character sporting the licensed likeness of Tupac of all people.

Which… lol. lmao even. I’m not going to pretend that I know much about Tupac. I never got into his albums, pretty firmly landed on the Biggie enjoyer of the spectrum of 90s hi-hop, and have pretty much accepted that his image will be exploited. I did not know who he was when he got resurrected as a hologram in 2012, and… I don’t really care. Personally, I’m an extremist when it comes to death and think people’s creations and likeness should immediately go into the public domain. That’s realistically how it works for MOST people. So my only problem with this is a capitalistic one, which I think is the reason why Tupac’s corpse is in this game. Because it may drive up sales. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, simple as that. Stranger Than Heaven is releasing for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC on January 15, 2027.

Crossfire(?) Announced
(Because Smilegate Does Not Believe in Subtitles!)

Crossfire (2007) is an incredibly popular Korean first-person shooter that can loosely be thought of as the Call of Duty, or perhaps Counter-Strike, of much of the Asian market. It’s what made Smilegate a major player in gaming, and made over a billion dollars a year during the late 2010s. Crossfire even got an Xbox exclusive release with campaigns developed by Remedy Entertainment, CrossfireX (2022). …CrossfireX was critically panned and shut down 15 months after launch.

With this in mind, I was naturally very confused when Crossfire was announced during this conference, as a “high agency single player story-driven game.” Nobody acknowledged that Crossfire is part of a broader series, there’s no subtitle, and I kept wondering what this is. Did Smilegate not secure the trademark for their multibillion dollar IP? …No, they did, the presentation of things was just messy. Only after things died down did I realize that this game is being published by Team K1, a subsidiary of Smilegate, and developed by That’s No Moon, a team of veterans from Sony Interactive Entertainment, Infinity Ward, and Electronic Arts. The team received $100 million from Smilegate back in 2021, and with all of the acquisitions going on then, I did not notice this.

So, what did Smilegate want this band of western game devs with experience making shooters and cinematic action games? Well, make one of those for their pillar IP, obviously. The story follows an unlikely alliance between a Lara Croft lookalike mercenary named Layla Qassem and her unlikely companion, Delroy Cross, an operator on the other side of this conflict. Yes, there is a character named Cross in Crossfire, and no, Qassem does not appear to mean fire in any name website I could find. For this decision, I am going to call the writers absolute hacks! I hope someone got fired for that blunder.

The gameplay reminds me of Six Days in Fallujah, as both game are clearly created by people who love war, love the sights, sounds, feeling, and romantic tension of it. Crossfire: That’s No Moon holds this by its heart, and fetishizes the art of warmurder with an adaptive cover system where Cross and ~~Layla~~ Lara must carefully remove around their environment in the African Atlas Mountains. They must use the rough terrain toone-up their enemies, shoot them first, and communicate with each other, as is the way of war.

It sounds all grounded, tactical, and a pit like paramilitary propaganda meant to glorify the way corporations and the Epstein class Elites force regular people to become soldiers with the expressed goal of killing each other. Which is not surprising considering the draft mandate and Panatir contracts across South Korea. It’s futuristic with the OctoCamo from Metal Gear Solid 4, but not too out of pocket. …That is, until 60% of the way through the trailer, where it introduces auto-healing wounds, medical experiments, and people being blown away by an unseen force.

Despite this sci-fi pivot, I still view Crossfire: That’s No Moon as propaganda meant to glorify war as something necessary and honorable. There’s a reason why I did not even talk about Call of Duty 23: Modern Warfare 사. Because these games are inherently anti-human works that exist to feed the military industrial complex, make people thing war is normal, cool, and just a part of life, when it is none of those things. War is abhorrent, destroys lives, destroys infrastructure, and leads to economic despair. I love Metal Gear Solid, but there is a wall of difference between those games, which are VERY critical of the war industry, and games like this, which exist to file down and sanitize real conflicts by proxy.

Crossfire: That’s No Moon is slated to be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC at an unspecified date.

Virtua Fighter VI: Crossroads Revealed in Earnest
(A Cinematic Action Drama with a Fighting Game Mode?)

Something that was obvious to me well before the relative failure of Riot Games’ ill-fated tag fighter, 2XKO, was that fighting games are not going to ever be mainstream. They will always be niche and have few ways to retain the attention of all but fighting game fans in the modern era. They cannot stand next to live services, the complexity of team-based play, or the simple inputs of a shooter. People tried, and they failed. We hit the limit with Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 (F’s in chat for that game), and unless you have a good IP to keep people invested, like Dragon Ball or Marvel, you’re not gonna make fetch happen.

A common criticism to this reality is that fighting games need single-player content, but while many people played, and enjoyed, story modes, they ultimately appeal to a vastly different desire than a competitive game. If people want to compete, they don’t need a damn campaign. Sure, something like the Metro City mode in Street Fighter 6 is great for both learning techniques and endearing players to characters, but that’s not why you’re here. It’s ultimately an extra, and marketing a fighter on its campaign is silly. You’re supposed to play these games for 200 hours via ranked and casual matches, as that’s The Real Game.

With that in mind, the next Virtua Fighter, dubbed Virtua Fighter Crossroads, was revealed via a story and character driven cutscene barrage featuring a tatted up newcomer, Cielo, a South East Asian setting, Latin American music, English voice acting, and a single familiar character. Needless to say, I was very confused. This looks more like a Like A Dragon spin-off or new Shenmue game— which are kinda the same thing— than a traditional fighter, and one with a pretty nutty cast of writers.

David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake, is the world building supervisor. Brad Kane, a writer from Ghost of Tsushima and As Dusk Falls is the lead writer. The scenario is by Persona and SMT writer Shinji Yamamoto. And what they came up with is a story set not in the established world of Virtua Fighter, but one set on Vilaspara, an island city closed off from the rest of the world and run by a deranged president who built the entire city’s economy around fighting, turning it into a city of fighters where violence could break out anywhere, any time, for any reason.

The story mode is an anthology of four playable characters, making everything sound SO MUCH more complicated. Combat is an expanded and revised version of the fighting that made Virtua Fighter what it is, along with brawler type combat against multiple foes. JUST LIKE SHENMUE! There is a branching story system where you can do back through time to complete tasks and events. Character stories also intersect via the titular crossroads of the title. And based on the almost ten minutes of story cutscenes shown… it’s not bad.

The writing’s natural sounding, beyond doing that incessant movie thing where spicy ESLers use their own language for the most banal terms so the English speaking stupid-asses at home can follow. The performances are quality and affable for the most part. And the cinematics look great. However, this is not a Virtua Fighter game. This is RGG Studios, who seemingly has a blank check for anything Like A Dragon like, wanting to turn Virtua Fighter into a cinematic open city action game.

Admittedly, the game is also a fighting game wrapped inside this packaging. You can just say screw the story and start playing some matches from the menu. They effectively made a new Virtua Fighter and a new IP set in a kinda grungy Southeast Asian city and smooshed them together in one game. Now, is this a BAD idea? I don’t think so, but it’s going way, way too far for just making a fighting game in a dormant IP like this. As a fighter, this looks pretty good from my limited understanding, but something about this just does not strike me as right. …Maybe RGG Studios new leadership really IS insane?

No platforms were announced, but Virtua Fighter VI: Crossroads will be released sometime in 2027.

1666: Amsterdam Revealed
(Time Traveling Cats and Witches!)

There is a long story to tell about Patrice Désilets. He was the director of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), Assassin’s Creed (2007), and Assassin’s Creed II (2009). He’s a guy with a real love of human history in a broad sense and who can possibly be the reason why Assassin’s Creed has its once central framing device. You know, accessing latent ancestral memories in one’s DNA via the Animus. Regardless, Désilets was a highly valuable creative, doing a lot to launch two incredibly successful series for Ubisoft. He should have been able to do whatever he wants after becoming a proven hitmaker, but conflicts between him and Ubisoft erupted in 2010, leading him to enter into an agreement with THQ to publish his next game in 2011.

Under THQ’s arm, Désilets went on to lead THQ Montreal, spurring up a decently sized dev team as they worked on their debut project, 1666: Amsterdam. Things seemed to be going well… until THQ went bankrupt during December 2012, and Ubisoft bought THQ Montreal during the bankruptcy auction. Why did Ubisoft buy his studio? Well, it’s not because they wanted him back. Once Ubisoft claimed the studio for himself, Désilets was fired, the studio was aborbed by Ubisoft, and Désilets spent years fighting over them in court, trying to get back the rights to 1666: Amsterdam.

During this time, Désilets formed a new studio, Panache Digital Games, and entered into a relationship with 2K’s defunct Private Division labels to release Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey (2019). While not a critical darling, hampered by an Epic Games launch deal, a less than stellar launch, and some first game jank, Ancestors was a captivating and mechanically dense game about the evolutionary lineage of modern humans. One that illustrated how humankind’s ancestors survived in an untamed and horrifying world, how they cared for each other, and how skills were passed on to other generations. It’s a game that requires a certain perspective to enjoy, but has the markings of a cult classic.

The title, evidently, did well enough to warrant the funding and staff needed for Panache to approach 1666: Amsterdam yet again, but between porting Ancestors, the pandemic, and adapting to new hardware, things were evidently delayed. However, it’s finally been revealed after being a known entity for roughly 15 years and it’s… uh… I honestly struggled to parse what this game was from its trailer, and seeing as how there was a prologue demo released, I tried playing it. …And as the first Unreal 5 game I’ve played, I understand why people HATE this engine, as it just does not perform well or look all too good. The fidelity is there if you have something better than my 12 GB 3060, but the game is so dark and can have such dreary lighting that I struggled to see the big picture, let alone the fine details. One great way to make your game look worse is to cover all the textures in darkness…

Okay, but what is the game? Well, per the demo, it’s a cinematic walking and traversal game where you play as several characters tied within a story spanning hundreds of years. All of which is related to a mysterious magical happening in Amsterdam, 1666, related to cryptic languages, witchcraft, and a man whose soul is placed in the body of a cat that travels through time. …But it also involves playing as a nun witch in Amsterdam, 1666, and fighting various demons that lurk on the streets, styling on them with sick witch combos.

If that confuses you, it should, and playing the demo only made me MORE confused! Still, I can recognize that this game is going to be something special. At best, a title worth discussing and analyzing, and at worse a fascinating mess. And that’s WAY better than something competent yet boring!

1666: Amsterdam was not given a release window and was only announced for PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.

Attack on Titan 3 Announced
(Another Game That Should Not Exist…)

One of the more surprising announcements was for Attack on Titan 3 from Omega Force and Koei Tecmo. You might not remember this, but Omega Force released two Attack on Titan games in a move to shift away from their usual Musou offerings. This was during a more middling time in the studio’s history, before they would shred their reputation with Dynasty Warriors 9 and begin rebuilding their reputation with more consistent releases.

Attack on Titan (2016) was a current gen console game that also launched on PS3 and Vita, which limited what the game could do and how well it could capture the frantic action implied by the manga and anime. Attack on Titan 2 (2018) was a sequel that attempted to redo everything the first game did while also building upon it with novel features, like your own OC protagonist. However, there was not enough time to make it feel like a full new entry, and with the Vita still on the target platform list, there was still a limit to what they could do. It was half a sequel, half them refining and adjusting a prior game, and then they added a $30 DLC pack for it a year later, which would have made it a far better sequel if it had been included, but nooo!

Following this, Attack on Titan underwent its own prolonged, uh, cultural collapse, let’s call it. Since the series boomed in popularity in 2013, it was subjected to a good amount of criticism for its fascist themes and visual iconography. It made the discussion of the series messy, especially as it veered into direct Nazi Germany parallels. While not always great in its execution, I was inclined to give the series some grace, see what the creator was going for, picking it up every few years and enjoying it. …Then I got to the ending.

This is where the series pretty much ruined itself for me. Not because of what the characters did. I have no problem with turning a traditional hero character into a deranged loser of a fascist who uses his chosen one powers to become a genocidal freak. That sounds about ACCURATE to me. But I do have a problem with how this is all framed and presented.

The series never really commits to turning its hero into the antagonist he clearly is becoming, even as he goes full doomer and decides that genocide is the final solution. Much of the audience who was endeared to the series did not seem to quite get that the protagonist was a quantifiably bad person. And rather than acknowledge the cycle of violence and break it off, try to position the story about how humanity learned their ways and become an equitable society, it goes in the other direction. The ending of Attack on Titan is a deeply cynical one that alludes to war as a part of human nature. Its final message is that the cycle of destruction that must continue until all humans are wiped away. Which, uh, fuck you, you unimaginative loser.

The author, Hajime Isayama had one of the most successful manga of the 21st century, had a platform to discuss hard topics like generational violence, institutionalized racism, and people with the power to literally control thousands of giants. And this is the best he could do? I know people have psychoanalyzed the author as the type of dude who believes he sucks no matter what and… if this is how he wants to end the thing he will be remembered for then… yeah. That dude sucks.

At least the anime had the decency to not include the final few pages, but that does not stop the utterly arbitrary, and downright nonsensical, 80% genocide rate. That shit doesn’t even make any sense.

With this in mind, you can probably gather that I don’t think Attack on Titan 3 should be a thing. While it is a popular brand, the series had such a messy fallout and left such a stink that I would want to pull away at any sort of major investment. However, I guess Omega Force thought otherwise, as they are making a new Attack on Titan, this one presenting itself as the finale of their trilogy. The trailer mostly focuses on the ending of the series, including many things I would consider to be outright spoilers, but it’s been five years. You had your chance. And Koei Tecmo is waiting to explain what this 8 year after the fact sequel is going to deliver until July 1, 2026.

Stellar Blade 2: Blood Rain Announced
(More Like Stellar FIST!)

Stellar Blade (2024) is an odd game for me to look back on. On one hand, the title is a success story, of a mobile developer that found success with Nikke :Goddess of Victory (2022), the hit ass-person-shooter, trying their hand at a console game and succeeding. The end result, while derivative of Nier: Automata (2017), having a bit of a drab story with pretty basic problems, and being very telling with its female character design, was ultimately a solid title. Unfortunately, it was opted by right-wing tourists and culture vultures who viewed the game as “anti-woke,” whatever that means, and attributed its success as some cultural signifier, because they have the brains of a corn.

Personally, I just viewed the game, with all of its hyperreal ultra idealized feminine beauty contrasted against flesh monster uggos, to be pretty damn video gamey. Like, there is an entire genre of hot girls fighting monsters video games, ranging from Valis to Onee Chanbara to even Cy Girls (2004), and viewed the game as being part of that general mold. I’d rather a game be “gooner bait” than it be afraid to sexualize its characters. Sex and sexiness needs to be celebrated, or else it will become legal to discriminate, and by extension murder, queer people. Well, more than it already is.

Anyway, most of Stellar Blade’s shortcomings can be attributed to it being the developer’s first console game, and if they deliver a 7/10, or 8/10 if you trust MetaChrist, that’s still pretty dang good. They shipped it, got criticism, and have the opportunity to develop it into something more with an already confirmed sequel. I figured it would be a good while, but I guess putting in Korean hours can sometimes “work.”

Stellar Blade 2: Blood Rain was announced as— okay, no. You cannot just call your game “Blood Rain” and get away with it like that, especially when you’re making a game about a hot lady beating the life outta freaks. I’d ask where the owners of BloodRayne are, but I know they don’t got money for a can of spam, much less lawyers.

Name aside, Stellar Blade 2: Blood Rain looks pretty dope, actually. The visual fidelity is a step-up even from the impressive visuals of the original. The dismal “alien” planet has been shifted over to an expansive cyberpunk city full of interesting characters going about their days, robot folks, casual cyborgs, and all the grime and grit that a grungy sci-fi setting warrants. The protagonist has been changed out from the rather plain Eve to the spicier Evie, who is completely different.

For one, she wears a white bodysuit with no skin, because you don’t need that to be sexy. For two her hair is shorter giving her more of a, uh, I want to say tomboy vibe, but I think the definition of tomboy changed on me. For three, she seems to have a more defined personality than Eve’s persona of a wet noodle. And for four, she attacks people WITH HER ROBO FISTS! The gameplay looks wildly different as a result, involving a lot of rapid punches, careful weaving through attacks, and powerhouse kicks as this 50 kilogram Korean lady knocks 150 kilogram flesh monsters across the room. I love it!

No release date or platforms were listed, despite the trailer being entirely in-engine from what I could tell, but Stellar Blade 2: Blood Rain looks pretty dang good per my first impressions.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin Re-Announced
(A Larry Ellison X PlatinumGames JOINT!)

Paramount Game Studios, a Larry Ellison company, is currently doing this big to-do regarding a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin movie. Rather than just have a movie though, Ellison is trying to make this a multimedia venture, hiring on PlatinumGames to make a game based on the sub IP he created. This is a pretty sensible choice, as Platinum has worked on the IP before and is an action game for hire studio. It could be a sort of redemption for them after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan (2016) was shipped half-finished and never fixed. And for as weird as a Last Ronin TMNT game is, it… makes enough sense as a game. If freaking Strange Scaffold can make a turn-based strategy game based on the IP using game pieces, then anything is fair game.

No real details were revealed, no footage was shown but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC.

Also, I am personifying every product and action made by Paramount Skydance Warner Bros. as being Larry Ellison’s personal creation, giving him the credit and the blame, out of sheer hatred. I’m not even giving the credit to the actual CEO, David Ellison, because he’s a nepo baby who should not be allowed the privilege of his own identity for as long as he functions as a pawn of his creator. Not that David Ellison would be able to do that. The only way he can actualize himself as his own human being is to take a gun and shoot himself in the head. He would die afterward, but he would die as a person, not a thing. It’s a very complicated web of boundless disrespect.

Akumako: “Complicated? That’s being generous, you deranged trans bitch. Anyway, Natalie, you seem to have forgotten the fact this game was already revealed.”

Wuzzat?

Akumako: “Yeah, three years ago it was announced as a game from Black Forest Games of all people.”

The Destroy All Humans guys? Clearly, there must have been an uptick in terms of budget… And this game is probably super early in development. Weird! Looks like Larry Ellison is bad at being a solo games publisher!

Akumako: “…Sure. Whatever you, say… fuckin’ idiot.”

Final Fantasy VII Revelation Announced
(After 21 Years, the Final Fantasy VII Remake Dream is Almost Over…)

Last year, I went on this big tangent about how Square Enix fumbled u, and I similarly talked about the sales shortcomings of modern Final Fantasy titles in 2024. The Final Fantasy problem has not gone away, and while Square Enix seems to have recognized their faults by porting the FFVII Remake games to more systems, I have to wonder if staggered ports like that really helped. Did casuals get their “fill” of Final Fantasy VII with the remake. Did many who played the game during the COVID boom move onto other IPs because they could not be arsed to wait four years for a sequel? (Such as Genshin Impact, which has like five games of content at this point.) I don’t know. This industry is too damn private with its data.

However, there was no doubt that a third FFVIIR game was in the pipeline. To cap off Summer Game Fest, it was given its own 12-ish minute chance to shine, which… might have been a bit much for the third game in a story-driven title, but it was somewhat necessary. It was important to establish what Final Fantasy VIIR-3: Revelation was to the wider audience so they know why they should care, and… they make it out to be more of an open-ended adventure about going around and defeating the Final Weapons summoned by the Livestream to stop Meteor, before killing Sephiroth for real-reals.

This is pretty much what happens with the lead-up to the end of the original game. Well, they are skipping past the whole Cloud gets Mako poisoning and you need to venture into his mind to help him learn that his entire identity was a lie formed from trauma, grief, and an inferiority complex. …But that would not work in the Remake trilogy for reasons. After that, it’s a lot of bopping around the world in the airship, or other vehicles, fighting super bosses, learning how to stop Meteor, taking care of side quests, and getting prepared for the final battle. It’s pretty much the endgame one thinks about when looking at a classic JRPG like Final Fantasy VII.

Personally, I have to wonder how this will all work as a standalone game, as you can easily go through the final stretch of Final Fantasy VII in under ten hours if you are focused. And that’s counting the two hours for the Mako poisoning plot! But rather than explain that, they mostly focused on what they were adding. This includes outfits that change character attributes, basically functioning as a class system, which I think is very funny. Playable versions of Cid Highwind and Vincent Valentine who look like flashy and cool fun, each with their own unique playstyle. However, I’m more surprised that they weren’t playable in Rebirth despite being introduced in that game. And in a move meant to prevent the player from re-exploring the whole world again, players will have access to an airship that they’ll be able to parachute out of. Just like in PUBG! I’d ask why the airship wouldn’t be able to land, but it simply does not work in a game with a world map that resembles actual terrain.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation… is just a terrible name by the way. “Revelations” is already an overdone nothing subtitle, but when you drop the S it gets even worse! Final Fantasy VII Revelation does not really have much of a wow factor beyond being the game where it all ends. It’s a Halo 3 situation. You’re hyped to finish, strive for a better future, where people don’t have to die, and… where the ambiguity of the original will almost certainly be lost. I’d complain, but it’s been lost since Advent Children.

At worse, FFVIIR-3 will be an iterative sequel that continues the narrative of the last game— something we used to love back in the Xbox 360 era, and I’m just glad to see that this saga is both ending soon and coming out for every platform. Final Fantasy VII Revelation will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC in spring 2027.

Hitman Classic Trilogy Remastered Announced
(More Fodder for the Re-Whatevers Piece)

Moving onto things that were revealed AFTER Summer Game(s) Fest, IO Interactive and Saber Interactive announced that they are working on a remaster of the classic trilogy of Hitman games. This includes Hitman: Codename 47 (2000), Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002), and Hitman 3: Contracts (2004). Three titles that represent the mildly janky beginnings of the Hitman series, which received a huge upgrade with 2006’s Hitman 4: Blood Money before being refined with Hitman: World of Assassination.

Now, I have a lot of thoughts about World of Assassination as a game. I think that it’s amazing how terribly Square Enix handled its original 2016 launch. I think the sheer breadth of updates that IO Interactive has added to the game have been incredible, even if those upgrades were originally part of two separate games that converged into a singular platform. I think the game’s history with online dependency is disgusting. And I think the limited time content is both cringe and gross. Let me kill celebrities when I FEEL like it, and if I need to buy DLC for that, I’ll buy it.

But I’m here to discuss the remaster, which was not announced with gameplay footage, but a number of comparison screenshots. These screenshots present this as a very faithful remaster that aims to recreate the game with better graphics, though not necessarily modern graphics. They clearly looked at the original and attempted to recreate everything one to one, “painstakingly” as the store description puts it, and make changes in the pursuit of realism while adhering to the visual identity of the original.

It’s all very subtle, subdued, and is not trying to impose on the original. Every texture has been updated, every model has been tweaked or replaced with a similar yet higher fidelity one, and the game has the same look at its core, just with higher visual fidelity. The biggest change is, of course, the lighting, which in a remaster can utterly destroy the visual direction of the original game , but here that’s not the case. Some colors shift, losing or gaining saturation, some grays and browns shift places, but… that’s what happens to bricks depending on the weather.

Rough low res bit crunched textures were given the details that were otherwise implied, while models were replaced for ones that make more sense. Twin beds that were just layered textures on a box are not individually rendered with pillows that look like pillows and sheets that hang off like sheets. The environments still have the core visual design of an early 2000s video game, with big rooms without a ton of visual details or interactable. And while some textures are given a decent amount of reimagining… the old ones kind of looked pretty rough. Telephone and power poles look better with wires coming out of them. They clearly took a photo of a skyline of a real place and copy-pasted it as part of a skybox, so I’m not going to say they must adhere to the original artistry.

Though, I don’t know why they changed the angry Buddha to a happy Buddha. That change is weird.

Now, I still have reason to be suspicious of this remaster, as while Saber has a yo-yo-ing history of remastering games, from Halo 1 and 2 to Crysis to their Tomb Raider releases. They own Aspyr, whose schtick is porting and upgrading games, which they are sometimes hot garbage at, but there are clearly people within their umbrella that care very much about enhancing what an original game was, what it represented, and capturing the same vibe as the original. Which is good, as they delivered the mother of all bad remasters with Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (2011).

I am hoping that this remaster is faithful and adheres to the original art direction with the warranted level of care. However, I also need to ask if this is actually necessary. What Saber and IO are doing here is hard, intensive, and very skilled work. But it’s also sprucing up old games, that will still play like old games, that are designs like old games, for an audience of people who are probably receptive of old games, and their visual shortcomings.

I believe the visuals of older games should be modified, but not necessarily replaced, as it is here. Things like texture filtering, antialiasing, aspect ratio, and UI alterations are all things that I think should be changed or given toggles when doing any re-releases. I believe all of them can do a lot to make an older game look cleaner, easier to read, and generally better. (Muddy textures are not the problem, the fact that there’s a muddy filter is.) Still, this version seems close enough to the original that the games have virtually identical visual identity. …Also, you can toggle between both styles, which I think should be the STANDARD for making any remaster with visual changes. If you don’t like the modern look, switch over to the old look! Cool! Everybody wins!

Hitman Classic Trilogy Remastered will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC sometime in 2027.

…Sidebar: This is not the first time Hitman games have been remastered before, but this was back in 2013, when the approach was to largely take older games, put them in HD, make them widescreen, and put them on modern consoles. (The safest and cheapest way to re-release old games.) This was about par for the course of remasters at the time, and I remember Hitman: HD Trilogy (2013) being a wet dud of a console only release following the relative failure of Hitman 5: Absolution (2012). …But confusingly, HD Trilogy was NOT a remaster of the first game. Instead, it was a remaster of Silent Assassin and Contracts along with a disc for Hitman 4: Blood Money. Well, at least on Xbox 360. Blood Money never came out to PS3 before, so it was on the PS3 Blu-ray.

Video games!

Barbie Rewind Announced
(Banger Galge Collection Dropping!)

Oh my gush, why are so many announcements happening outside of showcases? STAHP!

Not content with just putting out a Toy Story collection this year, Atari and Digital Eclipse are also re-releasing a collection of 16 Barbie games via a collection dubbed Barbie Rewind. This might seem like an odd choice, as Barbie games are among the first to be dismissed as shovelware, but Barbie is a nostalgia IP for many people. Most of the games are considered pretty middling per whatever revisits that I have seen over the years. However, there is joy in playing bad games with the power of emulation at your hands, and you cannot deny that many of these titles are nostalgic touchstones for people… my age.

What are my thoughts on Barbie? A big fat meh. I’m a trans woman, so I never really played with Barbie dolls as a kid, and I did not really want to. I was fussy Autistic kid with texture sensitivities, I liked the feeling of plastic, I did not like the feeling of synthetic clothing or doll hair. During my edgy teen arc, I was pretty negative toward the IP, as a deflection point to reinforce my false guise of masculinity, and because hating Barbie was cool back then. It was feminist to hate Barbie! I still hate the Barbie World song for being an absolute brain rotting earworm. And while I enjoyed the Barbie live action film, I don’t think highly of the dolls. They are built on a history of idealized, harmful beauty standards that they did not create, but they played a role in reinforcing.

As for the contents of the collection, Digital Eclipse is in a bit of a tight spot here, as most Barbie games were PC games, which are a lot harder to re-release. You can’t really emulate Windows 95 on a console, with a controller. So, instead, Digital Eclipse is using their NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, and GBA emulators and picking up whatever Barbie games they can release. 16 games are included, but Atari is inconsistent at differentiating what exactly warrants a game, as games can have two or more versions, and they did not provide a list. So I tried to make one myself.

Per the trailer and official descriptions, I can confirm the following games are included in Barbie Rewind:

Barbie (NES, 1991)
Barbie Game Girl (Game Boy, 1992)
Barbie: Super Model (SNES, 1993)
Barbie: Super Model (Genesis, 1993)
Barbie Race & Ride (PS1, 1999)
Barbie Super Sports (PS1, 1999)
Barbie Pet Rescue (GBC, 2001)
Barbie: Groovy Games (GBA, 2002)
Secret Agent Barbie: Royal Jewel Mission (GBA, 2002)
Barbie Horse Adventures: Blue Ribbon Race (GBA, 2003)
The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery (GBA, 2006)
Barbie Vacation Adventure (Genesis, 1994) (Previously unreleased game)
Barbie Vacation Adventure (SNES, 1994) (Previously unreleased game)

However, this is only 13, or 11, games, and does not include several titles that fit in with the platform spread. Doing some list checking, I believe the missing 3 or 5 games would include some of the following:

Barbie: Ocean Discovery (GBC, 1999)
Barbie: Fashion Pack Games (GBC, 2000)
Barbie: Magic Genie Adventure (GBC, 2000)
Barbie: Explorer (PS1, 2001)
Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper (GBA, 2004)
Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus (GBA, 2005)
Barbie in The 12 Dancing Princesses (GBA, 2005)
Barbie as the Island Princess (GBA, 2007)

That being said, I cannot be certain until Atari clarifies what games are included, and if they don’t include Barbie: Explorer, the mascocore Crash Bandicoot clone, they are crazy. That’s some PRIME MID!

Rather than just be a collection, the game also comes with a customizable dreamhouse. Everything’s sprite-based, isometric, looking like a browser-based game from the early 2000s more than it looks like something released for a typical game console. Still, it’s sufficiently retro to fool a kid or casual player, and is a sufficiently on-brand thing to include. What is a modern Barbie game without some customization?

Barbie Rewind will be released for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC on November 12, 2026. …Oh snap, a November release? GTA VI better watch out, or else it will get swept under the rug by none other than a Barbie game.

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered Announced
(They Massacred MY BOY with UE5!)

So, here’s an announcement that was leaked before being revealed on some livestream. Publisher Atari and developer Pipeworks Studios, after years of fan requests, are developing a remaster of Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee (2002). Upon hearing the news, I was hyped. As a Godzilla kid with a GameCube, I LOVED Destroy All Monsters Melee! and found it to be such a fun brawling game with so many diverse giant characters to play as. Grabbing buildings, crushing things, and using fairly simple controls to cause mass destruction. It’s arguably a bad Godzilla game, as it’s more akin to a wrestling game than a destruction sim, but the game was damn fun to play by myself and with friends.

I also loved hopping over to Usman Salem’s house to play the sequel, Godzilla: Save the Earth (2004) on his Xbox, and was psyched to play Godzilla: Unleashed (2007)… until it got bombarded with 5/10s. Because it was more of a party game and had some mandatory motion controls on Wii.

Like with many things, I am not alone in loving these games, and fans have been doing excellent work in upgrading and revising these games into more robust and featured packages. It was enough for anyone to think that a remaster or remake would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, Toho was stingy with their licenses until recently. Nowadays, they will just let Sega add a Godzilla stage to their Sonic X Larry Ellison race game. So, it’s not too surprising that they are letting the original developer, Pipeworks, remaster Destroy All Monsters Melee. Just the first one, as a $30 release, presumably with Save the Earth being a maybe if the DAMM does well.

Before talking about the “Remaster,” I want to first give some context. I think that DAMM holds up pretty damn well visually. Models are highly detailed, the texture quality is pretty dang good on the characters, not so much for non-blocky environments , and the animations are not the most natural. They are basically doing wrestling moves, their weight be damned. I would not say it has a particularly strong art style. They were aiming to replicate the look of the movies, which is to say, real life, and this is about as good as realistic graphics got on the GameCube in my mind. Everything is defined, every monster has their own color or visual identifiers, and when bumped up in Dolphin… shit, you could just release that, no need to do any other work.

Unfortunately, a straight upgrade that changes few original assets would not work, especially from a studio like Pipeworks. Pipeworks has been shuffled about through the games industry over the years. Since their first sale in 2014, Pipeworks has been traded around to five different owners and are currently a subsidiary of Virtuos, the Unreal Engine 5 remake factory and support studio. Rather than be absorbed by their parent company however, the Oregon-based studio has mostly gotten by on doing licensed game works and co-development on titles like Madden and Marathon. This is not a glamorous life, but it pays the bills. The values and culture at the studio would shift with their work, leading them to prefer photorealistic and more overtly modern effects. …They worked on Call of Duty and Concord (2024), okay?

So, what does this “Remaster” offer? Well, all 12 of the original characters are back, including both MechaGodzillas. Only eight locations are included, when the Xbox version added more environments, which is just baffling to me. The Xbox exclusive destruction mode is back— yay for that basic expectation. Online multiplayer has been added, which is a must for a game like this, along with the same co-op mode. The unlock system is more sensible than the original, when I’d ask why even bother. And the game looks, uh, bad.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. COLORS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN GRAPHICS. The original version of the game was not the most vibrant, but everything was defined, it was clear, and the developers were not ashamed to be seen as arcade-y as they littered the environment with giant glowing power-ups. In the remaster, I genuinely struggle to make things out because everything is beige and brown. I get 90s Godzilla being gray-ish, he’s just built that way, but the lack of any blue betrays how he was actually designed. I’ve seen the movies, I had my own excellent 90s Godzilla figure, and I know what this man looks like. I know what King Ghidorah looks like. He’s fucking gold! He’s YELLOW!

Pipeworks were so enamored with their fancy new Unreal 5 lighting system that they forgot what color trees are. Trees are supposed to be green, grass is supposed to be green, and unless the sun is literally exploding, unless it’s autumn or winter, they are still green. I know that because I’ve been outside. I’ve CLIMBED trees and EATEN leaves! From this snippet of a trailer, I know they could do better. They have colorful ship containers in one stage. They have Helipads that are a Crayola green in comparison to the trees. They know that the water should be bright blue, even if it’s just a 30 meter wide river. They deliberately tuned these assets to look uninteresting and bland.

This is not cinematic, this is not respectful to the source material, this is just being so enamored with how much definition and fidelity you can pump into a game that you forget that it looks goldarn sepia toned at times. This is NOT what the original Destroy All Monsters Melee looked like, and this isn’t a good-looking game on its own right. It’s a visual facelift added to make the game look modern and flashy, when all it does is make it look BORING, BLAND, and like some Unreal Engine 5 preset.

For Peatrice’s sake, if you are going to do this, then have the decency to make it black and white. You are SO BAD at colors that no colors is a better option! You got the assets right. THEY LOOK GOOD. You just messed up the COLORS!

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, and Switch 2 on November 3, 2026.

Progress Report 2026-06-07

Oh cripes, it has been over a decade since I saw these PSAs, and there are straight up FOUNDATIONAL to the Millennial sense of humor.

— Stupid Twink (@stupidtwink.bsky.social) 2026-05-31T22:31:11.104Z

This, but replace cartoonist with writer.

Coffee Buns, the successor to Mice Tea, is getting partial voice acting? …WHAT? In what money is that even possible? HOW did they get Gamecrazed from the TTA reboot AND goldarn RINA-CHAN herself? Actually, I don’t care. LET’S FUCKING DOE! Gosh, this is going to be absolutely amazing when it’s done, isn’t it?

2026-05-31: Made three headers for Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 Act 3, but after making three entirely new backgrounds and some new character sprites, I was just BORED of this process, so I decided to do something else. Instead, I made another two headers before writing the 1,300 word segment where I BITCH about Trick Room.

2026-06-01: Wrote 1,300 word segment on a potential Baldur’s Gate or Fallout Remake, because I was BORED at work, and then went back to the grind for header images. I am NOT enjoying myself, as I need to spend so much time just making new settings and bit characters. Still made four headers, just need to do the final two, which should be easy, as they use prefab backgrounds, God, I abuse the word prefab way too much. …And I don’t think I need to make new assets for any of them, barring outfits. YAY! I made like twelve new character sprites for bit people here and like ten backgrounds, when I didn’t wanna do this SHIT right now, but I gotta GET IT DONE! Also, finally fixed my controller by taking it apart. Even with a removal tool, it was a ripe PITA.

2026-06-02: Wrote 1,400 word Toy Story bit. Wrote 4,700 words for the State of Play stuff, wrapped up the Raymond Leggings bit. Also FINALLY wrapped up the final two header images. I’ll do a final review of them tomorrow to spot errors, ‘cos it’s like 2 AM.

2026-06-03: Edited 11,000 words for this Rundown, because why not do it during the calm B4 da Storm! Edited 3,800 words that I HOPE I will be able to use. 100% finished Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders, now I am DEAD. Decided to go back to Aria of Sorrow, since I’m in a holding pattern before I begin the next big obligation, which I’ll explain after the S3 season is over.

2026-06-04: Had a proper work day today, then decided to wrap up Aria of Sorrow, finishing the latter half of the game and finding it to be less than its reputation amps it up to be. …And what I remembered about the game. I did not feel like starting up a review at 00:30, so I decided to chill and do some other stuff.

2026-06-05: Wrote 2,800 words for the Aria of Sorrow review prior to Summer Games Fest starting up. Wrote 6,200 words for Summer Game Fest stuff.

2026-06-06: Chores, work, waking up late, wrote 3,500 words of stuff for more Summer Games Fest stuff, including the 1666 bit and the final three segments. Edited like 10,000 words or something to wrap up this 22k word BITCH.

Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report

Total Word Count: 251,273

Estimated Word Count: 250,000

Words Edited: 251,273

Total Segments: 29

Segments Outlined: 29

Segments Drafted: 29

Segments Edited: 29

Header Images Made: 16/16

DONE! 100%! Now to do some OTHER SHIT!

2026 To-Do List Progress Report

THE NEW LIST FOR THE NOW-NOW!

2026-07-01: Verde’s Doohickey 2.0: Sensational Summer Romp Act 3: Worldly Wonders – DONE
2026-06-17: Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Review
2026-07-22: Help! I’m Turning into a Mermaid! Review
2026-07-29: Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review
2026-08-04: Natsumi Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
2026-08-06: Maria Mania Legacy Route – Student Transfer Scenario Review
2026-08-12: Natalie Rambles About Monkey Man
2026-08-??: Beast of Reincarnation Review
2026-09-??: TSF Series #019: A Change of Flesh
2026-??-??: re:Dreamer Review #6
2026-??-??: Coffee Buns Review (TSF Game)
2026-??-??: Fate Stay Night Remastered Review (Shiba & Rain Request)
2026-??-??: A Mirror’s Curse Review (TSF Game)
2026-??-??: Thread – A Tale of Identity, Monsters, and College Review (TSF Game)
2026-??-??: TSF Showcase 2026-01: Chronicstuss (Ouran Request)
2026-??-??: Natalie Rambles About Re-Whatevers
2026-11-18: TSF Series #020: Chateau del Bitz
2026-12-29: Natalie Rambles About 2026

Rundown Preamble Ramble:S3 2026: Let the Gorging Commence

Natalie Does Not Like Trick Room in Pokémon(And Apparently I Need to Explain Why In Grave Detail!)

Toy Story Games Are BACK!(At Least The Most Noteworthy Ones Are…)

State of Play: BIG Edition(The S3 One!)

Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine Acts Like It’s 15 Years Old(In Both Meanings of the Word!)

Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends are BACK!(Two of My Favorite 2D Games Return*!)

Tomb Raider #1 Remake #2 Looks Good(Too Bad About the AI Drama)

Natalie Complains About Sony’s Classic Re-Releases(Because the State of Game Releases Annoys Me…)

Kemuri is Cool Urban Fantasy!(So Much Better than the Multiplayer Thing It Used to Be)

The Stuntman is BACK!(…What the Heck is Stuntman?)

Until Dawn 2 Announced(Third Game; Third Developer)

God of War 4.5 Gaiden: Laufey Announced(God of War, Faster, Slicker, and With A Woman!)

Summer Game(s) Fest Happened(And Here’s What Happened!)

Summer Game(s) Fest Riffraff Roundup(There are Too Many Segments Already!)

Resident Evil: Veronica Announced(Because It’s Better to have an REV Remake Than An RE5 Remake…)

Gen Atlas Announced(Project Shiico is Full of Robots!)

Tupac’s Corpse Confirmed for Stranger Than Heaven(Because Hiring A Known Sexual Abuser Wasn’t Bad Enough…)

Crossfire(?) Announced(Because Smilegate Does Not Believe in Subtitles!)

Virtua Fighter VI: Crossroads Revealed in Earnest(A Cinematic Action Drama with a Fighting Game Mode?)

1666: Amsterdam Revealed(Time Traveling Cats and Witches!)

Attack on Titan 3 Announced(Another Game That Should Not Exist…)

Stellar Blade 2: Blood Rain Announced(More Like Stellar FIST!)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin Re-Announced(A Larry Ellison X PlatinumGames JOINT!)

Final Fantasy VII Revelation Announced(After 21 Years, the Final Fantasy VII Remake Dream is Almost Over…)

Hitman Classic Trilogy Remastered Announced(More Fodder for the Re-Whatevers Piece)

Barbie Rewind Announced(Banger Galge Collection Dropping!)

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered Announced(They Massacred MY BOY with UE5!)