This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Infinitely Perpetual Intellectual Property
- Natalie Tried The Project; Virai: Doomer’s Life Escape Demo (Depressed Internet Girl Life Sim Action)
- Terranigma Re-Release Announced (Revealed via Pixel Arcadia)
- Ecstatica Re-Release Announced (Resident Evil With BALLS)
- Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection Announced (An Alien Breed History Lesson, I Guess)
- Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom 2026 Part One! (The Biggish Picture!)
- Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom 2026 Part Two! (The Dribs and Drabs!)
- Age Twisters Announced (Age TF is Not a Particularly Nifty Mechanic for a Co-Op Game)
- Mega Man 12: Dual Override Gameplay Reveal (Yes to Mega Man, But Why Like This?)
- Showa American Story Re-Revealed (Alt History Where Japan Colonized America, Envisioned by Chinese Devs)
- Heroes of Might and Magic III Remake Announced (That Heroes 3 Remake Looks Pretty Iffy)
- The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt – Remastered Announced (Because That’s How You End An Event!)
- The Grand Theft Auto VI Section (The Reality of Unreality)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Infinitely Perpetual Intellectual Property
Seeing as how this week as home to the Geoff Keighley Game Adverts Convention Part 2 with Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom*, I got to thinking about the murky subject of intellectual property. The core and periphery gaming community that the Keighley’s are targeting have an interesting relationship with IP, because people want different things. Some want older IPs to be revived and for series they have varying levels of fondness for (they like the vibes, or they have a personal connection with it) to come back as a multi-generational property. Some only like a staple roster of IPs and don’t like to tread into foreign territory. And others are always looking out for new IPs that can do different things, birth new fandoms, create new characters, and make for a more diverse gaming landscape.
* – Keighley doesn’t actually own Gamescom, just the event where most news from the convention is delivered.
I’d say that a LOT of people who follow gaming news carry all three of these desires in their head at a given time: They want the maintenance of what they knew, a return of what went missing, and the introduction of the new. Many of the most celebrated media events in gaming featured all of these in some capacity, and they are all built upon the subject of catering to these desires for intellectual property and everything it represents. Consistency, community, continuity (a thing that continues), and general comfort. Many of us got into the crunchy center of gaming because we loved a specific game and wanted to see everything related to it, and enjoy IPs as a general rule.
Still, they also say they want new IP, and there has always been an undercurrent of people who have made a fuss about this. I remember the clamoring for new IP back in the late 2000s as companies reacted to The Great Recession by becoming more conservative and looking to sequel-ize what they did at the start of the generation. And long before then, it was common for magazine writers to bemoan the fact that such and such series kept on going when it had gotten stale or failed to effectively innovate.
However, new IPs can flutter out and die just as much as they can soar, and with the indie market having such an excess of creativity, I think new IPs from major AAA studios are strangely becoming a harder sell. It stops becoming a bold new idea for seasoned creatives and more them delaying a sequel that fans are clamoring for but now won’t get until a decade after the last one. “Why should I be excited for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet when it means The Last of Us Part III won’t come out until 2032 or later?” Some weird dude might say.
It makes all the sense in the world why people would want an active and routine IP to continue offering bursts of excitement and joy into their lives every couple years. Hell, I have viewed the loss of more routine every 2-3 year sequels as a major loss to the medium as a whole. Yes, not just the industry, but the medium, because it affects how people engage with the medium.
I am all for IPs remaining fixtures and doing their own thing to keep themselves alive. If my constant recounting of history whenever an older IP is revived are any indication, I love it when old things are brought outta the closet. And I will poo-poo skidoo any publisher/developer for not capitalizing on their IPs properly— looking at you Bethesda.
However, what I do take issue with is this idea that we can’t just have ongoing regularly used IPs, live IPs, and revivals, but that everything should be revived, brought back, and maintained in perpetuity. Which is something I have been noticing when browsing through various slices of fan discourse. A lot of this is a learned behavior.
People are used to something being ongoing, then it stops rather than ending, and they are left wishing for something more. Many IPs are cycled through continuously, giving an expectation that a successful IP is a lively one that is brought back routinely. And the very concept of fandom is built on the expectation that there will be something more. There aren’t a lot of fandoms for any random three episode 1990s anime OVA series that never even got a Blu-ray release, because what is there to be a fan of?
The simple fact of the matter is that not every story or series needs to be ongoing, in this perpetual state of iteration, universe building, or recycling existing stuff. Something can just exist, be available for you to go back to, and not tied around something bigger. Series can just end, and that’s not them dying, being killed, it’s just them being finished.
The original dev team did what they could, maybe it was brought back in some extent, maybe re-whatevers were attempted, but eventually the series is just done, and that’s just fine. We don’t need a sequel, a continuation, the series came out, made its mark, the dev team scattered to do something else, and people who played this 20-year-old game as kids are now making games inspired by them. Games that can often be better, as they have been thinking over design decisions the devs made over 20 years instead of… 20 months.
Like, shut up, we don’t need a new Banjo-Kazooie, no matter how much you wanna fuck that bear! Naughty Dog is never going back to Jak & Daxter, they already made that clear. You’re not going to get a new StarTropics. That IP never even got mentioned in Smash Bros. Certain things are just gone, and the most you can really hope for is the ability to buy it again, which is another topic altogether.
There are definitely series that I think should still be around, ones with a long storied history expanding a single console generation or decade and have a lot of history to them. But I’ve been following gaming enough to see them rise, fall off, and just stay there, maybe getting a collection thrown their way for good measure. It’s unfortunate, but some of your faves are just going to stay dead. Them’s the breaks kid.
Natalie Tried The Project; Virai: Doomer’s Life Escape Demo
(Depressed Internet Girl Life Sim Action)
Last week, Ouran hit me up in my DMs to talk about a niche game she found and wanted me to cover. Since she’s one of my handful of friends, and my demo appetite is quite large, so I decided to give it a look. Project; Virai: Doomer’s Life Escape is a story-driven game with life simulation elements where you play as Hicha, a twentysomething burn-out fed up with life, the world, and her continued existence. In her depression, she retreats to the online platform VITA and begins a career as a virtual idol/singer/streamer by the name of Virai. At the start of the game, Hicha is already done with her existence in meat space. She lives in squalor, does not take care of herself, barely eats, doesn’t clean up after herself, and the only highlight of her day is browsing VITA and posing as Virai.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because this game is likely inspired by Needy Streamer Overdose, a game that I did not particularly enjoy, and for two reasons. One, I had precious little sympathy for the protagonist, and found fulfilling the role as her keeper, therapist, and emotional regulator while she trauma bombs me to be frustrating as hell. If I wanted to find a girl I could try to fix through scheduling, emotional support, and money tricks, I could just go on some trans-girl Discord and catch me a new Clavietika. Two, there was a layer of obfuscation over what the mechanics actually did and how the math worked, in a way that I just found annoying. It made me think that I was playing the game the wrong way from minute one, and I was, which absolutely detracted to my experience.
Fortunately, based on the demo of the first four days, Virai is a lot less complex and arduous than NSO. Your options in a day are simpler, you only have health and sanity to balance, and there are only a few obvious things that can curb it. Like playing video games to stay sand and eating food to curb both ailments. In fact, it’s so simplistic that I’m tempted to say these options, this time system, is mostly there for set-dressing. Sure, you can have Hicha cry her eyes out or smoke, but you mostly just need to perform as Virai, check her computer, play a shitty beat ’em up, and give her some food when she gets hungry.
The comments and brief scenes these options produce are really the meat of the game, showing Hicha as she goes about her day and navigates between her three worlds. Hicha normally lives in a dreary overhead pixelated world with occasional splashes of 2D artwork. Her computer is a hodgepodge of Windows 95, Mac OS X, and some Linux distro, full of glimpses into this alternate internet, meant to feel familiar yet dissociated and somewhat archaic. A fact emphasized by the 4:3 aspect ratio this game just insists on using for a story set in the 2020s. While her time as Virai takes place in a low poly 3D world, mostly viewed from first-person, or through an in-universe camera, making it feel like the realest world of them all. Real life is fake and dreary, low res when you aren’t looking at yourself, VR is bright and full of people-shaped people.
As for what type of world is created here, it’s a scattershot of everything. VITA is basically VRChat X Twitch X Roblox. A digital metaverse where the currency is a proprietary stablecoin cryptocurrency, AI generated avatars and assets are bought and sold as NFTs, and digital queues that exist to incentivize subscription payments. Also, Mr. Beast is there, because of course he is. I’d say it feels unfocused, because it is, but it’s merely meant to be an approximation of a 2020s digital landscape in order to explore Hicha’s struggles with… existing in this wack-ass world.
As a character, Hicha is a brat who doesn’t want to go outside or do anything. Though in more of an angsty “I fucking hate everything” manner as opposed to the clawing “love me or else I’ll fucking kill myself” personality of NSO’s protagonist. I think this makes Hicha fare better, and my understanding of her is helped through her routine introspections, observations, and clear dissatisfaction with the fact she needs to be a human, not a digital anime girl. Virai is the only thing that brings her pleasure, is what gets her out of bed many days, and makes her feel alive and real, unlike in the real world, where she accepts the decay and stagnation of everything in her apartment.
The interactive nature of games can be a great way to illustrate perspectives and feelings by controlling someone different from you, navigate their life, and deal with mechanical simulacrums of emotions, mental states, and general struggles. Game developers, broadly speaking, are still scratching the surface and building the vocabulary needed to explore these topics, and games like Virai are attempts by a new generation of developers to both explore it and tell their own stories. As an avid lover of games, I am glad to see games like Virai exist. Though, I find playing them to be draining in a way similar to dealing with someone like Hicha, let alone living her life, due to the fact that you need to guide her through these things, while remaining unable to truly help her. It’s frustrating… but that’s also kind of the bloody point.
Terranigma Re-Release Announced
(Revealed via Pixel Arcadia)
I’ve mentioned this before, but I really don’t see the logic in having smaller events orbiting around massive ones. It just seems like a good way for your announcements to be overshadowed. If anything, you might want to announce things a week or two before or after the big events, when news is typically light. I’m sure there is SOME logic to it, or else why would people bother, but I have to wonder if they’d do better by rescheduling things.
Point is, this week was home to the Pixel Arcadia showcase for retro and retro-flavored games. Lots of cool looking indie games were announced, but there are a dozen cool indie games coming out each month nowadays. So what do you want from me? A list? If you know me, you know I LOVE going on about the history of classic games and logging what gets the coveted re-release system in this decentralized climate, and we’ve got a few of those.
First off, Clear River games is re-releasing Terranigma (1995) for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC in 2027. Cool. Terranigma is a classic SNES hidden gem that never hit North America, but it did release in Europe, and is considered one of the great RPGs for the system. Developed by Quintet and published by Enix, the game was the final entry in a loosely bound hexalogy of games the developed released for the Super Nintendo. ActRaiser (1990), Soul Blazer (1992), ActRaiser 2 (1993), Illusion of Gaia (1993), Robotrek (1994), and Terranigma (1995). All games that place somewhere on the neat to dope spectrum.
None of these titles got any significant re-releases in modern memory— not counting the Wii Virtual Console— making this choice of a re-release rather… confusing. The tools, knowhow, and emulation tech used in bringing Terranigma could be used to bring over the other five games for relative ease and make up a mighty fine Quintet collection. But I guess we can’t just kill six birds with one stone.
Now, part of the reason for this could be because of how weird Quintet got after the mid 90s. The developer kept running on the Saturn and PS1, including work on the space dog adventure game, Planet Laika (1997), which Dungeon Chill did a keen video on. However, the company went quiet in the early 2000s. The company president disappeared for a few years, and we saw not hat nor hair of their games until 2021, when ActRaiser Renaissance was Nintendo Direct shadow dropped. It was developed by train and plane sim maker, Sonic Powered, and looked… pretty ugly. Sorry, I calls ’em like I sees ’em. Some elements looked great, but others looked like they were straight from a low end 2004 PC game.
Clearly, someone has access to the rights, but I guess it’s just not in the cards for anybody to release a proper collection. …Or maybe Square Enix is just giving Clear Water Terranigma before doing their own Quintet collection if it does well. Business is complicated and confusing!
Akumako: “Don’t forget about Brightis (1999)? You can’t talk about Quintet without talking about Brightis. It was the culmination of their everything!”
Sony published Brightis, never localized it, and there is a net-zero chance that anybody still at Sony remembers that game existed.
Ecstatica Re-Release Announced
(Resident Evil With BALLS)
Ecstatica (1994) is one of the fakest looking games I have seen in a hot minute. Nothing about it looks right, it does not look like a real game, and upon seeing seconds of what it looked like, I became mesmerized. Because this is a 1994 game made entirely out of BALLS. No triangles, no quadrangles (they were a competing standard that never took off), but BALLS! Ovals! Spheres! And I don’t know HOW that is even remotely possible! Okay, there are some cubes there, for furniture and stuff, but the rocks are BALLS, the walls are BALLS even the grass is made up of stretched to hell BALLS!
Then when I recoiled from my shock and awe, I realized that Ecstatica is actually a fixed perspective survival horror game with 3D character models and pre-rendered backgrounds. This game is a missing link between Alone in the Dark (1992) and Resident Evil (1996) that in all my days I had never heard anybody mention. Because this shit? This shit I would remember FOREVER. Because of the BALLS!
Akumako: “The proper term is ellipsoid.”
BALLS!
What’s more, this is not just a survival horror game, it’s a medieval fantasy comedy survival horror game, where everything is made of BALLS! Just skimming through a playthrough and checking out every five minutes of this game is a damn trip. You go from some dude fighting a baby dragon the size of an eagle in his shop with a spatula. Then you see a naked man on a cross in a church, not a statue, but a real man. Crucifixion confirmed! Then the protagonist brews a potion that turns himself into a mouse with clothes, only to embiggen himself to escape from imps and steal an old man’s sword.
I have NO IDEA how this game escaped the wider world of game likers, other than it was European exclusive until 1997, when the sequel was released, Ecstatica II. I similarly skimmed through a longplay of the sequel, and it kinda sucks by comparison. It’s clearly a technical upgrade, with larger areas and more ellipsoid shapes per character models, but the character and charm of the original is basically, uh, gone. The game is built around going through conceptually dreary fantasy environments, slashing away at orcs, goblins, and far less endearing creatures. There are barely any characters, any story, you just need to schlep your way through to kill the wizard and get back the girl who the protagonist “won” last game.
These games were effectively stranded when their publisher, Psygnosis, was vored by Sony, and I guess the rights didn’t fall back to developer Andrew Spencer Studios. Nearly thirty years later, the folks at SNEG have picked up the license. With SNEG being a publisher founded by former GOG staff who publishes a grab bag of older PC games, namely old Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons games. They also don’t have a website or YouTube channel, the wankers.
However, rather than do a bog-standard re-release, SNEG are effectively remastering this game using modern technology. You can just play it via DOSBox, or you could play a version with modern resolution, smoother character models, and backgrounds with ellipsoids so smooth you could count them. (There are hundreds of ellipsoids on screen every moment, ball lovers rejoice!)
Also, I want to acknowledge that, in the first Ecstatica, the male protagonist has a ball bulge in his trousers so you know he has a penis. Meanwhile, the female protagonist has a comically fat ass. …I think I need to look up an old walkthrough and play this game, because the people need to know about this silly nonsense of yesteryear.
Akumako: “OneyPlays already did that two years ago.”
The fuck’s an OneyPlay? If I wanna play this hour-long fever dream and spend more time than that reviewing it, I WILL.
Ecstatica (1994) and Ecstatica II (1997) will be re-released exclusively for PC on October 26, 2026.
Akumako: “WAIT! I just remembered what game this swordplay reminded us of! It’s like a better version of Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods (1995) for the Atari Jaguar CD!”
The Atari Jaguar?
Akumako: “The JAG!”
One with the CD add-on that made it look like a toilet?
Akumako: “The Atari toilet!”
Damn, that takes me back…
Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection Announced
(An Alien Breed History Lesson, I Guess)
One thing I like about early 90s PC games is how often I am just blind sighted by some series that lived and died in that era, like Alien Breed. Developed by Team17, the Worms guys, as their first real series, these titles were overhead shooters with hues of horror strewn throughout, designed as… basically legally distinct Alien games.
The first three/four games, all overhead shooters, aren’t very horrific mechanically due to the large amount of screen real estate, making it clear where enemies are. However, they do have pretty impressive sound design for an Amiga game, ditching music for several channels of atmosphere. The horror elements got better alongside the graphics and visual effects, but by being a run and gun, it’s not especially scary in my book. You have too much visual information.
The fifth game, Alien Breed 3D (1995) was a 2.5D Doom-like shooter that, per the footage I could find, was too much for the Amiga. I don’t know what the internal resolution of this game is, but it’s low, so low that everything becomes an array of colored blocks that I struggle to view as a world. The sprite-scaling, ways pixels move and fade, it just looks compromised. Some might find it admirable, the same way that Doom for GBA is, but I think this is a step below that.
While the final game, Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds (1996), was… a HUGE step-up! The gunmetal gray corridors sing with hostility, the looming sense of ambiance and dread evoked by the music is more than effective. With everything being the good kind of dark, it feels like enemies could easily sneak up on you. They finally figured out how to make the sci-fi horror shooter they were gunning for since the start! Too bad it was an Amiga game two years after Commodore croaked and two months before Quake (1996).
Alien Breed was later revived via a 2009-2010 trilogy of XBLA/PSN/Steam releases that I’m somewhat familiar with. I tried the demos back in their heyday and thought the games were neat sci-fi horror twin-stick shooters. However, their design was arguably more action oriented, with boss battles, co-op, arcade sensibilities, and Unreal Engine 3. …I’m not saying you couldn’t make a horror game with Unreal 3. I’m saying that if your game looks THIS MUCH like Gears of War, people will expect Gears of War shit to happen.
The series petered out after that, ready for Team17 to re-release it whenever. …Instead, they handed the task to Antstream and Commodore for a compilation just in time for the 35th anniversary.
For those not privy on things, Antstream is a game streaming platform specializing in retro games, which I never really found a point in. Game streaming, the act of transmitting video across the internet, is such a wasteful process for games that take up less space than a photograph. However, they seem pretty legitimate, have sourced some obscure licenses, implemented bespoke challenges to recontextualize older games, and only charge $4 a month or $100 for your whole-ass life. Hell, Atari invested a good chunk of change into them. I’m sure they have some quality emulation tech at their disposal, but I really wish they would use it to release games you can own, rather than games you can stream. I’m cool with streaming as an option, but not the only solution.
Antstream, why is this on your service? That is just the key art for Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers!
Meanwhile, Commodore are not the Commodore who made the Commodore 64 and Amiga. I just told you that they were DEAD! Instead, the bushel of rights to Commodore were recently sold to a guy named Christian Simpson, better known under the alias Peri Fractic. In the summer of 2025, he bought the rights to the Commodore namesake for a “low seven-figure sum,” and the more I find out about Simpson, the more suspicious I get. He’s an AI enthusiast, actor who had minor roles in major pictures such as Star Wars, but relatively little else, and fancies himself a creative. Simpson strikes me as someone from wealth, or with access to capital, who is merely bored and wants to revive a brand he enjoyed as a child. I lack hard evidence for this hunch, but this guy is giving me mad Amiico Man vibes.
…So, how does Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection look as a re-release? Pretty good, I would say. The UX is a bit too colorful for a game of this sort, almost suspiciously so, but it appears to be the games in their full form, with various extras thrown in. Online co-op for the relevant games. Twinstick support, a much appreciated feature for any overhead shooter. Oodles of filters, too many some would say. In addition, they are adding virtual museum and horde modes with entirely redone lighting. While the sprites and tiles are the same, this makes the games look wildly different, and I think better. They enhance the yellow glow of gunfire, bask corners in darkness, and give the games an added sense of dread, which I think is much appreciated.
Will this lighting be carried over to the overhead games, which could benefit from more visual flair? Probably not!
Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection will be released for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC on September… just September. Way to lock in a day, chaps.
Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom 2026 Part One!
(The Biggish Picture!)
I ultimately consider events like Gamescom Open Night Live to be a net positive. They put eyes on games, they are just commercials, companies pay for ad space, streamers watch them and share them with their audiences as part of their hustle. Some games are whatever and worth ignoring. There is a stark lack of variety and showmanship in how these trailers are distributed. And there is a stark lack of variety, with so many games made by dudes who like the same things, that it’s easy for games to just bleed into one another as a sea of content. Content that can be categorized into broad buckets where it becomes hard to see where one begins and the other ends.
Cutesy critter live services such as Aniimo, Roco Kingdom, and MiHoYo’s Petit Planet, all of which look like they could be fine games and are at different places in the spectrum of Animal Crossing to an open world action game. However, when paired in the same showcase, they just look like a bunch of Chinese Pokémon wannabes. A wannabe that, unlike a regular Pokémon game, is meant to be a time sink you are expected to spend hundreds of hours in and hundreds of dollars on. Sure, the vividly crafted worlds full of marketable creatures are appealing on a broader level, but their nature as live services means you aren’t selling a product, you’re selling a lifestyle.
It is a struggle to sustain two of these bloody things, and once people get sucked in, they do not want to give up. It becomes their game, their familiar ground, they get invested in the story, the meta, the fandom, make friends through this game, and often spend hundreds of dollars on it. I genuinely do not understand where these games keep finding people who are willing to invest the hundreds of hours these games demand.
These games are free, but time is the real cost for them, and anybody who’s dabbled into the genre a fair bit knows how deadly this can be. You can deviate in aesthetics, appeal to microgenerations, but the market is going to bottom out eventually, and I do not see deviating in aesthetics to be the best way forward either.
Case in point, MiHoYo’s attempt at creating a dark fantasy game reminiscent of Elden Ring, Nodus Fall. Yes, they are investing in more ongoing services instead of improving their current ones, upgrading the animation pipeline, or focusing on improving things that have been stagnant for going on six years. How this is supposed to earn favor with fans of MiHoYo games, like my good friend Cassie, is frankly beyond me. This is especially true when Nodus Fall looks just like a Chinese Elden Ring like multiplayer action game about raid battles against giant mythological creatures. It’s very fidelity, looks like it’s fine, but this aesthetic has become immensely common over the past few years, and all the games blend together to me.
Also, MiHoYo plans on investing over $14 BILLION USD into internal AI tools over the next three years.. I don’t even know HOW they have that much money when they have like 7,000 employees they gotta write checks to! I’d say they plan on cutting them down to 700, but China is a society where people have employment rights and companies are urged to operate effectively. In America, people can just build a datacenter that demands 20% of a state’s power demand and fire half their staff for yucks. Unfortunately, AI is AI, and no matter where it is, the more money going into this crap means less money is going to literally anything else.
…Now, where was I? Oh, right.
“Photorealistic serious action games set in ancient history about battling mythological creatures” sounds too broad to be a genre. However, every one of these showcases has a few of them, and it’s hard to feel anything looking at them. Genigods: Nezha, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Nodus Fall, and probably two or three more that I blanked out on from this showcase itself. Clearly inspired by the success of games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Monster Hunter, these feel like they are becoming the gritty shooter of this generation. A game that’s far from a majority, but dominates with its aesthetic markers.
I would say that variety is the key to making this showcase more interesting, but that’s not necessarily true. However, due to its immense length of 2.5 hours and lack of “major games,” “major IPs,” or stuff I’ve been conditioned to care about, it’s hard to care too much about anything, especially when there are over 60 games on display here. With a line-up like that, am I really going to must a reaction for a new Worms, train sim, Rollercoaster Tycoon, or cutesy genre melding cozy/action game that looks like it was pitched by pointing at popular titles and gesturing at them? When presented like this, with a remarkable lack of showmanship, it’s incredibly easy to look at everything with a cynical eye, even if they look good.
For example, Mariachi Legends is a Metroidvania with gorgeous sprite art, infused with Mexican and Aztec culture, with some character action flourishes. (But no ranking system, the thing I don’t like about the genre.) It looks cool, like something I would enjoy checking out. However, I also view it as a game that is trying to stand out in the wake of the avalanche of the dastardly Metroidvanias after Hollow Knight, and with Silksong, they ain’t stopping anytime soon.
Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom 2026 Part Two!
(The Dribs and Drabs!)
Seeing as how I’m done with the broad strokes and games I can group together, I’m going to go over the games I have some things to talk about, but not a lot.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Tactics seems like a no-brainer idea considering the fact there has been an uptick in console-first Western squad-based strategy games. After XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012) paved the way, games like Disney-Marvel’s Midnight Suns (2022), Gears of Tactics: COGS of Lordly Caliber (2020), Disney Saudi Arabia’s Zero Company (2026) saw critical/communal acclaim. So of course one of the OG tactical squad based shooters is getting another reprisal, buoyed by how Rainbow Six: Siege (2015) developed a stronger character focus throughout its life.
Akumako: “Also, Baldur’s Gate III falls into this camp, even if its UX makes it look different and RPG systems are far more overt. And if you sell a game as being like BG3, it will be that much easier to get a project greenlit.”
Now, Tactics still looks like a firm side game, and one that I will dismiss due to the stories history of Tencent-Ubisoft over the past few years, their rampant layoffs, sex abuses, and general mismanagement. …Moving on.
Ananta, the open world anime GTA-like action adventure live service that is technically not a gacha was given another trailer. I still remember being pissed that a game with all this bombast, flourish, and budget behind it was being relegated to a live service with an engagement loop, wishing it were a real game. However, after Neverness to Everness disappointed me immensely with its similar take on this concept, I’ve tried telling myself that no matter how much glitz and glamor Ananta has, it’s bound to be a mess.
Fortunately, the trailer helped me understand this, presenting some trite dialogue from the protagonist and assigning them the mantle of “Yeet Master.” I know that real effort and intention had to go into this game, and I am unfortunately curious how much its supposed polish spreads. It’s coming out on January 15, 2027, during the calm before the storm for me, so maybe I will give it a whirl then. Or maybe I will be sensible and save myself the 10 to 20 hours.
Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons is a game that struck me as off in a number of ways. And not just because the definition of a warlock was made egalitarian in recent years. The title is coming from Invoke Studios, who made the maligned Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance reboot, so that’s already an uphill battle. And to compound matters, watching this 8 minute trailer made me feel like I was going through a time loop. Something about the jumping, walk cycle, and even general level design strikes me as dated, like this was a game from a decade plus ago but given a slightly new skin. This suspicion was only heightened by how scripted the trailer appeared to be, presenting itself as a free-form experience, yet while needing to be restrictive by design.
Sure, you could make platforms, but only to get over this specific gap using this specific rock. Sure, you can swap places with an enemy, but only in specific encounters. And sure, you can topple pillars, but only when the game lets you.
Furthermore, the focus on being a spellcasting lady seems to be somewhat lost in the actualization of the gameplay. While Forespoken is fraught and frayed (haha), its free-form magic system was at least an idea worth replicating for any action mage lady game. Instead, the interpretation of a warlock here is less a sorcerer and more of a mage with a sword and shield who can stab enemies while her magic meter is building up. For a game named after a class, this choice and a clearly limited amount of spells seems like a choice made out of compliance rather than something more deliberate or inspired.
1001 Threads of Mizan is a game that interested me, as it is a loose adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights, an early entry in the literary canon. Through the medium of video games, it could explore and recontextualize a lot of its short stories in a form of modern interactive fiction, reimagined through a modern lens. Instead, the Saudi Arabian private investment fund decided it was best to homogenize their inherited culture around something more palatable.
I could just move on by labeling the game as part of a Saudi Arabian soft power cultural psy op or whatever harebrained term I feel like using. However, there’s something upsetting about seeing a game like this feel the need to modernize so many clear concepts. Djinns and mythical creatures as reinterpreted as massive hulking boss battles for a party of three to take down mooks and minibosses before getting to the bombastic big bad. It does not look like a bad game, vast number of studios working to build this are clearly putting a lot of time and effort into every aspect of this title. …Including many divergences to the source material, as seen with the mechanical flying carpets. I have to ask why, but the real answer is likely become the Saudi Arabian government only wanted to show off a select version of Arabic mythology. …Or maybe they thought this would be more profitable.
Which is a shame. I want to see more games explore cultures I’m not familiar with, as I firmly believe in games’ ability to spread and share culture. If you enjoy the art of a country, you like it and its people. See Japan and South Korea. But if you don’t see their art, see most of the Middle East, it’s harder to give a shit about their culture.
Lego Skylines was announced as one of the most no-brainer concepts ever. Lego is doing huge in the post-pandemic climate. City builders and lighter games you can spend hundreds of hours in are big, they say, so why not have a city building Lego game? And why not get the new developer of Cities: Skylines II to make it? …Well, Cities: Skylines fans would probably have very strong opinions on that front, but do you have a better pick in mind?
Anyway, I’m out of my field with this one and all we saw was a pre-rendered trailer, with no release window announced, so presumably the game is still in early development. Still, could be something special for the genre, and something new for Lego games. One where you actually build stuff at your own discretion! What a concept!
Next, I have some peripheral malarkey that may as well have been announced at the Keighley’s, so I’m dumping it here!
Sanitarium (1998) was part of the initial rush of horror games that came out after the success of Resident Evil, but took things in a different direction. Instead of being survival horror, it was a horror adventure game with pre-rendered overhead background, 2D character sprites, and an overall presentation more similar to Baldur’s Gate and Diablo than anything that required a beefy graphics card. Combined with its eponymous setting— a sanitarium— and an eagerness to explore the fantastical during its latter half, it was a memorable experience for many in its heyday.
The game was never really lost— it got a GOG release in 2009— but the folks at Ziggurat Interactive decided to give the game another shot in the arm with a light remastering, Sanitarium Enhanced. It adds widescreen support, an appreciated option for pre-rendered games of this era, controller support, hints bug fixes, and a scattering of extras thrown in. Most of which seem like choices made so they could get the game on consoles, which they are. Sanitarium Enhanced is coming out for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, and PC on… an unspecified day in 2026.
Yeah, I’d say that remasters like this aren’t quite necessary, but there’s always some jank found in running a Windows 95 game on a modern system. So, thanks?
Earth Defense Force 6.2: Invaders from Another World was announced as an updated and expanded version of Earth Defense Force 6 (2022), this time targeting the PS5 exclusively and boasting a new feature previously unthought of before. MORE GIANT INSECTS! Just full on SHEETS of them, as much as the devs could manage, injected into the main campaign, to maximize the sense of despair players will feel. …Because they’d need to pick up all the spoils. Enemies previously released in DLC missions will be added to the main campaign, which was already years-long from what I recall. And, most interestingly, you will be able to customize weapons, a feature the series has needed since, uh, 2017. …Not the year, the Xbox 360 game from 2006.
Seeing this headline made me feel clairvoyant, as just the night before I was visiting Sandlot’s website wondering what they’ve been doing since EDF6 came out. Well, besides porting games to other platforms. And if the idea that EDF6 is 4-years-old sounds weird to you… that’s probably because these games just don’t get localized in a timely manner. EDF5 hit Japan in 2017, took a full year to come to PS4 in the rest of the world, then another 7 months before hitting Steam. EDF6? That took almost TWO YEARS to get a worldwide release! How? I know there is a LOT of dialogue to record and stitch into the game, especially with 50+ voice actors. But also, COME ON!
I’m sorry, I get that Sandlot is an indie developer by virtue of scale, only sporting 25 people who are damn good at what they do. But you can’t have these massive delays for a game like this, and you need to prioritize PC releases. It’s where most of the audience is. Especially since this game can’t run on the Switch 2.
Earth Defense Force 6.2: Invaders from Another World will be released in Japan for PS5 sometime in 2027. If we’re lucky, it will be on PC by the end of 2029.
Age Twisters Announced
(Age TF is Not a Particularly Nifty Mechanic for a Co-Op Game)
Age Twisters is the latest Hazelight-like, Hazelike if you don’t respect the Ubisoft Halo Killer, two person co-op variety adventure game. A granddaughter and her grandpa are going on a quirky voyage, or treasure hunt, left behind by their mother/daughter and venture through it using the power of age progression and age regression.
I tend to get excited when I see games implement TFs so casually and as a core mechanic. Unfortunately, as I’ve mused in the past, the language of games is so built around using multiple characters movesets, and weaponry that the physical transformation of your character is rarely ever fantastical. You need to have a narrative weight and mechanical friction to really incentivize behavior, and for characters to react to it. Otherwise, you’re just pressing the switch active player character button. Oh, I need grandma for this, kid for that, and regular adult for the other thing.
Sure, the banter could add some zest, but this is a Krafton joint made for mass appeal. It has a cute inoffensive art style and is clearly designed in the mold of It Takes Two. While I expect some message from Hazelight games, I doubt an imitator that looks like this would have anything poignant to say about generational friction, the way age changes perception, or how people covet youth and seniority. Now, if you made me the lead on this, that would be ALL I would to focus on, and it would be a deeply uncomfortable co-op horror romp. …But Krafton stopped taking my calls after the incident in 2019.
Also, the protagonists turn into a suitcase and cactus in one section in the trailer, and that’s WAY more interesting than changing ages. Because everybody changes ages, it’s called being alive, so it’s relatively low on the Transformation Fantasy spectrum.
Akumako: “Literally nobody else says that TF stands for Transformation Fantasy.”
Yeah, well, every trend’s got to start from somewhere!
Mega Man 12: Dual Override Gameplay Reveal
(Yes to Mega Man, But Why Like This?)
Mega Man 12: Dual Override received its first gameplay trailer, and… I continue to be perplexed as to the direction of Mega Man post-Inafune. Mega Man 11 (2018) set a supposed new standard for the series, but it was largely just another 8-bit Mega Man game but in 3D, with some flourishes to make the game more manageable and/or easier. It answered the question of how the classic Mega Man series can evolve with… it sorta can’t.
Widely influential legacy IPs like this cannot just do what they did back in the 90s without seeming redundant and devoid of personality. It’s been done before, and likely been done by a deluge of fans who may have done an even better job than the originals— hindsight and longer dev times and such. One can try to add new mechanics, but that runs the risk of making games cease to feel like their original incarnations and feel more like a game inspired by the originals. This fact is only worsened when you realize that the people working on these revivals are younger folks. They are fans of the original who, in another timeline, would be making indie games inspired by the original.
How do you make a classic Mega Man game that feels distinctive in 2026 and still feels like a classic Mega Man game? Well, Dual Override’s answer is to just tweak it a bit in a few places. Much of the gameplay could just translate to an NES, and the biggest innovations tend to be the following: Robot Master encounters are split into three smaller stages. Bosses generally take longer due to larger health bars. And you have a super attack and shield that can be activated using a recharging meter. All of which are pretty… humdrum changes to the formula. Though, the rechargeable shield and super attack are arguably being too much. Purists would just ignore them, as they can be seen as cheap in a game that is otherwise so transparently of the same stuff as the first ten.
The identity of this game is also a bit curious to me. It features returning characters like… Astro Man from Mega Man 8 as a remixed boss for the first stage in Twinkle Girl’s world. Yes, they finally added a second Robot Master. And it took them less than 20 years this time! While the big push revealed in this trailer is the fact that Proto Man is playable, because he apparently wasn’t in Mega Man 11.
I am being very critical here because I don’t quite understand what this game is going for other than keeping the classic series alive, when they don’t need to. Mega Man has always been defined by its various permutations, in how malleable the character and namesake is. Accordingly, it’s curious that they go back to the classic when they are just run and gun 2D platformers, games in no short supply. Capcom could instead return to a less explored segment, like a new Battle Network or Legends game, or just an entirely new pillar for a new generation and new gameplay style. Instead, they are just making these needlessly fancy Famicom games that apparently take 7 to 9 years to make. Remember when they used to make them in 7 to 9 months? I remember, because I was an egg back then!
If it were up to me, I would just commit to classic Mega Man being a retro thing, and aim to make the ultimate classic Mega Man game. Throw in every level, every weapon, make every Robot Master playable, add a level creator, and throw in a bunch of bonus modes. Effectively a bigger better version of whatever Mega Man Universe was supposed to be, and what Powered Up! attempted, but all in 8-bit. I could make a damn good design pitch too, but that would take too much time and Capcom won’t talk to me after the incident in 2009. I was 14, I didn’t know what plagiarism was, and I just wanted to make Bob and George REAL!
Showa American Story Re-Revealed
(Alt History Where Japan Colonized America, Envisioned by Chinese Devs)
…I think this might be my favorite game from Gamescom, funnily enough. …And I cannot believe that I missed it when it was revealed back in October 2024.
Here’s the pitch. Showa American Story is a Chinese game studio is making a game set in an alternate history future where Japan has turned America into an unofficial colony. Kind of like re:Dreamer but even more absurd. It’s the 80s, a teenage girl has been brought back from the dead, and she goes on a cross-country adventure to reunite with her sister. Except instead of being an emotional or sentimental game about bonds and connections. It is camp, earnest, and absurdromance RPG, but not in the way the term is used 95% of the time.
Showa American Story is not the product of some studio or some market analysis, it is a weird-ass idea brought to life by weird-ass people who want to make the world they have in their dreams. It’s a road trip game about exploring this new world, from Neo Yokohama to San Francisco to Las Vegas to the Japanese conglomerate owned state of Texas to Neo Tokyo-4. Yes, there are AT LEAST four Neo Tokyos, and I love to see it.
There’s a protagonist flavored White guy named Michael Hero and a sharply dressed Black guy named Bubba. Mt. Rushmore and the White House are surrounded by cherry blossoms in eternal bloom The president is an anime otaku who dedicates half an hour of every day to getting his fix. The Texan governor is both a cowboy and samurai at the same time. McDonalds is Wakudona’s. Yet, it is clearly not just wack-ass wacker jack. Beneath the absurdity it is crafted with a clear reverence of culture, the past, and the art of travel, seeing new places, and accumulating artifacts from it, even as the world is a more mundane and comedic apocalyptic hellscape.
Oh, did I not mention that the world is also full of zombies, monsters, and glorified gangsters trying to claim turf? Because that’s absolutely the case, and protagonist Chigusa Choko is equipped to handle them with swords, guns, and a stylish drill arm that lets the protagonist pierce the skies, and her enemies, in one single motion. Also flaming dive kicks and an American flag that can launch zombies into space with a salute. Video games weren’t a mistake if they got us here…
You can also drive trucks and motorcycles, partake in myriad diversions at rest stops and locations, equipped with totally original not-Sega arcade titles, and probably oodles more. But I don’t need to know more to know that I am IN! No release date was given, but regardless of quality, this is a surefire to be a cool weird game for freaks, and I’m pretty freaky deaky if I do say so myself!
Heroes of Might and Magic III Remake Announced
(That Heroes 3 Remake Looks Pretty Iffy)
While I try to keep tabs on most genres, I really have a blind spot when it comes to PC-centric strategy games. What can I say? I didn’t have a Windows PC until I was 18, I found the genre to be intimidating, and I didn’t hear too many people gas them up in 2013, let alone for being approachable to newcomers. It’s probably upsetting to some that my closest reference points for the genre are Pokémon Conquest (2012), Fire Emblem Awakening (2012), and Advance Wars 1 (2001). The toddler fodder of the genre.
So, 13 years later, I still have not taken the leap. However, I do know what a game is revered by certain people, and I know that Heroes of Might and Magic III (1999) is one of the most beloved games in the genre. It’s still a GOG top seller, and people are still playing it to this day. Why is that the case? Well, I’d assume it’s due to the depth, versatility, and speed of the game. There’s very little friction in making decisions, the game is massive in several ways, and has seven different campaigns to try out. If you’re a “games are a series of interesting decisions” person, and want something you can sink hundreds of hours into, you’ll probably be spoiled for decisions with how the game moves. Oh, and I’m sure this game has decades of custom maps to pour though.
However, as an outsider, I have never liked how many games of this era looked. With 2D artwork mixed with pre-rendered assets and Windows 95-era design ethos, it looks like it could run on a toaster (complimentary). However, I find it hard to mesh with its art direction, not helped by how blurry every screenshot and gameplay video of this game looks. I think it’s rendering however many million pixels to maximize screen real estate, but that’s not a great way to view a retro game in my mind.
But what do I know? My only familiarity with this series was Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes HD for XBLA. Really fun puzzle game that one was.
So, of course Ubisoft decided to remake the game in the form of Heroes of Might and Magic III Remake, which is a contentious decision for obvious reasons. In fact, to quote my friend Chari, “The original is basically a holy text in Eastern Europe, and almost timeless.” I might not know a lick about religion, but I have pedestrian eyes that say… this remake is just a different game. The speed, the way you interact with the world, the character of the game as informed through its UX, they are all so different that it looks like a different game, period.
This ultimately begs the question of who this is for. It completely reworks the presentation in every manner, yet claims to be so faithful you can use old map files from the original. Is it meant to give the game a coat of paint more appealing to newcomers? Perhaps. But if that was the goal, why bother with this fully 3D remake? Couldn’t you just give another go at Heroes of Might & Magic III: HD Edition, but make it not shit this time?
For classic fans, I would imagine that this would sit especially poorly after the early access release of Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, which came out earlier this year. Olden Era simply looks more like HoMM3 than the remake ever could. The UX, the traversal, the speed of combat, and the general feel all capture what the original was doing, but with enough flourishes, flair, and presentational differences for it to feel like a modern game. I feel crazy for pointing this out, but a turn-based battle scene with a static camera feels HUGELY different from one with a dynamic camera.
I’d ask why these changes were made, and I think that might be because Ubisoft is releasing this remake on consoles, specifically PS5 and Xbox Series. …Yeah, they took one of the most beloved PC games of its era, remade it, homogenized it, and are making it console friendly. That… that sure sounds like a plan if I’ve ever seen one.
Also, I simply do not trust Ubisoft-Tencent with remakes or re-whatevers at this point, as it’s bad news after bad news. The cancelation of the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, the vaporware status of the Splinter Cell remake. The Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake where they laid off the main dev team right after shipping the game. Any number of their bad remasters that added bugs or sucked the life out of games. Combined with Rayman Legends Retold… I think I would rather Ubisoft just do nothing.
The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt – Remastered Announced
(Because That’s How You End An Event!)
The Witcher III is one of those generation defining titles that I saw, witnessed, and let pass me by— like most PS4 generation games, let’s be real. I respected it enough to give it a shout-out in two of my novels, and people seem to generally like it a whole lot, with the game seemingly never undergoing its phase of critical backlash. Which, for a decade old GOTY title, is a bit impressive.
Anyway, in conjunction with a new expansion releasing next year, The Keighley’s capped off this even by announcing a remaster of this game. Which is not to be confused with the numerous updates the game received over the decade, or the next gen upgrade it saw in 2022. Instead, it is a visual and mechanical facelift that aims to rework the combat, traversal, skill trees, and more to make the game better than ever. However, as is often the case when you have an extensive change log, you risk changing too much and altering what people liked about the original. Which is before getting into how even updated lighting can radically change how a game feels to play.
I’ve done a whole Ramble on re-whatevers, so I’ll hold my tongue here and say that this looks to be a more complimentary upgrade. It does not appear to be changing things for the sake of changing them, but we won’t know for sure until its release date of September 29, 2026. Because there just are not enough games coming out this H2.
You might think this will be paired with the new expansion, Songs of the Past, yet it is not. That expansion is not due until 2027, and it sure looks like a Witcher expansion.
Now, I’m giving this its own section because of how strange this game is as a capstone to a showcase like this. All these new games, yet we end by showing off a remaster of a game already played by tens of millions of people? Really? Was nobody else willing to take the ending slot and get a big crowd reaction? I guess not, and that is not too surprising given how Gamescom has rarely been the place for big announcements. …Presumably because the wind is being taken out of everyone else’s sails this week thanks to the game of the decade, the last true game of the culture forevermore, Grand Theft Auto VI.
The Grand Theft Auto VI Section
(The Reality of Unreality)
Oh, grief. I’ve already talked so much about GTA VI and so much has been said about its place in the industry. Every week I’m being hit with some think piece about it, what it represents, and its role in the current collapse of the video game industry as an industry where people make games. It’s going to be the biggest media event ever, and just dominate the conversation across every corner for weeks, months, or years to come, because none can stop GTA.
In preparation of the gameplay reveal event, I originally wrote out some section where I handed this topic to one of my worst characters, ZeroX The Alpha, née ZXA Yungboi, from my 2023, 2024, and 2025 Rambles. However, upon actually watching the 27 minute-long gameplay reveal trailer, I really don’t have much to say about it. Despite it being 13 years since the last entry, GTA 6 is still a GTA game at its core, and my main takeaway from this one is how it is trying to create an idealized reality.
The big thing I saw people on my usual cultural Petri dish was how the game looked, how realistic it seemed, and the immense attention to detail seen throughout the game. The title is a graphical showcase, aiming for photo-realism, and it largely succeeds. Vehicles run the gamut and are customizable, usable to traverse the world and participate in races, yet have gas to make them feel a bit more tangible and personal. The world is crafted with a pronounced attention to detail applied to both the urban sprawl and divide between wealthy and poor neighborhoods. Even nature is given a luxuriousness that makes Miami look almost like a place habitable for humans.
The lighting systems, while a too damn dark in places, is among the most realistic I have ever seen, and does much to make the individual elements of the world pop. From the burst of light when emerging from shadows to the beautiful evening light. While the NPCs have come a LONG way and boast a truly impressive level of care and detail. The hair, outfits, and details fine and large make this a game that pushes the boundaries, and that should be acknowledged. Everybody runs and moves, but they move slightly differently, and are gussied up with a considerable level of detail. It truly feels like a next gen experience compared to GTA 5, but that’s not hard considering we’re literally two gens past that game.
It’s impressive, but… I was content with PS4 graphics being the peak a decade ago. So part of me shrugs this off, thinking “yeah, it’s pretty, but pretty is the standard” and going back to playing my 1080p PS Vita games.
However, the entire ethos and identity of this game seems off to me given the fact that, as the name implies, Grand Theft Auto 6 is still a game about doing heterosexual crimes. But whereas the prior entries could fall back on older ideas of crimes crystallized in the 20th century, it’s 2026, the 21st Century is no longer new, and the way crime is understood nowadays is different. Violent crime rates that peaked in the 90s have gone down to where they were in the early 70s.
The idea of a criminal with a gun has shifted from a robber to a spree shooter in it for the thrill of the game. (I would know.) Security systems and a burgeoning police state have made these crimes far less… reliable. While the very concept of robbery of cash registers from restaurants and convenience stores has become far less viable as the world is shifting away from paper money. Like 80% of all commerce in the US is done with an app or a card. When was the last time you paid for food with paper?
Hell, you’d probably be better off raiding a GameStop and stealing their PS5 Pros than you would be robbing a dinner. Stealing a car is vastly more profitable than robbing a store, and you don’t even need a gun to it. Even though I don’t know how grand theft auto still happens on newer cars full of cameras that you can track in real time. And let’s not get started on how the way to make money in America is good old financial crimes. Either break into someone’s account, or use social engineering to make them give you the money out of pity or coercion. I know people who lost MILLIONS thanks to pig butchering schemes. And that’s WAY more lucrative than robbing a bank.
Combined with the various shootouts, the use of guns for hires, and gangs straight out of a 90s crime movie, it all feels dated. It is not a version of crime born from reality, but from GTA, from what people expect of this game, from the fantasy the game is selling. Though, it has been tweaked with some modern flourishes, like carjacking apps, to make it feel more grounded. It’s a modern realistic game where what you’re doing feels anachronistic… because it makes for a better game. The gameplay loop of a robbery is good, exciting, running away from and shooting cops is a really fun thing to do in a video game. Escaping a crack-house full of stereotypes is exciting compared to… manipulating gambling markets on your phone. And infiltrating a party of C-Suite tech bros is more fun when you get to shoot them in the fucking face for narrative reasons.
This all needs to be here, because it’s a GTA game, while the fixation on realism is instead carried across different mechanics. The protagonists, Jason and Lucia, are a couple, and you get to influence how they interact, if they really love each other, and have them pair up on missions or bail each other out for relationship points. Or you could give them NO romantic connection if you’re part of the manosphere or some guff.
It ain’t no Faith and a .45, but it is a unique idea that puts greater emphasis on the characters as people. Same with the decision to add fatness and exercise routines as game mechanics à la prior games in the series. So many people are going to make Lucia as fat as possible, and godspeed.
Which brings me to what I find to be the most notable aspect about every and any discussion about GTA 6. We’re not talking about the entirety of GTA 6. Everything we have been shown is for the first pillar, the single player campaign. We still know nothing about the online mode or how it will be distributed.
We don’t know about how role-playing will be handled, as that has been a HUGE aspect of GTA 5 that people wave off like it’s some rounding error. Nor has there been any indication of how GTA Online is going to react to the new standards of online game platforms and if it’s going to offer tools for user-generated content. Because THAT is how GTA 6 becomes the next big thing. Not by offering a story, but by creating a synthetic reality that feels more engaging, more rewarding, than whatever crap people have in meatspace.
When Grand Theft Auto VI debuts in 2.5 months, it will merely be the start of a digital empire a decade in the making, and the real game will only emerge in the coming months, or perhaps years. …And I’m going to be so, so upset when that happens.
If massive platforms like this are video games now, then I guess I just don’t like video games anymore…
Progress Report 2026-08-30
Watched Shrek and The Emperor’s New Groove with Cassie and Shiba. Those movies are very similar, but quite good. Shrek is a classic that I watched over and over again on VHS as a kid, as it came out when I was 6, so I loved it at the time and thought it was hilarious. It’s funny how the film underwent a reassessment over the years. It was an ironic punching page in the 2010s, but after becoming a staple part of meme culture the teenage irony faded as people gained the comfort to outright like the movie, as its eccentricities stopped being dated and became classic.
The Emperor’s New Groove is one of the last gasps of Disney’s 2D animation, and I think it’s an incredibly entertaining comedy film. It’s short but does everything it needs to, has just enough emotional hook to feel like a complete story, and fills its runtime with delightful and memorable gags with its core cast of four characters, who all work and play off each other well. I was not a Disney kid, so I only watched it once when I was little, so going through it again, I was impressed at how well it held up.
2026-08-23: Movies with friends. More Fate Stay Night, got to the beginning of the final day of the first route. Played Virai demo to appease Ouran.
2026-08-24: Wrote 900 words on Virai before work. Spent like four hours researching and writing up sections for the Pixel Arcadia bits, because research is necessary! 2,100 words in total, after scrapping the Sanitarium bit. A remaster of a game that’s already on digital storefronts ain’t sexy, it’s Tuesday! Only a little bit of Fate today, getting to the coffins and reaching the beginning of the end of the first route.
2026-08-25: OF COURSE the Citadel K-1s decided to ship today! And OF COURSE the Coffeezilla folks decided to futz with my ish by laying a wet hot quiche on my nuts. I know I don’t have nuts anymore, but the point still stands! Basically, I pulled a 12 hour day, so no time for Gamescom, which irked my dirk. Slang for dick. Which I also traded in for some ish with wheels ‘n’ stoofs.
2026-08-26: Worked until 21:20, had some dead time while my boss was spending two hours on an engagement letter, wrote 5,500 words for the Gamescom malarkey, including research and shaz. Orz.
2026-08-27: Edited this bulbous harlot, made the tasteful abomination of a header, worked up a mild tempest on some K-1 Killer Ones. Wrote 1,100 words for GTA 6.
2026-08-28: Work, work, and more work for the side job, before getting distracted by crap. A real do-nothing day. Orz…
2026-08-29: Did chores in the morning, played around with Cassie a bit, got jerked around by my boss, wrote 1,600 words for next week’s Preamble Ramble, finished the Fate route in Fate Stay Night. Tried going back to select the alternate options before realizing that I truly do not care to see this level of flavor text knowing I have another 60% of the game to go through.
Are you TEAM VIRAI or TEAM KANGEL?! WHATS IT GONNA BE!