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Summer Games Fest time! It's happening! 2027! No release date beyond "Fall 2026" but we do get confirmation that it's coming to Steam. It lived it died it lives again! This one is different from the one shown at the SGF, it doesn't have a rather huge spoiler lol. I thought it'd be a while before we saw anything about this one lol. Prologue available now. Open beta available now. Spring 2027. Couple of other things: Palworld 1.0 coming out July 10, Gundam Rogue Orbit could be fun, hopefully it's not a multiplayer only title , Clutch could be that game for people who wish Forza Horizon had a darker story lol.

September 24. Some games moved to 2027, others moved to the same 2 week period.

October 2. Pre-orders/early physical versions come with Ace Combat Zero!! \m/ \m/

I'm not done with the game yet but so far I agree with this 100%. I always reload in stealth games when I'm detected, but in this one I keep going, the only other game I can think of that pulled that off was Ghost of Tsushima/Yotei. And it totally feels like the movies where Bond will be infiltrating somewhere, get spotted by a couple of guys, and knock them out real quick without the whole base going on alert. It's great. That's just one of the ways that whole thing really feels like a true Bond simulator, it's really impressive.

007 First Light This turned out to be both less like Hitman and more like James Bond than I expected. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It's definitely the best Bond game so far simply by virtue of not just being a glorified shooter. This adapts the full experience of being Bond including the social stealth aspect and the way you can recover from breaking stealth just by throwing a few punches. Getting spotted in Hitman usually means immediately reloading whereas in this I always just rolled with it since that seemed to be in the spirit of the game. I kinda wish it was more open-ended, though. I don't see a ton of replayability in the main campaign. The levels really aren't as sandboxy as in Hitman. And it remains to be seen how much longevity TacSim will actually add to the game. I guess that's going to largely depend on how much content they plan to add post-launch because right now there doesn't seem to be a ton of content there. Especially considering the amount of cosmetics I've already unlocked from pre-order bonuses, twitch drops and Hitman account linking. So I'm expecting the support to be rather extensive and long-term. I'm a long time Hitman fan, and as much as I'm looking forward to the next Hitman, I wouldn't be mad if IO Interactive alternated between Hitman and this for the next decade. I definitely hope it does well enough for a sequel to happen, at least.

Ditto Shovel Knight was way too good for me not to get this day one. I'll probably play it next once I'm done with First Light.

Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate has restarted development and is now Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams. Coming: not anytime soon lol. At least we actually get some footage of this version, though.

Donkey Kong Bananza Okay, I get the hype. This game is hands down the best in the entire DK series. Not only that but it has one of the best finales out of any Nintendo game ever. Top 5 at least. Holy hell, the Odyssey team was cooking on this one. They said "It's time to return to monke" and locked the hell in. A-freaking-plus.

Pokemon Legends Z-A Borrowed this one. I swear, Pokemon is such a frustrating franchise. They often introduce or refine one thing that's great and then surround it with a bunch of half-assed crap. This game is a prime example. The real time battles are great, probably the best the franchise has ever been. It completely cuts out all the tedious text boxes that I've been griping about for literally decades now. Battles are quick and snappy and don't waste your time with a bunch of popups you have to go through by mashing the A button. Not only that but the real-time aspect means you not only have to keep your positioning in mind but you will probably find yourself using moves you never used in older games based on their cast time or area of effect. This is probably the first Pokemon game since I was a kid to give me a decent challenge at more than one point in the story, though I did deliberately avoid doing a bunch of the side missions so I wouldn't be overleveled. Battles are just about what I always wanted them to be. There's room for improvement, but this is a tremendous step forward for battles in the same way Legends Arceus was for catching and if you put both of those together you could end up with the perfect Pokemon game. Too bad the rest of it is so lazy. Yes, the whole game takes place inside of Lumiose City and there is no going outside of it at any point, not even in the postgame. The city doesn't even feel alive. You can't enter most of the buildings except for Pokemon centers and a few story related locations. Hell, most of the citizens don't even walk around the streets. They just awkwardly stand in the middle of the road, radiating the kind of NPC energy I haven't seen since the Gen 1 days. Performance is pretty good, at least on Switch 2, but the environments are straight out of the Wii. Also, the lack of any voice acting whatsoever in a full priced game in 2025 is inexcusable. There is nothing that feels more awkward than watching a dramatic animated cutscene play out where everybody is just silently flapping their lips while you have to read subtitles at the bottom. This game costs 70 dollars. Enough is enough. The story isn't really anything to write home about either, though it does try to put a band-aid over some of the stuff in X/Y that people found to be stupid or shallow. Honestly if this was a 40, maybe even a 50 dollar game I could give it a soft recommendation just because the battling is so good and the battles are definitely where this game has its focus, but 70? No way. Just another case of Nintendo's eyes being bigger than their stomach.

Hitman 2 I decided to replay this to kill some time while I wait for First Light but this turned out to not be a normal playthrough. It started out normal enough, I was going to replay the story and then go for all the achievements so I could transfer my progress into Hitman: World of Assassination and finally play the last set of levels and the end of the story. Well, turns out I waited too long to do this because about halfway through the Hitman 1 levels I found out they killed the Hitman 3 transfer when they added cross-progression to the game. So now I have to once again redo everything in Hitman: WoA. Which isn't a bad problem to have, I'm already looking forward to starting over on a fresh save. But it is a hell of a time sink so idk when I'll get around to do that. Maybe the Steam Frame will be out by then and I'll be able to do it in VR. Anyway, once I found out I couldn't transfer my progress, I changed my approach. Instead of treating it like a story replay, I switched into achievement hunting mode. I started skipping all the story cutscenes so that my next run in WoA would be somewhat fresh and I started being more optimal with my runs. I realized that if I started every level with a Master Difficulty/Suit Only/Silent Assassin/Sniper Assassin run (using a video guide), I would unlock a shit ton of "classics" challenges and would get enough xp to almost max out level mastery immediately (since I was already halfway there on most levels). That made things much more efficient and I started making progress much faster from that point on. It also had the added benefit that I didn't spend hours exploring every nook and cranny of every level. So once again, my next run in WoA should be somewhat fresh when played normally. The only issue was the multiplayer achievements for the Sniper levels but I found someone willing to help on the Steam forum. At this point, the forum is basically nothing but people looking for help with those achievements. I wasn't sure I'd have enough time to finish this before First Light came out but as it turns out now I have another week and a half to kill...

Oh right, yeah, me too.

I should be set for a while. Might get Splatoon Raiders if it turns out good and the Tears of the Kingdom upgrade since I already own it. Other than that I'm good on Nintendo games until they unveil something new. I got no interest in Metroid Prime 4.

Mouse PI for Hire I'm aware that IGN gave this a 6 and got torn apart for it while most people are giving it an 8. I'd probably give it a 7. It's a competent enough shooter but doesn't really set itself apart through anything but the visuals. The detective aspects are basically nonexistent in gameplay outside of pinning stuff to a board and automatically making connections by hitting a button. The guns are also pretty unbalanced. The paint thinner gun is so strong that the only real reason to use anything else is because you ran out of paint thinner for the paint thinner gun. You also can't replay levels so if you missed something after finishing one then too bad, you're locked out for the rest of the game. I can't help feeling like this team may not have made an FPS before because it's missing some QoL stuff I've come to expect. What they made here is decent but I wouldn't say it's amazing. Plus, outside of some death animations and a spinach powerup it doesn't lean into the cartoon wackiness nearly as much as I hoped. An FPS where you use a bunch of toon gags to kill enemies sounds like a hoot but that's not really what they did here.

To be fair, she was I think being freaked out is understandable. That said I did find the stutter annoying.

I'm enjoying the game, but I am finding Grace's voice acting sooooooo annoying. "W-w-what's going on?" What's going on is that you are a grown-ass woman who is working a full-time job as a bloody FBI analyst, but you seem unable to even string a sentence together. Like, fine, when you are being confronted by some eldritch horror trying to eat your face, understandable to lose the plot a bit. But when you are in a room talking to a blind eight year old girl who is locked in a cell, maybe you could show a teensy bit of backbone?

I got one used. Originally I wasn't planning to get one at all but that was before the entire world economy lit on fire and every console started to go up in price instead of down. I'm not going to bother waiting for an OLED model because I'm mostly going to be playing this thing on my OLED TV anyway and an OLED model will be even more fucking unaffordable by the time it comes out. I only plan on playing first party exclusives on this thing, preferably used when I can get them. I still hate a lot of Nintendo's business practices but frankly 5 years from now I don't know if I will even be able to afford consoles anymore so I'm just going to get while the getting is good.

Every open world game where you have to walk and talk with NPCs needs a follow button. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 had one and I'm pretty sure RDR2 had it and every time it's not present I hate it. I hate having to slowly push the stick and stop and start so I don't accidentally overtake the NPC. Just let me push a button and forget about it. My input really isn't needed here.

UVS Nirmana This was a cool Zach-like, much better than Kaizen imo. It was a little short, but it was also $12 so I can't complain about that too much. When it ended I felt like it was only just starting to build to the really hard puzzles, so I would have liked to see a second set that continue to grow the complexity. But what's actually here is good, and fun, and I recommend it if you like Zachtronics games. Grade: 4/5

Saros Everything I was afraid of based on the pre-release media is true, they completely wrecked the balance of the game with their effort to dumb down the difficulty. The modifier system is technically optional, except as a practical matter you have to use it for the last part of the game because of [spoilers]. Okay, so whatever, they claim you can add stuff to make it harder to offset the ways you're making it easier, which is fine in theory, except that the system is so horrifically unbalanced that it's super easy to make the endgame a complete cakewalk for yourself without even meaning to. I never once did a run with a total modifier level below 0 (adding things to make it easier subtracts from your score, things to make it harder add to your score, 0 is the default) but still absolutely roflstomped the final boss. Eliminating the challenge at that point in the game just sucks, it completely steals the thunder of the ending. The narrative also isn't as compelling or well-told as Returnal, the weapons are less varied and less interesting, the skill tree means your runs are less varied from each other, the worlds have less randomness to them which also means your runs are less varied... everything about it is just designed to make it less interesting and more repetitive. The one thing it does have going for it is that the moment-to-moment combat and movement still feels great, it's very fun at that level. And if I stop with the Returnal comparisons for a moment I did have fun with it on its own merits, it's just disappointing as the follow-up to one of my favorite games of all time. Usually you expect the second game to improve on the problems of the first, but this did the opposite. Grade: 4/5

New mode added: Leon Must Die Forever, not quite Mercenaries but looks pretty fun.