About an hour after I posted my prior blog post talking about the announcements of Not-E3, Nintendo had to go and announce a Nintendo Direct for the next day. Naturally, of course, that Nintendo Direct was absolutely filled with exciting announcements that I want to talk about, so here is the Not-E3 Round-Up of Opinions 2026 + Expansion Pack. Big Walk Finally, after waiting for years, we finally get a release date. I have not really had a chance to play some of the so-called “friendslop” due to both my online shyness as well as a majority of my online friends being in inconvenient time zones. But I am forcing myself to play this with friends, whether it is in the afternoon on a weekend or at 11 pm at night. Team Cherry and House House carrying the Australian game industry on their backs. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave 2026’s most anticipated game is finally coming out, and I am absolutely stoked to see it here. I’ve only really played the last two main Fire Emblem games, but I am a...

Well, the official fully announced Not-E3 has come and gone, and with that comes a new slew of video game announcements, trailers, demos, and second-degree embarrassment in the case of the actual Summer Game Fest. So today, I thought I’d go through the three major showcases (PlayStation, Summer Game Fest, Xbox) and talk about what I liked, what I didn’t like, and so on and so forth. Let’s get into this. Sony PlayStation State of Play Marvel’s Wolverine Bloody violent way to start the show! I enjoy myself some X-Men occasionally, with most of my knowledge coming from David Hayter’s X-Men (2000) film and subsequent series. I also enjoyed Insomniac’s prior Marvel games with Spider-Man. However, from what is shown here, it is not all that impressive from a gameplay perspective. Yes, this might be the goriest first-party game ever made, but if you remove the blood, screaming, and violence, you’re left with a linear-looking melee combat game à la Arkham Asylum. Granted, this was a combat-foc...

  This is going to be a new recurring feature (or as recurring as anything here) of just general impressions of stuff I’m playing, new or old, full playthroughs or light touches. All the games I’ve played over the last few weeks will get a little bit of that writing goodness here. Pragmata The type of game Pragmata is doesn’t come around as often as I would like. A game of singular focus with no extra stuff around it. No tacked-on multiplayer, no post-game grind, no asynchronous online features. It is a full, complete video game. The fact that it is a new IP too is even more confounding. Pragmata feels like it fell out of a 2010 Xbox 360. From its storyline, to its characters, and especially the aesthetics, the game just screams to me “late 2000s”. What a state the industry must be in for “complete, functional video game” to come off as fresh and exciting. One of the things I love about Pragmata is that it is lean. There is nothing throwaway about Pragmata unless you engage with it...

Marathon Might Have That Bungie Polish, But It Completely Misses the Point of Extraction Shooters: A Dynamic and Enjoyable Experience Before we talk about Marathon, I want to first tell you a story of mine from its main competitor, Arc Raiders. During one of my excursions, I ran into a hostile player who tagged me with a rifle shot right before I entered a building. I tried to communicate that I was friendly, but they were having none of it. As I sprinted into a nearby building, I knew I was playing at a disadvantage, as I only had a silenced pistol and little ammo. However, I did have a trick up my sleeve. I knew that he thought I was on the ropes and was going to run in after to finish me off, but in my prior scavenging, I had managed to find a grenade. So right as I entered the building and rounded the corner, I threw the grenade right at the frame of the door—and what do you know: the instigator came running right on top of it as it exploded, knocking him down and getting me the ki...