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...

This will almost certainly be my biggest post I’ve made since starting this blog, and this is just game industry stuff. I’m not even getting into other things like getting a new car (yay!), or my feelings on the new Gorillaz album (I liked the last one more), or buying the new Galaxy Buds Pro 4 (the noise-cancelling feature freaks me out), because the industry seems to flip-flop between “we are so back” and “it’s never been more over” on a nearly daily basis. Let’s all take a deep breath and get through this together.   This Is (Not) An Xbox COO Pour one out for our wide boi. Xbox’s now-former COO, Phil “Obscure Game T‑Shirt” Spencer, has retired from Xbox and left the company, assumingly with a burlap sack over his head, being shoved out through one of the service exits alongside Head of “This Is An Xbox” Sarah Bond, following behind him. This is a big deal because Xbox has been losing relevancy for almost the entirety of Phil’s tenure since taking over the position after Don Matt...