Sony really just couldn’t fucking help themselves, could they? Yes, I saw the news that the Sony Corporation would be discontinuing production of physical discs for PlayStation consoles by 2028 , pursuing an all-digital approach to the release of their games from then on. It’s a profoundly anti-consumer and anti-culture decision, stripping away agency from people to control how they enjoy the media they purchase and ensuring that any art that does emerge from this future status quo is ephemeral and able to be revoked – or outright erased – at any time. It is, put simply, a bad look to support Sony in its pursuits at this point and time. So what, then, does one do when one has spent weeks preparing a round-up of the very titles that might be subjected to this dystopian approach to media distribution? I watched the June 2026 State of Play, finding it adequate as a showcase and therefore sufficiently worth my time to cover. There were some good-looking games in that presentation, made by ...
Fifty minutes or so, out of a live stream that went on for over two hours. Yeah, sure, there's been more strenuous ways to justify churning out several hundred words about an assortment of game previews. (The 1hr5 mark, for those looking to cut to the chase.) FINAL FANTASY XVI I am entirely convinced from this trailer that the background for this game's development was that someone at Square got really into Game of Thrones a decade ago (oh god...) and made the connection that it could work for Final Fantasy . I certainly buy that it'd take them approximately that long to move this game down the development pipeline, both because game dev is a messy and uncertain process and because Square Enix. That said, as "Japanese takes on moderately-grim Europeon medieval fantasy" go, this doesn't look half bad. XVI seems to be carrying over the quasi-real time combat system that worked for Final Fantasy XV , and the choice of high-fantasy aesthetic and setting after seve...