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Showing posts from February, 2022

What Was Worth A Damn About Summer Game Fest 2026?

Yeah, it’s Keighley o’clock again. I won’t do the whole spiel about Geoff Keighley or the games presentations associated with him - they’re vapid, bloated productions run by gaming PR’s favourite host, but you know that already (OR you know that now). Other folks have better, more entertaining material poking fun at the whole farce of the thing, whereas my aim is simply to find the potential gems amid the middling fare. This year’s Summer Game Fest was definitely among the more underwhelming and anemic in my experience, but I still managed to find some noteworthy titles, my reactions to which I have presented below. Have a look and see if anything strikes your fancy. Star Wars: Zero Company Developed by Bit Company and Respawn Entertainment Published by Electronic Arts Releasing August 27, 2026 for Windows PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The initial reveal for this game gave a strong impression that the central idea for this game was “What if XCOM, but with Star Wars stuff?” What they sh...

1987's CONTRA: How Does It Hold Up?

  As of February the twentieth, it will have been thirty-five years since the release of Konami’s popular run-and-gun title Contra to arcades. The action genre in gaming did not emerge with Contra , but it was helped along by that property as the medium inched ever closer to the new millennium. Though games about muscle-bound soldiers and plentiful gunfire had existed before, the Contra series leaned into the absurdity of the setup while refining and building upon the basics of the side-scrolling action template. So, in honor of this anniversary and the property's significance to gaming, let’s take a look back and see how that beloved title fares now… The Experience One’s experience of the original game’s aesthetic leanings absolutely depends on the version chosen. There’s the initial arcade release from 1987, which sports the more detailed backgrounds and character sprites, and the later edition for the Nintendo Entertainment System (or Famicom, for Japanese players) that simpli...

First Person Action Games in the 2000s: The Good Ones

For a hot second there, first-person action was a dominant, arguably overabundant presence in the realm of gaming. High profile series like Call of Duty and Battlefield set the template going into the 21st century, while lesser known works such as The Operative: No One Lives Forever and Prey explored a variety of angles by which to keep the genre interesting. Not all these works turned out to be winners, but for every few run-of-the-mill projects there was an outlier released between 2000 and 2009 that showed how much further the genre could be taken. So it is that we find ourselves here today, with what I feel are the best and brightest first-person action titles (a.k.a. “First-person shooters” or FPSes) of the 2000s…  The Runners-Up Star Wars: Republic Commando - A very solid bit of grittier-than-normal Star Wars material that actually does well with the infusion of tactical shooter squad mechanics. If it’d been a tad longer and more involved, and perhaps a bit more forgivi...