Kurt Of Cambridge

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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...

The Obligatory (Not) E3 2023 Round-Up, Part 2: Sifting through the Slop

Alright, it's been a while but we're back again to cover the PC Gaming Show, the Xbox Showcase and the Ubisoft Forward. After this, that's it, that's all, we're done here. PC Gaming Show The Most Questionable Stuff 3. Road to Vostok (???) Choosing to look down on a game for overt familiarity from the word ‘go’, even if all it has done at this point is have its existence announced to the world, is not inherently an act to be proud of. Much of gaming iterates and builds upon what came before, much of the medium as it stands (for good or ill) exists because someone looked at a past work and were inspired to develop their own take on the material. How many excellent games would cease to be if people decided that “it’s just a clone of X” was a valid argument in itself? I establish this now to make it clear that I do not roll my eyes at Road to Vostok for taking the form of a sparsely-populated shooter set in a post-apocalyptic wilderness area… but rather because it loo...

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...

2022 in Gaming: What Looks Good?

So that happened. 2021 managed the feat of being potentially more demoralizing and negatively revelatory than the year before, both in personal terms and when looking at the state of the globe. Naturally, the game industry being what it is (in part, an intensified and distilled expression of the state of art, technology, wider cultural and political concerns, and the values of humanity for good or ill), that meant that what went wrong in 2021 - pandemic-related or otherwise - was all the more evident in and around the games. Still, I'm a believer in the idea that for the wretched things in gaming there are still things (and people) worth fighting for, now and yet to come. And, thus, I feel obliged on some level to acknowledge that there are indeed projects coming down the pipeline that show the most promise, that seem best prepared to revitalized and refresh other folks' love of the medium. So, without further ado, here they are... The Runners Up SIFU - The studio's last...

Thoughts on... STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

Some Background, First Much like a lot of folks I know, and I imagine a significant portion of the populace, I grew up with Star Wars. I distinctly recall being in the theatre as a toddler, back in 1999, seeing The Phantom Menace for the first time. I also remember being woken up in the car by my mother, having (apparently) fallen asleep while watching The Phantom Menace, soooooo… yeah. The prospect of a Sequel Trilogy excited and thrilled me in a way I’d not felt in a long while - seeing that first teaser of The Force Awakens, where the Millenium Falcon comes swooping into frame over the deserts of Jakku, was nothing short of breathtaking. I’d loved the Original Trilogy, I had a certain abiding fondness for the Prequels, I adored the games, I liked the spin-off books I’d read (Tales of the Bounty Hunters and the early Rogue Squadron books, primarily). Point is, I cheer at the mere thought of new Star Wars. The Force Awakens was quite pleasant, all told; not quite EMPIRE-leve...