Another fairly short one again this week because I am 3000 words into a review of a big fighting game that is out this time next week. I’ll no doubt have a fair bit to talk about following my review, perhaps going into more detail on the nerdier side of things, so look forward to that in the next issue. Once I’ve got that tucked in, a bit more normal service will resume in these newsletters. I tend to use them to keep myself match fit between reviews and articles that I get commissioned to do because writing about games isn’t my full time gig - I like things like “holiday pay” and “a decent wage” a bit too much to be a full-time freelancer but you can’t afford to let yourself slip in case you get a really good offer come your way.

Like this week, for instance! I talked some shit on Twitter and an editor asked my if I could flesh that tweet out to an article and they’d pay me money for it. The end result is this piece on the violence in Mortal Kombat. Who needs to pitch when you can just tweet endless rubbish until someone decides they’ll pay you for it, eh?

THE PLAYSTATION SHOWCASE 2023

That Playstation Showcase was a load of shite, wasn’t it? Just a load of CGI trailers or more games that simply failed to show anything more than nice visuals and spectacle over interesting or unique looking mechanics. I think it’s fair to say that Sony did a really smart thing and moved a bunch of late PS4 development over to the PS5, allowing them to stack the first few years but the constant looming shadow of the effect COVID and the switch to remote working has had on the industry is going to catch them eventually and, based on this pretty fallow showing and near radio silence on the progress of some already announced big-hitters, it looks like there’s an opportunity for Microsoft to make up some lost ground if they can actually start releasing some of the stuff they’ve had in the pipe for years now.

I just find it extremely hard to get excited about a CGI trailer. The second it says “not actual gameplay” at the bottom of the screen, my brain just says I might as well disregard it completely. Sure, it is really nice to know that they’re remaking Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater but ultimately, that is ALL we know! That wasn’t what the game will look like, showed us nothing about how it controls or how it plays - hell it didn’t even tell us who was making the fucking thing! I get it, it’s nice to be excited and all that… but you’re getting excited about a logo at this point. I hope the remake knocks it out of the park but for all we know, right now, it could be dog eggs. It was the powerful resident of Videoworld, Stuart Gipp, who absolutely nailed how I feel about this, so far…

Spider-Man 2 and a new Assassin’s Creed did have actual in-game footage shown but both simply looked like very visually impressive versions of games we were playing over a decade ago. Mark Cerny’s pre-launch big talk about the PS5 and the SSD contained inside changing gaming still hasn’t really bore any fruit, has it? When was the last time you saw a trailer for a game and didn’t immediately know everything about how it controls and feels and what you’re supposed to be doing? Probably Death Stranding, right? Of course, Hideo Kojima is the absolute boy - head and shoulders above almost everyone else in the AAA space. Oh look, I’m talking about Kojima again. Where the fuck was Death Stranding 2? Is he saving that for his mate Geoff again? Christ, this event needed something like that.

Barely anything committed to a release date and those that were brave enough to put SOMETHING on screen usually flashed up a vague ‘2024’. It certainly appears that 2023 is going to be a fairly dry year for big exclusives and they’re banking on Spider-Man 2 to be enough. It probably will be, which is sad.

Oh god, how could I forget?! They announced a screen/controller hybrid device that can stream your PS5 games and it honestly looks like someone cut a Dualsense in half and glued a tablet in the middle. Game streaming has gotten exponentially better in the past few years but you’re hardly going to be able to play good games like Street Fighter 6 on this thing due to the slight latency. Of course, you can probably play Spider-Man 2 under that tiny bit of latency and it once again shows you the type of game Sony are focused on.

Shit ones. That’s what.

The main thing I was genuinely excited to see was the Metal Gear Solid collection, mainly because it is one of the first reissues of the original Metal Gear Solid, after they’ve made some tweaks to copyrighted content that prevented any re-release. Also, the fact that this Metal Gear Solid collection is labelled VOLUME ONE gives hope the idea that a volume two is also in the works - get Metal Gear Solid 4 on that and you’ve got yourself a deal, Konami. I’m not the biggest fan of Twin Snakes but, for the sake of preservation, I’d love to see it collected alongside MGS4. Peace Walker will probably appear too. I like this sort of thing, hopefully it is a high quality collection.

I also really like the look of the Granblue Fantasy: Relink RPG! In fact, I like the look of it almost exactly the same amount as how much I don’t like the look of Final Fantasy 16. I hope FF16 is great, I really do, but it just looks like it has barely anything I want from a JRPG left in it. Granblue Fantasy: Relink looks every inch the modern JRPG and I can’t wait to see how it turns out. It also occupies a really weird space in my head where I KNOW Granblue Fantasy is a long-running mobile RPG but I first played the Granblue Fantasy Versus fighting game and know very little about the mobile game, so to my mind this is a big, elaborate JRPG based on a cool fighting game. I’m genuinely excited for this one.

There were a few other cool bits scattered among the presentation but nothing that really blew my arse into orbit. Perhaps we’re looking at this one all wrong - without E3 Sony can essentially do these showcases whenever they wish and therefore, this one doesn’t have to be the big magic special one. It’s probably better that way, with update events scattered throughout the year that show off a bunch of forthcoming stuff and with significantly less on stage rubbish than an E3 event. Regardless of whether this was just another Sony showcase or their big E3 replacement, it was massively underwhelming.

THANKS FOR READING.

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