Gamescom Roundup! (My thoughts on Gamescom Opening Night Live)

     If you know me, you know that I'm always ready for more video game news, even if it's not anything that I'm particularly interested in. Fortunately, we got exactly that on Tuesday, August 23 when Gamescom kicked off from Germany with a 2 hour livestream hosted by Geoff Keighley. During the massive stream we got glimpses at so many different projects, as well as full trailers and gameplay showcases that have been in the oven for quite a while. There were so many games here that I just have to focus on a few of them, since there's no way I could have anything interesting to say about each one. There's a lot of stuff to cover, so let's get right to it today!

    Sonic Frontiers was probably the game that I was most excited about going into the show, and that's still probably true. To say that this game has had a difficult news cycle to overcome is a major understatement. People have been against this game since IGN put out the first gameplay footage a couple of months ago, and I'm not here to say that those people are wrong to feel that way. That first footage certainly looked rough and the gameplay just didn't seem to make much sense. It looked more like a proof of concept than what an actual full Sonic game might look like. Now that we've seen more of the story and learned a bit more about the Cyber Space levels, the game has made a little more sense, though there's still a lot to see here. The trailer started off with Sonic saving a cute little stone guy that's very reminiscent of the Koroks from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we finally see that Amy has been captured and put into this cyber-cage or something, and according to the synopses that we've seen so far, it's safe to assume that Tails and Knuckles will also be rescued throughout the story, but we'll definitely have to see. In some of the previous gameplay footage, we saw Sonic picking up pink heart icons which now seem to be related to Amy, maybe he has to pick up a certain number to let her out of the cage or something, implying that Tails and Knuckles may have their own icons to pick up in different zones of the world, but again, a lot is being kept in the air. Honestly, I think it's good that Sonic Team is playing their cards close to the chest this time, as I think a lot of the disappointment that came from Sonic Forces came from overhyping people and underdelivering on promises. I'm still skeptical about this game, but at least the story looks really interesting, and I'm curious to see how much the mysterious floating girl has to do with the overall plot. She seems almost human, or at least human-esque, and we haven't seen a lot of important human characters in the whole series other than Eggman and his grandfather.

    The Callisto Protocol is a game that, for all intents and purposes, is a new Dead Space game. It's being worked on by a lot of the team that worked on the original Dead Space games, it has the same sort of horror/space thriller atmosphere as that series, and dismemberment seems to be just as big of a deal to them as it was in those games. It looks so similar, but with a lot more meat grinders than I remember, which is good for folks looking to chop up some space zombies into seemingly dust. It honestly doesn't look like it would really be up my alley, but I'm interested in trying it anyways. I've enjoyed my fair share of Horror games, such as the Resident Evil series, and this doesn't look any scarier than that, though it does look like it has a lot more needless brutality and violence. It looks interesting, I will say, and I hope the fans of that older franchise will find this to be a fun time as well, even though Dead Space is also getting a remake next year I believe.

    Lies of P is a Souls-like game that is loosely based on the story of Pinocchio, where a robot creation has to face all sorts of odds in order to become a real boy and defeat whatever plague is facing the world. This game looks beautiful, with an almost identical style to Bloodborne, and I just love different interpretations of fairy tales. This looks like it might just be something special, especially since so many people have been begging From Software for a sequel to Bloodborne, this may be something to scratch that itch, while also presenting a new interesting storyline into the mix. I love the way that the enemies move, it's a very jerky animation which really sells that these people aren't human, but extremely convincing animatronics. Honestly, I don't know if I'll be able to play this, since puppets creep me out and it might touch on some of those similar themes, but we'll have to wait and see, like always.

    Gotham Knights looks to be a really cool game, though it remains to be seen if you can play it with only one player. I hope that the game will be able to do well, but after seeing people's reaction to the Avengers game a few years ago (which, again, I felt like was a pretty decent game, at least from my experience on PS4, and later on PS5), I'm not so sure. I'm excited for it personally because I loved the Batman: Arkham series, and even though they've said in the past that this isn't necessarily tied to that continuity, I'm still really curious to see where this game goes. That goes double after the last trailer revealed Harley Quinn, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, as well as a few other members of Batman's Rogues Gallery joining in.

    Hogwarts Legacy is an interesting idea. On one hand, it's exciting to see a game potentially capitalizing on the concepts that the Harry Potter series always had, but never really mastered in video game form. On the other hand, it's a shame that the game has come now that the series is not nearly as popular as it once was with the core demographic that was targeted. Controversies around the series and its author aside, this game looks pretty good so far. I would be lying if I said I was champing at the bit for it, but it does look to be well made, and the concept of walking around a version of Hogwarts from a long time before the book series takes place could be an interesting experience. I'm still unsure about the plot of this game, and I have to wonder if there will be some sort of time travel mechanic to meet some of the characters that people are familiar with. It's entirely possible that they won't, and I feel like the character development could actually be undermined even if they did, but we'll just have to wait and see once again.

    It's always fun to talk about games, even when a lot of them don't have a lot to go off of yet. I know that this post has been a lot of jumping around, but like I said, it was a two hour long show and they crammed a lot of trailers into it. There were a lot of space games, which makes sense since there were a lot of space games that we saw at the Summer Games Fest back in June, and it was cool to have a video that was shot on the International Space Station kicking that part off. All in all this show was a good time, even if there weren't tons of games that immediately grabbed my attention. I will say that the "most excited for" awards seem really strange to me, as they are based on the trailers that have been shown off, not actual games, but congratulations to the winners of the awards for PC, Xbox, and Playstation. There was no Nintendo Switch category, I'm not sure why, but those awards were just weird, and I really don't understand how they worked at all. All in all, this was a pretty solid show, and I hope that you liked something from it at least if you watched it!

    Thanks so much for reading this, friends. I know that this is kind of a weird post, but I just wanted to get some of the news out of the Opening Night Live show, and I picked some of the most interesting stories here. Oh, also, Hideo Kojima announced that he's doing a podcast in September with some other interesting people. I wasn't sure where to put that weird piece of news, but I felt like it needed to be said somewhere at least. Geoff Keighley is still keeping his award show chops up for December 8, when the Game Awards will be shown off, and chances are that I'm going to be talking about that then. Thanks again for reading this, and I hope you'll have a great week! I've been Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed News proclaimer (I guess?) and I'll talk to you all again soon