Back to game news! (Thoughts on Summer announcements!)

 Hey friends! Long time no talk, I hope you're all doing alright! I told you a while ago that June was really packed this year, and so I missed a lot of news. Today I'm going to work on catching up with some of it here! I may just talk a bit about a few different things and then keep going for a few weeks as I do more research on exactly what I missed, because I'm sure there was a lot. I'll begin with the bits and pieces that I have seen and been told about by some friends who were able to catch announcements as they were happening!

Summer Game Fest is still a thing, whether you watch or not!

    The first week of June, I took a trip up to New York, so I was very grateful for my friend texting me every now and then about different game announcements that I may be interested in. The biggest one was definitely Resident Evil 9: Requiem. You play as Grace Ashcroft, a technical analyst for the FBI. It's very unclear what this game is going to be like based on the first trailer released at Summer Game Fest, but it's clear that Grace is a very different type of Resident Evil protagonist, seeming pretty introverted and jumpy. She's going to be launched into a world of horrors when she has to investigate the hotel where her mother was murdered several years before this game takes place (Alyssa Ashcroft, a character from Resident Evil Outbreak, which I've never played). Makes sense that she would be a little jumpy, and things go south pretty quickly if the trailer is to be believed. It's also unclear exactly how, but Raccoon City is going to be a major part of the story it seems, being shown off for the first time since Resident Evil 3, when the government blew up the city to contain the T-virus. I'm really excited to try it out when it launches on February 27 of next year. It's also interesting because it's the 30th anniversary of the Resident Evil series, and I'm curious to see how it ties to previous games in the series, since the team behind it have already said there are closer than they were in 7 and 8, which followed Ethan Winters and didn't have a lot to do with the plots of earlier games.

    Sonic Racing Crossworlds is another game that I've been excited about for a while, and I'm interested to see how things continue to shape up as we get closer to the release. The last time I talked about it, I'm pretty sure I talked about how I could see the After Burner and Panzer Dragoon stages from Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed in the trailer that they put out in a Sony State of Play a few months ago. I need to acknowledge my mistakes here, because those are not in the game, what I was looking at was actually a few tracks based on Metal Harbor (from Sonic Adventure 2) and Dinosaur Jungle (from Sonic and the Secret Rings). They put out a new trailer during this same show, and I'm happy that they announced many crossover characters in this! Joker from Persona 5, Ichiban from Like a Dragon, Hatsune Miku, a few characters from Minecraft, they've announced Spongebob and Patrick, as well as Avatar and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being announced sometime soon! I'm interested to see what the other characters in the season pass will be, but I'm pretty excited about this game overall.

    We've had a lot of smaller game reveals as well, Pragmata was a game with a trailer so bizarre that I could not possibly forget it from the PS5 reveal stream, and it looks like it's actually coming out in 2026. I don't understand what it's going to be, but it looks like a fun action game with a heartfelt story between an astronaut guy and a robotic girl, so hopefully that'll be what happens! It looks like a weird one, and Capcom has been making great things in the past few years, so I'm excited. Speaking of weird, Suda 51 is making a new game called Romeo is a Dead Man, and if you've seen No More Heroes or any of Suda's previous titles, you're well aware of the very strange games that he makes, and I'm sure this is going to be a fun one (though definitely not for kids, of course). We're getting a new Bloodstained game, Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement, which is coming out sometime next year. It looks really cool, definitely bringing the Castlevania vibes that Bloodstained is so good at, which are especially helpful in this period of time where we aren't getting many new games from that, other than the collections that Konami has been putting out the last few years. It has the two character system that we saw in Portrait of Ruin, and I hope they do some cool things with that! 

    I don't want to be here all day just listing things, so I'll talk about just a few more. We're getting a new game from the developers behind Journey and Abzu called Sword of the Sea which is coming out in August. You play as a character using a flying sword as a skateboard or a snowboard and flying through various different beautiful locales, and it just looks amazing, that's about all I can say. We're also getting Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls, a game by Marvel and Arc System Works that has a very similar vibe to the Marvel Vs. Capcom series, but with only Marvel characters and some really cool redesigns bringing some Japanese inspiration. Iron Man looks like he's flying around in a Gundam armor, for example, and it looks so cool. I'm really excited to try this 4v4 fighting game, and I hope it plays just as beautifully as it looks. For one last recommendation here, There Are No Ghosts at the Grand looks incredible. I don't even really know how to sell it, it's like a musical... spooky... home renovation game? I don't really know what I'm looking at, but it does look really cool. It's not coming until next year, but I hope it can live up to its very cool trailer.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! We're always getting more and more interesting information about different games coming out, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the horrible layoffs that Xbox continues to do. There's no reason for them to let anyone go, Microsoft is such a profitable company, but I guess they're just not willing to pay for people to have their jobs in the games division. It's disgusting and despicable, and I really hope it stops sometime soon. The people who have lost their jobs for no reason, and many of them have such incredible skills in game development, it just stinks. Anyways, thanks so much for reading this, and thanks for all the support over the years! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed games journalist, and I'll talk to you again soon!