Lots of news and so little time! (Thoughts on Kirby Air Riders Direct and Gamescom Opening Night Live presentations)

     Of course, I ended my last post by saying that I'll probably not be able to write as frequently as I'm going back to school this week, but we did get two presentations yesterday (August 19), so I'll do my best to talk about them! We're still just barely out of the summer season down here, so in a way, this was kind of like a continuation of Summer Game Fest, even though that event was back in June. Time is truly a wild and wacky construct, isn't it? Geoff Keighley was back hosting Gamescom Opening Night Live from Cologne yesterday afternoon (as I was getting out of my first class), but first, we had a 45 minute presentation from Masahiro Sakurai about Kirby Air Riders. Since that's the one I was able to watch all of, I'll talk about that first.

A Packed Day!

    Kirby Air Riders was briefly teased back in April during the Switch 2 reveal stream, the same stream that showed off Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, and a few other titles, but it only had a very short teaser, maybe a minute of pre-rendered cutscenes. Though we were assured that this game was going to come out this year, we hadn't seen anything from the game other than that very brief tease, and it was easy to worry that the game would be coming out sometime next year. It was announced this Monday that there would be a direct all about the game the following day, so naturally we assumed that we would be getting basically everything that the game had in it, since it was 45 minutes long. Mr. Sakurai went through the whole development cycle of this game as well as a history lesson about the original Kirby Air Ride before getting to the new stuff. The reason the new game is called Kirby Air Riders is because there are multiple playable characters this time around, which is honestly what I was most hoping for. We saw not only Kirby, but King Dedede, Meta Knight, Bandana Waddle Dee, Waddle Doo, Chef Kawasaki, Cappy, Starman, and many more. Even though you could technically play as Dedede and Meta Knight in the last game, you couldn't control what Air Ride machine they were going to be riding on. Dedede was always riding a Wheelie and Meta Knight was just flying. I'm excited to see just how it's all going to play with the different race courses all looking really good this time around, as well as the return of the star of the show, the returning City Trial!

    City Trial has always been the most interesting part of the original game, and I think the company has always known that, and is most likely the reason we're having a sequel of any sort in the year 2025. This time, the map has a real name, it's called Skyah and it's a floating island, looking to be a good bit bigger than the map in the original game, also with more variety. We still have the basic themes of city, forest, volcano, and there's a rail that takes you all around it just like the old one, but we also have an underground mall among many other secrets for us to discover while playing. This time, there can also be 16 people in one round of City Trial, with two on each console, which is four times more than the original game, and we'll see how that makes the proceedings feel moving forward. There's also a different way to select your events at the end of the 5 minute matches, which is a nice change from the randomness of the original game. Sometimes it will be random, but other times it will tell you what is coming, allowing you to customize your machine to prepare for it. It's a pretty cool system, and when paired with all the new characters that are being added, I think that'll add a lot of fun to it. There was a lot to this presentation, and it all ended with the reveal of a shadowy character coming from the darkness (maybe Dark Matter) and the release date is November 20, so I'm really excited to be getting it in time for the holiday season!

    Moving on from the Kirby Air Riders Direct, we had the kickoff of Gamescom with a lot of announcements that didn't interest me, but quite a few that did. Hollow Knight Silksong was announced to be finally coming out this year after many years that we hadn't heard anything about it. At the Opening Night Live stream, they teased a presentation happening on Thursday, and there we learned the official release date, September 4, only two weeks from the day Team Cherry's presentation was put on! I'm very excited for the fans of the original game, and I'll definitely check it out at some point in the near future. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight goes through seemingly all or most of the different incarnations of Batman. "Television, Comics, Film, and more," according to an email that I got from WB shortly after the presentation. In the trailer, there were references to The Batman and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, among some others. I've always had a soft spot for Lego games of course, so I'm excited to see what they come up with for this one. 

    The announcement of Bubsy 4D was something that I never thought would happen in my wildest dreams, but I certainly hope it doesn't end up being as terrible as Bubsy 3D or we may never hear the end of it. Ghost of Yotei got a new trailer and also Legends mode got announced, following the legacy of Ghost of Tsushima. Legends mode is an online co-op side game that allows you to team up with other people against threats that are more supernatural in nature, and I hope it'll be as fun as it was in the older game. We got a new trailer for Resident Evil 9: Requiem, though it was fairly short and mainly story focused. I'm really excited for that game, so I'm happy with whatever we get about it, basically. The "One last thing" moment was the spiritual successor to Black Myth Wukong, this time called Black Myth Zhong Kui, focusing on a different character in Chinese mythology. The original one had a lot of buzz around it and it seemed like people really liked it, so I hope that continues for this new title as well.

    It has been a really busy week, and I wasn't able to see all of the Gamescom presentation as it was happening, but I was happy that I could at least check out some of the highlights there. I got to see all of the Kirby Air Riders presentation before I had to go for my class in the afternoon, so that was nice. Thanks so much for reading these thoughts on the different news shared in the past week, friends! Are you excited for anything that was revealed or shown off here? I would love to hear from you sometime soon! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a self-proclaimed Games Journalist, and I'll talk to you again soon! I hope you're all doing well.