There’s were so many big news drops this week, so this is but a sliver of what was announced. Oh, and non-show things did happen too.

Games Done Quick (GDQ) has withdrawn and canceled what would have been their upcoming in-person event in Orlando, Florida, making a hardline stance against the state’s recent legislative policies. GDQ representatives have spoken against the Florida’s lax COVID-19 policies and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric present in local legislation that they feel would endanger their group and attendees.

Bonnie Ross officially resigned and left 343 Industries and Microsoft. 343 Industries has worked on several Halo titles since 2007. Pierre Hintze will take over as studio head immediately. 

Square Enix recently partnered with Oasys, a blockchain company, now becoming one of the largest games publishers to invest heavily in blockchain technology.

Genshin Impact is getting some sort of animated project. The adaptation will be developed under Ufotable, who is known for their work on Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and the Tales and Fate series.

In the tabletop gaming world, Wizards of the Coast has finally filed an injunction against NuTSR for using Wizards trademarks to publish “blatantly racist and transphobic content”. This long-winded legal saga has been going on for years.

Babylon’s Fall will be ending service in February 2023. The game has been online for less than a year.

Also having been active for less than a year, the relaunched G4TV has been hit with huge staff layoffs.

A huge portion of Fanbyte’s staff have also been laid off. The publication has been under Tencent since 2020.

And getting into all of the major show news…

A majority of the announcements made in the latest Ubisoft’s Foward event was all about Assassin’s Creed.

D23 Expo

Huge hardcore Disney heads and investors making bills rain know the D23 Expo is a huge deal, and this year features a substantial amount of games-related announcements from the House of Mouse.

Return to Monkey Island releases on September 19 for the Nintendo Switch and PC. The game will be published by Devolver Digital in will be in coordination with Lucasfilm Games, the latter acquired by the Walt Disney Company back in 2012.

The Sega Genesis Gargoyles game from 1995 is getting remastered. No release date has been determined, but it is slated for release on consoles and the PC.

Disney Illusion Island will be a multiplayer co-op platformer that will release exclusively on the Nintendo Switch. The game is a revisit to a previously canceled title that would have been Metroidvania-like.

Indie studio Bithell Games has been given the green light to help develop TRON: Identity, an adventure-mystery visual novel set to release next year in 2023. The game seems to take place in a new setting that has yet to be explored in the rest of the franchise.

Disney Dreamlight Valley, Disney’s newest online roleplaying game, will have its first major content update revolving around the universe of Toy Story. Dreamlight Valley’s character creator is available and free to try,  in which the character you produce can be imported into the full game.

Somehow, we’re still getting Avatar content in the year 2022, so trust us, Avatar: Reckoning will be coming out eventually. Reckoning is intended to be an online MOBA for mobile devices.

Nintendo Direct

The rumor of the rumor was true: The latest Nintendo Direct wasn’t delayed, but it wasn’t shown live in the UK. Speculation believes it might possibly be due to the The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s sequel subtitle in relation to the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II—

And after much waiting, “Breath of the Wild 2” is officially now known as Tears of the Kingdom. The game will be released in May 2023.

Previous leaks have proven that the stark, red-blue character design of the main character in the upcoming Fire Emblem Engage is apparently real. The game revolves around a mechanic in which you can summon past Fire Emblem characters to aid you in battle.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is getting a remake. The game will be billed under the official Story of Seasons localization trademark for its English-language release. A remake of the GameCube game that came out in 2003, the game will not only feature a significant graphics overhaul, but will now allow you to play a male, female, or non-binary protagonist on top of flexibly being able to woo any of the game’s marriage candidates regardless of gender.

Various Nintendo 64 games are coming to Nintendo Switch Online. Titles like the first Mario Party, Pokémon Stadium, and GoldenEye 007 are included in this lineup.

Tales of Symphonia is getting remastered. The remaster seems to be based on an older PC port and will run at 30 FPS, much to the chagrin of fans who played it at 60 on GameCube.

John is ready to be hurt again because Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE is the new game from Tookyo Games and Spike Chunsoft. Yeah, the Danganronpa team is bringing the band back together for a new mystery solving game. It launches Spring 2023.

Splatoon 3 is having its first Splatfest near the end of this month!

Nintendo Switch Sports will now have golf. But you have to wait.

Pikmin 4 has been confirmed as the next mainline game in the respective series.

And a little more of Bayonetta 3 has been shown.

You can watch the entire Direct below.

Sony Playstation’s State of Play

God of War: Ragnarok now has a story trailer.

Tekken 8 has been officially announced. The game is currently being built from the ground up using the Unreal Engine.

Bandai Namco is debuting a new IP called Synduality.

Pacific Drive, the debut game by Ironwood Studios, has now dropped a reveal trailer. Ironwood Studios is based in Seattle, Washington, comprising of a team of developers who have previously worked in AAA.

The entire State of Play is can be watched below.

Accompanying the State of Play’s showcase was the RGG Summit, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s own showcase regarding their studio’s IP, announcing that:

The previously unreleased in the West Yakuza spin-off Yakuza: Ishin is set to release as a remake titled Like a Dragon: Ishin!

Judgment and Lost Judgment are now officially available for the PC.

And finally, Like a Dragon 8 is set to release in 2024. It seems as though that Yakuza series is set to drop the “Yakuza” moniker here on out, following Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Like the seventh game in the series, the game will remain a turn-based RPG. Protagonists Ichiban Kasuga and veteran Kiryu Kazuma are to return.

The post The Bulletin: Directs and Drops appeared first on Gamesline.

Runners up: Judgment, Wolfenstein: Young Blood

SOLON: What depressed you the most about finally playing Kingdom Hearts 3? Was it how if you hit the (triangle)-button in pretty much any fight it locked you into a cutscene where you basically automatically won?

ROSE: I think that’s a big part of it. I think another was just how gimmicky everything was and just how bad the gimmicks were. I played KH2 for at least the 10th time in the leadup to 3’s release and how consistent everything felt and how fun it was to fool around was night and day compared to 3.

ELVIE: And the fact alone that Kingdom Hearts 3 followed Kingdom Hearts 2—a truly great video game of our recent times—just further exasperates how lukewarm 3 ended up being in comparison. Undeniably, I personally still had fun playing it, but 3 reeks of an unfinished game that had with too many ideas left unaddressed. Tetsuya Nomura basically submitted a school assignment that could have been much better if it so obviously wasn’t procrastinated on. This is most egregious with the discovery of a watermark of a 3D software renderer that was carelessly left in the recreation of Elsa’s iconic “Let It Go” sequence. Now they’re trying to resolve these issues and fill in the gaps with DLC, which is a pretty gross and lazy move a lot of video games have been doing that I’m pretty sure we’re all sick of by now. After all, we also witnessed what ended up happening with another video game that was touched by Nomura’s grubby little paws the previous year.

ROSE: I know there was a lot of buildup to Kingdom Hearts 3 that absolutely could never have been fully reckoned with, but the fact that Birth by Sleep, a PSP game, had more of what makes up the ideal Kingdom Hearts experience is crazy to think about! I think Kingdom Hearts 3 is a real indication of exactly what’s been going wrong with modern Square AAA titles: they take far too long and get far too focused on what they “should” do that they end up letting stuff that made a lot of their older titles so incredible just slip through the cracks in favor of a more simplistic or streamlined approach that “anyone can play.”

SOLON: Right! After researching every other entry in the franchise it was weird playing such a safe, by-the-numbers, simple game. KH3 is a pedestrian romp through Disney movies and that isn’t something you can say about any other Kingdom Hearts game in the series. It’s not the worst game in the series, but the House of Mouse found a way to turn a generation defining franchise into Wonder Bread. A soulless monument to a media monopoly. I love Big Hero 6, but if any video game’s most imaginative world is ‘San Francisco but slightly oriental’, that’s a problem. Oh is that not fair? Well you can also go to “mall”, “warehouse”, “forest”, “beach”, or “snow-level”…

ROSE: Exactly! Going back to even the last big entry in the series, KH3D, you have these wild worlds that are vibrant and unique! Tron Legacy with hyper realistic Jeff Bridges contrasted against vibrant scene boy Riku, the crazy spindly rails of Traverse Town, hell. They even made France look good! All contrasted with your funny little Dream Eater buddies who are a pastel nightmare! Which reminds me of how bad the summons were this time around! Bizarre statuesque monolith versions that provide a minigame, rather than say Genie from Aladdin jumping in and popping himself into Sora’s stupid zipper outfit to shoot beams at people!!!! Everything had to operate under the most sterile of ways: if it doesn’t look like a marketing tool than you can’t use it felt like the modus operandi of the game.

ELVIE: It does say a lot when the side games of the series have more development and thought put into them than KH3, which should have been the grand, final to cap off to this trilogy. Kingdom Hearts pulled in many of our hearts—but not too hard so we don’t turn into Heartless—with its bizarre amalgamation of nostalgia and….more nostalgia. It’s freaking weird and they committed to it! What other franchise can really say that proudly panders to the disturbing fanfiction dreams of shipping M*ckey Mouse with a silver-haired anime-esque bishounen? KH3 just sort of forgot what it was supposed to be and who it was for halfway through. Instead, we got a slightly more complex version of the mobile game, Disney Magic Kingdoms. The Re:Mind DLC may address some of these issues but KH3 is definitely a dire reflection of a number of big-budget Square titles recently as Rose has mentioned. It also is unfortunately telling of video games in general where putting out an unfinished product is acceptable when it is viable to just fix it later. Although KH3 also suffered from the secondary effect of when monopolies get out of hand, it’s pretty much inexcusable in that regard for all of the resources it had when it had so many cool things that could have been explored again. Lest we not also a ton of things that continued to be unaddressed. Let. Kairi. Fight!

SOLON: “Yeah but I ain’t paying a $40 pink tax for Kairi to do what she is owed.”

The post 2019’s Most Disappointing Game: A Conversation appeared first on Gamesline.

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The post VGCC Episode 272: Kiryu Teaches Typing appeared first on Gamesline.

As always you can support us on our patreon, and follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @Solonface, @ScottBloodborne, and @John_Michonski.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com, via twitter with the hashtag #AskVGCC or into our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask

You can also join our discord channel at thegamezone.zone !

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via iTunes, Hipcast, Direct Download or listen below!

The post VGCC Episode 270: Who Goo’d You? appeared first on Gamesline.

As always you can support us on our patreon, and follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @lvmaeparian, @YourPalNiall, @horngal, and @John_Michonski.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com, via twitter with the hashtag #AskVGCC or into our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask

You can also join our discord channel at thegamezone.zone !

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via iTunes, Hipcast, Direct Download or listen below!

The post VGCC Episode 269: Control the Rocks appeared first on Gamesline.