E3 Or Whatever Predictions 2024

It’s that time of the year again. E3 itself may be gone forever, but video game companies will still absolutely make big announcements in May and June.  As always, I’m here to make predictions about them. There will almost certainly be more, but I’ve chosen five shows to make predictions for. Three that we already know the dates for, one that we know the month it’ll happen in, and one that according to leaks should be happening in the next week or so.

Random Game Wednesdays: Warlock (Sega Genesis)

I was recently thinking about how long it had been since I wrote an installment of Random Game Wednesdays. Taking a look back, I haven’t written one in over four years. So I decided, why not do a new one? I don’t know if this will be a regular, ongoing thing again, we’ll see how it goes. I don’t have anywhere near as much free time as I had when I first started this feature, but it is one I always enjoyed doing.

A Play Date on Mars, Mars After Midnight Review

In late October of 2022, I received my PlayDate, which I had preordered over a year earlier. The PlayDate is a very small, black and white indie handheld console. It mostly looks like a small Game Boy, with it’s D-pad and two face buttons, but it has a unique control twist. On the side is a crank that you can turn to do different actions in games. I was pretty excited for it, it seemed like a very unique new thing. But after a few weeks of goofing off with the included games, I kind of just put it down and forgot about it.

Top Ten Games of 2023

It’s the start of the new year and that means it’s time to reflect on my favorite games of last year. As I do every year, I will be listing my ten favorite games of the year, with a couple rules. One is that remasters don’t qualify, as these are not new games, however full remakes would count. This is a weird year for that, as there are a couple examples of games that really walk the line between remake and remaster, and I may have broken that rule depending on how you look at it, maybe even how I looked at it if you go back and read what I originally said about it earlier in the year. The other rule is that the game had to release for the first time in the US in 2023. I don’t think there’s any weird examples of that with what I played, but it does come up in some previous years.

Sonic Superstars First Impressions

It’s been six years since Sonic Mania’s release. That was a game that was immediately clear was a labor of love, a game made by fans for fans. It also might be the best 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game of all time. With that in mind, I was ready for another 2D game when Sonic Superstars was announced. However, with a completely different developer, Arzest, the team behind Balan Wonderworld, it was pretty easy to be nervous. So, how did it turn out?

E3 or Whatever: Summer Game Fest

Ever since 2020, when E3 took a year off, Summer Game Fest has been around to pick up the slack. The early days were fairly underwhelming, basically the kinds of announcements you could expect from The Game Awards but without the awards attached to them. But the longer E3 is absent, the better the show has gotten. That’s still true this year.

E3 or Whatever: PlayStation Showcase 2023

PlayStation’s presentations are typically either incredible or fairly boring. Remember the E3 press conference where Final Fantasy VII Remake and Shenmue III were announced? That’s one of my favorite E3 moments of all time. But on the other hand, remember the one where they only showed four games and it was in like a weird church setting? Yeah, pretty boring. This year’s PlayStation Showcase leans more towards boring, in my opinion, but there was a few really great announcements.

E3 or Whatever 2023 Predictions

Once again, there is no E3. But we won’t let a silly thing like the show getting cancelled stop us from predicting what’s going to get announced! There’s still plenty of individual presentations from publishers happening during what would normally be E3 time. There’s even one happening tomorrow!

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, More Than More of the Same

How do you follow up a game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? It came out day and date with the Nintendo Switch, completely reinvented the series, and may have pushed the medium of video games forward. Do you reinvent everything again, or do you refine what you have into something more polished? It’s been six years since Breath of the Wild, and in that time Nintendo really could have done either.

Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp First Impressions

As much as I like the Fire Emblem franchise, there’s always been a part of me that was mad that it blew up and took the attention away from Advance Wars. Advance Wars was the first of Intelligent Systems’ strategy games that I had played, and many lunch periods and study halls were spent passing a single Game Boy Advance around a table, taking turns in intense multiplayer matches. It did get a few sequels, but ever since Fire Emblem Awakening’s success, it’s seemed that Nintendo felt that Fire Emblem was enough for the turn-based strategy niche and turned its back on Advance Wars. But now, after a fifteen year gap from the previous entry, Days of Ruin on the Nintendo DS, we finally have a new Advance Wars release.