Author: A.K.H.

Video games can be useful in various ways, and one of them is wish fulfillment. This is defined as the satisfying of unconscious desires in dreams or fantasies. Recently, I was very disappointed with the performance of a local cricket team – the Sunrisers Hyderabad, when they crashed to a terrible defeat against the Kolkata Knight Riders in the final of the Indian Premiere League. As a spectator, there was nothing I could do about that result. But as a gamer, I could do the next best thing and seek revenge using a video game. And that’s what I did.

We no longer have E3, but we still had a busy weekend in June where hundreds of game studios and publishers came together to throw a bunch of gaming news at the world. Sony avoided all the noise by holding their state of play event in late May, and Nintendo avoided the noise by not yet announcing their Direct showcase, which is still scheduled to be held in June on an unknown date. But everyone else opted to use the second week of June 7 to showcase their games, and there are literally hundreds of game trailers and teasers to go through.

In this video, I have handpicked 30 games that I felt were worth mentioning for various reasons. Highlighting only these 30 games means I have left behind hundreds of other games, and I had to do that simply because my brain couldn’t process any more news. I’m skipping some big titles like Indiana Jones, the Starfield DLC, the new World of Warcraft expansion, Metal Gear Solid Delta, the new Diablo IV Expansion and many interesting indie games, most of which certainly seem promising. But that’s the fun of curating your personal list – you get to make your own choices and let your head focus only on those few titles, because no one can keep up with all of the news.

Should you buy Wayfinder in June 2024? The short answer is: yes, it is a pretty good bargain for $25, but it may still be safer to wait for the full launch of the game. The long answer is a bit more complicated, which is what we’ll talk about in the video. Before we begin, a quick note on the visuals: I don’t have a modern PC, so I had to run the game on medium graphics settings. The game actually looks much better than what you’re seeing here. There will be a few spoilers in the video.

At the very last moment, Sony announced a State of Play, and we finally got to watch it a few hours ago at the time of recording. If you’re not familiar with these shows, State of Play is usually more of a smaller show focusing either on a mixture of games or on one single game. But it is different from a showcase, where Sony usually announces big games, and which runs for more than an hour.

So expectations were low from this State of Play, which ran for a little over 30 minutes. And it kind of met those expectations. It featured 14 titles, and while I think there was something for everyone, there didn’t seem to be anything that got a large portion of the player base excited. In fact, people were still confused and disappointed because they were expecting some big announcements that usually happen in a full showcase. They’re not wrong to be disappointed, because last year, Sony held a full showcase that featured thirty games, including a lot of AAA titles. But this year is different, because Sony has already announced that we can’t expect any blockbuster titles from their first-party studios until at least 2025.

I played the latest update of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League almost by accident. This update, which is Episode 2 of the first season, came out on May 23, 2024, and it just so happened that I didn’t have anything to do after work that day. If it had come out on May 22 or May 24, I would have probably found myself watching cricket, but on May 23, I was free. Also, my PS5 was switched on, and since my games update automatically, I noticed that Suicide Squad was recently updated. So I decided to have a look. And as it turns out, it was a happy accident.

As we get closer to June, it’s time to gear up for a month full of gaming announcements, demos and a general feeling of excitement for the rest of the year in games. June has been one of the most important months of the year for gamers for more than 20 years, because it used to be when the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, used to be held. The expo used to be the one-stop place to learn about all the big announcements about games, consoles and everything in between.

Then of course, the pandemic came around, and it became impossible to conduct the expo in its usual format. E3 2019 was the last in-person event, and E3 2021 was the first and also last online event, after which the expo itself was cancelled.

However, from 2020 onwards, we started getting used to another format of consuming news in June, and that is through the many digital streams conducted by publishers and event organisers. And for most of us, who have only ever watched E3 events online, this felt familiar. Actually, it was even better, because a lot of these new online events brought along with them demos and gameplay videos that previously used to be limited to those who attended E3 in-person.

So yes, while it’s sad to lose E3, what we have gained in return isn’t too bad. And let’s look at what we have lined up in 2024, which is gearing up to be one of the most financially challenging years in the industry.

This is not a review of the Hades 2 early access release, because we don’t know how much is going to change between now and the final release of the game. Instead, this video talks about a few early impressions about the state of the game as it exists in late May 2024, and whether this game really needed to exist in the first place.

On March 20th, 2013, Valve officially announced the early access feature on steam, the largest video game marketplace for the Windows platform. The first batch of early access games was a modest list of just 12 titles, out of which Arma 3, Kerbal Space Program and Prison Architect are the most recognisable ones. As of May 2024, Steam now has more than 11,000 titles in Early Access. It’s clearly a popular business model that has worked wonders for a lot of developers and publishers.

However, as recently seen in the case of Wayfinder, things don’t always work out.

Should we categorise games as Indie, only when the studios that make them have produced them without any external influence? This is difficult, since a lot of indie games are published by external studios, which provide funding and other support that helps the games come to the market, and in return they do have some sort of influence on the game’s production.