A PlayStation Showcase is seemingly on the horizon, so I’m sharing some of my predictions for what will be at the event. Will Ghost of Tsushima 2 be announced? Is Marvel’s Wolverine getting a gameplay trailer? Should we hope for a new Kingdom Hearts IV trailer and release date? Let’s talk about it all and get hyped!
At Xbox’s business update earlier this year, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer tried to explain the company’s business rationale behind putting four of their first-party titles on other consoles. A key reason he gave for sharing these games with other platforms was that it would allow the company to “invest in maybe future iterations of those or sequels to those, or just other games like that in our portfolio.” One of those games was Hi-Fi Rush, the surprise 2023 hit from Japanese developer Tango Gameworks. Yesterday, the company announced internally that it would be shutting down multiple studios across Tango’s parent company Zenimax Media, and Tango is one of them.
The Kingdom Hearts series has jumped between consoles, handhelds, phones, and PCs, and if new rumors are to be believed, it’ll also be making the jump to the big screen. These rumors kicked off after film and TV insider DanielRPK stated that Disney was looking to make either a TV or film adaptation of the beloved Square Enix series. That information was then corroborated by Skyler Schuler, founder of TheDisInsider who says that idea has evolved with Disney looking to make a full-on Kingdom Hearts movie.
Kingdom Hearts is a special series to me. Not only has it played a key role in molding me into the person I am today, but it’s also been a constant source of comfort for me throughout my life. With that in mind, I decided to go back to six key games from the franchise, some of which I haven’t played in a long time, in a series I call Revisiting Kingdom Hearts to see what I think of them in the year 2024. Have my feelings changed about each game over the years? Am I able to take away anything new from them that I didn’t before? How does any one game compare to the rest of the series? These are the kinds of questions I’ll be asking myself as I work my way through the franchise. In part two of this series, I’ll be focusing on arguably the most divisive game in the franchise, Chain of Memories, and the great amount of respect that I have for it.
Going into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I was equal parts excited and nervous. Its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake, set a high bar after it managed to blow me away and become one of my favorite entries in the franchise. After spending just shy of 80 hours with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I feel confident in saying that once again my expectations have been surpassed in ways I never would’ve imagined. There are some bumps along the way, but they don’t keep Rebirth from being one of the best Final Fantasy games I’ve played.
PlayStation’s internal studios have felt fairly stagnant for a couple of years now. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve gotten some incredible games from them so far this generation. Guerrilla knocked it out of the park with Horizon Forbidden West and its Burning Shores expansion; Sony Santa Monica delivered an epic conclusion to Kratos’ Norse adventures in God of War Ragnarok and its Valhalla DLC; and what more needs to be said about Insomniac Games, a team that’s proven itself to be the PlayStation Studios MVP as they’ve released a steady cadence of amazing games with Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Spider-Man 2. But although these have each been top-tier games, it’s disappointing that we haven’t received too many fresh ideas in the form of new IP from PlayStation’s biggest internal teams.
Kingdom Hearts is a special series to me. Not only has it played a key role in molding me into the person I am today, but it’s also been a constant source of comfort for me throughout my life. With that in mind, I decided to go back to six key games from the franchise, some of which I haven’t played in a long time, in a series I call Revisiting Kingdom Hearts to see what I think of them in the year 2024. Have my feelings changed about each game over the years? Am I able to take away anything new from them that I didn’t before? How does any one game compare to the rest of the series? These are the kinds of questions I’ll be asking myself as I work my way through the franchise. With all that said, there’s no better place to start than with the very first entry.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an amazing game that I can’t get enough of, but one thing that I couldn’t help but think about the whole time I played it was how much it makes me want a Final Fantasy X remake of the same scale. I’ve talked about a potential remake of one of the series’ best games before, and now after playing Rebirth, I believe that its open world, its combat, and the amount of depth it gives its characters should serve as the blueprint for what I would love to see from a remake of Final Fantasy X.
Xbox held their much-anticipated business update yesterday where they addressed recent rumors about game exclusivity and more clearly laid out how the company sees the future of the brand. In the latest episode of The Official Xbox Podcast, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, President of Xbox Sarah Bond, and President of Gaming Content & Services Matt Booty covered a range of topics including Xbox games coming to other consoles, future Xbox hardware, the games industry at large, and how it all pertains to the company’s strategy going forward. The answers they gave paint a clear picture of how they see the future of gaming and where Xbox fits into it.
Sony hasn’t been in the handheld gaming market since they stopped producing the PlayStation Vita in 2019, but if new reports are to be believed, the company is planning to return to the space in the coming years. Coming from YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead (and spotted by WCCFTech), he reports that Sony is in fact working on a new PlayStation handheld system (which I’ll refer to as the Vita 2 for simplicity’s sake) and that it’ll be compatible with PS4 and PS5 games.
TheComfySpot 