The Ringer-Verse - Gaming's First-Half Highlights and Second-Half Hype | Button Mash

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Ben brings on Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio and Oli Welsh to sum up the first half of 2026 in gaming and preview the remainder of the year. First, they discuss the odd dynamic of dire industry news coinciding with a glut of great games. Then, they each share their top 10 games of the first half of the year, and break down the differences and similarities among their respective lists. Finally, they assess the up-in-the-air race for Game of the Year, how the timing and rollout of 'Grand Theft Auto VI' could affect its fortunes, the late-summer pileup of pre-'GTA' releases, and their biggest questions about the upcoming calendar. Intro (0:00)Industry news  (3:00)Game of the Year picks (16:53)Outro (1:28:20) Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Giovanni Colantonio and Oli WelshProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor at the Ringer and button mash hosts. Wait, haven't you heard from me already this week? Yes, you have, but we're back for more mashing already. It's a double button mash week. And today, I'm joined by a pair of polygon people, which makes them sound like human triangles or something. But no, they're not.

They're normal members of games media, if that's not a contradiction in terms, with us for the second time is Polygon's editor at large, Giovanni, NeoGeo, Colantonio. Hi, NeoGeo. How do you feel about that nickname? I like that a lot. Yeah, no, you can keep that. I'll accept that one. You can keep it too, or we can just reserve it for your button mesh appearances if you'd prefer. I've also always loved the title, Editor at Large, because I always imagine an editor at large just being on the run from the law on some editing-related rampage. That's exactly how I've always pictured in as well, just kind of like in the shadows, in the city, you know, the alleyways. Where is he? I don't know.

Well, if you were committing crimes of editing or writing, I'm sure you would be apprehended by our other guest today. Joining us for the first time is my senior editor counterpart at Polygon, though in his case, the masthead says senior editor UK. He is appearing from across the pond. It's Ollie Welsh. Welcome, Ollie. Hello, lovely to be here. Lovely to have you both here. And like everyone, we do a Games of the Year episode and a written ranking of our Games of the Year in December. But on ButtonMash traditionally, we also publish a premature podcast where we jump the gun at the halfway mark of the year and assess our favorite games so far. So today, we're talking about first half highlights and second half

hopes and hype what we have enjoyed so far this year, what we're looking forward to enjoying the rest of this year. We will share our personal top 10 lists. We'll ask some big questions about the upcoming calendar. We'll assess the state of the game of the year race. I do want to accentuate the positives on this pod to some extent, but first, let's acknowledge the negatives, too, because if we are providing an accurate accounting of this year, then we cannot give short shrift to the bad news. Earlier this week, the ringer's unboxing boy, Sean Fennessey, was here to talk about the death of disk-based gaming. We also discussed the latest layoffs at Xbox.

And, of course, we've talked a ton this year about price hikes, generative AI creep, remake fatigue, live service fatigue. We have multiple types of fatigue. It seems like ages ago that High Guard launched, crashed, and burned in quick succession. But no, that was this year, too. And, Ali, you recently summed up all of the above and maybe more in a piece with the provocative headline. these feel like the end times. And look, we're all prone to recency bias and negativity bias. And if it leads, it leads applies to games media too.

But you've been covering games for a long time. And you are assessing the vibes. And the vibes have been pretty rancid of late. So does this in some respects seem different and worse than previous supposed crises, say, post-video game crash of 83? It does. This is one of those occasions where I find myself having to hold two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time. Yes. The first part, I think, if we're going to accentuate the positive, is as I wrote, I think, in that piece, or in one of the pieces, many, many despairing pieces I've had to write recently, is you can't kill an art form. It just, it can't happen. And look at what's happening to the movies right now. A theatrical movie going is having a huge bounce back after the pandemic and streaming should surely have killed it off.

you're not going to be able to kill video games. They're more profit than they've ever been. There's more video games being made and released all the time. There's new markets being created all the time. There's new development cultures happening in China and South Korea that are really exciting. And people want to play games and they will find a way. And brilliant games will be made and we'll find their way to players. And all of that is 100% true and it's going to be true this year, just as it was true last and we'll be true next year.

And we're going to have loads of great stuff to celebrate at the end of the year. But aside from being dark, I do think these times are different. There's a couple of things. The first is the hardware crisis is an unprecedented change in the way the entire business operates. And not just the business, but a great part of what makes the art form or the medium, what it is, is that we've always assumed we'll be making these technological leaps every roughly seven years and that there's a constant drive to improve and that increase in fidelity

is going to bring more to players and it's going to expand the boundaries of the art form and that proved true for a long time. It's been less true for like the last generational change, I would say, maybe the one before two, but specifically the last one. But now we have like a real inflection point where nobody can afford to have better games.

We can't afford the consoles to play them on. We can't afford the hard drive storage to put them in and the companies making them can't afford to make them. I mean, I think Rockstar will probably make a profit on Grand Theft Auto 6, but that's a unique case. The amount that it will have cost them to make that game over at least eight years, probably more like 10 or 12, is just absolutely astronomical. Like, they've become an unsustainable art form as they are. And I think there needs to, people are having.

having to have a deep examination of what we expect video games to be and what we expect is going to happen next, because that is going to change. To the extent that there's a big question mark next to that even being another generation of game consoles right now. Or when it will be. Yeah, the timeline keeps being pushed back. And it does feel unprecedented.

It's not as if hardware shortages are new necessarily. Of course, we have the pandemic supply lines issues. Every time a new console launches, supplies are limited as companies ramp up production. You can't always get the system you want. And even 20 years ago, there was a RAM price fixing scandal and cartel. So all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again, except for the facts that we have really never seen a console generation just get more and more expensive over its lifespan. That does seem new,

and plenty of people have tracked what we were accustomed to, which is when hardware would get older, it would depreciate, and you could pick it up cheap. And that is the opposite of what we're seeing now. And that is the thing that makes me worried for the medium, for people who aren't already in the tent and hopelessly hooked like we are,

will the next generation, you know, if you can't buy used or secondhand, because everything is digital, if you can't just give games to a friend or a sibling or something and introduce them to the hobby as well, or if it just becomes something that's reserved for people who have enough disposable income to pay whatever we're paying for these things a year or two from now, that is kind of concerning. And it's also a bigger bummer because of what you also said there, Ali, if it's the worst of times, it's also sort of the best of times. and the games are great. And we have more games than we have time to play them on this podcast.

And there's just always something that we're enjoying and recommending. And, Gio, you're writing about a lot of those games. You're recommending them. Do you feel like we're whistling past the graveyard every time we just talk about, boy, games are so good and look at all the upcoming games, what's our responsibility to sort of acknowledge everything else that's going on in the industry without just constantly being doomers and downers. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to hold both things at once.

You have to be realistic about what's going on in the industry, right? You have to be realistic about, like, how the business is changing, the horrible things that are happening in it, and how those impact the games that we play, right? Because ultimately, like, that's part of what changes with this, right? If you see these wild layoffs happening at Xbox, like, that's going to, even if you're somebody who does not pay attention to the industry and you're like, I don't care. just care about the games. That's going to impact your games, you know, so you really do have to think about it. At the same time, I do always think it's important to be able to, like, still talk about

the art as the art. And that doesn't mean, like, totally separated away from the business and the production of it and things like that. But I mean, I feel like we have to care about the games in order to care about the industry in some way, right? Like, we have to, we have to be like, it's worth fighting for and it's worth like getting angry about this stuff and it's worth looking for solutions because like the art's great and it's meaningful to us and we want to see it develop and grow. So I always try to hold both those those things at once, which obviously can be challenging in a week like this, right, where you're just like, there's so much bad news. Everything feels dire. Everything feels horrible. But I think you have to

like be able to see the light at the end of it and then say, hey, the reason that I care about this so much is because like look at all this, this really phenomenal human work that is out there and these really phenomenal games. And, you know, this evolution of this industry that continues in spite of everything. Like, that's a beautiful thing. For me, I just think it's so imperative to be able to hold those two things and talk about both of them. Yeah. And some of the dooming that was happening with movies post-pandemic as the box office tolls were falling, people were really concerned about just the economic model of movie making and how it would affect the art.

And now those concerns have been allayed to some extent as the box office has bounced back, as we've seen this new wave, this YouTube to box office pipeline, partly market player-driven market supplier was on this podcast to talk about Iron Lung. Before obsession and backrooms, there was Iron Lung, the video game adaptation.

And there may be some parallels there because we're seeing now smaller teams being able to make big hit video games. And you could dismiss it as friend slop in some cases if you'd like. But these are very popular games. Everyone in the world is playing mecha chameleon right now, right? 15 million sales over the past month. And I think there isn't as much concern that there won't be games anymore

or that the games won't be good. As you said, Ali, you can't really kill gaming, even if you can kill games in some cases, although there is, of course, a movement called Stop Killing Games. But I think that because of the various tools that are available, and of course, some of those may be Gen AI tools, and we could talk about how that will affect development. But really, you might have some concern, some existential fears for AAA gaming,

for big budget gaming, is this sustainable? Are the development costs and development timelines too long? But then whenever you start to feel dismayed about that, then some new excellent indie comes along that was a one-person team or maybe a little bit bigger than that. And suddenly it catches fire and it's brilliant and we're all talking about it. And so there is always that. I think there are some reasons for optimism. And I'm sure as we're about to share our list, there will be some examples of that. So, yeah, we will continue to hopefully balance both of these ideas in our head as we cover the many games coming up the rest of the year.

And it does seem like the very glut of games that we have, that in itself is a double-edged sword. Because on the one hand, there's never any shortage of things to play. But the fact that there is a glut of good games actually makes it harder for any maker of an individual game to stand out. Right. Ali, it's almost like, I mean, we're about to talk about it with the pre-GTA pilot. up coming later this summer. There are, you know, thousands of games coming out on Steam every year. Every year is a new high score. And so we're so inundated with good games that kind of counterintuitively, it makes it harder for the people who are making those games to actually make bank on them. Yeah, and indeed, it makes it harder for someone in our liner work or someone who's just an enthusiast to keep up,

unless they're geo and have some sort of mysterious time dilation device, device in their home that allows them to play literally every release, I still haven't figured out how he does it. I don't have kids. That's it. Oh, that's what it is. That helps. Yeah, that's where Ali and I went wrong, I guess. It's a problem.

Like, there is actually just too much, and this happens when our platform like Steam basically lowers the barrier to entry until it's almost inconsequential, right? You can make anything and get it on Steam or get it on the Nintendo e-shop without too much difficulty. It's a worry, but at the same time, like, I'm aware of as many great games breaking through that you wouldn't expect to as I am others struggling to make an impact. It is getting less easy to predict, and it's getting less easy to understand the narrative, like you could never in a million years see mecca chameleon coming. whereas I think almost all of us in the games media threw our weight behind a game like Mina the Hollower

which you know we saw us like an e-quarter something like Hollow Nike Silk song that came out last year and was a massive hit and it just hasn't got anything like the same kind of attention so I mean we can just continue to do our job as curators and try and point people in the right direction whilst doing our best to curate our own interests and our own time to sort through it all.

The strange thing is that while we have this enormous glut of indie gaming, the top of the pyramid is narrowing, right? The AAA releases are getting fewer and further between because they're getting so outrageously expensive to make and the development schedules are getting slid down. One of the trends in the last year or so that has encouraged me most is to see mid-sized gaming making a bit of a comeback. Now, a brilliant example of this is Claire Obscure.

it's technically an indie game, but it's a mid-sized production, right? It's got like, I don't know, two or three hundred people in the credits, takes up, I don't know, 10 gig or something, 20 gig. And there are signs that on PC, on Steam, this sector is starting to grow quite significantly, and it's also starting to pick up,

though, a little bit more slowly on the consoles. Consoles are still very AAA-dominated. But I think if we can reinvigorate the gaming middle, I think it's going to help structure everyone's understanding of what's coming out, if that makes sense. Instead of it just being like three massive games you care about and a giant sea of stuff that you have no idea how to sort through every year. Great. Yeah, there are some movie parallels there too where people have wondered about, oh, okay, you've got your big blockbusters, you've got your indies, where's the middle movie? Where are the rom-coms? Where are the comedies? Are they all on streaming and they disappear because there are hundreds, thousands of movies accessible to people at all times? So we are blessed and cursed with how much

media is available to us on command, at least unless the tap is turned off and something we bought is no longer available to us because a company said so. All right, Gio, since you have reputedly played every single game released this year, why don't you lead off and run down your top 10 here. And we'll just see how much similarity there is and how much accord and how many points of departure. And we can, of course, shout out some snubs and some close calls. And we'll see if we agree or disagree. I would love to because my list is weird in some ways. And I'm excited to talk through it. So I'll start from 10. I'll go up. Should I talk a little bit about these games or are we just kind of listing? Yeah, you could give a little capsule summary at least.

I love it. Okay, number 10 on my list, Mio, Memories in Orbit. I'm a Metroid Vena, Siko, as you know, Ben, we've talked about Metroid on this show before. Really, really enjoyed Mio. Very stylish game. I mean, just the look of it, like the hand-drawn look of it is incredible, and that alone is worth playing.

But it also does a Metroidvania thing that I love, where you can't even, like, visualize what the upgrades are going to be that you get in the game, like the way it gives you game-breaking traversal. Basically, this game is you're like a little robot going around a spaceship facility that has been abandoned. And, you know, it's the Metroidvania format, right? You're getting upgrades as you go.

But the way that it breaks traversal and opens up the world in ways that you're not expecting, I'm a sucker for it. I'm just a sucker for it. And this game does it incredibly well while looking pretty, I mean, just astonishing. It's one of the best of the games in the year for me. And that's, I think, an appropriate way to lead off when talking about our tale of two cities, best of times, worst of times, because this game came out. It got great reviews and seemingly didn't break through.

And its indie French developer is shutting down, I think, already. Right? So you're shouting out one of your favorite games of the year. And nonetheless, the people who made it, this triumphant release, already, that's not necessarily enough anymore just to make a good game. Not that it ever was, you know, there were always cult favorites and hits that for whatever reason just didn't find an audience, but with a specific audience, they were hits,

and with everyone else, they never heard of them. But that's what we're seeing very often now. It's that there's not much runway, there's not much margin for error. And so it's not solely a live service thing. It's just like if there's no audience, if your concurrent player accounts aren't high enough, if the immediate revenue is not there,

a lot of these developers are just sort of, well, we have enough to get this game out the door, hopefully, and then we're relying on it selling to prop us up. And if that doesn't happen, if it doesn't meet expectations, which is tough when you're talking about a Metroidvania, which is also one of my favorite genres, but a very crowded one. You could have been describing any number of pretty good games

from over the past few years there. Yeah, and it hurts so much to know that the game didn't do well to that extent because it's like you would think, oh, Hollenite Soxong was huge last year, renewed interest in the genre. People are going to be looking for like the next thing that they can play. And maybe they like more of those games. And like it just, it just doesn't work like that anymore necessarily,

especially when there's just so many options. It's a bummer to see. But if you like Silk Song, hey, there's another really good 3D Metro Advantage this year that I guess it's too late, but like, play it. It's cool. Yeah, it's too late for the people who made it, maybe. But the game still exists, so it's not too late for you.

All right. Number nine. Yeah. Number nine, I actually have vampire crawlers on here, which I unexpectedly love. This is the new game from the Vampire Survivors' Devs, but the gimmick of it is that, hey, it's like a card-based dungeon crawler, like an old school kind of like PC dungeon crawler, but the combat happens through deck building and cards. And I, when it was first announced, it was like, that's a funny joke, you know,

like the idea of making vampire survivors, but it's a deck builder or dungeon crawler. I was like, I get it. They're doing a gag. I am shocked. by how fantastic this is. And I probably shouldn't be because the team that made vampire survivors, like, cracked into something genius there. So, of course, they, like, have the capability to do that again.

But the deceptive depth to it really got me. When you first played, it's just kind of like, the idea of it is that you get more damage from cards if you play them in order of cost. So your zero cost, your one cost or two costs, cool. And it kind of seems like, okay, that's easy enough. You just play the card's in order. But, like, what is even? my level of choice in this game.

And the depth of it comes from realizing, hey, you can get these mods that you put on cards that can, like, change the sequence a little bit. So you can make cards cost more intentionally so that they go later in the sequence. You can turn cards into wild cards. You can turn cards into like reverse cards so that you can

like then go back the other way and go to one zero in the sequence. And once you crack that, and start to realize that like, this is this like deck building math problem of like, how are we going to kind of like, extend out the sequence to build the largest combo possible. I think it's just brilliant as a concept,

and I got way into it for a long time. I love it. I think it's fantastic. And another one that feels like it went overlooked, despite the fact that vampire survivors was huge. You know, so another weird example there, but maybe it's bigger than I think.

I don't know. Hopefully it is. Okay. Number eight. Number eight, I have Pragata on this list, which I think is one of the better AAA games this year. And I really, I mean, Capcom's just been cooking lately.

I don't know what's in the water over there, but they really have cracked something with how to make AAA games. And especially how to make these AAA games that, again, they're not necessarily doing these gigantic open world games all the time. Like this is a very tight kind of classic. Yeah, you know, 12-hour single-player game, cool, that all hinges around a really kind of genius central idea. So obviously this one is third-person shooter,

where you are doing a hacking mini-game in order to shoot robots. It takes place on the moon. You're an astronaut who has an Android child, you know, and that's the idea of it. And for me, it just really brings me back to an era of like, hey, we have a really good, weird gameplay idea. And we're going to build an entire thing around this and see how far we can go with it. And we're going to riff on it just enough. We're not going to overdo it, but we're going to take this idea in as many directions as it can go before it gets old. and execute it with perfection.

And I really just love a game like that. And I feel like this is the kind of game we're talking about, right? But the middle that we, I guess, don't get so much anymore, where it's just like a really focused, great single player. I don't care if it gets another sequel. You know, I don't care if I do this idea a million times. Like, I love games like Vanquish or things like that, right, where it's just like really cool idea.

I love this, I cherish it. And they really executed this strange thing that could have been. been a one-trick pony very well. Really recommend, too, for Pragata. Summer Games Done Quick is happening right now, speed-running event, raising money for Doctors Without Borders. They actually had the first, like,

games done quick speed run of this game, and the way the runners have figured out how to, like, break that combat system and optimize it in ways that I didn't even realize were possible. Just the hidden depth to it that I have kind of found this week has really reinforced this to me,

where I'm like, they really did. They really cooked, with this one specific idea. And I love to see people kind of running with it. Yeah, that was really heartening. Not just that, okay, Capcom has dollar signs dancing at its eyes and can now foresee another franchise perhaps. But the fact that it found an audience,

it felt distinctively Capcom, but also like its own original creation, which it was. And it sold. People liked it, not just us critics telling people to play it, but also people played it and people bought it. And even though it comes with the Capcom, Cash, which obviously helps you launch an original property. Still, it had to stand on its own, and it did.

And that was nice to see. All right. Number seven. Number seven, this one's a curveball. Reanimal. Yes. Yes, is a horror game from the creators of Little Nightmares, and it is pretty much little nightmares.

It is a variation on that idea where it is just a very atmospheric, kind of like walking around these strange, surreal worlds. The thing that this studio does so well and reanimal does incredibly that I think I took for granted about Little Nightmares until playing this and I was like, oh, they do this better than anybody. Their ability to create a surreal space where like where you are at the beginning of the game looks so different from where you are at the end of the game. But it just feels natural the entire way through like this, this weird kind of nightmare world that they create never kind of feels like, oh, it's a bunch of set pieces that we put together, you know? and you can feel the stitches of, okay, here's our next big section. But the way they just all flow

and it creates this fluid, like, again, dreamlike, I guess, nightmare. I think it's so underappreciated. Just the way they designed their world, how naturally they flow together. I think that's the success that made the original Little Nightmare's games so, I mean, just made them so powerful at the time.

And I see a lot of that in reanimal. A fantastic horror game, you know, minimalist horror game. I don't know. It stuck with me. And I don't want to spoil too much about where it goes, but it goes in a very unexpected place thematically that has stuck with me, and I've thought about a lot since. And I definitely recommend to check it out. Yeah.

Kind of cryptic, open to interpretation. But there are some interesting themes there. Good co-op experience. I played it with Matt James. I think it took us two sittings. It's a bite-sized experience. All right. Number six.

Number six for me is the other horror game this year of Resident Evil Requiem. I think Requiem is excellent. I think the recent Resident Evil games have been really strong, but I've been a little hit and miss on some of them. Village, there are parts of it that I love, and there were parts of it where I'm like, I don't really care for the back half of this game necessarily, which is the Resident Evil curse.

But for me, I just found Requiem really strong from search finish, even if it dips in the end. I think, like, the third act, as is the case with every Resident Evil game is the worst part of it. But I still think it's pretty solid. I was just really struck by this game, you know, in returning to the Raccoon City incident, which has been something that has been kind of core to this series for so long. And having, you know, Capcom return to that and return to it in this like very kind of,

I don't know, like serious manner of like, hey, we just like thought thoughtlessly blew up this city at some point, you know, in the series as like a fun video game thing, right? Like we just blew it up. What a fun ending. cool guys don't look at explosions, whatever, that kind of like ending that you get in Reson Evil. For them to finally kind of return to that, you know, 30 years later and to treat it seriously and treat it kind of like, what would Leon Kennedy feel like returning to this place, right? And dealing with the fact that, hey, I escaped this town, but I was also supposed to be here to protect it. You know, I was supposed to be the one who saved this place.

I just think like that was, that made for this really strong story for me, you know, just where a really good use of the franchise, a really good use of, hey, what's it like to return somewhere that you have left behind, that you were supposed to protect, and it has been completely obliterated. And I think they get a lot of mileage out of having the two characters and dealing with kind of these two characters who are facing trauma on kind of micro and macro scales, right? Leon kind of mourning this entire place that has been destroyed that he was responsible for, whereas Grace, her mother, you know, was killed. She was kind of there when it happened, and she is dealing with the trauma and her responsibility in that. And I think contrasting those two things, I know it doesn't work for everybody.

I know that some people think, you know, the great step is great. Why didn't they just do that? The Leon stuff is free. Why didn't they just do that? But I think putting them in one game is actually kind of the strength of that. I love it. I think it's fantastic. Agreed.

Yes, it was a nice melding of multiple gameplay styles. Kept things fresh. All right. Your top five. Oh, my God. Well, here's the bummer one. Marathon is in my top five, speaking about an interesting. industry that is unsustainable and you can make a hit or a great game and it doesn't matter sometimes.

Obviously, you know, the Bungy team, they go off, they decide they're going to make this extraction shooter that's different from Destiny, really leap of faith. Like, we're doing something really different. We're doing something strange. And I think they crushed it. I mean, I think this game, it's such an acquired taste and I get why it's niche because of it. But when you start to dig into the world building of this game, the future they have built, how they've built on old marathon lore,

but kind of turned it into this game of like, hey, this is a killer v. Kill world. This is just this world where like you are going to go in and you need to kill your fellow runners, you know, to survive in this world. I think just makes for this really great meld of gameplay and theme, right, where you have this game where you have to go in and you don't trust anybody and you are killing everybody on site

because you need to do your job and come in, and it becomes this satire of just like the modern workforce, right? This like killer be killed kind of like, I need to step over everybody to do what I need to do to survive in this world. And the horrible irony of this ends up being that Fungy gets gutted during this, right? That this game is seemingly deemed not a failure necessarily, but like not living up to standards, right? and they kind of get the axe,

not necessarily for Marathon, but right, we see Destiny 2 shuts down. There's significant layoffs over there. There is a pivot within that studio to kind of like focusing on Marathon to like get the health of it together. I think like it almost makes the game

more thematically relevant in a very dark and horrible way. So I don't, it's one of those games I don't know what to do with it and it's one of those things where we were talking about earlier, like how do you balance the business and the art? This is one of those games where it's like, I think you can't separate it and like it's part of the story of it in some way.

Yeah, Ali, you wrote about Marathon in March with the headline. Critics have decided they love Marathon, which means it's on its way to the game awards, at least in the multiplayer category. But I've been watching this because it seems like a test case for what a big publisher considers remunerative or worthwhile or sustainable. And I hate that SteamDB turns us all into vultures, just pouncing, waiting, okay, what's the player count, uh-oh, it's spiraling, it's dwindling, and then it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because we're all looking, oh, players are abandoning ship, and that makes other people

less likely to check it out because they've seen the live service death rattle before, and they know what happens? And so do you want to get invested in a game that seems to be trending down? And Marathon has sort of found its level, and it's a fairly low level, seemingly, even though Bungee has made some efforts to broaden the tent and make it more accessible. And Sony has said some stuff about how they appreciated and aren't abandoning it and want to keep pursuing live service, even though they've been tilting at windmills with that. But, you know, it's down under 10,000 concurrent players these days. There hasn't really been any sustained bounce in season two.

And so we end up in this cycle where we're kind of just waiting for these games to fail. even if it's a game like Marathon that has founded audience and people who like Marathon really like Marathon. So this isn't Concord, this isn't High Guard, where there just wasn't much of a contingency for it or everyone who checked it out,

if anyone checked it out, abandoned it right away. And yet it's Sony, it's Bungee. They're banking on a big hit, right? Not sort of modest critical success. I think the game's been really unlucky as well. I think Bungee were onto something. I think that the idea that there was room for an extraction shooter

to go big and to capture people's imaginations and to capture the middle ground of the shooter space was 100% correct. It's just they got beaten to it by Ark Raiders. And Marathon itself was also not that game. Like it's a very, very refined and well-made game, but a little bit too clever and a little bit too harsh. So like it's partly a problem with their own marking,

making partly just bad luck, I think. But yeah, I do, I think it'll be interesting. I stand by what I said. I do think the critical community is there around it, but what it doesn't have that games like Overwatch or Harthstone had back in the day is that sense that everybody's playing at their lunch break. There's one guy on your team at work who is like, oh, I love marathon. I've been up all night playing it.

But it's not like we're all going, oh, let's do a quick 15 minutes of marathon. It's just that isn't happening, sadly. Right. And then you worry what will be. become of Bungee, what's left of Bungee, there's no destiny, there's nothing new on the horizon if they can't sort of resuscitate Marathon, then what is the future for that storage studio? It's sad, but like, I wouldn't want to put all of the blame at Sony's door for this. I don't think they should have bought Bungee at the time they did for the amount of money

they spent on it, but I also don't think Bungee has been a well-run studio for quite a long time. Yeah, there has been a bunch of buyers' remorse among many buyers. over the past few years and subsequent downsizing. But it does reinforce that timing is everything. And whether you stand out, Arc Raiders comes along, not that it was necessarily the first extraction shooter, but it was the first maybe to be mainstream accessible. And it obviously was rewarded for that.

And then Marathon comes along not that long later, but maybe you miss the window where it could have been, ah, this is the big breakthrough for this genre. Okay, what else you got you? Okay, here's my top four. and this is the sicko stuff. This is the stuff I'm really excited about this year. Number four, Titanium Port,

the independent game festival winner this year, and for good reason, this game by AP Thompson, it is impossible to explain. It is a match three strategy game, PC text adventure, roguelike. It's very, very strange, and part of the fun of the game is kind of going into it and just kind of figuring out what it is.

It is a game that is so, invested in screwing with you. It is like just a court jester that is so, so happy to go in and be like, we're just going to throw weird systems at you over and over again and you're not going to know what to expect. And you're going to feel like we're pulling the prank on you. And the thing I really love about it, beyond the fact that it's like very funny, it has its roots and kind of theater and absurdity and things like that. But the thing I really like about it is that I think this ends up being a game about things that don't make sense, right? You can read it as a sort of parody of game design and like the wild and weird decisions

that you make when designing a game that like when you start to say them out loud, or like, what are you talking about? What does that mean? But I think the thing that's kind of brilliant about it is that it extends to everything, right? The heart of this game is like, you are in a fairy court and there is a war happening. and the war is played out in these kind of like match three segments where the rules are just so convoluted and it becomes this like send up satire of warfare in that way right where it's like what are the rules of this thing like why why have we decided that it works this way you know what these these bizarre rules

of engagement that we have kind of determined and i think the entire thing just becomes this very like big brain satirical uh send up of just like the concept of rules and like why we follow them and how things work yeah i i think it's one of those games that you just have to kind of dig into and learn what it's doing and go in with as little knowledge as possible and let it screw with you yeah it is sort of a meta of you know is this messing with us undertail's kind of sensibility all right your top three okay top three my number three is is my most obscure on this list, but the one that I'm like, I'm very excited about this one, which is Sol Cesto.

Sol Cesto is a incredibly, incredibly, incredibly cool French game. It is a rogue-like dungeon crawler, but it is very much unlike any rogue-like dungeon crawler that you have ever seen before. The idea of it is that you are going through floors of a dungeon and trying to find the sun, which is hidden underground at the bottom of it somewhere. And the way that levels are represented is you walk into a dungeon floor and you see a bunch of rooms. And it's a grid like I think with a four by four grid of rooms. And in each room there's like a monster or a treasure chest or a healing item or something like that or a trap.

And you have to clear a certain amount of rooms in order to go to the next floor. So you want to pick up treasure chest. You want to defeat enemies, all these things. But you don't have control over what room you go into. You have to click on a row. and then you have a 25% chance of hitting one of the four boxes in that row, right? And the rogue-like part of it is that as you go, the upgrades you're getting manipulate the odds of what you are going to hit.

So you start off with like a 25% even chance of hitting everything, right? But then you might get an upgrade that's like, okay, 50% chance, better odds at hitting a chest, but also like a 30% better chance that you're going to hit an enemy. And the whole game becomes about like odds and numbers manipulation in a way that is like just, showing you how games work, but taking out all of the, like, things that hide the math. It's like, what if we just showed you the math?

What if we just showed you that all of these games are about manipulating odds and math? And we made that the game, right? And we put you in control of that. And I think that's brilliant in like a weird meta way. I think it's brilliant. But also, I just think, like, it's so easy to pick up. And it's so easy to understand what's going on in it, that, like, it almost has this feeling of like playing solitaire on a PC as a kid to me where I'm like yeah fire up around

and I'm going to do it and I don't care if I win or lose in the way that I do in a rogue light like the pleasurable tactile act of like just clicking on the things and trying to see as far as I can get is is the joy for me. So that is one that is like stuck with me a lot. I think it's a brilliant piece of design and I mean it just aesthetically is unbelievable. You know it has this hand-drawn art style that that evokes like tapestries and it like looks so alien but ancient at the same time, the sound design, the music, and it's just firing on all cylinders, and I highly recommend people check it out.

It is one that has gone totally under the radar, but is so fantastic. Yeah, you have some excellent hipster picks here. This is great. And even if I was more of a minesweeper person than a solitaire guy, I'm with you on that. And random number generators in video games can be kind of frustrating because, I mean, we're all subject to the fickle whims of reality when we are not gaming.

And so one of the nice things about gaming is that you feel empowered. You feel in control. Things are predictable. And the conditions, you know, I can exert my will. And yet sometimes if it's why I did that attack and it failed because of the arbitrary random number generator that dictated the outcome of this thing. But if you make that explicit and you know that going in, then, yeah, that is kind of a compelling hook. All right. Number two of continuing on the theme of like fraught development stories that have made it difficult for people to engage.

Zero parades for Dead Spies. The game from the studio behind Disco Elysium, though not necessarily all the same people behind Disco Elysium because of a whole complicated backstory there that I think a lot of people know about very much. Fractured into five studios and five successors, it's like when Alexander the Great died and everyone was warring over the empire. It's very much like, what is the official spiritual sequel to that game? Yes. And I think, you know, because the development story of this is so public and what happened at the studio is public, there's been a little bit of a like, we're just not touching that one. I think with a lot of folks. And I think it's fair for people, you know, it's always fair for anybody to make decisions based off. Like I just feel uncomfortable about, you know, the business behind this. I, you know, I don't need to engage with it. There's so many games, whatever. I think that's totally valid. What I will say is that like the actual game that is here is phenomenal. Debatively might be even better than disco. Elysium. You know, it is a variation on the same idea is that CRPG theme where, you know, you are rolling dice and making decisions, very dialogue-based and, you know, nothing else really. But it is an a spy story. And I think the ideas that they built through Discrolesium mapped so well to a spy story because, like, you're doing a lot of things like deception and lying and things like this that lend themselves really well to like these tense skill checks where it's like, ooh, is my cover going to get blown on this, which I think is brilliant. But the thing that I love about it is that it is also, like, disco, a game about a total hot mess. You are, you're playing as this,

like, spy who is absolutely terrible at their job. And not only that they're terrible at their job, they're terrible to the extent that the last mission they did went so badly that they screwed over their entire team. And now they are returning for a, for one last time, for another job, and they have to reassemble a team of the people they have screwed over. And it becomes like an apology tour. It's less about the spycraft and it's more about like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry about what I've done. I've changed. But at the same time, you still are like deceiving and lying to people. So you kind of haven't, you know, like you still have to like get these people on your side through sometimes nefarious means. And I think, you know, on its own, it is this really

brilliant inversion of it. It's very based in like John LaCarray and things like that. And I And I think it's like the fun part of it is that instead of being a spy story, we're like, oh, the spy is one step ahead of you. Like the spy is two steps behind you and there's such a fool that you're like, oh my God. Like what are you doing? And I think that makes for such like a fascinating genre kind of inversion. But there's also the like strange meta read of it if you want of like, hey, this is a story about like this person who feels guilt about screwing over their team. right, their comrades having to go back and do the apology tour about it and like feeling

a feeling away about it. And I think if you are somebody who has been really invested in that development story, seeing a game that you could read as a sort of like self-aware, like, we know, we know, we know what everyone feels about this, you know, and we feel that way too, like the actual writers on this team who, you know, weren't involved in the ousting of creatives or something. If you kind of read it through that meta lens, I think it becomes this like fascinating game. Again, like in the way that Marathon

is this game that you can read as like about work and how cutthroat it is, like, I think Zero Parades also works really well. It's that and they're kind of like weirdly perfect compliments to one another. It's fantastic. I hope more people give it a chance at some point. Well, this has been

a somewhat esoteric top ten so far, and you've kept me guessing here. And by process, of elimination. I think I've probably predicted your number one, but give us your top game of the first half so far for real. If you guess Mina the Hollower, you would be correct.

Yes. Okay. Ding, ding, ding. I love Mina the Hollower. I think, you know, Yacht Club game, follow up to Shubble Knight, another kind of like modern retro game, but instead of doing a 2D platformer, right,

it's your classic Game Boy, Advanced, Zelda, links awakening, send up. And I think just, this is just a studio, that knows how to design those kinds of games really well. They know how to make something feel retro and indebted to the past, but still feel modern. And what I love about Mina is the way that they actually like connect like 40 years of video game design history into one game.

Like it's not just like, oh, this is a retro throwback. It feels like old Zelda. There's also a lot of like Dark Souls DNA in it and specifically Bloodborne DNA in it. And the thing that I think is brilliant about it is the way they are drawing a line between like old school Zelda and Bloodborn. And they're like, hey, these are kind of the same game, right? We call Bloodborn, you know, or Soulslikes, this new thing, this new phenomenon. But like a Soulslike game is like not actually that different from like an old school Zelda game.

And we're going to draw that line for you. And I think in mixing and matching mechanics from these games, you kind of get this fascinating historical document that's sort of like a celebration of everything, of this long lineage of adventure games that is so, you know, interested in secrets, right? It's so interested in the idea of like the pleasure of games is finding secrets that you didn't know were there and decoding a world and learning the language of a world. And, you know, for me, it's like a formalist thing, right?

It's like, I'm so interested in the form. So maybe it's not as exciting a pick as like zero parades where I'm like, oh, this is thematically so interesting and narratively so interesting. But I think just as a celebration of games and a dissection of what they do, well. I think it's like just a phenomenal work.

And I'm kudos to that. Yacht Club knows what they're doing. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year too. A round of Jameson, ginger, and lime arrives at the table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time.

New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly.

Okay, well, there's definitely some overlap with your list in mind, though less than I was expecting. So I'll speed run through my list at the end. Ali, you can go and we can kind of skim over anything geo already covered. But a lot of overlap here, or is your list going to look different? No, there was one game, which was Pragmata, but I've ditched that in favor of something else, just to talk about it because GA very eloquently said everything

that I would want to say about Pragmata, which is just, it's fun to be a space man in a moon-based shooting robots again. Yes. A couple of quick disclaimers. Geoslis is way cooler than mine. There's a few reasons. One, kids, two, I spent so much this year at work,

just trying to keep up with what the hell is going on in this industry rather than actually playing the games. Yeah. And three, through a quirk of scheduling, three, there were three releases this year that were like aimed right at my lizard brain and that were obviously going to dominate huge amounts of my time. We'll get to those.

Okay, so number 10, I'm going to go there, mixtape. Yes. Now, I actually thought this game was kind of phony a bit. I wished that the developers who were Australian had set their game in Australia and actually made it autobiographical about their youth and given it some cultural specificity. I think a lot of the problem comes from it being located

in this sort of idealised indie movie retroland. And some of the needle drops don't work, but on the other hand, some of them really do. And the game is absolutely beautiful, and I was really interested in it as an example of an indie studio pulling off the kind of production values they don't expect of a naughty dog game, just in a different level of fidelity,

a different level of scale, but in terms of the way it plays, how seamless it was, how it made you feel the transitions, the cinematic transitions, amazing work. So I wanted to give it a shout-out. And also, because the discourse around it has been so poisonous. Yes. That I felt like I wanted to stick up for it. Yes, we have done discourse about the discourse. So rest assured. Yeah. Okay, number nine, this is one of my Olli brain games. This is Diablo Four Lord of Hatred. not my favorite Diablo game. Most people are Diablo two heads. I'm a Diablo three, sicko.

Four is fine. As ever with Diablo, I feel it's a really weird push and pull between their narrative ambitions for the game and the fact that I just want to get past all of that shit as quickly as I can so I can just grind monsters randomly. They did a really, really good job on the story in this. I've got to say, it's really fun. But I was still a little bit, my clicking finger was a little bit,

bit impatient going, yeah, but when do I get to the end game and the actually good part? But I did really enjoy it. And there's stuff with Lilith, how they've transformed Lilith from the boss of the bad, the big bad of the original base game into like everyone's favorite video game Mommy is hilarious. So number eight, another expansion pack. And here I'm going to put my family man hat on and give a shout out to deep breath, Super Mario Bros. Wonder,

colon, Nintendo Switch 2 edition plus Meetup in Bellabelle Park. That's a mouthful. I just had an amazing time with this for my kids. They absolutely love it. The mini games, there's so many, like, really fun and novel little game mechanics in there, both cooperative and competitive,

that you've never really encountered before that worked really beautifully with the 2D Mario template. I never thought I was never really into playing the, like, sort of co-op new Super Mario Bros game, I thought multiplayer Mario is not for me, but this absolutely hit the spot. Seven, sticking with Nintendo, Rhythm Heaven groove.

Hot off the presses. I believe that the first Wario Ware game, WarioWare Inc, is one of the most important games ever made, one of Nintendo's five great masterpieces and like a Jean-Luc Goddard style like deconstruction of the entire art form.

I think it's amazing. Anything even slightly warrior-ware adjacent is going to get me especially if it's got Kotakuichi art as Rhythm Heaven Grieve does. I don't know. It's not a masterpiece. I really, really enjoyed it, though. Like, lovely rhythm game,

a lovely wit to the way that the rhythms evolve in each stage. And there's, of course, that wonderfully surreal sort of punkish art. I think it's like Nintendo's sort of id coming to the fore in his work. So I really enjoy it. Six is a cheat. This is what I've subbed in for Pragmatica. It's actually a demo, but it's a publicly available demo, and it's definitely some of the best gaming time I've spent this year.

It's a game called Over the Hill. It's made by the people who made a retro rally game called Art of Rally, and they've got this lovely sort of pastel visual style, and they do these beautiful little models of classic cars. This game is like a sort of free-form, open-world off-roading game where you buy these, like, chunky old four-by-fours, like Landrovers and Toyota Land Cruises and stuff. like that and you just explore these landscapes and you get stuck in the mud and you have to winch

yourself up and it's a bit like mud runner or a snow runner but like a cool indie exploration about that exploration game variant of it that reminded me as much of like climbing games like just saunas driving games had a lovely time with it five a dragon quest seven reimagined a remake interesting just in the context of a lot of the interesting talk about Black Flag Resynced this week. How much should you change? What do you lose?

They changed a lot with this game. I never played the original, but I've read into it, and I understand they've really made some quite severe cuts to it in order to speed the process alarm. But what's great for me is that not knowing the original, I don't really sense that. I really sense that I'm playing a classic Dragon Quest game

when I'm playing it. And they've laboured so hard to keep the, glorious crisp simplicity of the Dragon Quest battle system that is, it's like the most basic version of a turn-based RPG battle system, but for some reason, it's just endlessly soothing and compelling. The game looks lovely, the storytelling's great, you fall in off with the characters. I'm very much looking forward to finishing that on my summer vacation. By the way, I've saved Mina for my summer vacation, which is why it's not in my list. I know I'm going to love it.

Number four is my deep cut. This is an indie game called Super Woden Rally Edge. This is like a retro, another retro arcade rallying game. It's made by a solo Spanish developer who has made the series of Super Woden games. They're kind of like Grand Turismo, if it was viewed from the top down, like micro machines. And this one is just a pure U-Vo. versus the track, arcade rallying game, you versus the clock.

There's no racing in it. It's just a time trial game with these little dinky rally cars going down these little twisting rally stages. And I absolutely adore it. It's got an absolutely banging techno sound track as well. It's just a brilliant game. Is that one that even you have not played you?

Yeah, this is news to me. And then I looked it up and I have that slaps, man. That looks great. it's so good and it does what art of rally thought it was doing art of raleigh is a cool game and it looks great but it does what art of roni thought it was doing with like a kind of early PS1 era kind of flare to it all right your top three number three this is the next of my lizard brain games this is world of warcraft midnight i love all the world craft i've always loved it. I will never stop loving it. I'm lucky in the sense that I've managed to have like a

healthy relationship with enjoying the game where when the new expansion comes out, I play it like crazy for a month and then I stop and move on with the rest of my life, even though there's part of my brain that really doesn't want to. I really liked this one for bringing us back to the old world. Obviously, as someone who's played the game since the beginning, it has an amazing nostalgic and emotional impact to come back to areas where and revisiting. it characters who you've known since the start of the game and that have all of the have this like a genuine historical significance because the events you're talking about the in-game happened actually 20 years ago.

So I thought they pulled it off really well and the game is so slick and so enjoyable still and the fan base will always moan about it but I always find a lot to enjoy and it remains Azaroth remains my like my digital home from home. and it's the only answer for my desert island game. Like, it's not even worth thinking about. Yeah, assuming you have an internet connection on the desert island. Number two, this is a game. I did wonder if it might turn up on Gio's list.

This is Cairn. This is a really beautiful rock climbing game. I mentioned Gassant earlier. Dusan came out a few years ago, similar idea. But Gusanne's very kind of... You're speaking my language here, Ali. I love this game. mindful and smooth and relaxing to play.

Kern isn't. Kern is intense. You're really like shaking almost as much as your avatar as in the screen, trying to find the next handhold. There's a lot at stake if you fall, because you might have to lose quite a lot of progress. It looks amazing. There's actually quite subtle and interesting character development

and storytelling going on the background, even though it's really a very quiet game about literally where is my next handhold, where is my next foothold. I really, really like that. Number one, I thought about not putting it number one, but I'd be lying if I didn't. It's Forza Horizon 6.

I'm like 150 hours in. I've loved every minute. So these games, like, I've played and loved every one of them. They are definitely reaching the point where something needs to change and nothing much has changed this time. And I ought to be mad about it, but I've just not mad about it because they've knocked it out of the park again. that playground games quality control is insane

like every game is just so well perfected the cars are just right the landscape is just right I've just written a piece about like creating virtual like sightseeing drives within the game and you can do this for every one of their games you don't even need to play it to have a good time you can just pick a nice car explore the map and just revel in like a really amazing

bit of digital world creation so that's my list Excellent list. I'm glad we got some Forza representation because spoilers, Forza misses my list, which is not really a knock on the game. I'm just not a big racing game guy the way that you are. And so I tried to really get into Forza and I appreciate its quality, but I just didn't feel the kind of personal connection that I was hoping to. But I think any list of highlights of the first half in gaming would be incomplete without Forza. Okay. I will quickly run through mine. Most of mine have been.

mentioned, though not all. And at number 10, I'm sneaking in Saros, which we discussed on this podcast. And, you know, it feels a little bit like a return to returnal. There's definitely a lot of commonality there. But there's something about that housemark house style that I don't really mind playing almost a reskinned version of the same game because that game is great and no other action shooter is quite like it. That kind of mix of our and tactics and beautiful graphics and kind of a convoluted story, frankly, but there's a lot to like about that game. Number nine, I'm going with 007 First Light,

which has obviously been a huge success, popular appeal-wise, and critically too, for that matter. And I certainly had my quibbles and complaints about this game, which I aired on our episode about it. But I think the whole thing hangs together, and even though there are aspects of it that do feel underbaked, I thought that as a complete package, they really did fulfill the assignment,

which was just let's make a bond movie because they have not made a bond movie in a while and won't be making one for a while. So let's have gaming fill the gap and create a bond-like interactive experience, which is a very meaty game that does its best to simulate all aspects of bond, maybe to its detriment.

Maybe there's too much. There's almost multiple bond games worth of bond game in this game. And yet this is kind of the epitome of the very polished, big budget, blockbuster, AAA experience, playable movie, quote, unquote. And there is something nice about just giving myself over to that game. Number eight, I have to shout out Pokemon Phocopia, which was another, I don't know if it was a surprise, but it was pleasant, whatever it was. And I quite enjoyed my time with this.

I enjoyed it with my daughter as well. And I think there's been a lot of understandable fretting about Nintendo's releases for the Switch 2 and where are the big heavy hitters. And yet we've been treated to a lot of, you know, maybe it's the JV squad instead of the varsity squad. But I loved Bonanza. I love Pocopia. I love taking these established characters and franchises and doing something new and different with them and mixing up the formula a little. and you have to hand it to Nintendo for finding ways to go viral, even as some folks have been disappointed by the Switch 2 lineup,

whether it's with this or Kamadachi Life or, you know, rhythm heaven. It's just there's a lot of weirdness going on with Nintendo these days, and I'm always there for Nintendo weirdness. Number seven, I had to put mixtape on here as well. Sorry, not sorry. Number six, Lego Batman, Legacy of the Dark Knight, which, you know, it's another. Lego game and all that that entails, but it's just really well done and polished and charming

and tough to put down and done with a lot of love for Batman. And, you know, is the formula wearing thin to some extent? We do kind of know what you're going to get with a Lego game based on some popular IP. And yet they keep getting chances to do that because people trust them with those properties because they really do justice to them and they become labors of love. And this is just a gigantic game and a pretty impressive open world and level of literacy for Batman and its history. Number five for me is Mina the Hollowark. I have to get that on somewhere too. Sorry, it's so low, Geo.

It's okay. You had it. You stuffed it at number one, so it's okay. Number four for me is Pragmata. Number three, I'm going to go there. I'm going to be this guy. Crimson Desert is on my list. Wow.

Which is among the most divisive games. in recent memory, certainly, whether you look at the division between player scores and critic scores or, in fact, within critic scores, the standard deviation of critic scores. There's no hurting here. You have people who thought this was incredible. You had people who thought this was trash. And I understand both perspectives. And yet, this game just kind of blew my mind. It's so ambitious and does it fulfill all of its ambitions? Absolutely not. Or at least it didn't at the time I played it, though I feel like I already need to revisit it because it's a completely different game than it was when I was playing it pre-release largely.

And so this has already become a story of rehabilitation and post-release glow-ups, which we've seen so much of in gaming. And sometimes that takes years. And in this case, it took weeks, months, maybe, because the pace of patching was just unbelievable and unparalleled. And the scope of this game, the visuals of this game were really something that set a new standard for me. And no, the story is not quite there. And yes, it does feel like reheated versions of umpteen other games just sort of smashed together.

And I know a lot of people thought this was just a gigantic world that was ultimately empty and not in a good meat of the hollower empty kind of way, but just devoid of life and character. But for me, it worked. And I had to salute it here. Number two for me is Resident Evil Requiem for all the reasons Gio mentioned. And number one, I am one-upping you here, Ali, and I'm putting Cairn in my top spot. Love it. Number two for you, you probably thought you were going to be the high man on Cairn. I loved Cairn so much.

And look, is it the game of the first half of the year in a larger sense in terms of how many people played it? Or I don't know. No, it's not, I guess, in that sense. but in terms of just personal appeal to me and how memorable I found this, it really does stand alone. And I'm excited that there's new DLC coming next month. So I will be returning to this world. And as you said, I mean, the controls feel kind of clunky, but in a good way,

because climbing is kind of clunky too. It's hard to climb. And this was an excellent simulation of that even more so than Toussaint. And I love the story. And I loved the setting and the graphical style, just everything about, Karen spoke to me. So this is a great list if we combined our top tens and however many games we would end up with. It's a lot. And there was a lot of divergence here, which I think speaks to, again, the strength of the games on offer that we were not in lockstep here. I feel

like I was the most basic, maybe the most chalky picker here, but we had a lot of points of departure. And I'm struck by the fact also that on my list, a lot of original. and really on all of our lists, I guess. And, you know, there is certainly a fatigue with remasters and remakes, and we're in this run from Star Fox to Black Flag to Halo to Ocarina, and are we just retreading the greats of past eras? And, of course, there's prequelitis and sequelitis, but much as with movies where people are suddenly saying,

ah, obsession, backrooms, you know, those are the movies that are breaking out. This is what audiences are hungering for. Meanwhile, Mando and Grogu and Supergirl are falling flat, and minions and monsters had a sort of soft launch. And we can oversell that. You know, there are still sequels and franchises and blockbusters and Super Mario Galaxy movie is the top-grossing movie so far. And Toy Story 5 is climbing that list. And we've got Spider-Man and Avengers and Dune. So there's plenty of huge franchise films and plenty of big franchise games.

But really, most of my selections are originals, or if they're... they are based on established IP, at least new takes on them. So I really didn't have any traditional sequels, I suppose, on my list. And that's kind of refreshing, I think. So there is so much, and there's so much more coming. And you might think this is kind of the, well, I guess I had one sequel, Rest and Evil Requiem, but we'll let that pass. There's so much coming that it feels like we're kind of in the con before the storm, but you just wrote Geo like next week, which might seem like kind of a lull, you zoom in a little, and it's just, it's packed with interesting indie games. So it's, there's really never any slack in the release calendar.

And with all the great games that we just named, Ali, you are sort of the foremost tracker and handicapper of the games of the year race, specifically at the game awards. And you're monitoring this throughout the year. And it, it strikes me that there's no obvious favorite among the many games that we have mentioned thus far. And it's different from last year. You know, I'm generally loath to cite prediction markets, but I think it's illustrative in this case, because this time last year, the overwhelming favorite, if you look at, say, Kalshi, was Klaerbskir, right? I mean, from the day Klaerbskir debuted, it was kind of, this is the game, right? And, you know, that came out in April. And we've kind of gotten away from the big games, the game of the year contenders

are holiday season releases, but maybe we're heading a little more for that this year. If you look at the odds and the probabilities this year, there's no clear consensus favorite. People still think it's going to be GTA, of course. That's the elephant looming in the room. But as you have noted, with the timing of that release, it's barely squeaking under the wire with the eligibility deadline for the Game Award. So what do you make of this? How do you assess the state of this race as it stands today?

I would say all the games we've mentioned for the first half of the year, there's only one that I think is a shortfire nominee, and that's Resident Evil. That will definitely get through. Because there's so many other good games that have an asterisk against them. Like, Fort's Horizon is six. It's brilliant, but it's a racing game. Nobody ever nominates racing games for Game the year.

Ditto Pokemon games. So Bacopoeia is out, spite reviewing incredibly well. Crimson Desert, I think, weirdly, is actually in the race. I think it has that. You're right. It has its hooks in the narrative. somehow and it's just not going away. But no, it hasn't been like the strongest first six months in terms, brilliant games,

but in terms of like stuff that you would expect to compete at the game boards and all the traditional like game of the year races. GTA, I mean, I think ultimately, like, I think the timing, especially considering what Rockstar does or doesn't do in terms of distributing review copies, it's going to be really tricky for the jury. I think ultimately the Game Awards will probably move its deadlines around to accommodate it because it would look

crazy if it wasn't in the running. And yes, it's the overwhelming favourite. I think you mentioned Kalshi, it's at like 70% on there, but I don't think it's invulnerable. If you look at the history, Red Dead Red Dead Red Dead Redemption 2 was beat out

by God of War in most awards the year that it came out. GTA 5 was beaten by The Last of Us in many awards the other day came out. You can take down a rock star game in these awards competitions. And there are a few games. There's two, I think, that have got a really good shot this year. Okay. So the first is the Blood of Dawn Walker.

Yes, this is my dark horse also. I don't know if it qualifies as a dark horse. but if I had to pick an upcoming game that might really mount a challenge, it would be this. It's getting really, really glowing previews. We're getting hands-on previews out there. People love it. It's got the Witcher 3 pedigree behind it. Yes.

But also, it's an original. The studio is a new studio. They've got that kind of outsider AAA thing going on where if you look at recent GameWords picks like Clare Obscure, like Border Skate 3, they're more open to these games that have arrived. in the mainstream from a slightly weird angle and from newer studios or independent studios, I should say. So that's one. The other one I would point out for people is control resonant. The Game Wars loves Remedy. The games are right in the sweet spot of the kind of things that the Game Awards enjoys these very cinematic, quite serious pieces of narrative gaming with very

slick production values, but they also have a little bit of an outsider thing because remedy is currently a fleafoting independent. The last, Alden Wake, though, it didn't win, did very well at the game awards when it came out a couple of years ago, so I could see that as a dark horse as well. But if we're looking at the game that's going to knock up those like 93, 94, 95 metric scores, whilst being right in the sweet spot of genre for the game boards, it's the blood of door Walker. I really think it's a genuine threat. And that's what we've been missing, I think, so far. There's a deep bench here, just an ensemble of very good games that we might consider

great, but the consensus, there has not been a above 90 metacritic games thus far. 90 is the ceiling so far, I think at least if you're looking at wide releases. So that's why the field feels so open. And maybe GTA will come out and be a masterpiece and fulfill everyone's expectations somehow. But there is some significant question about whether that can happen. And I wrote a big piece about that recently and some of my big questions about the games at the ringer. So you've covered the the GTA at TGA angle. But I also think there's a genuine, and this ties back to what we sort of talking about at the start. There's a genuine existential question about what GTA represents for the whole industry and for the art form that I think is going to start to creep into

people's minds. I've heard it discussed as like, this is the last video game in that sense that we can't actually keep doing this. And I don't know whether that pushes people toward it as like this is a last amazing, incredible indulgent celebration of what a AAA video game can be or if it pushes people away as like this is not the future of the art form. maybe this team in Poland with like a quarter of many people on it still making a game of scale on like a fraction of the budget is is what we're actually looking at.

And yes. The clear obscure wave was incredible last year. And I think I think reporting on it, I've got to be inured to it. But I was in the room at the BAFTA Games Awards earlier this year. They happened in April. They're extremely late. But the huge swell of support and the excitement within everybody in that room, and it was an industry room for that game

was really energizing. I was like, oh, yes, this is why people are excited about this game, apart from being very good, this is why people care. They're like, you can do it. You can make an original game and succeed. You can be an Indian maker game

that looks like a Final Fantasy game and that has that level of scope and grandeur about it. And I do think that's where the sentiment lies, not with a big beast like Rockstar. So I think, I think this could be more interesting than people think. Yeah, it felt like the vanguard. It felt like the way forward.

It felt hopeful. Easier said than done. Oh, this is how you make a great successful game. Just make a game like Crowscare if only it were that simple. But yes, GTA, it does feel like maybe it's the culmination or maybe it feels like the last gas or a vestige of a dying era or something. That was one of my questions, too, which isn't to say that if Rockstar puts out GTA 7 in 2039 or whatever that people won't get hyped for it.

But yeah, can you make games in this mold? It's obviously a singular case and a unicorn to some extent. But, you know, can it wow us after this long wait after all the expectations, after the fact that, you know, you've got diminishing returns going from one generation to the next. Now we're hard to impress because the games are so good. The baseline is so high. Plus, we don't know if it'll feel dated at all from having been in development for so long.

narratively, setting-wise, can Rockstar write a romance that is actually the central aspect of that story? We haven't really seen that. What's the multiplayer plan? We still have no idea. We haven't seen gameplay yet, as we speak, aside from Leet's footage from four years ago.

So there is a lot that we don't know. And it's being made without Dan Houser, who's been the creative architecture of these games since GTA-3. Yes. I wouldn't bet against rock stars ability to make something feel fresh and relevant. Like they've proved time and time and time again that they can do it. And I'm not going to assume that that was just Dan.

I'm sure there's institutional knowledge there and everything I've seen from the trailers and the way they've just down to curating the songs on the trailers. I think I feel like they've still got it. Yeah. I worry a bit, though, looking at Red Dead Redemption too, whether they've still got it on a more mechanical sense. Like, Reddit is an amazing game, but it's clumsy as shit. Like, it's got way too many buttons.

It's really fiddly. It's amazing that somebody can release something like that and call it a mainstream game because it's quite off-putting. And they have this amazing allure that they'll get you over that hump, and I'm sure GTA6 will do it as well. But that's where I feel like they might be sliding to drift a bit out of touch. But, of course, we haven't seen any of that yet. We haven't seen gameplay yet, so I wouldn't like to say.

That's tough to gauge. And people will debate, well, that was part of the plan for Red Dead. It's friction so that you feel like you're really in this world, and it's hard to do these things. But also, sometimes it can feel kind of clunky. And maybe that wasn't entirely intended. And, of course, the hope that GTA will be a system seller, that it will restore the console ecosystem. Well, that's pretty tough to do if no one can afford those systems. and maybe they can't even manufacture enough to keep up with the demands.

So it's hard to see that coming. I've heard that Sony is confident that it has enough PS5 stock on hand to see it into next year, including what it expects it's going to sell off the back of GTA. If they can hold off from a price rise before then, if they bought all that inventory long enough ago, and I think that's maybe possible, then it's still going to be big. It's still going to be a big bump for them.

It's going to be a big bump for PS5. It's going to get a lot more next-gen systems out there. That's even with the prices as they are, that's still definitely going to happen. So it is, I mean, I keep hearing people say, just wait till GTA-5, everything's going to be fine. Not only is it going to be an amazing, like, era-defining work of art, but it's going to completely solve all of the industry's problems as well.

And that's not true. especially since the model that it belongs to is one that is unsustainable for literally anybody else. Yes, expecting a panacea. It is going to help. There's going to be more people excited about playing a game. People have drifted away. I haven't played anything a few years. They're like, oh, I've got to play GTA.

It's going to help, right? And then we roll into next year and there's just more people out there going, oh, what am I going to play next? It's a tall order. I'm in between. If anything can live up to the hype. Yeah. So, Gio, last question for you then, because we've talked a lot about the pre-GTA pile-up,

and we will have plenty of previewing of GTA 6 on this podcast when the time comes. But everyone else crowded out of the way to avoid the big, bad behemoth that is coming on November 19th. And as a result, every other game of the year is coming out between late August and maybe mid to late October. And perhaps there's no better illustration of this than Onimusha Way of the Sword, which is the next perhaps great Capcom game, we will see, just shifted up. Often we see games come out later than expected. This is coming out earlier. So it was supposed to come out September 25th, and they said, well, that's crowded

because we've got Dune Awakening coming to consoles. We have Control Resonance. We have Silent Hill Townfall. We have other things coming out within a day or two of that. Okay, let's move it to September 3rd. Uh-oh. Well, wait, or September 4th, September 3rd, we have orbitals, which looks like a really fun switch anime-inspired co-op kind of split fiction game,

and the blood of Don Walker is also coming out September 3rd. So you try to end up in a less crowded portion of the schedule, and it's still extremely crowded. So there are going to be some winners and losers of this inevitably, right? There will be some great games that just get lost in the shuffle. So how do you see this playing out, and is there anything that you're particularly looking forward to? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's a battle royale, right? that like September to early October, I mean, is just untenable. And like, yeah, there are definitely to be things that just like lose attention out of it.

I think like there have been some games that have been smart to move. Valor Mortis was one of the ones that like was supposed to be in that September 24th range. And it was like, I mean, we're not. We know. We know that we're, we're not going to get attention down here. I kind of worry about control resonant, if I'm being totally honest. Like I think as much as that game, I think will be a critical. darling really, really busy.

Like we're also, we haven't even mentioned like Marvel's Wolverine is coming out this month, right? Yeah. That is, that is like the big, like, we know that's going to be a big like metacritic hit, like everyone's talking about it kind of game. So, you know, control is going to be competing into that and blood, one of the Don Walker and Onamusha and like all these games that are going to have like a couple of weeks on it.

So I do worry about that. I worry about Silent Hill Townfall a lot. That game. I've seen gameplay of it behind the scenes. you know, it looks really neat, but it also is like a much smaller, more niche kind of attempt at the Silent Hill IP. And I just,

I don't think you're going to get a Silent Hill F moment with that. I think it's going to be a much, much smaller game, which I'm sure they're sure they know and are prepared for, but I worry that's going to get buried. I really do. I think there's a lot of opportunity, though. I think there's like plenty of games in there that hopefully will have some room to break out.

Ace Combat 8, which is coming in early October. It seems like that is going to be a little bit more of a mainstream breakout for like a very, very niche series and continue that. I hope so, too. I'm so excited for that one. I really am. Me too. Orbitals, I think, is going to be a huge breakout. You know, speaking about that kind of early September block previews for it just dropped.

I played at the Summer Game Fest and it is fantastic. It's scratching a very specific nostalgic itch in terms of the art style. But also, you know, I think people really want multi-fews. player games, you know, and we saw that with split fiction last year. And the fact that it's like a hazelight game, but it's not hazelight is like a pretty good selling point, you know, like in some ways for a lot of people. So, so I think that'll be a huge breakout there. The thing I am most curious about is what actually dares to drop in November, what actually dares to like go against GTA6, because at the end of the day, there's still a lot of runway in that month. Like,

you can still drop something early November and be far enough away if you're like, a game that people are going to beat by the 19th anyways, right? I think it'll be interesting to see when the Ocarina Time remake drops. I think that's like this weird, like, we're not talking about it because they have given the release date, but like there's a chance that that comes out and it is like the game of the year contender for a lot of people, right? Depending on how big that remake is or if it's just a graphical overhaul, who knows, that's one to watch.

The one to watch for me, though, the big November game that I'm excited about, forget GTA 6. Let me tell you the hot thing. Let me bring you in on this. Barbie rewind, baby. The smartest counter-programming that has ever happened. Atari is dropping a new Barbenheimer. A collection of Barbie games around the time that GTA 6 is coming out,

like old school, old school, like Game Boy and PlayStation 1 Barbie games with like a meta layer, like new game kind of on top of it that like incentivizes you to go and explore these other games. And like unironically, completely unironically like I think that's awesome. Like I'm very excited for it. These are games that I have never touched that are like culturally significant. And like just a great way where like if you're just not interested in GTA6 and you're like, I don't know. Like I don't care about this like crazy violent crime game.

Like I, you know, I want to play something that's like cozy. That's my style. This I'm psyched about it. I'm psyched that they're like brave enough to do this. And I think it's very smart. And I think more games that are like very separate from what GTA6 is doing. like they could spot into that space and I think be fine. And I think you'll see that for Nintendo, especially.

I think Nintendo knows, like, well, we don't have GTA6 on Switch, so we need to counter-program the heck out of it. And I imagine that they're going to own that month. Yeah, that's what I'm wondering about. Ocarina will be big. And, you know, I tend to go originals on my lists, which is probably why I left Black Flag Resig off of my top 10, even though it probably is one of my top 10 gaming experiences of this year so far.

But Nintendo is sort of a cipher. We know that Spatoon Raiders is coming soon later this month. We'll be talking about it. You've played it. And we know that Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave is coming in September. We don't know when Ocarina is coming. We don't know when the Dustbloods is coming. And does Nintendo have some sort of secret up its sleeve, some Ace, some Samus,

because there was a leak from the Brazil Ministry of Justice and Public Security of all places where a rating apparently leaks for Metroid ravenous, which people are speculating is possibly a 2D follow-up to dread. So do you think Nintendo is going to drop some kind of killer app here? I mean, probably Akarina is the flagship holiday title, right? But is there some surprise in store? I think Aquina and Fire Ramblin are both the flagships for the holiday season. I think we're underestimating Fire Rumble a little bit.

I think it's a weird one because, like, Engage people didn't really care about. Fire and Blum Engage, but like Three Houses was like a massive hit. And I feel like this is way more of a follow-up to that, or is Engage kind of felt like a side game a little bit. So I think that's more of like a killer app than I think people will see it as perhaps. But it'll depend on how much it scratches the itch of three houses. I think Aquarine is the big deal. I think that Metroid Ravenus could be a real thing.

and I wouldn't be surprised if that is something that we like hear about soon and they're like yeah it's coming in three months you know in that classic like Nintendo quick announcement to release something I wonder if that would be

like a December game if that's more of like we know this isn't going to be an awards thing it's going to be our kind of like niche like we want to have a game every month thing you know which is what they did with Metroid Prime for ish last year

that was like a late year release what I will say is that if Metroid Raveness is up their sleeve and that is a thing. I feel like people forget that like Dread was a game of the year competitor when it came out. Like that was a game awards. I think it was up for the game award. It was up for like the GDC Awards. That studio and in a weird year, to be clear, like it was in a very, very strange year that it got into that.

That was like, I don't know, death loop. Is death loop the game of the year? I don't know. Everything's like an 88 on Metacritic. We don't know. But I think if that team does have a 2D metric up its sleeve and it is building on what it built with dread and maybe fixing some of the things

people didn't like about it. That is a dark horse, but I think that Ocarina... I just remembered... Yeah, I remembered one of the game so from that Nintendo Direct, the big tune Nintendo Direct, my kids watched it as their first time

engaging with the video games PI cycle. And obviously they're very excited about Ocarina Time, but the game that they immediately were like, I want that was Big Walk. and they were really, really pumped about Big Walk. So this is like they, it's sort of, I don't want to be mean, but a friend slot made by people who actually know how to make a video game.

And it looks just really, really fun. And for their generation of players, their sort of Minecraft brain, Roblox brain generation, they saw it, they instantly understood it, they instantly wanted it. So I'm interested, I'm not saying it's going to be a mecha-cameleon-sized smash. but just in terms of what Gio was saying about orbitals as well,

the potential for one of these multiplayer games to go a bit viral, I think that will be an interesting one. Yeah, and another game unveiled in that direct Final Fantasy Resonance is coming in October 2. So there's a ton to be excited for. We've named draft and name-checked so many games and didn't even mention others that I'm excited for. So the Colchie traders somehow have Fable as a top 10 favorite for game of the year, which someone should probably let them know that that got delayed until the next year.

You can short that, maybe pick up a few pennies. But, you know, I'm excited for the Star Wars games, of course, Zero Company, Galactic Racer. There's Phantom Blade Zero coming in late October. There's a new Castlevania game coming in mid-October. There's just so much here. I forgot about all this. I know. Wolverine coming mid-September.

It's not the only Marvel game that people are excited for right next month, Marvel Token Fighting Souls is coming in early August. I mean, it's just, it's kind of a killer lineup. It's just a litany of potentially great games. So this more than most recent years, I think we can say it's already been a good year for gaming, but it feels up in the air, really, what the final legacy of 2026 will be.

And we will find out over the next few months, and people can keep track of that here on ButtonMash, and of course they can read Polygon, where they can follow as Geo continues his quest to play every game release this year. And Ali monitors the smart money, the best picks for the game awards and how that develops as we get closer to the end of the year. So we talked about things might be burning around us, but we're playing on happily.

There's always plenty to play. I feel like the Titanic band may be just playing as the ship sinks, But nonetheless, we have so much to get to and so much to discuss. And I'm glad that I could do it with you guys. So thank you. And thanks to you for listening. And sorry, my mic crapped out midpod. Yes, that happened.

This is what I'm supposed to sound like. Whoops. Maybe in about 13 years, we will release a button mash re-sinct, where I go back and re-record the last half hour of this podcast in higher audio fidelity. Speaking of Black Flag, after I talked to Geo and Ali, reports came out that Ubisoft, laid off a bunch of the people who worked on that game, right as it came out and met with a warm reception from us and everyone. And if that doesn't sum up the highs and lows and odd dual dynamic of this year in gaming, I don't know what does. Other than maybe the other news

that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma just joined a Federal Reserve Task Force on jobs and productivity. You can't make it up. You can, however, contact us at RingverseGaming at gmail.com. If we snubbed any of your first half favorites, maybe Mugenics or MOUDICs or MOUDivety. or invincible verses or esoteric ebb. Write in and let us know. Look, we haven't played everything yet, but by the end of the year, we will have. That's an ambitious goal.

But for our year end, games of the year draft when we do our final official accounting of 2026 in gaming, I'll be joined by Matt and Steve and the regular crew. And this way, we won't all repeat what we said at the midway mark.

Thank you to Devin Ronaldo for producing this episode and to our Juno Ramgapal. For letting us go back to the well for more mashing so soon. We'll be back later this month to discuss Splatun Raiders, Halo campaign evolved, and who knows what else. I'm sure 2026 has many more surprises in store.

And I look forward to talking about them with you. When we're back on Button Mesh.