GameCentral offers a round-up of the big announcements from the Xbox Games Showcase and how what it didn’t talk about was as important as what it did. The not-E3 period of summer showcases is meant to be a time of excitement and surprise but that’s not really how things have worked out this year, even though a number of very promising new games were shown. Once again, the PlayStation State of Play was devastatingly uninteresting, with only two first party games, while Sumer Game Fest was fine but had no real scene stealers.
And, just like last year, the Xbox Games Showcase was by far and away the most impressive of the three (Nintendo has a Direct planned for June but there’s no date yet). This time, Sony at least had the promising looking Astro Bot, but if anything Xbox’s showcase was even better than last year, even if the other constant from 2023 is that everything of note had leaked out well ahead of time. Doom: The Dark Ages and Gears Of War 6 were the big reveals but those had been rumoured for weeks, with the name of the former leaking out ahead of time but not the latter – which is actually called Gears Of War: E-Day and seems to be a prequel starring a young Marcus Fenix.
The majority of games were shown as either pre-rendered trailers or in the ambiguous middle ground where they’re using in-game assets but clearly aren’t gameplay. The Indiana Jones segment, for example, was very impressive but the majority of it was clearly a cut scene where you, as th.
