Friday was the day that everybody decided to say all the deeply held gaming secrets at once, a policy that only echoed for the rest of the weekend and technically - technically - won't even resolve until today at noon my time, when Ubisoft does its thing. My favorite things from them were the pre-RPG Assassin's Creeds and Splinter Cell, which is to say I haven't been "addressed" as a "market" for a while. But Bungie also dropped the raid that unlocks The Final Shape's ending mission on the same day, with all the revelations that must certainly entail.  

As if all this weren't sufficient for a Friday, it was also Prom for my Eldest, which put me into a kind of hypervigilant state I couldn't shake for hours just in case something happened that would require immediacy. Nothing did, but it put me into the perfect headspace to watch teams try to get the world first for hours upon hours while my body's threat compounds were breaking down. There was an evil puzzle that basically locked the whole process down worldwide so long that the TwitchRivals stream covering the event shut down before it happened. Destiny Raids really aren't like anything else; I'd heard at one point that they pointedly choose designers from outside the shooter discipline for them. It makes sense if that's the case: they're like rubbing your belly, pattings your head, and solving a Rubik's Cube with your feet. In an old WoW raid, once I had to hide behind a column. In Destiny 2, you might have to manufacture a multidimensional proof of Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Summer Game Fest felt a little weird to me; this is probably why Gorf tried to manage the fervor a little bit. My favorite bit was probably the announcement of Outersloth, Innersloth's indie fund honestly. There is a lot of stuff in varying states of manufacture that I think we can look at, that was the weekend in general, and maybe it's just because it was the last one I saw but the Xbox Showcase had a couple nice things in it. I think Fable might actually bang. I couldn't make heads or tails of the first Indy trailer, and somehow this new one is better than the last movie. If Ubi shows Splinter Cell or a new Division that might end up being an enduring takeaway, but the best thing I've seen so far - the one I'm prepared to advocate for in a full throated way, was Doom: The Dark Ages. I'm literally going to embed it.

I don't think that Doom Eternal was as good as what we generally call Doom (2016) these days. It sorta hung out too long. Dark Ages looks like exactly the right kind of dumb.  The Romero aesthetic, ascended.

(CW)TB out.