Purely Academic #33 - Not-E3 2026! All the Gaming News from Sony, Xbox & More!

The most wonderful and/or tedious time of the year has come once more: It’s Not-E3 2026, when all of the video game giants share their biggest announcements for the year. As always, we’re here to recap it, with thoughts on Sony’s State of Play, the Summer Game Fest, and the Xbox Showcase, across which we saw the unveiling of God of War Laufey, the sooner-than-expected Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the long-awaited reveal of Persona 6 and more gameplay of Persona 4 Revival, and much more, including Xbox’s completely incoherent exclusivity ‘strategy.’ We also find some time to quickly review Saros, the new PS5 exclusive from Housemarque, and talk about 007 First Light from Hitman developers IO Interactive. A very silly Monthly Ten rounds out the episode, in which Jonathan pitches 10 Star Wars projects for Disney to announce and then quickly abandon.   Enjoy! TIME CHART: Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:04:33 General Gaming News: 0:04:33 – 0:31:08 Sony State of Play: 0:31:08 – 1:13:12  Summer Game Fest: 1:13:12 – 1:59:45 Xbox Showcase: 1:59:45 – 2:47:34 Saros: 2:47:34 – 2:53:50 007 First Light: 2:53:50 – 3:14:39 The Monthly Ten: 3:14:39 – 3:46:59 Read Jonathan Lack’s movie reviews and stay up to date with all our podcast projects at https://www.jonathanlack.comSubscribe to JAPANIMATION STATION, our podcast about the wide and wonderful world of anime: https://www.japanimation-station.com Read Jonathan’s book 200 Reviews in Paperback or on Kindle – https://a.co/d/bLx53vKSubscribe to our YouTube channels! Japanimation Station: https://www.youtube.com/c/japanimationstation  Purely Academic: https://www.youtube.com/@purelyacademicpodcastSupport the show at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuffOriginal Music by Thomas Lack https://www.thomaslack.com/©2012 - Present Jonathan R. Lack & Sean Chapman