Julius

We'll have men on Pluto before England make it out of a group with all 9 points. Why the hell were we passing it centrally instead of pushing the ball into a corner to cross it in at the very end there? Speaks volumes.

Made it to our first final in 55 years and lost trying to protect a 1-0 lead for 120+ minutes that we got in the 2nd minute and no longer had in the 67th. I mean, if you don't learn from that, I don't think he'll learn from this either

Beautiful goal from Hjulmand. Yeah, no-one can be surprised we dropped deep and then conceded after scoring. It's our MO at this point. It's what lost us the Euro's final in 2021, and it's coming back to bite us now. I can't help but think that it's a mental thing where players are looking at their captain dropping deeper. Kane scores plenty, but he's a bit of a snail these days and drops deep a lot, which works great with pacey wingers but not so much when we hate fizzing the ball around and over the top (for some reason). So he comes back, the midfield then I think comes back too, they see him playing a bit slower, and everyone else slows down too? He's a great goalscorer, so obviously he needs to be on the pitch, and his time with Spurs and even Bayern this past season shows him dropping deep can be very effective because he's a great passer of the ball. When he drops, though, we lack players on the wings who are willing to run back and forth to make those sprints to make use of those passes -- and, again, fizzing it over the top and around diagonally doesn't seem to be part of Southgate's plan anyways. Anyways, grateful I'm not needing to listen to Lee Dixon and the ITV bunch, but I'm not sure what surprises me more: Southgate-ball and how stupid it is, or people - including the BBC commentators and pundits - expecting him to not play Southgate-ball and being surprised when he does. Like, have you seen England play at the last few major tournaments? This is us through and through. Hopefully it picks up but I'm pinning most of my hopes on Spain v Italy to give us something fun to watch. It's not even tense watching England in the group stage, it's just boring; imagine not taking any risks or making any changes when you're the big boy in one of the easiest groups in the tournament. Urgh.

Someone at Ubisoft jumped the gun with a tweet which has now been taken down, but no matter: this is arriving June 25th -- that's this coming Tuesday! Guessing this was saved for LRG and was maybe meant to be a shadowdrop? Can't help but wonder if this has faced a mini delay, because I can't think of any other reason you'd save it for LRG over Ubi's own show.

Here England go again, then. Would be nice if we could score more than just the one goal tonight boys

Launch trailer for Shadow of the Erdtree: Way more interestingly, though: the latest patch, 1.12, has updated the base game's final battle to include Torrent – you know, that FINAL BATTLE IN A MASSIVE ARENA WITH CERTAIN ATTACKS CLEARLY DESIGNED TO BE TAKEN ON WITH TORRENT?! Kind of insane to not only see it added, but to see it updated this far out from the game's initial release, and tied to the update going live before SotE goes live – I wonder if that's a hint that there might be another big boss battle where you can do this in the DLC?

Funnily enough, this happened back in 2012 as well - when they met in the group stages and then again in the final. They do tend to cross paths a lot, though -- and checking on it now, they've played against each other at least once at every edition of the Euro's since and including 2008 (so this is the 5th competition in a row!), and Italy haven't beat Spain in any competition since they did so in the knockouts of Euro 2016. Should be an interesting one. Definitely two of the favourites and their clash on the semi-finals in Euro 2020(/21) is still one of the best international matches I've seen.

To me visually it looks like a shinier version of what we saw in Prime Remastered (based on the trailers and the first few hours I spent with the game), but I do agree with @killthenet that it seems a little early to make the call on it. What we see in the trailer, for the most part, I'm guessing is the absolute start of the game, and from my limited time with Metroid games up to this point, it looks par for the course? There's still plenty of time to show off new mechanics and a greater sense of identity, but this trailer was to reintroduce Prime 4 after not hearing anything about it officially since they restarted development in 2019, and before that we only had that generic logo reveal from 2017. There seems to be a portal behind Samus in the stinger -- so maybe we're saying some type of space/time travel this time around? Which is a cool thing to tease but absolutely shouldn't be where you go with your first trailer for a game like this. Anyways, hadn't commented on it before, but so happy to see Sylux turn up here. I had a friend who played Hunters when we were younger on the playground back in primary school and I spent countless hours just staring at character trophies in Smash Bros. Brawl, just wondering what these characters were all like in games I didn't own/had no way to access, and Sylux just always looked really cool to me.

Metroid Prime Remastered is 30% off (down to £24.49) and Metroid Dread is 33% off (down to £33.29) on the eShop until 30th June, following this week's Metroid news in the Direct. If you've been holding out for a digital version of these games for whatever reason, I guess now might be the time to pick them up!

Really professional handled game by Germany to get the win over Hungary, who on another night could've drawn or even won -- they just couldn't take their chances. Musiala has been great once again, in last tournaments there were flashes of brilliance but he's so far been very consistent in the opening two matches. Germany's defence looks like it could be there for the taking against a better team, though, but I'd say the same about most of the defensive back lines at this tournament; football is seriously lacking in quality centre backs and defensive-minded fullbacks these days, similar to how we don't see many traditional 9's.

Really professional handled game by Germany to get the win over Hungary, who on another night could've drawn or even won -- they just couldn't take their chances. Musiala has been great once again, in last tournaments there were flashes of brilliance but he's so far been very consistent in the opening two matches. Germany's defence looks like it could be there for the taking against a better team, though, but I'd say the same about most of the defensive back lines at this tournament; football is seriously lacking in quality centre backs and defensive-minded fullbacks these days, similar to how we don't see many traditional 9's.

Hungary are chomping at the bit early on in this match against Germany. Nothing to show for it yet, but in less than 10 minutes they've already had a few more chances than Scotland did across the 90 last Friday.

As someone who enjoyed TotK but found the menus to be even more stuffed than they were in BotW... ...yeah, I totally agree. The approach they're taking is an interesting one but it absolutely looks more in line with some of the ideas from TotK's Ultrahand and the general BotW/TotK approach of doing things your own way vs a hard set of solutions to puzzles as I think you'd expect in a 2D Zelda. This game feels to me like Nintendo are going "trust me, WE HEARD YOU! kindofmaybe HERE'S THE 2D ZELDA LIKE YOU ASKED FOR intheartstyleofLAremakewhichsomepeoplewerespliton AND HERE'S PLAYABLE ZELDA LIKE YOU'VE BEEN ASKING FOR butwithanon-traditional2Dapproach ANYWAYS GIVE US YOUR MONEY NOW K THANKS BYEEEEEEEE". I'll be shocked if this game doesn't split opinion when it releases. Personally, I like the idea they've got going on - and I think if you're not going to give Zelda a sword it's either this or a pure magic-casting system, and this seems way more in line with the idea of open experimentation popularised with BotW and TotK, in fact it really reminded me of that 2D Zelda demo we got for BotW back in the day at GDC - but I think the look of it, like you guys have been saying, is going to remind those who weren't fans of BotW/TotK a little too much of those games, whether it's the approach to puzzle design or even just the UI. Which means the game might not start off on the right for some people already. Happy to be proven wrong, though. I think there's a lot of cool stuff they can do with this Echo system, but I guess we'll need to wait and see!

Me in the Direct thread just after it was announced: there's no way Ashley spends time anywhere else on the internet, right guys? Obligatory You Will Know Our Names

Beyond Good and Evil - 20th Anniversary Edition will be turning up to the Limited Run Games Showcase at 14:00 EST (that's 19:00 BST) on Thursday 20th: Crazy that this game managed to dodge every major conference this month, including Ubisoft's own.

Reminder that Limited Run Games have their June show on Thursday, and they've announced that there will be 20 new upcoming LRG projects being announced: Elsewhere, the Bandai Namco Summer Showcase has been set for 5th July during Anime Expo 2024.

TimeSplitters has been rated for PS4 and PS5 in Taiwan, leaving some to believe it will be included in the next batch of PS2 Classics:

Well I typed it up, then deleted it, then typed it back out again... @drahkon what did the people of the Czech Republic ever do to you?!

You just had to say it Game on!

What a beaut from Provod!

Time to see what this Portugal team have to add to this tournament

The Steam Page for the game is already up, and with it comes a super clean and presentable image of the protagonists for the first two games with Erdrick nicely cropped out and the logos popped in, and it looks real good. For whatever reason that wasn't on the S-E press release page so I'm not sure if someone working on the Steam page jumped the gun or went the extra mile, but I'll take it! Eh, Konami seem to be doing the same thing with how they're starting over with Snake Eater, too. I think it makes some sense when the story is known and has been for a few decades in the case of Snake Eater and the Erdrick trilogy, just to reorder things to make it approachable for newcomers. It does expose them to potential issues with story payoff if there's something in that later game that's now coming first, but I think there are other ways they could manage that, too.

Damn it Ike what are you trying to do to my wallet?! What did I ever do to you?! Anywho, the official art for III and the trilogy without logos is up for this via the S-E press pages and gosh darn, they're just beautiful: Here's a question -- what platform is everyone planning to pick this up for? I have this weird thing where even for remakes, especially 2D remakes, I find myself wanting to almost default to the brand it originally released on...so I'm leaning towards getting this for my Switch? But then, well, it'd surely perform a bit better on my PS5, right? Hmm. Decisions, decisions... Also! Seems like a new vocation is being added?

Been so busy and focused on the hype of the Nintendo Direct that I totally forgot -- reviews and previews dropped for Shadow of the Erdtree at 15:00 today! And, at time of writing, this is currently sitting at 95 on Metacritic and 94 on OpenCritic. Time for gaming to have another conversation at the end of the year about whether or not a DLC/expansion can be considered for GOTY, I guess, because if we go purely off review scores and aggregates here - which, okay, isn't the most complete picture - Shadow of the Erdtree is the highest rated game of the year so far on both MC (beating Rebirth, which is on 92) and OC (again beating Rebirth, which is on 93). Anyways, I've got to round off Peace Walker first, but expect me back in this thread before Shadow of the Erdtree drops this weekend, because I've made a very, very stupid decision