Video game news in review: The biggest news from the week of August 30, 2024

It feels like the video game world has been catching fire with hot news constantly off the press. It probably doesn't help that Gamescom 2024 happened last week and flooded everyone's senses.

But the news didn't slow down last week or this week, so let's get right to it, because there's a lot.

Tomb Raider Nettlix cartoon

Okay, this hit last week, but we still wanted to cover it because we love everything Hayley Atwell does. And she's pretty dang perfect as the next Lara Croft for Netflix's upcoming cartoon:

Remedy Entertainment & Annapurna are partnering

Or personal favorite developers, Remedy Entertainment, announced on Thursday they're partnering with Annapurna, the independent multi-platform media company, to finance Control 2 and build out the Remedyverse with Alan Wake and Control coming to film and television.

You can read both press releases at Remedy's website, but this is great news. It means Remedy will have the funding to make the Control 2 they want (which was always what they preached for Alan Wake 2) and we'll get even more insane, heavily Finnish content from them. I'd love to see Control as a TV series.

New games releasing this week

There are two big name games releasing this week. The first one, Star Wars Outlaws, is Ubisoft's open-world game they've been touting for a while. It's getting decent reviews, although everyone's complaining that the stealth system is lackluster. As always, Gameranx has a solid Before You Buy if you want some insight into it before spending your money:

The second one is our personal favorite that we're excited for: Squirrel with a Gun. This is a sandbox shooter mixed with a puzzle platformer and the squirrel is so dang adorable. You can either be a help or a hindrance and we cannot wait to play it and see just how much fun it is to be a squirrel with a gun.

The best and worst of online gaming communities

This is some fun insight: Casino.ca did a study of over 4,000 gamers to get a look at the online gaming community. Not surprisingly, the most inclusive and friendlist gaming community is Minecraft while the most female-friendly is The Sims. And also to no one's surprise, the most toxic community is Call of Duty.

The latest Nintendo Showcase

Nintendo had a two-fer this week with a back-to-back Indie World Showcase and Nintendo Direct: Partner Showcase. There was no mention of the Switch 2, as they commented on Twitter beforehand, but there are some fun-looking games on the horizon. You can watch the 40-ish-minute presentation below:

New Xbox consoles

Oh yeah, this one hit last week, too: Microsoft announced a mid-cycle update to the Xbox Series consoles. It's slightly cheaper pricing for slightly more storage, basically: $350 for the Series S 1TB, $450 for the Series X Digital 1TB, and $600 for the Series X 2TB.

Honestly, I'm not a fan of the mid-cycle updates to consoles, especially since current video games are barely using the Xbox Series and PlayStation 5s to their actual potential, but the corporate greed machine never stops rolling.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer

Last up is the official trailer for the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which gives us our first look at Keanu Reeves' Shadow. Michele here at Culturess has a fun writeup about it!

What gaming news happened this week that has you excited? Let us know in the comments!