Before Summer Game Fest kicks off and we get all carried away with the new games (or not-so-new games, as the case may be) revealed, I thought I’d share a bit more about what I got up to this past weekend. I attended DreamHack Dallas 2024, where I got see some of the best people in the world play video games and a whole lot more than that.
This year’s DreamHack had a lot more than just esports — though that was more than present and accounted for — with a lot of the floor taken up by an expanded artist’s alley, a large number of booths for indie game developers, and a massive tabletop section.
When I say “massive,” I mean that a whole portion of the convention center was blocked off specifically for card games and tabletop RPGs. There was a Magic: The Gathering tournament happening pretty much all weekend. Among the robust non-esports or esports-adjacent live content was a D&D one-shot DMed by one Brennan Lee Mulligan and played live by Zac Oyama, Erika Ishii, Anjali Bhimani, Valeria Rodriguez and Anna Margaret. It was great fun and surprisingly accessible despite the general furor around the event hall. Hopefully this is the sort of thing DreamHack keeps doing in future years.
Other than the live D&D, one of the most intriguing things about the show was how much space the event organizers offered to local indie developers. Around two dozen booths in the center of the floor were filled with showcases for games created by said devs, and DreamHack attendees were able to play demos of most of them. They even offered some of them for sale in the form of “Zettes,” or small flash drives secreted in cassette tape cases. It was heartening to see so much attention given to up-and-coming developers.
Anyway, in personal news, I was quite excited by the reveal of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf’s new title, The Veilguard. Not necessarily because the name is thrilling — I have no idea, as yet, who “the Veilguard” is — but because it means that there’s some forward momentum on the new Dragon Age game and I might get to play it sometime this century. I won’t have much time to play much of anything this weekend beyond a bit of Little Kitty, Big City. That’s assuming, of course, that no games get shadow-dropped this weekend. A girl can dream.
What to play this week
What’s new:
- Star Wars: Hunters
- Destiny 2: The Final Shape
- Killer Klowns From Outer Space: The Game
- Rolling Hills
- Autopsy Simulator
- Chornobyl Liquidators
- Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge
- Sneak Out
- The Smurfs: Village Party
New on subscription services:
- Firework (Xbox Game Pass)
- Octopath Traveler (Xbox Game Pass)
- Octopath Traveler II (Xbox Game Pass)
- SpongeBob Squarepants: The Cosmic Shake (PlayStation Plus)
- AEW Fight Forever (PlayStation Plus)
- Streets of Rage 4 (PlayStation Plus)
- Star Wars: Battlefront II (Prime Gaming)
- Weird West Definitive Edition (Prime Gaming)
- Genesis Noir (Prime Gaming)
- Farm Together 2 (GeForce Now)
- Street Fighter 6 (GeForce Now)
- XDefiant (GeForce Now)
- Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge (Nintendo Switch Online)
- Mega Man II (Nintendo Switch Online)
- Mega Man III (Nintendo Switch Online)
- Mega Man IV (Nintendo Switch Online)
- Mega Man V (Nintendo Switch Online)
- Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse (Apple Arcade)
- Return to Monkey Island+ (Apple Arcade)
- Tomb of the Mask+ (Apple Arcade)
- Fabulous – Wedding Disaster+ (Apple Arcade)