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The Jeff Gerstmann Show - A Podcast About Video Games

June 16, 2026

Some hands-on reporting from the worlds of Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Turok Origins, Stranger Than Fiction, and Sprawl Zero. Also: last week’s “Xbox has to make some tough choices” talk turns into this week’s “massive layoff and studio closure” talk. EA gets (back) into in-game advertising.
Speakers: Jeff Gerstmann
**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:06)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:06)
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**Jeff Gerstmann** (1:21)
Hey, what's happening, everybody? Welcome to the program. I'm Jeff Gerstmann. This is The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It's a podcast. It's about video games.
I mean, while there are still those, we're all in on that. It's here, we're mid-June, 2026 And yeah, I don't know, we're about a week removed from The Summer Game Fest, as well as the assorted shows that aired around it.
And yeah, I don't know, we're settling in for the rest of the year, you know, settling in for the back. This is when all the video games come out, you know? And now the payoff, like, you know, we spend the first six months reaping and then the next six months sowing.
And everything comes out great, right? And then that's sort of the, that's sort of how that's supposed to work, I think. We're in the middle of the Steam Next Fest, which is a bunch of demos are out.
And that's running through the rest of this week into Monday. There's, I don't know, I have never been a big demo person, because, you know, those games come out eventually, and, you know, it's like, I can look at them then. There are so many games out right now that spending a much of time going like, ah, the demos, you know, is like, well, I don't know, there's a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, I don't know, the Sprawl Zero demo is probably the one that I was most attracted to. That's been on my wish list for a little while here. It's a first person shooter, kind of in the vein of, um, you know, like maybe I think, you know, from a from a distance, I think Sprawl Zero looks a little bit like Quake 2 Um, like aesthetically, the form factor of the guns and just the little bits and pieces of how that stuff looks. Um, but gameplay wise, that's not really the game that they're making. It is, it's a game in which you seem to only be able to hold one gun, and that's more than enough, because when that gun is empty, you throw it at people and that's fun. And also you have like gravity gloves that you can use to like pull guns towards you. And so, hey, uh, zap, you know, so you zap a gun into your hand. They give you like bullet time and when you kill people while bullet time is active, health pops out of them. And so you end up in this cycle of make things slow, shoot a bunch of people, throw your gun at someone, grab another gun, go pick up this health. You know, you're kind of popping in and out of slow motion all the while. And navigating this environment, you know, that has a nice look to it. And the shooting feels good. The gravity stuff feels very crunchy. Like there's a lot of stuff in the environment that you can kind of grab onto and fling at people as well. Or, you know, sometimes you are pulling holes open in walls with it and yanking, you know, balls apart so you can keep moving.
Yeah, I don't know, like it's, you know, it's the sort of demo that like I played some of it just because I've been wanting to, you know, like after seeing a trailer of it a while ago and throwing it on my wish list, I was like, oh yeah, I need to look at this and played a little bit of it. I was like, cool, I don't need to finish this demo. This is a game I'll play when it's out. I don't need to, you don't need to sell me on Sprawl Zero. I'm already, I'm in on that. I want to see that thing.

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