How Do You Like How That (Stuff) Works

**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:22)
What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the program. Hi, it's The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It is Tuesday, June 30th, 2026, and here we are, ready to talk about everything that's happening in the world of video games and whatever's going on around them. It feels very precarious. I mean, I guess it has for a long time. Today is the last day of the fiscal year, and so that is the, all of the layoff stories have been around the idea of just like, okay, all the layoffs are going to happen after the end of fiscal, and that's today. So yeah, we'll see where the world takes us from here, I suppose. But it does feel a little bit like, and there's like a staring into a void, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's a, it's a quest will feel, speaking of staring into a void, Koei Tecmo re-released Dead or Alive 6, last round, they're calling it.
And people are unhappy because it's a real, they didn't do anything to, I don't, I'm still trying to figure out. So they like deprecated the existing version of DOA 6 on Steam in favor of this upcoming new release, which was released in a form of like, okay, there's a free to play version where you can play as like four characters, and then there's a bundle of characters you can buy, and then a lot of, a lot of costumes, hundreds of dollars of DLC. The fun part is some of the DLC from the previous version transfers over, and some of it does not.
All of that is like various forms of like bikini and maid and nurse outfits and all that other shit, right? But like, but also some of it doesn't transfer over, and like you can buy it again.
And they put in like, yeah, it's got like Kula from King of Fighters in it, and that's, you know, that's neat or whatever. But like, yeah, it's DOA 6 It doesn't look like they improved the netcode. So it doesn't look like something where they went like, oh, and now it's got rollback. It's like, no, it's just kind of the same thing again. Like visually, it looks like this weirdly blurry, almost low res kind of thing.
And like, it's just a really strange release. I don't know, like this looked like a strange release prior to it coming out. We are like, oh, why are they shifting from, it's still DOA 6 It doesn't seem like they're making any meaningful changes or nothing they're announcing makes it sound like that they're doing anything major to it. Why are they doing this? It's not like they're adding rollback. It's not like they're adding cross play. It's just a really, did some license expire? Like someone's gonna find some like middleware that changed or something, go, Oh, they didn't want to pay the wise people. They didn't want to pay their font bill. They want to pay for what a monotype or whatever the hell the font company that all the Japanese companies use or something like that. But yeah, I don't know. It seems like that they, yeah, I mean, they refresh some of the licenses for really like the DLC characters are back, like the Kula and that stuff, I think got yanked out at some point or whatever the deal is. But yeah, it's a very straight font works. Yes, not monotype. Yes, font works. That's right. Is the font is the typeface company? Yes. So it's a very strange release. I would be very open to a new Dead or Alive game, much like just about any fighting game really from any of these kind of major franchises, like Dead or Alive is a relatively fun fighting game, but DOA 6 is maybe not the best one. They introduced some just weird mechanics, like some weird kind of mashy mechanics of like, oh, you just mash out this button four times and it'll kind of chain into a super, and like that stuff's not terrible. It is terrible when you are facing off in the confines of their kind of shitty netcode. So all of it taken together, it is certainly not the best Dead or Alive has ever been.
And yeah, I think they will at some point make another one, but it's just a very strange release. People are not happy about it. The handful of people that probably bought some chunk of that DLC are like, what the fuck? You want me to rebuy some of it? It's a very strange situation.
Also, kind of on the game front, Nintendo released Star Fox for the Switch 2 Pardon me.
And this has been an interesting week for me with Star Fox stuff. It's been interesting to kind of revisit the original Star Fox 64, which I did on Friday, as part of the launch of ranking every Nintendo 64 game. And I had played some of the Star Fox remake prior to revisiting Star Fox 64 And I think, you know, like I've come away from it feeling a lot better about that game in general. I still think that I don't like the length of that game. I don't like the, I guess it's less the length. I don't like the structure of Star Fox 64 I don't think that's a game that really truly benefits from its multiple path design. You know, people try to say like, oh, it's like Outrun or After, you know, or, you know, or After Wonder Climax or whatever, where you can kind of take these kind of branching paths and like, yeah. Yes, it does have that. The ways you take the paths are sometimes a little bit more esoteric than just going left or right. But I think that game is like criminally short and I don't think it's like enjoyable enough to go back into and like hunt for the side stuff. And these days, all of that is kind of a known quantity. You just go look it up or whatever. But to keep it holistic here for a minute and talk about the stuff that's in the game itself. I think that it would have been better. I think they would have been better off if they had just had one path, minimal branching and made a longer game with more variety. Like the thing that stuck out to me playing Star Fox 64 again and almost finishing it in one sitting because it's not a long game, is that there's nice variety from level to level. Like the looks and feels of these different levels is actually really good. I think that if they had done more of that out of the gate, I think Star Fox 64, I think I would have felt a bit better about it then. I mean, when that game came out, I remember playing it, finishing it obviously because it's not like, it's like 45 minutes or something. Then you get to an ending and you're like, okay. It's like, oh, do you want to go back and do more? Like, no, I like this. I know. I did not enjoy this enough to want to go back and hunt for other stuff. So I don't know. I think there's something to be said for putting all of the good shit on the critical path in a game. That's a weird balance, right? Because you want to put interesting things there for people who are engaging deeply and want to hunt. You want to have a reward for them if you're doing that sort of thing, right? You want to make sure that like what they jumped, the hoops they jumped through are worth it in the end.