It's Grim Up North

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:48)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. It is once again a Tuesday. You somehow made it to another one of those. It's July 7th, 2026 This is The Jeff Gerstmann Show. I'm Jeff Gerstmann. I'm here to discuss with you what's been going on in the world of video games. It's fucked. There you go. All right, thanks everybody. We'll be back next week to do it again. We'll take the temperature and see what's going on. It's, I don't know, the last seven days have been.
Remarkably fucked up. Some ways you knew was coming and some ways you did not, but here we are. But I don't know, we'll get to the news.
In me messing around with New Things Department, Rhythm Heaven Groove was released for the Nintendo Switch, and it's fantastic. It's a great Rhythm Heaven game. I'm having a lot of fun with it. The kids got way into it, which I was not expecting because they are not, you know, my oldest is six and my boy in the middle is four, and they're not, like rhythm is not really their thing yet. They're not, you know, my daughter did some dancing. She had her pre-ballet recital, and that went off fine. She's like, you know, she's kind of, she's picking it up and, you know, can kind of follow the instructions and what have you of the dance that she learned and then did. And there's obviously rhythm involved in that, but like, you know, we have like a little electronic drum and, you know, there's just, there's stuff that you just go, like, yeah, you know, here's how you play, here's, can I play the drums? And like, you know, it's not really, you know, they haven't really gotten there yet, but rhythm heaven is, I dare I say it, I think it might be teaching them the concepts. I don't know if they'll be able to apply those concepts immediately, but you know, it seems like it's creating a framework for them to do things rhythmically. They're having some trouble with some of the harder levels, they're playing a lot of the multiplayer stuff, which is hit or miss, to be honest. There's some stuff where it's like, you're playing volleyball, but you're kind of just bouncing the, you know, rhythmically bouncing a ball back and forth between two sides, a tennis game that's relatively similar.
And yeah, I don't know, they've both got their own save both been kind of playing through the campaign stuff. And so I've mostly been experiencing it that way. I played through the first tier myself on my save. And then I have mostly been stepping in to fill in when they can't get anything, when they can't finish a thing. And so I've basically been like randomly just playing levels out of context, out of order inside of Rhythm Heaven Groove and really enjoying it. It's interesting to see the series on a device that can be hooked up to a television, which is not something that happens every day, because they did have to fill it full of like, hey, latency adjustments and all the sort of stuff that you have to deal with when you're making a modern rhythm game. But when you fire it up when you're not in handheld mode, it just kind of says like, hey, yeah, I mean, if you ever are going to play on a TV, this is the screen you need to go to to do that. Like, okay. But I've been playing it on TV and they've been playing it handled. It's been fine either way. I think that's depending on your setup. It doesn't seem like it lets you manually adjust the latency. It's just more like, hey, we're going to put a thing on screen and you hit the button in time to the thing and it makes the adjustments that way. It seems to work fine. I don't know. I have not had any issues getting metals and perfects both on a television and in handheld mode. Hey, here it is. It's another great game in the Rhythm Heaven series, which is everything I wanted it to be. It reads to you. It has a kind of screen reader sort of voice. And at the beginning, it asks you what sort of screen reading you want. If you want it to be silent, if you want full audio descriptions of what's on the screen, or if you just want to read the text. And it's just kind of weird that they didn't record actual VO for it. It's just kind of strange because it mispronounces some things. And it even says like, you know, I'll try my best, like it's a little girl and she's the screen reader. And I couldn't turn her off because when you go into the screen, when she asks you how much screen reading do you want, and when you turned it off, she's sad, she's very sad. And I was like, oh man, I'm not, all right. It can stay on. It can stay on. The screen reading can stay on. You can say beat every so often. It'll be fine. But yeah, it's a hell of a game. And I, you know, as a long time fan of the Rhythm Heaven franchise, as a long time fan of the Rhythm Heaven franchise, there are games in this that are fine, but I think maybe are not, maybe not reaching the tip top of rhythm games that have been in previous entries in the series. And it is holding pretty close to the blueprint, the original formula. Like when you play these levels, and you know, the song structure, the song structure as it relates to what you do. Most of the games in this have like two, sometimes three different patterns, and you need to learn those. And then it has audio callouts that let you know what's coming next. And the way it uses those, how often, like if you've played enough of these, you know what's coming next. You almost don't need some of the guidance because you just go, yeah, okay, yeah, no, I understand. Now it's going to be the B rhythm, and then we're going to go back to the A rhythm a few times, then we're going to do the B, you know. And, you know, it is comfortable in that way. And seeing a series of new games that, you know, are built on this formula, I think is pretty fantastic. I've been having a really good time with it. So keep that in mind. That is out now. I have also been playing Assassin's Creed, Black Flag, Resynced. This is in a weird state of limbo right now where there are a bunch of streams going on. I don't, you know, it's not a lot of reasons to really get into the specifics of embargo requirements and what have you. It's rare that it comes up, but for this one, it is actually a wide swath of the game that streamers can be streaming. I could be streaming that game right now up to like sequence four or something. It's like hours of the early game, along with some of the side stuff and whatever. But the thing that they made very clear is that it's not to, you know, you're not to be giving impressions about what you're playing, which I don't understand how you can, yeah, I don't understand how you can play a game for any major length of time without commenting on what you're doing. And my guess is they're not actually policing that super strong because so many people are streaming it. And like I said, you know, like the streaming embargo for that part of the game is up, it was up yesterday. I've got a video up on YouTube of the first, you know, not the first, but it's about a half hour of it. And then I was like, okay, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to do a bunch of long stuff about this because I want to talk about the game. So, you know, I'll have more to say about it, but, you know, hey, the thing I'll say, the very carefully navigating, you know, to navigate that very narrowly, the thing I'll say is that playing Black Flag Resync has been a really good reminder that I really, really enjoyed Black Flag when it came out. At some point, a lot of the Assassin's Creed stuff, kind of, you know, like, it's not necessarily that it fell off. It's just that they made a whole lot of them, and it becomes very easy for them to all kind of blend together at a point. And I really didn't like three. And Black Flag was a really good, like, hey, you know, we can still make a good one of these. And all this boat stuff that you were worried about is actually really awesome. Like, all the boat stuff was real cool in the original Black Flag. Is it cool in ReSync? To ask me again tomorrow, I don't know. Maybe I'll have an answer for you. But it's been a really good reminder about like, oh yeah, yeah, Black Flag is really good. Like, I'm not sure how much, you know, how many hours I want to put into a remake of Black Flag or what have you, but it is, I guess I can't say the other half of that, but you know, but it's, I really enjoyed Black Flag when it came out, it turns out, and I had kind of forgotten that. And so it's been nice to revisit this framework and see some of the things that they've changed and whatever, you know, they've got some new stuff in there. I haven't really seen much of that, but yeah, the original Black Flag was a hell of a game. And this is a fairly faithful remake of that. Connect those dots if you want to, I certainly will not, I can't.