Introducing: "Catch My Drift": CMD (January-March 2026)

I am creating a format to talk about multiple games at a time. In this one, I'm gonna tell you all about what I've been getting up to. As the year rolls on I will attempt some updates using CMD!

In this edition of “CMD”, I’ll be chatting about the stuff I have been playing from January through mid-March of 2026. Playing fast and loose, here. Look for more tightly formatted game criticism here going forward!

Ah, I feel loose. Loose as a goose.
I am looking to talk about some video games today, and I am gonna do it like so: I have a couple of games I have finished this past month, some games I have touched, and I wanna mention some games I wanna check out the rest of the year. I’m gonna throw it all here, in this nice, neat bucket I’ve made for myself. Hope that’s cool? Gonna try to do these things quarterly.

Let’s start with the games I’ve beaten, then we will get to what I’ve messed around with. I won’t talk about every game I’ve finished—just some highlights.
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GAMES FINISHED JAN-MAR 2026:
The Outer Worlds 2 (PlayStation 5)
Resident Evil 4 (2023) (PlayStation 5)
Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter (PlayStation 5)
Big Hops (Switch)
Cairn (PlayStation 5)
Final Fantasy IX (Switch)
Dredge (PlayStation 5)
Resident Evil Requiem (PlayStation 5)
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The Drifter Dabbled: Recent Games I’ve Been Playing
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (Playing on PlayStation 5)

Just played a few hours of this, but I am really digging it so far!
It’s a good bit of fun to just sink into a bit of some old school JRPG stuff now and then. My history with Dragon Quest is scant, to be frank with you. Haven’t really played much of them since I grew up mostly interested in the ‘other’ “Squenix” RPG series of the late 90s and early 2000s, like Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts. So, I decided that with Dragon Quest VII getting a remake this past February, I would check out the HD-2D remakes that have come out in recent years to get a feel for the series’ beginnings.

The premise is simple: You are a hero destined for greatness. You gather a party at your local tavern, you fight random mobs to increase you and your party members’ levels, and you all gear up to continue the fight. Very simple one of these games, to be sure. I like that about it, though. It doesn’t feel like it needs to be anything else but that.

Honestly, the best part about it so far is the aesthetics and character designs, for me anyway. Akira Toriyama (RIP) was one of the best artists ever to do it, if you ask me. His art is some of the greatest ever, and for good reason. There is that sort of iconic, patented Toriyama style you get with his stuff that feels like a warm blanket. Must be the Dragon Ball fan in me still that finds the Dragon Quest series so comforting to take in. Looking to play more of this soon, for sure.
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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (Playing on PSP through Retroarch)

I love Persona. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Persona 4 Golden fan, especially, and I platinumed Persona 3 Reload just last year, on PlayStation. Adored my time with Reload as well. Maybe has the best story in the series?? Anyhoo, I wanted to get deeper. I wanted to see the series’ roots because I loved 3 and 4 so much. So, on a whim, I decided last year after finishing Reload to start this up. I did some research beforehand and saw that this was very different immediately.

The turn-based action is now isometric; hell, the whole game is isometric until you get to the dungeons, which are in first-person, like its parent series Shin Megami Tensei was for a few of its entries. It takes a good bit of getting used to, to be sure. It’s very difficult, too.

This is a revision of the original PS1 game Revelations: Persona, with all the cut or altered content from the Japanese version restored to the North American release. Famously, the North American release of the original game was a mess. Thematically, lots of names, imagery, and story were butchered to align more with Western tastes, and I can’t believe how badly it was carved up to satisfy the American market. There is also a character, Mark, who is straight-up a racist caricature that is in unbelievably poor taste. They basically race-swapped a Japanese character and did the worst art pass you could think of to make the character black. It’s frankly absurd. Different times, I guess??

It’s an interesting history lesson, this PSP revision. It is streamlined from the original, with some quality-of-life additions, such as a soft fast-forward function getting added in this new revision to speed up battles. Still, the core content of the original Japanese game is there, just retranslated into English for a second time. If you’re gonna play this game, the PSP game is the way to do it. Until they inevitably remake or remaster it, that is.

The combat is solid, the encounters are both random and plentiful, and the difficulty is ball-crushing at times, but I am enjoying it. I am about 15 hours in and almost finished with the main SEBEC campaign (the original game had two unique routes, SEBEC and Snow Queen, both with wildly different storylines), and I am quite enjoying the ride.

A couple of interesting quirks about it, though. One of the party members I sought out (because you can only select from a couple of optional members, each with their own requirements to attain them), Reiji, has maybe the most convoluted path to get a party member I have ever seen in a JRPG. It’s wild the steps you have to take to get him (he’s fine, I guess).

The second is the Persona Interrogation. It’s not as convoluted as the previous steps to get Reiji, but it’s still esoteric and extremely hard to get a handle on. You have to talk to Personas to gain their cards and use their strength in battle in this one, and to do that in here is weird. Each party member can talk differently or use different prompts when talking to Personas. Each Persona requires a different combo of prompts to lend you their strength, but it’s not clear which combo to use for each Persona because they also have temperaments you have to use that are weak or strong to a certain prompt from a character. It’s basically a battle system within a battle system here, where you are having language battles with monsters, which is a cool idea, but it can get frustrating pretty fast.

Very weird game. But I like it. I should be finishing up the first route soonish. I just play it here and there when I feel like it.
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Fallout: New Vegas (Playing on PC)

So, I got the hankering to play this game again after I finished the most recent season of Fallout on Prime, and I decided I was going to get everything in it this time. All the Steam Achievements, that is. Hopefully, I can get them all unlocked. Gonna have to be strategic about who I link up with storywise for the faction achievements. I’m really taking my time this time to see everything I can.

This is my second time playing through this game, and I am loving it again even more this time through. Every place unfurls more story, deeper quests, and more interesting characters. Just recently, I got all the companions in the game. The last guy I met was Raul. Cool Ghoul. For ease of access, I sent all of the party members to the Lucky 38 so I could get at them more easily, but I think a couple got lost on the way. I couldn’t find Rex from The Kings, or Lilly from Jacobstown, to save my life, so I had to dismiss all of them again by terminal and then use PC console commands to summon them to my person just outside the building instead (which was a godsend).

Obsidian just makes damn good video games. Why the hell aren’t they making another Fallout game already?? Microsoft is out of its mind. More on this as I keep playing it. I’m about 17 hours in again with no end in sight!
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Pentiment (Playing on Switch 2)

Finally getting back around to this. One of my early goals for 2026 is to play more narrative games like this, Disco Elysium, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, et cetera, and this is my first push into doing that. I started it up a couple of years ago when I had my Series S and Game Pass, but I fell off for one reason or another. It’s a great game, and I like a lot of what I’ve played so far. I think the Switch’s portability will help me chip away at it more easily. It’s my before-bed type of wind-down game, and it’s really good for that.

Not much to say other than that, really, just that I’ve started it up and I am playing it when I can. I love reading, but I play too many games to make a ton of time for it. This is a happy medium I can strike that satisfies both urges. This is also another Obsidian game, god bless them. They are really doing the Lord’s work these days.
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Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition (Playing on PlayStation 5)

Started this back up recently.
I adore Devil May Cry. It’s a series I hold close to my heart, but my favorite one in the series has gotta be Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening. It’s my favorite PlayStation 2 game; it is immaculately designed, extremely replayable, and is tied with… maybe Sekiro, for the best damn action game ever made?? It’s up there, man. I adore that game. Hell, I wanna play it right now, as I write this. I documented my feelings pretty concisely in my The Dreaded Backlog 2025 write-up around Game of the Year time this winter (linked at the bottom of this segment!), so check it out there!

I had a hankering recently to get back to playing DMC4 again, this year. I did some cursory research on how folks felt about 4 upon release, and it is mostly well-liked, if not as cherished as DMC3 was upon its release. Good game, though, from what I could gather. I knew nothing about Nero or Gloria or any other character in here at all when I started up the fourth game, and it’s kind of a rare thing for me to go in as blind as I did for this one, because I usually over-research and over-analyze any game I am interested in. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but I dunno. Just how I am wired, I guess.

I do know a major spoiler about Nero’s parentage from DMC5, unfortunately, though. The truth is— I watched too many “Bury the Light” edits on TikTok… flew a bit too close to the sun on that one, I’ll admit. Someone hit me with a white lawn chair! Capcom just makes cool dudes doin’ cool stuff, huh?

Anyway, I’m far afield here— so getting back to the game itself: it’s very fun. Still getting a lot of combo moves doled out to me at a quick pace, getting my head around how Nero’s sword works (he revs it like a motorcycle… Capcom, you’re so saucy for that for real), and I like the grapple you get in the early game. Same DMC camera problems exist here, too, though. I don’t know what possesses them to have fixed camera angles for an action game throughout the series, but it’s a trend they don’t get away from till 5, it looks like. Crazy. Anyway, I’m chipping away at it and really enjoying it. Seems a bit more serious than 1 and 3, but not as deathly serious as say, DMC2 is, thank god. More updates on this in one of these CMD’s later, I expect.

(Check out my DMC3 thoughts here!)
https://nukatronic.substack.com/p/the-dreaded-backlog-2025-edition)
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Pokemon Pokopia (Playing on Switch 2)

So, sounds like everyone is playing this, huh?
I certainly am. It’s become something of a phenomenon lately, at least in the gaming circles I frequent. Seems like a lot of gamers were like me this past month, where some folks picked this up right after playing through Resident Evil Requiem. It’s definitely a huge tonal shift, to say the least. I have probably put about 8-10 hours into this so far, and have found it just delightful.

Pokopia has all the hallmarks of what you’d expect from your normal Animal Crossing grade life sim, but with a Pokémon theme and characters, normal Nintendo restrictions loosened, and injected with short, entertaining quests to incentivize players more to build their own virtual town of dreams for the Pokémon they meet.

It’s very well made, looks nice, and is breezy and light while being structured enough to make you want to interact with all its systems. It’s fantastic so far. Might be a sleeper hit for the year on Switch 2, and I expect it will do so well that it may just sell a few consoles on its own. It’s also a native Switch 2 game only, so no original handcuffs to the original Switch can be found here. I loved my Switch, and they did sell a lot of them to be sure, but it’s time to move on. It’s been almost a decade, Nintendo. Let’s move to the new one, yeah?

Gonna keep playing this as my evening chill game after rounds of Marathon, I think. It’s been a great way to decompress from getting murdered in space while running contracts for Bungie’s “SC Johnson” corporate equivalent, “NuCaloric”. Which brings me to my next game…
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Marathon (Playing on PlayStation 5)

Okay… now I know what you are thinking.
If you have read some of my recent write-ups, you know that I don’t play a ton of multiplayer things, so why would I be playing this? It’s very simple… It feels SO FUCKING GOOD. Bungie is back? Have they ever not been back?? I dunno… but I do know that Marathon is the game I can’t stop thinking about, playing, or researching right now. It took over my entire Sunday this past week, because I was just running solos all day on Dire Marsh. It’s FUCKING AWESOME.

Marathon might be the biggest surprise of 2026 for me so far. Bungie has always made great games, to be sure, but I will admit I was very skeptical about this one. For one, it’s been a long time since they have made a new game not named Destiny this past decade, second, it’s been even longer since they have even made a Marathon game, so I kinda didn’t know what to expect, and lastly, I am not really a multiplayer guy, let alone an extraction shooter ‘enjoyer’ at all, so this game had many things going against it in my book. But I trusted Bungie, paid the 40 simoleons, and I haven’t looked back since. It’s been an incredible time so far.

The thing I love about it the most? The brutality of it. It’s very difficult to extract with your loot. I love the creeping dread that lies around every neon-splashed corner of its dilapidated sci-fi complexes, the robotic chirping of enemy NPCs patrolling just beyond sight, and the horrific cries of surprise from your shell when you inevitably get shanked by an opposing player who got the drop on you when you weren’t paying attention. It’s hardcore and demands your attention during every moment of a match. It’s so much more engaging than Arc Raiders was for me. I can’t wait to play more of it this weekend. For someone who hasn’t played many modern multiplayer games, this one has its hooks into me, and I don’t see any signs that I will be set free from its thrall any time soon.

Buy this game.
It’s good solo, with a pair or a group. They nailed it, man. It’s so so good. At risk of sounding trite or even cringeworthy… Bungie ‘cooked’ here.
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That’s a few of the games I’ve been looking into lately. Every one of these, I will attempt to mention my progress if I feel the urge. Now, let’s talk about a couple of games I beat during the last few months!
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The Drifter Triumphed: Highlights of Some Games I Finished or Completed
Final Fantasy IX (Played on Switch 2)

I actually finished this recently for the first time, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I played it casually off and on, on Switch 2 (it’s an original Switch game, however), this last month, and I really enjoyed it. Took me around 30 hours just playing casually, and sometimes using the speed options the game offers you. Not sure where it ranks for me on the Final Fantasy Pantheon yet (I’ll probably rank each mainline, non-MMO game one day when I finish them), but it’s probably top 3 besides Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VI for the best so far. I kinda don’t count the VII remakes, because they kinda fit under a best Final Fantasy VII series ranking to itself, I think… But anyway, IX is very good. One of the best ones I have played thus far in the series.

I don’t have many qualms with it necessarily. It did feel very easy at times, and sometimes it felt like the game was more interested in the cutscenes, the presentations, and the characterization than the actual gameplay, which is fine. It’s maybe one of the most cinematic of the series I have played (excepting the VII remakes of course, which are opulent and bombastic in a huge way) and I really love how they ‘go for it’ in the epicness and scale in some of the moments during the story.

I like the cast. The favorite here for me has gotta be Vivi. He isn’t dumb, just a bit clumsy and over his skeez, sometimes— but dammit if he doesn’t have chutzpah when it counts, though. You can rely on that black mage for damn near anything. Just don’t ask him to whack away at any enemies (he can be a weak attacker when out of magic). Out of the party members, I liked Steiner, Eiko, Quina, and Vivi the most.

How they handle Quina’s gender is interesting to me. They say s/he for almost every descriptor involving them in the story, since they appear to be genderless beings, but I dunno, the translation may have been better served with ‘they/them’ pronouns? It’s tough. Keeping the flavor of the original would be the goal, I suppose. I just think that can be handled differently. It’s not irritating, necessarily. I just think there is a more efficient way to describe them. But, alas.

I liked Dagger and Freya a little less than the others, for sure, but they were fine. Freya has a cool backstory and character arc with the Burmecians that I think is pretty strong, but I didn’t get much from Dagger. She’s good, really, and pretty inoffensive. Good character just didn’t move me in many ways. The exception to this is her moment with the Queen on the beach. Great scene. Wish there was more of that.

The weakest character for me was Amarant, by far. Not an interesting character to me at all. I don’t think he grows at all during the game either, as he constantly berates Zidane and the crew when he doesn’t get his way, and he has a holier-than-thou attitude to the whole party. It’s just lame. They attempt to make him more likable with the Zidane rescue part, but then they go back on it and make him act like an asshole again. Fuck Amarant, actually though. His design sucks, too.
Not a fan of his whole deal.

Zidane is great, though. He toes the line between a Tidus and a Cloud pretty well, I’d say. Not too overly saccharine or annoying like Tidus can be, and not brooding as much as Cloud, but just as capable. I like how singular he feels as a Final Fantasy protagonist. His best moment for sure is the “You’re Never Alone” moment, though. Great stuff. All in all, the villain Kuja, the story, the Eidolons as summons, and the characters are all top-notch, for the most part. Great world, characters, and story. Just an awesome game. So glad I finally got around to it. With these games, I like to play through them once casually, then play them again and get all the stuff, so I plan to return to this on PlayStation, hopefully later this year, and start getting some trophies. Here’s hoping!
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Resident Evil: Requiem (Played on PlayStation 5)

Oh my god. This game. This is one of the big ones.
Now, at the risk of speaking in hyperbole, I’m gonna make a bold claim. This game, already… is a “Game of the Generation” contender for me. Now, having said that, I need to be honest and admit that I know I cannot claim the new winner over my current champ (Metaphor: Re Fantazio) quite yet, given how new this entry is… but dammit if this isn’t the closest I’ve felt a game could take the crown from the incumbent, yet. It’s so fucking good. I think it’s by far the best Resident Evil game, full stop.

Listen, Death Stranding 2 was my Game of the Year last year, and Resident Evil: Requiem blows that out of the water, in my estimation. I would be shocked if it didn’t contend or flat-out top the list for me this year by the time it wraps up. Time will tell… but I know myself. It’s gonna be hard for another game to exceed the heights that this one hit. Gonna keep it short and sweet right there. I might just review it once I clean up some trophies, so stay tuned on that…

If you get this game, chances are you are also going to love it. It’s everything I love in video games. Capcom straight up made the best Resident Evil game 30 years into the series. Incredible. More coverage to come on this, soon. So look for it here when the time comes!
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Games are good! I’m really excited to see what’s next for big releases as we press on in 2026. This next bit, I’ll mention some stuff I’m looking forward to!
Read on, would you?
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The Drifter’s Backlog: Games from The Dreaded Backlog
Persona 5 Royal (PlayStation 5)
Final Fantasy X (PlayStation 5 or Switch 2)
Disco Elysium (Switch 2)
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (Switch 2)
Crow Country (Switch 2)
Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PlayStation 5)
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The Drifter’s Future: New Games I’d like to Play
Crisol: Theater of Idols (PlayStation 5)
Esoteric Ebb (PC)
Mewgenics (PC)
Romeo is A Dead Man (PlayStation 5)
Saros (PlayStation 5)
Pragmata (PlayStation 5)
007: First Light (PlayStation 5)
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That pretty much wraps up the recap! I should be doing another one of these quarterly-ish if possible, so stay tuned to the next CMD for more best-laid plans, progress on current games from me, new and old, and even more positivity! Thanks as always!

As always, as the great sports journo and podcaster Dave Dameshek says: “It’s been a little slice of Heaven.”