Happy former E3 week! Maybe it’s because the coming days will be loaded with gaming showcases, but other spheres of pop culture seem to have taken their foot off the hype accelerator… at least for a short while.

Series

Hands down the most exciting trailer of the past week was for something heading to home screens.

After a high-stakes, emotionally devastating first season, Marvel Animation’s X-Men ‘97 returns to Disney+ one month from now, on 1 July. Continuing the revival of classic cartoon X-Men: The Animated Series (1992–1997), in this batch of nine episodes, the surviving mutants are flung across time, and must return to their own era, while still reeling from their losses.

In further good news for X-Men fans (and 90s kids), Season 3 and 4 are confirmed to be on the way as well.

Gaming

As already mentioned this is a week for gaming showcases, which range from 20 minutes to 1 hour-plus. You can find the complete list of streams, with times and places to watch here. Whatever takes your fancy – expect showcases devoted to game genres, publishers, gaming platforms and geographical regions – expect new game announcements, release date reveals, updates, gameplay deep dives and probably even some shadow drops.

Of all the events, the two arguably biggest, and most high-profile, belong to Sony and Microsoft.

The latest PlayStation State of Play arrives tomorrow, 2 June at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET / 11:00pm CEST / 11:00pm South African time. You can watch the 60-minute presentation live here. Notably, the showcase will include a fresh look at Insomniac Games’ Wolverine game, which launches as a PS5 exclusive on 15 September.

With PlayStation essentially kicking off the week, Xbox is bringing up the rear, ending the period on a high with their Xbox Games Showcase and Gears of War: E-Day Direct double event taking place this coming Sunday, 7 June at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm UK / 7pm European and South African time. Watch it live here.

The week wasn’t without some disappointing gaming news too.

  • Steam Deck prices are jumping significantly due to the skyrocketing costs of memory (thanks AI datacentres!). We’re talking the Steam Deck OLED 512GB rising from USD 549 to USD 789, while the top-of-the-range 1TB OLED has experienced a jaw-dropping USD 300 jump from USD 649 to USD 949.
  • Meanwhile, the release of highly anticipated Fable, Xbox’s reboot of the beloved light-hearted fantasy RPG franchise, has been pushed out to February next year. It was initially supposed to debut during this year’s Northern Hemisphere autumn, but evidently has been moved to keep it far apart from the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI on 19 November.