The year's half-over, and that means that - with help from USGamer Editor in Chief Kat Bailey - it's time to look back at the past six months and lift up five games as our must-play picks for the first half of the year. Then we tackle Judgment, The Sinking City, Elden Ring news, and the E3 games that got you most excited.

We're back with a full episode full of reactions to E3 news - but first, strap in for a Father's Day-inspired rundown of some of gaming's greatest DILFs, with special guest Alaina Yee. Then it's on to Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Cadence of Hyrule, Collection of Mana, and the western devs you want to see tackle Japanese franchises.

E3 made a big splash this week, but we were too busy actually being there to record a show about it. We'll be back with E3 impressions next week; in the meantime, please accept this short, Top 5-only show we recorded earlier, in which Mikel, Chris, and Matt look at five games that far exceeded our expectations this year (or just suddenly appeared with zero build-up to knock our socks off).

When a Japanese developer wants to dig up a long-abandoned franchise and market it to westerners, one common tactic is to outsource it to a western developer. Sometimes, especially in the 2000s, this came with a mandate to make the series relevant to gamers looking for some hard-boiled nihilism, and the results stand as monuments to a strange era of gaming defined mostly by Grand Theft Auto making piles of cash. With help from PNB Podcast's TL Foster, let's look at five of the grittiest reboots of (already gritty) Japanese classics, after which we'll blast off to Outer Wilds and Void Bastards, catch some Pokémon news, and look at the features you wish more games would copy.