Much has been made of the fact that the year’s most recent breakout hit, an idiosyncratic role-playing game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, was made by a small team. (It has just sold its two-millionth copy). It’s a tempting narrative in this age of blockbuster mega-flops, live-service games and eye-watering budgets: scrappy team makes a lengthy, unusual and beautiful thing, sells it for £40, and everybody wins. But it’s not quite accurate.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.Sandfall Interactive, the game’s French developer, comprises around 30 people, but as Rock Paper Shotgun points out, there are many more listed in the game’s credits – from a Korean animation team to the outsourced quality assurance testers, and the localisation and performance staff who give the game and its story heft and emotional believability.Compared to the enormous teams who make the Final Fantasy games – a clear inspiration for Sandfall – Clair Obscur’s team is minuscule. The more interesting achievement isn’t that a small team has made a successful game – it’s that a small team has made the most extravagantly French thing any of us will ever play. Much to my partner’s annoyance, I’ve set the voice language to French with English subtitles, just to enhance the immersion.In Clair Obscur’s belle époque-inspired world, a sinister entity called the Paintress daubs a number on a distant totem every year, descending from 100 – and every person of that age dissolves heartbreakingly into petals and dust, leaving behind devastated partners and orphaned children. (This and Neva are the only games in recent memory to make me shed a tear at their beginning.) The game starts as the Paintress counts down from 34 to 33, and an expedition of brave and slightly magic thirtysomethings from the dwindling population sets out, as they do every year, to sail across to the Paintress’s continent and try to kill her and stop the cycle. I was sad to leave this opening area, because the city was so beautiful, and everyone was impeccably dressed. Also, nothing was trying to kill me every few minutes.The most French thing you’ll ever play … Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Photograph: Sandfall InteractiveMany expeditions have gone before. You find their grisly remnants all over the place as you explore, their recorded diaries left to help whoever comes next. You start off in a kind of ravaged Paris, the Eiffel Tower distorting towards a distant horizon like a Dalí painting. The game looks like a waltz through a distinguished art museum that’s about to get sucked into a black hole. One early area of the continent is a waterless ocean, the wrecked vessel of one expedition wrapped around a dead leviathan of a sea creature, fronts of seaweed waving in the nonexistent currents. It’s beautiful but extremely dangerous: you quickly have to get the hang of a pretty complicated combat system to survive even the first few boss fights.Clair Obscur’s fighting is inspired by classic and modern Japanese RPGs: rhythmic and flashy, it lets you supercharge a fireball or dodge the fist of a stone automaton with a well-timed button press. Combining your unusually distinctive characters’ abilities is the key. One of them wields a rapier and changes stance every attack, another attacks with an impenetrable system of sun and moon tarot cards, a third mostly with a gun and a sword. If this all sounds needlessly extravagant, it is – and I love it. The combat menus are a tinkerer’s dream, letting you pore over and combine characters’ esoteric powers and skills to create interesting combo attacks.What I enjoy most about this game is that it doesn’t look like everything else or, indeed, anything else. The majority of games riff on the same few predictable references: Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Marvel. Instead it draws from completely different aesthetic and thematic sources; this is a baroque fantasy that tells a story about fatalism and love and death and legacy, a European-style tale with Japanese-style action and flair. It plays very differently, but its distinctiveness and determination to actually say something with its story reminds me of last year’s excellent Metaphor: ReFantazio. (There is a strong correlation between intellectually ambitious RPGs and baffling titles, it seems.)Clair Obscur also illustrates just how good game development tools are now: if you’re wondering how a smallish team could create something that looks this high-end, that’s a large part of the answer. This makes me feel pretty optimistic about the future of this middle sector of game development, in between blockbuster and indie. In the 00s and 2010s, that was where many of the most interesting games could be found. I can imagine several large publishers deeming this game simply too French to be marketable, but Sandfall was able to make it anyway. Expedition 33 is an encouraging commercial success that will be cited all year as a counternarrative to the games industry’s prevailing doomsaying, but it’s a creative success, too.What to playA thrill a minute … Doom: The Dark Ages. Photograph: BethesdaA new Doom game is out very shortly and reviews suggest that it is a glorious heavy-metal orgy of violence. It has you massacring hordes of gross demons at once, impaling them with spikes, shredding them with a chainsaw-shield, even punching gigantic hellspawn from within a giant robot or shooting at them from the back of a mecha-dragon. Doom: The Dark Ages is slower than the other modern games in the series, with more up-close combat and (as the title suggests) a vaguely medieval flavour to its aesthetic, but it’s still thrill-a-minute.Available on: Xbox, PS5, PC Estimated playtime: What to readChaos machine … Grand Theft Auto VI. Photograph: Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto VI, which is delayed until next May, left a crater in the 2025 release schedule that other game companies are scrambling to fill, reports Bloomberg (via Kotaku). Expect some serious rescheduling to be going on behind the scenes before the summer’s glut of game announcements. The Strong National Museum of Play in the US has inducted four new games into its Hall of Fame: Defender, GoldenEye 007, Quake and the (IMO) equally deserving Tamagotchi. They beat contenders from Age of Empires to Angry Birds. After last week’s industry media drama, long-established podcast-video collective Giant Bomb has bought itself out and gone independent, joining a growing stable of worker-owned and reader-supported games outlets. skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion Block‘Read a book, rube’ … Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth. Photograph: 2K GamesReader Travis sent in this week’s question:“I’m planning to start a book club-style video game club. Two questions: what should I call it and what game would you love to share and discuss in such a setting?”This is an excellent idea, and you’ve reminded me that I tried to do something like this a million years ago as a podcast on IGN, but I cannot for the life of me remember what we called it. Press Pause? Save Point? LFG? I would pick shorter games for a book club-style group (so that everyone could actually play them through), and I’d want ones that leave room for people’s personal histories to inform how they respond to it. I’d love to hear other people talk about Neva’s environmentalist and parental themes, or any Life Is Strange game’s mix of emerging-adulthood drama and quasi-successful supernatural storytelling, or even a game like While Waiting, what it made them think about. That would surely be more interesting than simply arguing about whether the latest Assassin’s Creed is any good.I asked my partner what he’d call a video game book club, and he suggested Text Adventure, which is annoyingly better than anything I can think of. My pal Tom suggested Pile of Shame, One More Go and Shared Worlds. Readers: can you think of any more?If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Video games have been simulating football since the 1970s, but they have rarely ever thought about simulating fandom. You can play a whole international tournament in the Fifa titles, but what they never show is the way the competition seeps into the everyday lives of supporters, how whole towns are overtaken, how a World Cup can become a national obsession. The way most of us experience the really big matches is through stolen moments of vicarious glory on televisions and giant pub screens, surrounded by friends and family and the sounds and images of real life.This is the territory of Despelote, a beautiful, utterly transportive game about childhood and memory, set during Ecuador’s historic 2002 World Cup qualifying campaign. Football-mad eight-year-old Julián – a semi-autobiographical version of the game’s co-designer Julián Cordero – has just watched the team beat Peru, but now four more matches stand between Ecuador and the World Cup finals in Japan and Korea. Structured as a series of short, immersive tableaux, Despelote gives us control of Julián as he goes about his life, buffeted by his parents and teachers between shopping trips, car journeys and school lessons.Something of what it was like to be a kid … Despelote. Photograph: Panic GamesThe key scenes are where you are left alone, perhaps in a town square, or at a family get-together – and you experience something of what it was like to be a kid given crucial moments of freedom and agency. You listen in on adult conversations, watch an old man feeding pigeons, say hi to a shopkeeper, have a kickabout with friends – the world is depicted as a series of grainy photos, washed with single colours – a beautiful visual device replicating the haziness of our oldest memories, the background details indistinct behind the personal, emotional events.As the game goes on, depictions of Julián’s childhood merge and interchange with recollections of later teenage parties and responsibilities. We also learn about the sociopolitical background to the World Cup campaign: Ecuador is in the midst of a financial crisis, hyperinflation has bankrupted companies and gobbled up savings – in this context, the potential glory of footballing success becomes vital and talismanic. The tournament is discussed in the streets and at weddings, it permeates everything.But other aspects of Ecuadorian life and culture are drawn in too. You learn about the music, the food and the rebirth of the domestic film industry, via the 1999 crime film Ratas, ratones, rateros directed by Julián Cordero’s father, Sebastián Cordero. In this way, real life impinges on the game world, like a poetic and self-referential Agnès Varda film, and in one lovely sequence, while Julián is engrossed in a footie sim on the family’s console, his onscreen player leaves the pitch and wanders home – to Julián’s own house: a beautiful, subtle comment on embodiment, fantasy and the act of playing.Despelote recalls some of the great works of independent narrative game design – The Unfinished Swan, Gravity Bone, Virginia – yet it is also something thrillingly of itself. Even though it’s a game about one small boy in a specific rendering of Ecuador, it communicates the near-universal power of football as a cohesive social narrative: the way the Dutch team of 74, Maradona’s genius in 1986, and Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland at Euro 96 came to say something about the nations that produced them. At the same time, as we draw closer to the final matches of the qualifying round and the excitement and tension becomes palpable, the camera and narration pull back, beyond the structured world of the game and into a meditation on the creative process itself. This is fascinating, formally daring stuff that, in its two-hour playtime, asks more questions about the nature of memory, simulation and identity than a dozen 100-hour epics.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion

A games console is more than just a dumb box that sits at home these days. With portable versions, sophisticated technology and built-in shops, these entertainment centres are valuable items, costing hundreds. If the worst happens and your Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo gets stolen, here’s what to do.What to do if your console is stolen Change your Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo account password, which will help keep the thieves out of your entertainment library. Remove your payment information from the digital store built into your console to help prevent anyone running up large bills. Report your console as stolen to the police via 101 in the UK. Give them the make, model and serial number of the console, which you’ll find on the box or in your online Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo account. Don’t forget to include details of any games, joypads or accessories that were taken with the console. Report the theft to the manufacturer through its website or customer service. Contact your insurance company should the console be covered under your household policy. This is usually under “high risk” items but portable consoles may need to be included in specified items for coverage outside of the home. What to do as soon as you get a new oneWhen you get a new or replacement console, there are a few things you can do to help in the event it goes missing again: Unlike phones, tablets and other devices there is no built-in way of tracking most consoles, so consider attaching a Bluetooth tracker such as an Apple AirTag, Tile or Samsung SmartTag so you can locate them with phone or browser. Make sure you use a strong password and two-step authentication for your console’s account to help prevent your details being stolen and items from being bought from any associated stores. Set a pin code on your console’s account or turn on an option to require your password to confirm purchases on the digital store to prevent thieves running up a bill. This setting is either on your profile or part of the parental controls. Backup your game data and settings in the cloud, which should happen automatically if your console is connected to the internet and logged into your online account. Game save syncing is free on Xbox but requires a subscription for Playstation or Nintendo. Some consoles also allow game save backups to external storage. Make note of the serial numbers for your console, controllers and accessories. Take and store photos of each item along with purchase receipts so you can show them to the police or insurance.

Last week was a bad one for video games journalism. Two key contributors to the veteran site Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb and Mike Minotti, have announced their departure after a recent podcast was taken down. The 888th episode of the Giant Bombcast reportedly featured a section lampooning new brand guidelines issued to staff and is no longer available online. Later this week, it was announced that major US site Polygon was being sold to Valnet, owner of the ScreenRant and GameRant brands, resulting in a swathe of job losses. This follows ReedPop’s sale, in 2024, of four high-profile UK-based sites – Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 – to IGN Entertainment, owned by Ziff Davis, which also resulted in redundancies.It’s sad how these long-standing sites, each with vast audiences and sturdy reputations, have been traded and chopped up like commodities. On selling Polygon, Vox CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement: “This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio.” It felt gross, to be honest, to see this decade-old bastion of progressive video games writing being reduced to an asset ripe for off-loading. Of its purchase Valnet said: “Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.” Quite how it will do that with a significantly reduced staff is anyone’s guess.This is, of course, the familiar robotic doublespeak of the corporate press release and industry observers have not held back in their anger and incredulity. Writing on Aftermath, journalist Nathan Grayson said: “None of this was, strictly speaking, necessary, with Polygon an unqualified success in terms of traffic while Giant Bomb boasted a dedicated audience drawn to its unique mix of personalities. But of course, parasitic execs decided to suck the marrow from the bones of both, and now we’re left wondering what comes next.” You do have to wonder if any of the CEOs involved in these sales have ever read a story or listened to a podcast in their lives that wasn’t about maximising shareholder value.Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff at Code Conference in 2022. Photograph: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox MediaVideo game journalism has always walked a windswept tightrope between competing commercial interests. In the olden days of games magazines, much of the money came from adverts bought by the same companies whose products were being reviewed and often mauled by journalists. Several times during my career as a magazine editor I witnessed adverts pulled from publications I worked on following unfavourable reviews of the advertisers’ products. To bow to those pressures would mean losing the faith of our readers, which was the most important asset we had. Publishers always came round in the end, but once you’ve lost the trust of your audience, you might has well call it quits.Later, those magazines transitioned into websites, where ad space remained a vital income. Nowadays it’s much more complex, and the industry doesn’t need dedicated gaming sites so much, thanks to the rise of influencers on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube. It seems the companies most interested in acquiring gaming sites see only brands, not the creative and experienced staff behind them; in March digital news site the Wrap ran an investigative feature in which Valnet was accused of turning acquired sites into content mills for “mind-numbing SEO bait”. Valnet has since sued the publication. But the pay rates for journalism are stagnating, even falling, as the games themselves transform into live-service megaplexes inhabited by billions of paying customers.There is, it seems, a festering suspicion of human creativity in the modern tech corp landscape. Unquantifiable, expensive and resistant to spreadsheet analysis, it is an annoying barrier in the way of streamlined market penetration and exponential growth. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if AI could write those long, in depth video game walkthroughs that get so many hits, but take so many weeks of work to produce? Wouldn’t it make sense if news and analysis was generated and filed within seconds through some sort of automated content pipeline?There’s just one problem. Writing a game walkthrough is a complex task, relying on skilled play, the ability to interpret and explain a moment of action and the foresight to know what players will be looking for. A review is a subjective human response to an experience; a podcast is a parasocial chat with pals. Vitally, good games journalism also holds the industry to account, investigating and highlighting issues that would otherwise be buried. The people who do this stuff and do it well have been playing, writing and questioning for years. They know what we think about when we think about games.I suppose this is the same argument playing out right now everywhere in the arts, from movies to music. The tech bros want portfolios of brands to swap between each other, expecting the wordless masses to follow behind, consuming whatever slop they’re fed. But it’s not endless dead-eyed content we’re coming for, it’s ideas and craft. What a relief it is that independent sites are springing up at a growing rate. We have the UK games news site VGC and, in the US, there’s Aftermath – both have blossoming audiences. Fandoms can only be fooled for so long. I harbour high hopes that when it becomes clear understaffed machines of digital content can only spew out secondhand ideas, the pathetic ghost burps of dead fandom, authenticity will become the only game in town.What to playScarily good … The Horror at Highrook. Photograph: Nullpointer GamesEvery month sees a dozen new indie video games using the mechanics of collectible card battlers such as Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh to interesting but increasingly familiar effect. But don’t let that stop you trying The Horror at Highrook a heady occult mystery in which a group of explorers raid a haunted mansion in order to discover the truth about a missing aristocratic family. The game world is like a highly complex Cluedo board and mysteries are uncovered and solved by combining relevant item and skill cards, while upgrading the abilities of your party. Clearly inspired by the twin forces of Poe and Lovecraft it’s a beautifully constructed challenge, filled with ideas and little arcane treats for fans of both cosmic and gothic horror.Available on: PCEstimated playtime: 10-plus hoursWhat to readLucia Caminos, co-protagonist of Grand Theft Auto VI. Photograph: Rockstar Games Cheating is as old as video games, but it is ruining the experience of many who like online multiplayer shooters. This feature looks at how Riot is taking on cheaters in A League of Legends and Valorant and it’s a great primer on the Red Queen-esque battle between developers and hackers. Most great video games were, at some stage in their development, a fraction of a millimetre away from some disastrous design choice. The highlight of this long interview is how the former Sony president Shuhei Yoshida saved Gran Turismo by suggesting that the team make it actually playable by non-racing drivers. I love that video games, though products of modern technology, still inspire their own legends and folklore. A feature on the BBC site analyses a wonderful example, Ben Drowned – the tale of a haunted N64 cart, a creepypasta that infected games forums in 2010. If you’re done with reading, Rockstar just released a new Grand Theft Auto VI trailer and speedboatload of screenshots and info about protagonists Jason and Lucia (above), days after announcing the game’s delay until May 2026. Go have a look, it’s wild. What to clickskip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionQuestion BlockVirtually non-existent … games have struggled to break through on VR devices like the Meta Quest. Photograph: Meta Connect/AFP/Getty ImagesThis week’s question comes from Guy Bailey who messaged me on blue BlueSky with the following:“I love sim racing in VR and my son is addicted to VRChat and the camaraderie of the various worlds. Half Life Alyx is incredible, and most people who try VR love it – so why hasn’t it had its gaming mainstream breakthrough yet? Will it ever?”This question has haunted the VR industry since the arrival of the Oculus Quest in 2019, which was supposed to rejuvenate the whole concept of VR for the modern era. And while more than 20m Quest headsets have now been sold, alongside 5m PlayStation VR sets and many other contenders, we’re not all spending vast swathes of time in virtual worlds.There are many, many reasons. Motion sickness is one: a percentage of people (and it is more common in women for reasons that no one can agree on) will feel nauseous after a few minutes of use. No one wants to feel sick, no matter how fun the software is. There’s also the neurological and physiological disparity of being enclosed in a visual environment which does not align with what our bodies and our senses are expecting. We’ve all seen the funny videos of people getting carried away in a VR game and running straight into walls.VR also makes us feel vulnerable and silly. It is weird to be so cut off from external “reality” and it is weird to wear a massive helmet in your living room. These elements are perhaps part of why Apple has been betting big on augmented rather than virtual reality, via is Vision pro headset, which is comparatively inconspicuous and keeps us in touch with our surroundings – but even that has failed so far – at least as a consumer platform.Mostly though, I don’t think the content is compelling enough for a non-tech audience. It’s a cliche, but there’s no killer app. I have an unused PlayStation VR headset and my sons only occasionally play with their Meta Quest 3. The games they like can only be experienced in 20-minute bursts, and I don’t think they grip the heart, soul and intellect the way a traditional screen-based immersive game can.For most of us, VR will need to find a way to give us touch, taste, smell and presence, or at least give us a compelling enough reason to leave the sensual world behind for hours on end.If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com

When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris at the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he immediately knew it was special. “It was just the perfect game,” he recalls. “It looked so simple, so rudimentary, but I wanted to play it again and again and again … There was no other game demo that ever did that to me.”Rogers is now co-owner of the Tetris Company, which manages and licenses the Tetris brand. Over the past 30 years, he has become almost as famous as the game itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to buy its distribution rights from Russian agency Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) were dramatised in an Apple TV+ film starring Taron Egerton. “I suggested that Johnny Depp or Keanu Reeves should play me, but apparently they were way too old,” Rogers says.The casting wasn’t his only concern when he read the screenplay. “It was terrifying. I didn’t know anything about how a script becomes a movie. I thought: ‘This is a crap movie … a car chase?! There is so much bullshit in there!’”Trance-inducing … Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianStill, it can’t have been more terrifying than the KGB interrogation awaiting Rogers when he made that fateful trip to Russia in 1988. Tetris may now be one of the most successful video games in history, with more than 520m sales, yet it was conceived by Alexey Pajitnov while he was working on artificial intelligence and automatic speech recognition at the state-owned computing centre of the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union – and he certainly wasn’t supposed to be coding puzzle games. Those trance-inducing tetrominos were almost sealed away behind the iron curtain, the exclusive property of the Soviet regime.Alexey had never met a game designer before … there were no game designers in the Soviet UnionThankfully, however, a complex series of shaky international rights deals involving several companies, including Robert Maxwell’s Mirrorsoft, finally culminated in the Japan-dwelling Dutchman Rogers snapping up the Japanese computer rights, and then hopping on a plane to Russia hoping to secure a similar deal for handhelds. After he arrived in Moscow on a tourist visa, the KGB watched Rogers’ every move. Sneakily – and very much illegally – he managed to gain entry into Elorg, the state-owned company with a monopoly on all Soviet-made computer software. As he came face to face with the reclusive coder behind this mesmerising game, Rogers swiftly discovered he’d been duped. The Tetris rights Rogers “owned” had been sold without Russian knowledge – and the Soviets weren’t too pleased.“I was in a room with seven people, some of them KGB types, being given the third degree for a couple of hours, like: ‘Who the hell are you coming into the Soviet Union?!’” says Rogers. It was there that he first met Pajitnov. “Alexey was suspicious of me at first, because he’d met other people who had come sniffing for Tetris’s rights. He always felt that they were just slimy capitalists looking to make a dollar.” The film’s retelling of this encounter feels surprisingly faithful, with the tense interrogation scene and resulting paranoia of KGB surveillance matching Rogers’ own descriptions.“When he figured out I was a game designer, Alexey’s demeanour changed completely,” recalls Rogers. “Alexey had never met a game designer before … There were no game designers in the Soviet Union, because there was no game business in the Soviet Union. You had your job, and games would be something that you did on the side.”Pajitnov in 1989. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex FeaturesIntrigued to meet a fellow nerd, Alexey quietly asked Rogers to find him after the meeting. With the KGB watching their every move, and millions of dollars on the line, Rogers was aware of the danger that they both faced. “As a foreigner, I had to be careful. So I waited downstairs by the door and escorted him to my room in the middle of the night, quietly showing him my version of Tetris.”Rogers and Pajitnov have been friends ever since, and once the Soviet Union was dissolved and Elorg’s stake sold, they formed the Tetris Company together in 1996. Up to that point, Pajitnov had made no money from the game at all.Despite the 2023 film taking some factual liberties (“I cried about things in the movie that never happened, I cried about my daughter singing after I missed her recital – they made that shit up!”), Rogers says that he got a kick out of seeing his story on the big screen. “It premiered at South by Southwest and the audience can be very critical. But they were cheering when I first saw the Game Boy. They were cheering for a device! At the end, we all got to come on stage: Alexey, myself, and Taron. We got the biggest standing ovation from the audience. It felt like I won an Oscar.”However, compelled to share a more grounded retelling of his story, Rogers has just released a book: The Perfect Game: Tetris, from Russia With Love. It’s a fun, if slightly arrogant look at the events that brought the puzzle sensation to the world, littered with endearing, memory-correcting interjections from Pajitnov.Pajitnov, Rogers and Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi at Nintendo HQ in Kyoto, Japan. Photograph: Nintendo Company LimitedWhile the film highlights Rogers’ undeniable charm and business acumen, it buries his contributions as a game developer. While living in Japan in 1983 he founded Bullet-Proof Software and created the influential role-playing game The Black Onyx, which gave the genre the iconic health bar and also introduced RPGs to a Japanese audience. The game’s manual was written by Hisashi Suzuki who would go on to become president of Squaresoft, creator of the Final Fantasy series. The Black Onyx was apparently also a huge influence on legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto: “Miyamoto credited Black Onyx – thereby crediting me – for teaching him about role playing games,” says Rogers. “He said it was what led to him creating Zelda.”Is it strange though, that Rogers’ story has overshadowed that of Tetris’s creator, Pajitnov? “Alexey and I play very different roles,” replies Rogers. “The role that I’m playing right now, telling the story, he would never play that role. He’s more of an introvert. If you give him a chance, he’ll sit in a room and do mathematical proofs. In terms of connecting Tetris to the world, the world would have to search him out and he would come kicking and screaming.”‘We blue-skyed it in the desert’ … Tetris Effect (2019). Photograph: Enhance GamesNew versions of Tetris are released every few years, a recent highlight being 2019’s psychedelic Tetris Effect, which saw the creator of the Dreamcast classic Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, reimagine the game as a transcendental audiovisual experience complete with VR version – a concept dreamed up during a hedonistic weekend at Burning Man. “Gucci – we call him Gucci – is a good friend,” says Rogers. “We went to Burning Man together, where we blue-skyed in the desert about what Tetris Effect would be – a Tetris in VR – and he built that product.”While Rogers still enjoys games (“Minecraft really did something outside the box.”), his priorities changed after a near fatal heart attack in 2005. “I’m done with game publishing,” he says. “I know how much work it is and how much money it takes and my heart has to be in it. And now, my heart is in fighting climate change.”Rogers now lives in Hawaii, and over the last 20 years his Blue Planet Foundation has successfully lobbied the island nation to commit to clean energy by 2030. He is slowly convincing neighbouring islands to stop purchasing foreign oil and to invest in sustainable alternatives. If anyone can save the planet, it’s the man who outsmarted the Maxwells, escaped the KGB, and got us all dreaming of difficult little blocks blocks endlessly falling into place.

Billed as a prequel to id Software’s 2016 revival of Doom, The Dark Ages is about as different as it could be from its predecessors while remaining recognisably part of the series. Where 2020’s Doom Eternal was about speed and evasion, The Dark Ages emphasises standing your ground. Where Eternal involved picking off enemies one by one, The Dark Ages empowers you to obliterate dozens of demons simultaneously. Where Eternal saw you juggling rapid-fire weapons in a finger-cramping frenzy, The Dark Ages lets you solve most problems by hitting things ferociously hard. Ripping and tearing are out. Blunt force trauma is in.The kernel of The Dark Ages’ combat stretches back to the 1993 original, inspired by the slow-moving projectiles fired by enemies such as imps, cacodemons, and hell knights. The Dark Ages empowers most of its enemies to shoot such projectiles, making its interdimensional battlefields glow with drifting fireballs, scudding orbs and floating energy barriers.Interdimensional battlefields glow with energy. Photograph: id SoftwareYou must navigate these obstacles as a slower, heavier Doom Slayer, one so physically dense he triggers a thunderclap when landing from a height. Indeed, it feels like he shouldn’t need the shield which forms your primary defence against these projectiles. It can be used simply to block oncoming missiles, but certain attacks can also be deflected, returning them to sender. Successfully countering a projectile can stun its shooter, opening them up for a finishing “glory kill”. While still bone-crunchingly vicious, these executions are generally less elaborate than in previous games, often (but not always) reduced to a straightforward punch or kick.Many demons attack hand-to-hand in patterns it’s beneficial to memorise, while the largest and toughest foes are nearly all close-range duellists. These face-offs tend to take place within much larger battlefields, where smaller enemies prowl in their dozens and rows of undead shield-bearers guard their larger leaders. Id Software has devised several new weapons to deal with these infernal legions, such as a demon-impaling rail-spike launcher, or a gun that shreds enemies with the shrapnel of crushed skulls.The scale is impressive. Photograph: id SoftwareIt’s a fascinating reformulation of the core ideas of Doom, and learning the rhythm of its shooting is as fun as witnessing its devastating effect. It is an easier riff to master than Eternal, however, while the slower pace and less stringent toolset mean that, at its highest level, it doesn’t produce the same adrenaline rush.It doesn’t help that the system is stretched over the flabbiest game id Software has made. The Dark Ages’ 22 levels are all vast in scope, and many are open-ended, letting you pick your battles and unpick their secrets in whatever order you choose. Yet although the scale is impressive, the levels can be wearying to traverse, and it doesn’t always feel as if the game makes the most of this real estate from a combat perspective.Id Software tries to counterbalance the slower pacing by mixing up how you explore. Some maps see you piloting an enormous mech called an Atlan, punching mountain-sized demons in slow-motion combat. Others involve flying around on the back of a dragon. There’s novelty value here, but the game doesn’t really know how to make either a meaningful experience. These parts are reminiscent of the obligatory vehicle sections that plagued shooters in the noughties, and the best I can say for them is they don’t crop up too often.That said, I admire how much more experimental Doom: The Dark Ages is than it needed to be. Far from resting on its laurels, id Software seems possessed by a Nintendo-like urge to innovate. It wants Doom to be the shooter that rewires how you think about the genre with each new entry. The Dark Ages isn’t as successful at doing so as id Software’s earlier fare, but it is nonetheless a highly accomplished, smartly designed shooter that, at its best, hits like a truck.

Something new is coming to the Grand Theft Auto universe next year. I don’t mean super-high-definition visuals, or previously unexplored areas of Rockstar’s take on the US. This time it’s something much more profound. If you’ve seen the newly released second trailer from GTA6 – somewhat cruelly released just days after we discovered the game won’t be out until next May – then you might know what I mean. The brand new thing is romance.It’s now clear that the key protagonists of the latest gangland adventure are Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, two twentysomething lovers from the wrong side of the tracks. He’s ex-army, now working for drug runners; she’s fresh out of jail, looking to make a better life for herself and her beloved mom. They fall for each other, hatch a plan to get out of Vice City, and then when their simple heist goes wrong, they find themselves at the sharp end of a state-wide conspiracy. You always knew that if Rockstar were going to tell a love story, it would involve a formidable cast of underworld kingpins, gang members, conspiracy nuts and corrupt politicians, and you were right.Sleazy riders … Grand Theft Auto 6. Illustration: Rockstar GamesBut how will the writers look to establish a couple who fit the tone and mythos of the series, which has previously focused on incredibly damaged loners such as PTSD-haunted ex-soldier Niko Bellic and brain-fried sociopath Trevor Philips? There have been brief romantic entanglements in the games before – headstrong Catalina dallies with CJ in San Andreas , Mercedes Cortez is a flirtatious gangland accomplice to Tommy Vercetti in Vice City and then there’s the curious affair of Trevor and Patrice in GTA5 which is less Love Story and more Stockholm Syndrome. However, the emotional dynamics always played second fiddle to bloody heists and bullet-riddled car chases. The world of GTA is largely nihilistic – it’s every man for himself, the constant overtures toward brotherhood usually followed by brutal betrayals. The new GTA trailer though, shows a new sense of sincerity. “Instead of half-baked fantasies,” states the Rockstar website, “Lucia is prepared to take matters into her own hands. A life with Jason could be her way out.”It’s likely the writers will look for inspiration where they always have: the movies. With its sun-bathed violence and flashy cars, Vice City paid glorious homage to Scarface and Miami Vice; GTA: San Andreas was in thrall to the early 1990s South Central LA movies of John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers; GTA 4 breathed in The French Connection as well as the Russian gangster flick, Brother. Already GTA6 is being compared to that most obvious of cinematic sources: Bonnie and Clyde. It is after all another story of troubled lovers willing to risk everything for a bank job or two. But Rockstar has doubtless also studied The Getaway, Sam Peckinpah’s sexiest and most successful film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands with its thrillingly blank and disaffected couple, and Tony Scott’s True Romance, for its combination of fantastical comic book love affair and high octane violence. Natural Born Killers and even the more recent Love Lies Bleeding may also have provided more quasi surreal inspiration.Whatever the case, it’s coming at the right time. For all their satirical, deliriously amoral brilliance, the GTA titles have often lacked a softer edge; the relationship dynamics always tied up in broken families and hyper-masculine gangland codes of honour. This is a series that has also never had a female lead protagonist before; new dynamics are coming into play.Maybe GTA will handle romance the same way that it handled friendships in the past – notably Roman and Niko in GTA 4 – as a contrast to the darkness and violence, but also as something that intensifies the risks. We can be fairly sure there won’t be much player involvement in the course of the relationship – GTA is not a role-playing adventure in the strict sense, there aren’t dozens of dialogue trees with multiple choice responses; you can guide the story through actions but not words. But I do wonder what the writers will have learned by watching how people behave in the still hugely popular multiplayer spin-off, GTA Online, and how the dedicated role-playing servers have opened up to virtual relationships and flirting.Whatever, I’m rooting for Lucia and Jason. They’re clearly among the most attractive characters the series has ever seen – the internet is already shipping them. Rockstar’s art team are great at getting us to study bodies, but usually they are ugly reminders of inner corruption; these two are hot and not only that, they’re hot for each other. Perhaps Rockstar has seen, with the current state of the world (and perhaps the success of The Last of Us), that some heartfelt romantic yearning is required. Next May, there will be love as well as bullets in the air.

For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.I bet a lot of you will have had a similar experience with a Bethesda game – if not Oblivion, then Skyrim or perhaps Fallout 3. There’s something intoxicating about these role-playing games, the way they lay out their worlds for you like a buffet, inviting you to gorge. Go where you like! Learn some weird spells and try them out on bandits! Nip into a cave to fight a necromancer and end up getting ambushed by vampires! Open-world games such as this are exhaustingly common now but Oblivion was the first one I ever played. Lately I’ve been devouring it all again, after Bethesda surprise-released a remake last Friday.I say it was a surprise. In fact, the Oblivion remake/remaster has been one of the games industry’s worst-kept secrets for months, just behind the Switch 2. Nonetheless, I am thrilled about it. Oblivion has, over two decades, become at least as famous for its technical weirdness and amusing glitches as for its pioneering design, and I was relieved to find Bethesda has not tried very hard to fix it. Characters still get stuck in walls, repeating their asinine lines of dialogue. The facial animations are still off. The game crashed on me two minutes into Patrick Stewart’s opening lines as the soon-to-be-murdered emperor of Cyrodiil, and I have twice fallen through the world into the endless void beneath. Weird stuff happens all the time, and it’s rarely intentional. They’ve even preserved an infamous voice-acting blooper. It is a perfect time capsule of 00s accidental gaming comedy, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.A game of choice with no consequence … The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Photograph: Bethesda Game StudiosI remembered Cyrodiil as enormous and picturesque, full of gently glowing magical ruins and rivers that caught the light in just the right way. By 2025 standards, though, it is weeny, perhaps the size of the opening section of any current game’s gigantic map. (I’m thinking particularly of Avowed, the recent Elder Scrolls-alike from fellow Microsoft studio Obsidian.) The imposing-looking Imperial City at the centre is a village of tiny interconnected districts with around 30 people in it. I don’t know how I managed to spend more than 100 hours in such a relatively small space as a teenager, but as I rode around last weekend I found, unexpectedly, that I still knew it intimately. I’d meet a new character and remember details of some quest I hadn’t thought about for years, or ride around a corner on my armoured horse and know exactly where I was from the view.In Oblivion, your character develops according to what you do with them. You don’t meaningfully have to choose between magic, stealth and strength; pick up a greatsword and start using it and your heavy-weapons stat will start increasing. (The trick back in the day was to crouch into a sneak position, use a rubber band to pull the controller’s analogue sticks together, and spin around in circles until your stealth stat hit maximum.) This is part of what makes it feel like a buffet: you can become a master thief, run the mages’ guild and be a combat arena champion all at once. It is a game of choice with no consequence, beguilingly frictionless and generous. A small world that revolves entirely around you.I have a theory that the Bethesda RPG spell only really works once. You get one life-consuming experience with an Elder Scrolls, and then whatever you play next feels like a repeat; I played Skyrim and Fallout 3 for ages but never finished either. It turns out Oblivion is still my game; I can lose myself in it for hours where newer, more sophisticated open-world games start to get on my nerves. I still hate the Oblivion Gates, portals to a generic hellscape where you have to spend a tedious 20 minutes fighting demons in towers with flaming corpses hanging from the ceilings; their vibe is very 00s metal album art. But the beauty of a game like this is that you can effectively ignore the entire plot and fool around as you please.The Oblivion remaster illustrates that old games don’t always need fixing. It looks different, but it’s got the same soul. I imagine my teenage self would say the same about me.What to playOne of the best puzzle games I’ve ever played … Blue Prince. Photograph: Dogubomb/Raw FuryIf you haven’t yet played Blue Prince, stop whatever you’re doing and download it now. You are the teenage heir to a giant mansion, with one catch: if you want to keep it, you must find its secret 46th room. Also, every time you go to sleep, the mansion resets, so your route through it will be different every day, drafting each room from a random selection of blueprints, occasionally finding a chamber you’ve never seen before.I spent 40 hours playing through this with my eldest son, who acted as note-taker, and it is up there with the best puzzle games I’ve ever played. Even after you’ve found Room 46, there are deeper mysteries to probe at; a couple of people I know have truly gone off the deep end with it. Its sedate pace and intellectual challenge were both ideally suited to playing during a period of convalescence. Wonderfully, your reward for playing is always more knowledge.Available on: PC, Xbox, PS5 Estimated playtime: What to readEnjoyably bizarre … Split Fiction. Photograph: Electronic Arts Sydney Sweeney is to star in a film adaptation of Hazelight’s co-op game Split/Fiction. How is that going to work? My partner and I are halfway through this game and, though it’s a blast to play and enjoyably bizarre when it wants to be, the plot and characterisation are … not the most complex. Via Video Game Chronicle, some details on October’s Ghost of Yotei, the sequel to the gorgeous but bloated Ghost of Tsushima. “The game will see the player hunt down the Yotei Six, a group of warriors who have caused death and destruction across Japan,” they report. “As the player hunts them down, a sash worn by the protagonist, Atsu, will display the names of the Yotei Six that she is pursuing.” How very Arya Stark. Call of Duty’s Warzone has become famous for it’s odd celebrity tie-ins, which have allowed you to, say, gun down dozens of peers as Nicki Minaj or Lionel Messi. The latest choice? Seth Rogen, as part of a new (lord help us) “weed-themed” content package. A very important essay here from Gizmodo: isn’t it past time we got a good Predator game? skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion BlockA divergence … Isabela Merced and Bella Ramsey in season two, episode three of The Last of Us. Photograph: Warner Bros DiscoveryThis week’s question comes from reader Toby:“Video game movies and TV shows are all the rage, and I’m curious to see how they adapt The Last of Us Part II. I thought the interactive medium really enhanced its emotions and themes. Can its story still have the same impact in a passive medium? On that note, what great video game narratives do you think absolutely cannot be adapted into a movie or a TV series?”I have just watched the third episode of the second season of The Last of Us, and it’s clear that they’re diverging more from the game’s plot this time than they did in season one. They kind of had to, because as you point out, the game’s impact largely comes down to playing it from both points of view, which won’t necessarily work on TV. That said, the first game also owed a lot of its emotional heft to the fact that you, Joel, were the one doing terrible things, whether you as a player agreed with him or not. The TV series couldn’t pull those same levers, so it expanded The Last of Us by showing new perspectives, going into deeper detail on things that wouldn’t have been practical or fun to play through; I’m thinking particularly of that wonderful episode about Bill and Frank, which would never have worked in a game. This is the art of the adaptation: finding something fresh to offer.On that basis: there is no great video game narrative that couldn’t be adapted for film or TV by a sufficiently talented and understanding writer. The key word there is adapted, not transliterated – because a film or show has to offer a new interpretation or perspective. That said, there are plenty of games whose plots are simply too bad to ever make for a good TV show or film. It’d take a true visionary to get anything worth watching out of, say, Heavy Rain.If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Microsoft announced on Thursday that it will increase Xbox console prices worldwide, citing “market conditions” just days after Sony made a similar move with its PlayStation 5.The tech giant also plans to raise prices for some new games developed by its video game subsidiaries.In the United States, the entry-level Xbox Series S will jump from $299.99 to $379.99, a 27% increase. The premium Series X Galaxy Black model will now retail for $729.99, up from $599.99 previously – a 22% hike. Additionally, certain new games from Microsoft-owned studios will be priced at $79.99, up 14% from the current $69.99.In Europe, the Series S will rise from €299.99 to €349.99, a 17% increase. In Australia, the Series S will start at $549 and Series X at $849.“We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development,” the company said on its website.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to TechScapeFree weekly newsletterA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhile not explicitly mentioned by Microsoft, Donald Trump’s tariffs on Washington’s trading partners have cast a shadow over the gaming industry.Xbox consoles are primarily manufactured in China, which faces 145% US tariffs on numerous products under the Trump administration.The Series S and X launched in late 2020 and have sold approximately 30m units, according to industry analysts’ estimates.In mid-April, Sony announced price increases for several PlayStation 5 models in select markets, including Europe but notably excluding the United States. PS5 consoles are also primarily assembled in China. Nintendo has likewise delayed opening pre-orders for its Switch 2 console, whose debut came just days before Trump’s tariff announcement.

The indie video game scene is currently dominated by two unassailable genre titans: the rogue-like and the deck-builder. The first is a type of action adventure in which players explore procedurally generated landscapes, where they battle enemies, level up and then die – whereupon they start all over again from scratch. The latter is about building decks of collectible cards (think Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering, but digital) and fighting with them. Titles that combine both in interesting ways – such as Balatro and Slay the Spire – can become huge crossover hits. But the market is getting saturated and so developers are having to find new genres to mix into this potent game design cocktail.Hence Drop Duchy, a game that attempts to combine the rogue-like deck-builder with … Tetris. Yes, the action takes place on a playfield in which differently shaped objects drop from the top of the screen to the bottom – except here, each object is either a landscape-type or a building, and the player isn’t only trying to create unbroken lines, they’re trying to place these units effectively to generate resources. Place a farm near a grassy plain block, for example, and it will produce wheat. Put a wooden fortress near a forest and it will generate farmland and swordsmen. When you complete a line, it doesn’t disappear: instead, it multiplies the resources you’re gathering. Why do you need the aforementioned soldiers? Well, alongside placing your own military bases, you also have to find space for random enemy bases, too, and at the end of the round, when all the blocks have been placed, you enter a combat sequence in which you align your military units to take on your foe.Tetris in a whole new way … Drop Duchy. Photograph: The Arcade CrewThe deck-building part is perhaps the most ingenious. Each random block that gets dropped into the play area is based on a card you hold in your deck – and as you progress, you can add new cards to widen your tactical capabilities. You might start with a farm, a wood clearer (turns forests into agricultual land) and a watchtower (produces archers), but as you play through an act – a sequence of battles that culminate in a boss encounter – you unlock new cards, and can spend resources on upgrading them to be more powerful. The boss battle is a themed encounter with specific challenges. In act one, the boss is the Wall, an edifice that restricts the play area, forcing you to build in a tight space, while act two ends with the Keep, an almost impenetrable fortress that you have to concentrate your forces against.It sounds complicated, and in some ways it is. But to the credit of the developer Sleepy Mill Studio, learning the basic rules and strategies is fairly intuitive, helped by a decent tutorial level and lots of onscreen hints and info. As with most rogue-lite games, there is a progression tree that allows you to unlock more powerful card types and mechanics that will stay with you through subsequent play-throughs. In this way, you can gradually crawl your way to easier victories through dozens of inevitable failures.What’s really interesting about the game is the way it forces you to think about Tetris in a whole new way. You’re not just placing objects to clear lines and stay alive; you’ve also got to think about how each piece interacts with those around it, and also how best to place enemy pieces in order to starve them of resources. It’s essentially a sprawling, five-dimensional challenge, disguised as a simple block-dropping puzzler.There are times when this ceaseless assault on your mental faculties can feel all too much. For the first few hours, you’ll be beaten senseless by the boss encounters, especially if you’re unlucky with your random card draws at the start of each battle – often, one misplaced block can turn a carefully planned battle map into a military blunder the size of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.And yet, the quaint pastel visuals, soothing music and ever-expanding range of resources, mechanics and abilities keep you playing. As with Balatro, there’s a sense that you only ever understand about 20% of what’s happening and that often you’re just throwing stuff out there and praying for a lucky break. That’s kind of fine, though, and as you stick with it, you learn more robust strategies for powering up your armies while limiting those of your enemy.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionDrop Duchy is an extremely clever experiment in game design by combination, and with each new feature you wonder how on earth the team managed to balance all the spinning plates. There’s a reason why the rogue-like and deck-builder genres are so wildly popular: they’re compulsive, challenging and systemically fascinating, and each one adds its own little foibles to the collective rulebook. In the case of Drop Duchy, the foibles are worth the price of entry alone.

Rockstar Games has delayed the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI until 26 May, 2026. The game had been scheduled for release this autumn, but the lack of a definite date was beginning to raise concerns within the industry.Announcing the decision via a brief post on its website, the company said: “We are very sorry that this is later than you expected. The interest and excitement surrounding a new Grand Theft Auto has been truly humbling for our entire team. We want to thank you for your support and your patience as we work to finish the game.“With every game we have released, the goal has always been to try and exceed your expectations, and Grand Theft Auto VI is no exception. We hope you understand that we need this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve.”It has been more than a decade since the release of Grand Theft Auto V, which has now sold 210m copies, making it the one of the most successful video games of all time alongside Minecraft and Tetris. GTA V was itself delayed several times before its eventual arrival in September 2013.Little has been revealed about GTA VI since the release of a teaser video in December 2023. The open-world crime thriller is set to take place in the fictional Vice City, GTA’s version of Miami, and its home state of Leonida. The story is expected to follow veteran criminal Lucia as she embarks on an ambitious heist with her male partner.No other information on the GTA VI delay has been given. However, Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two is due to report its financial results on 15 May, when questions from journalists and shareholders will no doubt dominate the session.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been tidying our attic, and while the general aim has been to prevent its contents from collapsing through the ceiling, I have a side-mission. My most valued possession when I was twelve was a Casio GD-8 Car Race watch – a digital timepiece that included a built-in racing game on its tiny monochrome LCD display. Two big buttons on the front let you steer left and right to avoid incoming vehicles and your aim was to stay alive as long as possible. I lost count of the number of times it was confiscated by teachers at my school. I used to lend it to the hardest boys in the year, thereby guaranteeing me protection against bullies. As a socially inept nerd, this was invaluable to my survival. I’m pretty sure I still have the watch somewhere, and my determination to find it has been augmented by a recent discovery: these things are valuable now.Casio started making digital watches in the mid-1970s, using technology it had developed in the calculator market to compete on price, but as the decade drew to a close, the market became saturated and the company started to explore new ways to entice buyers. Speaking to Polygon in 2015, Yuichi Masuda, senior executive managing officer and Casio board member, explained, “Casio went back to its original thinking when it first entered the watch market; that is, ‘a watch is not a mere tool to tell the time.’ We started talking about a multifunction [approach], time display plus other things, such as telephone number memory and music alarms.”Taking off … children playing Space Invaders in 1980. Photograph: Eugene Adebari/REX/ShutterstockAt the time, Taito’s arcade game Space Invaders was a phenomenon in Japan. And so in 1981 Casio launched the CA-90/CA-901, a chunky calculator watch that included a sort of space shoot-’em-up but with numbers rather than alien spaceships advancing down the screen. “We wanted to create a new lifestyle of enjoying the game anywhere at any time,” said Masuda.But wasn’t Casio also inspired by Nintendo’s Game & Watch series? After all, this iconic range of handheld electronic games started in 1980 with the juggling and catching sim Ball, and its success led to a vast array of titles, including the famed two-screen Donkey Kong that inspired the Nintendo DS. Shinji Saito, general manager and chief producer at the product planning department of Casio’s timepiece business unit, says not. “In 1980, the year before Casio launched the CA-90, Casio launched the MG-880, a game calculator that allowed users to enjoy digital invaders. Nintendo’s Game & Watch was also launched in 1980,” he says. “In developing the CA-90, Casio utilised the development assets of its MG-880 game calculator, but the starting point for the idea was Casio’s development philosophy of creating a new culture using light, thin, short and low-power technology. We were not inspired by Nintendo’s Game & Watch.”Indeed, Casio was developing a wide array of innovative features at the time including databanks, thermometers and pulse checkers. “Their entire watch range in the 80s was huge,” says watch enthusiast Andy Bagley. “I have been collecting for years and even now I will still come across a model I haven’t seen before; there were many hundreds. I only recently discovered Casio made a range of touch screen watches in the 80s – way ahead of their time!”Times past … Casio Gaming watch page from Vintage Casio catalogue Photograph: CasioWhatever the case, the CA-90 was such a success that it inspired a period of rampant creativity in the Casio R&D department. Between 1980 and 1985 the company produced dozens of different game watches – an incredible feat considering the limitations of LCD displays at the time, which couldn’t produce computer graphics or animation and simply relied on matrices of pre-set shapes that would switch on and off to suggest movement. There were several different racing games, there were shoot-’em-ups such as Heli-Fighter and Zoomnzap, and there were very rudimentary platformers including Jungle Star, where you play a Tarzan character leaping out of the way of rampaging panthers, and Hungry Mouse, where you are the mouse leaping over incoming cats.Some were more eccentric. Aero Batics was a stunt flying game, while Hustle Monira had you helping a dinosaur catch falling acorns (as opposed to Egg Panic where you caught … falling eggs). There were even rudimentary football and golf sims. As with Nintendo’s Game & Watch titles they were often merely visual variations on very simple game design concepts. But at the time, they felt like science fiction.Of course, Casio wasn’t the only tech company producing game watches in the 1980s. The US firm Nelsonic managed to get a Nintendo license and made watches with games based on Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, while Seiko had its Alba range of game watches throughout the 1980s, including the catchily named Y822-4000, which featured a baseball sim. The most aesthetically wild were from veteran electronic toy firm Tiger, which spent the spent the early 90s crafting gigantically chunky LCD game watches based on film licenses and arcade games such as Double Dragon and Altered Beast. Eventually however, technology and tastes moved on. After the high profile launch of the Game Boy in 1989, Nintendo swiftly cornered the portable gaming market. The game watch era was all but over.Now, there is a thriving collectors’ scene. “They are incredibly sought after and very expensive,” says Bagley. “A downside is that they were actually not that well made in comparison to say the all-stainless-steel Marlins, meaning there are not many survivors, hence rarity is an issue. In perfect condition the rarest, most collectible game watches will fetch many hundreds all the way up to £1,000.” For Bagley and other collectors, these watches are nostalgic treasures, recalling an era when kids were disrupting classes not with social media alerts, but hourly digital watch bleeps, and when one publication was absolutely unmissable: “Anyone like me who liked Casios in the 80s will no doubt remember the Argos catalogue,” he says. “It was my personal reference manual for the latest available models; I eagerly rushed to the watch section every time a new catalogue came out to check out the latest innovations.”The watch industry retains its interest in the classic video game scene. In 2022, Timex launched a limited edition range of Space Invaders watches featuring sounds from the game, and earlier this year Casio produced a similarly limited collection of gorgeous Pac-Man watches, sending old fans like myself scurrying to the pre-order section of its website. If you were a slightly nerdy kid in the 1980s these things were your smartphone, your Apple Watch, your grasp at playground cachet. That’s why I want to find my Car Race watch; it’s not really about the potential monetary value – it’s the one thing that really connects me to my 12-year-old self. For all that’s been lost along the way, we still have games in common.

When it comes to gamer-gatekeeping, there are few genres as snootily guarded as the immersive sim. From PC classic System Shock to the Dickensian Dishonored 2, these system-heavy sandboxes are video gaming’s equivalent to avant garde electronica or the films of Darren Aronofsky, adored by critics and genreheads but largely baffling to everyone else. Much like those elitist fandoms, the im-sim’s loudest cheerleaders often look down on linear blockbusters with similar sneer. No, Assassin’s Creed player, you cannot sit with us.While massive games such as Tears of the Kingdom have recently flirted with elements of the genre, there’s still a surprising lack of breezier, beginner-friendly immersive sims. Enter Blendo Games’ Skin Deep – an attempt to cosy-fi the genre. Doing away with the sour-faced sci-fi of Deus Ex, Skin Deep sends you hurtling into space with a premise ripped straight out of a noughties web comic. You play Nina Pasadena, an insurance commando sworn to rescue feline fleets from raiding pirates. As you answer each well-insured tabby’s urgent distress call, Nina quietly sneaks across the raided ship, using whatever tools she can cobble together to rescue her kitty clientele.Stalk your prey with whatever comes to hand: a book and a lighter? … Skin Deep. Photograph: Annapurna InteractiveThe story is incredibly silly – more on that later – but Skin Deep’s cacophony of colliding systems deserves to be taken seriously. As I stalk my prey with a book and a lighter, I quietly release a cloud of hand sanitiser before bashing his head in with a hefty novel. Before he can draw his gun, I leap backwards, chucking my flickering lighter into the cloud of sanitiser, engulfing the poor pirate in an explosion of glistening flames. It’s this gleefully slapstick approach that sees Skin Deep at its best – a playground that embraces the absurdity of its simulation with a Cheshire’s grin.It’s not all design by worship and tribute, however, with Blendo introducing some fun gameplay twists of its own. Pirates can respawn after being taken out, detachable floating “skull savers” attached to their heads hovering desperately back to their lifeless bodies. Nina must swiftly dispose of each screaming head before they can seek revenge. From shattering ship windows and sending a skull hurtling into outer space, to flushing screaming heads down a toilet, finding new ways to bin each bonce adds a welcome layer of variety. The duplicating “duper gun” is another fun innovation, allowing players to sneak up to unsuspecting guards and instantly copy whatever items they hold – from weapons to those crucial cat-freeing keys.A cartoony playground … Skin Deep. Photograph: Annapurna InteractiveEach fully mapped ship exterior also allows you to leap out of the airlock and scale the outside of the ship, surveying the vessel for sneaky new entry points. In one mission, I come crashing through the ship’s external window. As I land on the bridge feet first, I pull a bloodied glass shard from my foot and fling it straight into a pirate’s face, leaving me grinning like a cat-loving John McClane.Blendo Games understands that the best immersive sims are inherently cartoony playgrounds, sandboxes where every item is a tool for maleficence. From chucking pepper at a guard and making them sneeze so hard they pass out, to riding a pirate’s back and charging them straight into a wall, you certainly couldn’t accuse Skin Deep of taking itself too seriously.Unfortunately, I started to wish that the writers took it all more seriously. As freed cuboid cats leap from their rectangular cages with a sparkle and an enthusiastic MEOWW, and I reply to paw-penned emails asking me to find quirky VHS tapes, it dawns on me that I’m playing Deus Ex for Disney adults. While Skin Deep’s gags may well be catnip for the right player, the never-ending feline puns and overly-zany tone had me cringing, eliciting more grimaces than guffaws.If the cat-filled concept wasn’t millennially coded enough, Skin Deep is made using Doom 3’s 2004 id tech engine. Swapping the PC classic’s dimly-lit corridors for brightly coloured environments, it’s a knowingly nerdy-nod to the hardcore. While a cool idea on paper, in practice the archaic aesthetic falls short of the intended retro cool chic, instead looking disappointingly primitive.Still, if beauty is only Skin Deep, for £15, this is a colourful, breezy introduction to an infamously inaccessible genre. The end result is an enjoyable, if muddled game, a deceptively deep immersive sim that may be too silly for genre fans and too low-poly to entice newcomers. This isn’t the genre’s breakout hit then – a slapstick immersive sim using Doom 3’s engine was likely always destined to be niche – but if you can stomach Skin Deep’s saccharine silliness, there’s 10 hours of futuristic feline fun batting its paw in your direction.

I’ve been working in games for a little more than 15 years, and the main thing I’d say about it at this point is that it’s a pretty annoying job to explain at parties. People often say something like, “Oh, I don’t really play games,” which is surely an odd thing to tell a game designer moments after you’ve been introduced; I don’t really eat croissants, but that’s not the first thing I bring up if I meet a patissier.So one of the joys of publishing my first novel last year was the option to sidestep all of that, and say: “Oh, I’m a writer.” I wrote a novel; I’m working on another one; job done, the conversation can move on. Nobody says, “Oh, I don’t really read books,” even though that’s at least as likely to be true.It’s become clear to me that I’m not alone in switching between the two media. Why is this?A 2022 report commissioned by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), found that professional authors are paid a median of £7,000 a year from their writing. Mallory Marlowe is a romance writer – her debut Love and Other Conspiracies made the USA Bestseller list last year – and her day job writing for video games is part of what makes that possible. “Thankfully, I have a consistent paycheck coming in,” she says, “which is an advantage because the payment structures in publishing aren’t exactly sustainable.”At the same time, game writers are also having a rough time of it – GDC’s 2025 State of the Games Industry report claimed that one in five narrative designers and writers had been laid off in the previous year. So of course some game writers are looking for opportunities elsewhere.Scots sci-fi … Raik. Photograph: Harry Josephine GilesSometimes, writers even find the forms feed into each other, with a direct relationship between the two. Harry Josephine Giles’ game Raik, written in Scots and English, feels like a precursor to her book Deep Wheel Orcadia, a verse novel written in the Orkney dialect that won the 2022 Arthur C Clarke award. And Jon Ingold, co-founder of narrative game studio Inkle (80 Days, Expelled!), released two novels set in the world of the studio’s game Heaven’s Vault, with a third to come in May. Inkle published the books themselves; for Ingold, writing them was a way to spend more time in the world of the game, although, he says, “the plot in the novel was harder to construct. In a book, the protagonist needs focused motivation, all the time, or they stop doing things. But in a game, a player will investigate simply because the world exists”.When I ask all the novelist-game writers I know what the biggest difference between the forms is for them, I’m surprised by how different the answers are. For some, it’s a matter of process – novels can act as a release from the compromises of collaboration, while games can provide a break from sitting in a room on your own. Joe Dunthorne (Submarine, The Adulterants) has written novels, poetry and most recently a memoir (Children of Radium), and a few years ago he did a huge amount of work on a big-budget video game that got cancelled without ever being publicly announced. Even though the game didn’t work out, he says that, “after the loneliness and madness of novel-writing, I was relieved to go to an office every day. I loved working with games designers, in particular. I was in awe of their ability to think through these dizzyingly complex structures.”Post-apocalypse mystery … Saltsea Chronicles. Photograph: Die Gute FabrikSharna Jackson has written children’s novels including High-Rise Mystery and The Nine Night Mystery. She also worked on Die Gute Fabrik’s post-apocalypse mystery game Saltsea Chronicles and an audio experience for Yoto. For her, the key difference is that with most games, you’ll write “many, many words that may never be read or heard – it all depends on the pathways your players take through the experience”. Some of your best work may end up in the “rare outcomes and Easter eggs” that only a few players will encounter. Mallory Marlowe, meanwhile, talks about how novels offer, “a strange amount of independence” to writers used to working in games, while novelists might take a while to get used to creating game stories that work for players with wildly varying degrees of investment in the writing. “Some people just want to press buttons and cause trouble,” she says. “Others are going to engage with everything on a story level”.Sooner or later, almost everyone I talk to brings up the radically different cultural status of games and books – their equivalent of my complaint about people at parties. Jim Munroe (We Are Raccoons, Unmanned) has been writing games and books for more than 25 years, and he talks about how books are culturally valued in a way games aren’t. “Creators are in games in spite of the low status of games,” he says. Naomi Alderman, author of Disobedience and The Future, echoes some of this experience. There was a week in which both her novel The Power and her game Zombies, Run! (co-created with Six to Start) won awards. The award for her book made the papers, even the front page of the Times of India, while the Zombies, Run! award barely made the specialist games press.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionAuthor Naomi Alderman wins the 2017 Bailey’s women’s prize for fiction for her novel The Power. Photograph: Stuart C Wilson/Getty ImagesBut although everyone talks about the different position that games have in the wider world, not everyone responds to it with my slightly ungenerous irritation. Munroe says that it means games tend to draw creators with a more independent streak. Marlowe enjoys the way that people are intrigued and confused by the idea of game writing, and relishes the follow-up conversations. And for Harry Josephine Giles, the position that games occupy is part of what makes them joyful. She points out that games are still young compared with the novel, their conventions less fixed. Early English novelists like Aphra Behn and Laurence Sterne could mess around more, print a page entirely black, push at the still-forming edges of what a novel was. Nowadays only the most experimental novels have that freedom, “ossified” by their place in culture. Games – newer and with a lower cultural status – remain malleable. Plus, as Dunthorne says, “writing often comes pretty far down the list of priorities in game design – and that’s OK. Games are not novels.”Clearly, the emerging generation of young writers grew up as native video game players, so they’re willing and able to switch between the two cultural forms without finding it weird, and without seeing one as necessarily “better” than the other. And sure, if you work in games, there are still people at parties who will say: ”Oh, I don’t really play those.” But sometimes that might mean you get to make something weirder and more surprising, while nobody’s looking.

The haunted house has become a ripe location in which to set weird video games. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Blue Prince, Botany Manor and Layers of Fear spring to mind. The manor as a site of danger, supernatural peril, untrustworthy architecture – perfect, surely, for an unsettling experience. Or even a silly experience in unsettling surroundings.Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 promises much in its title. It presents initially as a high-concept dinosaur-hunting adventure in spooky house run by a sinister old mogul, then quickly reveals to the player that it knows it is a video game. A broken video game, that is, and it is up to us to patch it as we go.The player explores the mansion through text and puzzle vignettes, pushing the limits on every scenario in the hopes of finding bugs and glitches, ultimately in the hope of defying the wishes of the unseen developers and “finishing” the game themself. This is a big concept, but the game seems to be interested in telling us its ideas rather than showing them to us – or demonstrating them within the play itself.The combat system through which our butch, confused protagonist operates is a clever little game of match three, the rules of which bend and flex depending on what he is fighting. Sometimes it is a dinosaur with a gun. Sometimes it is a tripwire, sometimes it is a legion of clones – sometimes his own clone. Sometimes it is talking vegetables. Sometimes a dinosaur in a wig. The silliness is one note and becomes flat quickly, saved only by the pleasing nature of the puzzles.Still, in order to have an effective game of match three – or, frankly, Candy Crush – you have to use high-contrast colours to make it kinder on the player. There were rounds when I played in which the symbols were really difficult to differentiate, which interrupted the otherwise pleasing flow. This visual issue is not limited to the puzzles: the entire colour palette of this game is muddy. It neither commits to the gothic nor leans full chaos.The same issues applies to the text. The game is text based, but the dialogue and descriptive writing are as muddy as the visuals. The jokes are fine, though they aim to be subversive and shocking (dinosaur romance being a recurring gag). However, the game being about gameplay and game development means that much of the descriptions are couched in jargon. Discussions of files and version history are beyond inside baseball. So if you are a seasoned enough gamer to be up to speed with the meta language, surely you don’t need swearwords to be starred out. Surely we were all laughing at dinosaur romance five years ago. The writing is so close to great. It just needed to be sharper.Text-based gameplay in Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3. Photograph: Strange ScaffoldThe art style is sketchy, but not in a way that evokes a deliberate aesthetic. There are times in which reality is said, by the text, to be bending and glitching. There are moments in which we disappear into voids and exit the world. There is even a somewhat climactic moment in which we enter the internet. Still, the visuals pull their punches. These strange occurrences can be evoked with drawings and don’t require flashy graphics. I recognise the illustrative style is deliberate but the game would have been better served by even a little more playfulness, or even intentionality, in the art style. Two moments did make me laugh – one involving some unexpected clowns, the other, pets – when the visual style actually did move into the meta and demonstrate some of what the game tells us it is about.I wanted to love this game. On paper it is outrageous. Strange Scaffold, the developer, is known for the weird – notably Clickholding, which is sinister, experimental and truly queries what a game is in its execution (there is a lot of clicking, and being watched in the action of clicking). Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 certainly is creepy, and set in a mansion, and does have dinosaurs and some really satisfying puzzles. It also has some great ideas and isn’t quite a failed experiment. While it doesn’t bend reality in the way that it seems to want to, it aims high, and if the player can manage the places where the aesthetic falls short, they’ll have a great time. They might even meet a nice, blond dinosaur they can take home with them.

When we meet Clair Obscur’s protagonist Gustave, he’s getting ready to say goodbye to his ex-girlfriend, Sophie. Once a year the Paintress, a giant god-like woman visible from across the sea, wakes, paints a number on a large monolith, and in the peaceful town of Lumière, everyone whose age corresponds with the number dies. This process, called the Gommage, has shortened people’s lives for 67 years, and now it’s Sophie’s turn. Immediately after this heart-wrenching goodbye, Gustave and his adopted sister Maelle get ready to set sail as part of Expedition 33, on a journey to defeat the Paintress and end her gruesome cycle.While stunningly beautiful, the continent you arrive at is no friendly place, and the path to the Paintress is filled with surreal monsters called Nevrons, which you fight in turn-based battles. Characters have a melee attack and a long-range attack, but most importantly, they have a large variety of unique skills including elemental magic attacks and strong attacks with multiple hits that have the chance to stun. Each member of your team has a special way of building up damage even further; Maelle for example uses a defensive, offensive or aggressive combat stance, inspired by fencing, while the magic that Lune wields builds up so-called stains that you can then spend to make other spells more powerful. Add to this long list of optional passive skills called Pictos, and soon you have a wide array of ways to enhance your characters. The interplay between building up action points to use skills, building up damage and defending is really interesting, and I enjoyed trying out different tactics, even as it meant that a lot of my time was spent in menus.An enigma wrapped in a mystery … Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Photograph: Sandfall InteractiveIt can feel overwhelming, but each new skill gets introduced gradually, and permanent tool tips in the battle menu helpfully list each skill’s effect and cost. Clair Obscur’s combat can be quite a challenge, however, since battles use a parry and dodge system. If you don’t dodge at least, battles will quickly be over. Successful parries, which have a narrower reaction window than dodging, let characters answer with powerful counters, which can be crucial to beating your foes. Even regular enemies kept me on my toes with their many attacks, but the absolute screen-shaking force of a successful counter felt deeply satisfying every time. I continuously got a kick out of parrying because I’m the right kind of bad at it – it might get boring if you don’t get that hit of dopamine from occasional success, or feel frustrating if you struggle constantly. Enemies also feint incredibly often, which is meant to increase the difficulty of parrying but also lengthens their attacks, sometimes overly so.Developer Sandfall Interactive has been very open about taking inspiration from Japanese role-playing games. While combat is certainly a prominent example, I saw the influences everywhere: the menu design is as much Persona-inspired as the combat is, the enemies are as surreal as Bloodborne’s gruesome creations. But when it comes to storytelling, Clair Obscur shares the tendency of many JRPGs to over-complicate things.The dialogue though is well written and acted. Your party goes through some incredibly bad times, but they talk about it candidly and try to support each other as best they can. Optional conversations help you to get to know everyone better – some of Clair Obscur’s best writing is here. It’s the main plot where things eventually get exhausting. For the most part, Clair Obscur is the adult fantasy that Final Fantasy XVI tried to be. But it’s also an enigma wrapped in a mystery, and for hours and hours, it adds new questions and characters until it’s all revealed in an absolute dump of late-game information. Conversations, locations and gameplay repeat themselves in the final third, making things feel artificially lengthened.Towards the end, Clair Obscur constantly finds more ways to be even sadder than it was mere minutes ago, so unwilling to let you go that it forces you through lengthy boss fights accompanied by a whole soundtrack’s worth of operatic metal. It also culminates in a very frustrating ending that made me question everything I spent hours doing. Everywhere else, from combat to enemy design to music, I appreciated Clair Obscur’s flair for the epic, but too much subterfuge, too many tears, too many fights ultimately made for a seriously fumbled ending.

One thing you realise as you get older is that memories are plastic and that the stories you tell about your life change with every recollection, depending on who you are at the time. This is one of the themes – and indeed the mechanics – of Lost Records, a narrative adventure about four teenage girls who develop an intense friendship in rural Michigan during the summer of 1995. In the first instalment, they form a band, discover an old shack in the woods to use as a clubhouse, and encounter a supernatural force emanating from a deep hole they discover nearby. But as autumn draws in and the girls plan a climactic rock gig, tragic secrets are uncovered.Cleverly, the story is told mostly in flashback, as the characters meet again, decades later, in their long-abandoned home town – they’re older, wiser and with new perspectives on what happened to them as teenagers. Lead character Swann, a keen photographer whose video camera provides a key game interface in the first episode, is living a solitary life, while Autumn is still filled with anxiety and Nora is now an influencer. Missing is Kat whose terminal cancer diagnosis obliterates their world at the close of part one.Incredibly poignant … Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape Two). Photograph: Don’t NodWhile the first instalment focused on the excitement and hubris of the teenage characters, this is a much darker story concentrating on the adults as they pick apart their lives. Through dialogue trees and interactive memory segments you help Swann navigate the meeting, as well as moments from the past. There is less of the video camera this time. In the first part, there were multiple occasions where you had to film certain scenes, creating a nicely personal bank of footage which could be edited and reshot. There is also much less actual gameplay: an early scene where you have to pack a box and a later stealth sequence where you sneak into Kat’s bedroom are the only real moments of ludic challenge. I missed taking more of an active role.What you get instead, are some incredibly poignant narrative scenes, as the girls battle with the reality of Kat’s diagnosis and the raw ambiguity of their feelings for each other. Two moments stand out especially: Swann and Nora meeting alone one afternoon, talking and exchanging gifts, every word, every gesture, communicating a mass of unspoken feelings. Then, Swann sneaking into Kat’s bedroom and helping her cut her hair before chemotherapy takes it. This is some of the most profound, sensitively structured and emotionally resonant writing about the teenage experience of love and loss I have ever encountered in a video game.Tape Two ends on an ambiguous note, though I think this is utterly true to the experience of playing. The mysterious hole in the woods, which the characters call “the abyss”, can be interpreted as entirely symbolic, as can all the supernatural events in the game, and this is a brave, credible narrative decision. Sometimes, there are no answers, and sometimes the magic we perceived around us when we were young turns out to have been something else entirely – perhaps just friendship or imagination, or the yearning to be something in the world.The effect is like Stranger Things directed by Kelly Reichardt – a realist fantasy in which silence and ambiguity come to the fore. Lost Records is ultimately a game about love, grief and self-recrimination, and the different intensities of those forces as we age. By the end you miss the optimism and verve of those girls in the woods, as though you were one of them – and quite possibly, in a lot of ways, you were.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion

One of my earliest memories is watching my mum and dad play the opening level of Super Mario Bros in cooperative mode on the Nintendo Entertainment System. This was the early 1990s, and they were joined at the hip on the sofa, laughing at the idea of two portly plumbers becoming gigantic after consuming copious amounts of magic mushrooms.‘An ordinary human being rather than the tragic myth he became’ … family photo of Thomas Hobbs with his father, Jonathan. Photograph: Thomas HobbsIn this moment I sensed their natural chemistry, while the intoxicating mix of 8-bit visuals and perky, synth-heavy music blew my toddler mind. Although it was irritating seeing them constantly fail to jump high enough to hit the top of the flagpole at the end of the level, I remember being transfixed by the TV screen, and I’m pretty sure this was the first time I connected properly with a video game.I was only four years old when my dad died. It happened suddenly, a heart attack when he was just 37, and I witnessed it on a bike ride ... It left my family for ever broken. But the formative image of dad at his most carefree and in love, clutching a rectangular controller hooked up to a grey slab of Japanese joy, remained. It was something I could utilise whenever my grief became too much. Most importantly, the memory allowed me to visualise my dad as an ordinary human being rather than the tragic myth he later became.Ours was a working-class household with limited space, so eventually the NES disappeared: no one could work out whether it was gathering dust in an old plastic bag in a relative’s loft, or if it had been accidentally thrown out. So I was shocked recently when my mum unexpectedly handed me the console after finding it during a spring clean. She asked me if I could try to fix it, so that we could keep it in the family.It had no leads, games, or controllers. It was also filthy with sticky clumps of dirt, particularly around the AV slots, and judging by the rust collecting at the cartridge slot, had serious water damage. After giving it a deep clean, hoovering all the damp dust out of the inside and buying a pricey device that converted the games into HD, I switched it on. Somehow, it still worked. Clearly, like most consumer devices produced in the 1980s, the NES had been built to withstand a nuclear winter should the cold war heat up.A retro ‘Nintendo Family Computer’, sold in Japan as a forerunner to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty ImagesThe last few weeks of rebuying games and getting lost in their fuzzy charms have been genuinely restorative for my mental health; a chance to reconnect with my roots. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to make a jump on the Fortress level of World 1 in Super Mario Bros 3, with spikes descending from the ceiling just as my squirrel suit was on the verge of flying to the other side. But by working out I simply had to be patient and duck inside a small space to avoid looming peril, rather than blindly rushing forward, I knew I was experiencing the same glorious lightbulb moment my dad would have enjoyed.I’ve been particularly obsessed with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Despite the clunky 2D crowd and square-ish dimensions, there’s a genuine dynamism to the boxer’s movement and a feeling that David can defeat Goliath simply by bobbing and weaving and flipping the momentum with a well-aimed jab to the chin. While later boxing games might have been dripping with life-like bodily fluids, I have yet to find one that better replicates the magic of a boxer tasting blood and moving in for the kill than this 1987 NES game.Double Dragon has also been a revelation. This co-op fighting game gives you a big open space to navigate and – despite the graphical limitations – makes you feel like Bruce Lee: surrounded by foes, but with enough battlefield intelligence to use the environment to your advantage and kick knife-wielding enemies into the dust. With race-against-the-clock tension, one early sequence where you fight a couple of heavies on a moving conveyor belt made me feel like I was in a John Woo action movie.In these games the lack of a save mode forces you to continuously invest in improving, so the next time you hit the dreaded “Game Over” screen you’re more confident of avoiding the same mistakes. This grift is strangely addictive, and it’s easy to picture my dad taking a quick break after putting baby me to sleep, his mind on the allure of the hard-won achievements at the core of this more patient era of Nintendo gaming.Genuine dynamism … Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! Photograph: NintendoKnowing he would have once had the same smile on his face while playing the NES has made him more tangible in my mind; it’s allowed me to see through his eyes. And, as my two-year-old son experiences his own dad going crazy over firing Flower Power-ups or defeating Dracula Duck during the final boss battle of the family melodrama that is DuckTales, I feel like I’m keeping my father’s energy alive.Retro gaming is very much on the rise in the UK and US, with many players rediscovering the delights of analogue-era consoles. Playing these old cartridges on the original machines provides a deeper appreciation of the evolution of gaming and it’s an escape from a world that feels far less carefree than the time in which these machines were thriving. Perhaps they also hope to re-ignite the memories of those who’ve passed, to remain connected to the loved ones who once invested their time into these devices.Rather than letting that old console become a house for spiders in your loft, dust it off, get playing. It might just help you to grieve, or relive a special memory that otherwise could easily have been lost. When I hear the opening chords of the Super Mario Bros theme song, I’m instantly back on that sofa with my mum and dad, smiling, assured that everything is going to be OK.

Out of all the episodes in the excellent seventh season of Black Mirror, it’s Plaything that sticks out to me and I suspect to anyone else who played video games in the 1990s. It’s the story of socially awkward freelance games journalist, Cameron Walker, who steals the code to a new virtual pet sim named Thronglets from the developer he’s meant to be interviewing. When he gets the game home, he realises the cute, intelligent little critters he’s caring for on the screen have a darker ambition than simply to perform for his amusement – cue nightmarish exploration of AI and our complicity in its rise.The episode is interesting to me because … well, I was a socially awkward games journalist in the mid-1990s. But more importantly, so was Charlie Brooker. He began his writing career penning satirical features and blistering reviews for PC Zone magazine, one of the two permanently warring PC mags of the era (I shared an office with the other, PC Gamer). In Plaything, it’s PC Zone that Cameron Walker writes for, and there are several scenes taking place in its office, which in the programme is depicted as a reasonably grownup office space with tidy computer workstations and huge windows. I do not think the production design team got this vision from Brooker.“Zone had far less of the corporate workplace feel than the episode showed, and much more of a kids in the basement, youth club-cum-nightclub vibe to it,” says Paul Presley, who worked on PC Zone at the time. “It was a handful of messy, cluttered desks stuck in a windowless basement office round the back of Oxford Street (later Tottenham Court Road). We’d have killed for floor-to-ceiling windows! Editorial, art and production were all on top of each other, music blasting from the office stereo, usually furnished by the neighbouring Metal Hammer magazine. Desks were personal spaces, overflowing with paper, mags, trinkets, swag and tons and tons of CDs.”In the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I also contacted another PC Zone alumnus Richie Shoemaker for his recollections. “Although there were windows along one side, they were below street level and smeared with London grime,” he says. “The sills were piled high with dusty magazines, broken joysticks and likely-empty game boxes. It was perpetual night for the best part of eight years down there.”Kids in the basement … the office of PC Zone magazine in the mid-1990s Photograph: Richie ShoemakerThe episode was more accurate on the games themselves – the first scene in the office shows Cam playing Doom, when the editor comes over, shows him the front cover of the latest issue of the mag with System Shock on the cover, then asks Cameron if he’s finished his review of Bullfrog’s classic adventure game Magic Carpet. “[Plaything] is good on the timelines,” says Shoemaker. “Playing Doom in the office was of course standard – although when I joined the team Quake was the lunchtime and afterwork deathmatch of choice. The Magic Carpet review did appear in the issue after System Shock (which was actually Charlie’s first cover review), but it got 96%, not 93% and was written by launch editor Paul Lakin – who went on to work at the Foreign Office.” He also reckons the episode’s grizzled old editor might have been inspired by then deputy editor, Chris Anderson, who according to Shoemaker was “quite a vampiric character who seemed to exist on a diet of cigarettes and Ultima Online.”Most fascinating to me though is the inspirational origin of the Thronglets virtual pet game. Most reviewers have been referencing Tamagotchi, the keychain pet toy that took the world by storm int the late 90s. Brooker himself has referenced it in an interview. However, a much more likely candidate was the 1996 title Creatures, in which players cared for generations of cuddly-looking critters. Although it looked like a cutesy pet game it was in fact a highly sophisticated artificial life experiment, created by the distinctly sci-fi-sounding CyberLife Technology. Players needed to try to establish breeding populations of the creatures – called norns – but your control over them was limited as they were coded with advanced neural networks and had functioning internal bodily systems regulating their behaviours and physical abilities. CyberLife made a big deal of the complexity and experimental nature of the game: the box came with a warning sticker stating “Digital DNA Enclosed” and the blurb on the back cautioned players that they would be unleashing the world’s first artificial life-science experiment – which is exactly what Plaything is about.Less cutesy than it looked … Creatures. Photograph: CyberLife TechnologiesCreatures creator Steve Grand bears similarities to the Plaything (and Bandersnatch) coder Colin Ritman. He was a programmer who got tired of conventional games and wanted to try something extremely new. He went on to write a book about Creatures and its development, Creation: Life and How to Make It, and later became an internationally renowned roboticist, famously developing a robot orangutan. Surely the most Black Mirror career trajectory ever. In 2011, he started work on a spiritual follow-up to Creatures named Grandroids, which like Thronglets was about developing a race of intelligent AI aliens – Grand launched a Kickstarter for it in 2016. The project has yet to surface although Grand has a new website for it under the name Phantasia. All very intriguing.This is one of the things I love about Black Mirror, and indeed the use of technology and video games in conventional drama: this is an arcane world full of eccentric people no one outside the industry has heard of, yet the toys they make have massive ramifications. Personally, I wanted to see a lot more of the PC Zone as imagined by the programme, but I understand that the sinister Thronglets were the real focus. Maybe one day there will be a full Silicon Valley-style drama series about the games industry in the 1990s – it was a hell of a time. For now, it’s interesting to see the world both Brooker and I inhabited being used as the venue for dystopian fiction – even if they really did get it completely wrong about those windows.

My first day with Blue Prince, I told myself I’d just have a little taste before turning to my usual evening K-drama. Before I knew it the sun had long since set and my lounge was lit only by my Steam Deck and a game that had fast become my new obsession. It is the sort of game that feels as though it were made just for you – and the elements that make it truly special are best discovered without forewarning, so forgive any vagueness in what follows.In a similar style to What Remains of Edith Finch or Gone Home, Blue Prince has you exploring your character’s atmospherically uninhabited family home. But as in Outer Wilds, your exploration is limited: you are frequently forced to start afresh with little more than the snippets of knowledge you’ve gained. Each expedition is further complicated by Rogue-like randomisation: the house’s shapeshifting floor plan is a five-by-nine grid to be filled anew each day with tiles drafted by you, a feature that some players may recognise from the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. But in this case there’s a random choice of three options whenever you open a door.It’s always worth trying a room you haven’t seen before. Photograph: Raw FuryDifferent rooms serve different functions. Some provide resources such as keys, money, energy or gems (required to draft more interesting rooms), and these are occasionally locked behind relatively simple standalone puzzles. Others deplete your stocks, like the gymnasium that wearies you each time you enter. A few, such as the boiler room or utility closet, offer special features that affect the rest of the house, occasionally even beyond just that day. On every in-game day, you enter the house, draft rooms, and explore until you run out of energy or openable doors. Rinse and repeat.The point? Ostensibly, to fulfil the stipulation laid out in a deceased great uncle’s will to find an elusive 46th room and thereby inherit the estate. But like a parfait dessert, this game is deliciously layered. At first the sprawling house can feel sparse, with its lifeless rooms and the game’s calming cel-shaded art style and succinct sound design and music. You’ll focus on the draft, learning as you go that the further you get from the entrance, the more likely you are to draw rarer rooms; that most rooms can only be drafted once per run; and that it’s always worth trying a room you haven’t seen before even if it doesn’t seem useful in the moment.Before too long, you’ll start to find objects that hint at future discoveries: car keys when you’ve yet to see a car (or even considered venturing outside); notes written by different hands; larger puzzles you have no idea how or why to solve. You’ll scribble down hints and set goals for future runs, or – as I did – take copious screenshots of the letters, photographs and other artefacts found throughout. As the rooms become more familiar, you’ll notice more details and wonder if they’re background art, environmental storytelling, or clues.In another game such repetition could feel tedious, but Blue Prince sets a gently rewarding pace, the randomisation nudging you to try new things and make new discoveries each day. Thoughtful design details smooth your way: most locked doors only require any generic key, the more convoluted puzzles remain solved even when the house resets, the use of discrete energy units consumed when you enter a room – rather than a ticking clock – means you can always take your time. I never felt in danger of not being able to solve a problem, and multiple puzzles ended up having easier solutions than I initially suspected.And then there’s the fact that Blue Prince has the best titular homophone in video games (sorry Fortnite). It’s a game about the blueprints of the Mount Holly Estate, and naturally a magical mansion like this has a story; it’s this, the family behind it, and the fantastical wider world in which they live, that will draw you to the 46th room and far, far beyond.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion

In the early 00s, offbeat sports games were king. From the slam-dunking shenanigans of NBA Street to Mario Strikers’ show-stopping absurdity, once serious competitions were reimagined as wonderfully silly grudge matches. Yet as the live service era arrived, sport sims became less about pulse-pumping plays, and more about collecting increasingly expensive virtual trading cards.Enter Rematch, a refreshingly action-packed reimagining of the beautiful game. Channelling the scrappy thrills of Powerleague five-a-side, Rematch sidelines Fifa’s team-focused tactics to put you in the studded boots of a single player. With controls like a third-person action game, developer Sloclap channels its martial arts-heavy experience with previous titles Sifu and Absolver into creating weighty, skill-driven football. It’s wonderfully agile, fast and furious stuff. Passes are delivered manually, shots are curled in the heat of the moment, and goalies come sprinting down the halfway line like an Oliver Kahn possessed. Gratuitous slide tackles and bicycle kicks are the order of the day, and as my teammates and I score our respective half-line screamers, I can’t stop grinning.“Fifa is a football simulation and Rematch is a football player simulation,” says creative director, Pierre Tarno. “In gaming this kind of pass to volley kick action simply does not exist any more. So, we thought: ‘Let’s make it happen!’”Reflex-testing … Rematch. Photograph: SloclapWhere Sifu had you knocking seven shades of chi out of a slew of martial arts masters, Rematch channels similarly reflex-testing gameplay into a kickabout. Thanks to the high level of player control, matches get surprisingly sweaty surprisingly quickly. Without 10 other controllable players to consider, Rematch is a game of constant movement. Sprinting costs precious stamina, and holding the “run” button constantly à la Fifa is a swift way to fumble your shot. Thankfully, you’ve got a trick hidden under your knee pads. A tap of the bumper lets off a sudden, swift burst of speed. Tied to a separate meter, this emergency boost is great for chasing down the striker in your box or for ditching that defender snapping at your heels. Soon you’re balancing midfield and defensive play on the fly and charging into goalmouth scrambles in authentically scrappy fashion.Sporting an art style that’s part Breath of the Wild, part French impressionism, anime-esque speed lines follow your player as you sprint across each lusciously rendered pitch. Scoring a goal warps the virtual environment around you, the stage’s backdrop transforming Smash Bros-style, to match the leading team’s home stadium, as the ball hits the back of the net in an explosion of colour.According to Tarno, Rematch’s visuals were an attempt to recreate the look of soft dreamy paintings inside immersive 3D stadiums. Yet despite its endearingly cartoony look, there’s a welcome lack of screen-filling super moves and gravity defying feats. “We once had wall-running built into the game,” he says, “but it was a little too far from the credible football fantasy that we were aiming for.”A game of constant movement … Rematch. Photograph: SloclapThis is a world that’s bright in aesthetic and outlook. Set in 2065, instead of taking place inside video games’ usual grimdark dystopia, Sloclap offers a refreshingly optimistic view of the future, the environments focused on renewable energies and natural landscapes. One stadium is encased in a dam that generates hydraulic power, another sees your match unfolding nestled under a hillside with spinning wind turbines.“We wanted to dream up a world in which mankind has made the right choices, in which cooperation and resilience are shared values, on and off the pitch,” says Tarno. “It’s really about the joy of playing with friends.”Once the controls finally click, I am fully invested in my ramshackle team. Just like Sloclap’s previous output, Rematch is about mastery, a game where your avatar starts off at the height of their powers – it’s just up to you to figure out how best to wield them. It helps that in Rematch’s world, offsides, fouls and – mercifully – VAR are a thing of the past, with futuristic footie letting nothing slow the action. “I think players who aren’t fans of football will be surprised that they can still enjoy a football game, because it’s intense and dynamic,” says Tarno.As Rematch is online-only, a ball call system lets players raise their hand as they shout and request the ball, with players also able to track the position of the ball – and their teammates – on an FPS-style minimap. There’s more than a touch of Overwatch to Rematch’s futuristic footie. The squad-led approach and precise manual aiming mean it feels just as satisfying to set up a goal as it does to score one. Rematch also shares a sense of arcade kinship with Rocket League – yet where Psyonix’s unstoppable hit sees players launching their Hot Wheels-esque vehicles into comically large footballs, Rematch delivers a more plausible approximation of the game.Rematch is filled with fun player customisation, allowing you to design everything from home and away kits to picking your avatar’s piercings. In keeping with its more inclusive vision of the future, there’s a vitiligo selector and even options for customisable prostheses for your player. Rematch will be a paid release, and I’m told that around half of cosmetic items will be unlockable through play, with additional items sold via in-game currency.Regardless of price point, Tarno is acutely aware that only one thing truly matters. “There’s no secret formula to game development,” he says. “The only way to make a commercial success is to make a very good game. It’s truer in games than any other entertainment industry … gamers are a very discerning audience. They are often very analytical, very precise in their assessment of mechanics and what works and what doesn’t … If the game is not good enough, it simply won’t succeed.”This month’s open beta will be crucial to fine-tuning Rematch. So far at least, it’s been a promising first half. I came into my demo expecting Mario Strikers-esque throwaway fun, and left with sweat-drenched hands. Sloclap’s mission is to bring a sense of fun back into virtual football, and based on what I’ve seen bandied about this colourful pitch so far, Rematch has the depth to make it to the big leagues.

This week I took my son, Zac, to see the new Minecraft movie, which is hardly a remarkable statement in the highly video game-branded world of 21st-century cinema – except that what followed was not typical at all. At least, not yet.As you may have seen from a number of bewildered news reports over the last few days, A Minecraft Movie has quickly engendered a community of, let’s say, highly engaged and enthusiastic fans. Spurred on by TikTok meme posts, vast portions of the film’s audience are now yelling out key lines of dialogue as they happen and singing along to the songs. In one key moment where a rare character from the game – the zombie chicken jockey – is introduced, they go absolutely crazy, throwing drinks and popcorn around, and in some US cinemas, getting escorted from the screening by police.The reaction was a little more muted in our tiny independent cinema in Frome, but still, there were rows of teenagers who had clearly seen all the TikTok posts telling them which lines to shout along to, and went to throw stuff, and they were extremely excited to be doing so, a few surreptitiously filming their mates’ reactions so they could add to the social media carnage. It was boisterous enough for the cinema to post on Facebook the next day about antisocial behaviour and the illegality of recording during a film.There is much to unpack here about the exclusionary nature of internet culture, cinema etiquette and the migration of online communities into physical spaces. Most of the audience reactions were fine – it’s an intentionally daft movie made for fans, and it is thrilling to celebrate fandom in a crowded space with likeminded peers. The film itself constantly rewards those who are immersed in its fiction – we enjoyed spotting the many Easter eggs (“oh look, it’s Herobrine!”) as well as little cameos from Minecraft YouTubers and even the game’s developers. There are also genuinely funny moments of slapstick and irony, hinging on committed performances from Jack Black and Jason Momoa.Flying as high as cinema popcorn … A Minecraft Movie. Photograph: Warner Bros/APBut for Zac, who is 19 and autistic, and for a lot of the smaller children in the auditorium, there were times when the atmosphere was confusing and a little intimidating. There have been comparisons to the wild reactions in screenings of Marvel movies such as Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home, but those responses were largely prompted by in-film events. We all understood why people cheered when Captain America successfully caught Thor’s hammer, since the moment was painstakingly built into the lore of the series.With A Minecraft Movie, the prompts to audience reaction are largely from memes, that branch of internet comedy that is by its nature arcane: the joke is that you are seen to get the joke by other people who also get the joke. Out of context, a meme is a private gag you’re not in on. Perhaps the closest analogy is the culture around The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its legendary fan screenings in fleapit cinemas, complete with water pistols and drag attire. But those events were opt-in – everyone knew what they were getting. I’m not sure the same could be said for all of the parents leaving my screening picking popcorn out of their hair.But look, we really enjoyed watching the film. When Zac was young and struggling to communicate, Minecraft was a cherished outlet for him, allowing him to be creative and to make friends. He still plays to this day; it is his comfort blanket and it changed our lives – not least because I ended up writing a novel, A Boy Made of Blocks, inspired by our experiences within the game. Just hearing that baleful piano music in the cinema, sharing those jokes, seeing something that has had a profound positive effect on my family depicted on a huge screen among other fans, was an emotional experience.Of course, teenagers are supposed to be confusing and intimidating – that’s their job. We can’t just pivot from handwringing over the anxious generation to “let’s ban them from the cinemas because they’re naughty”. Also, in these difficult times for the movie industry, film-makers need to find ways to engage with teen audiences who are going out less, whether that’s due to the expense, social anxiety or the all-encompassing nature of digital culture. A Minecraft Movie is that most perfect unicorn of the entertainment business: a review-retardant, multimillion-dollar blockbuster that’s reaching the most unreachable generation in modern history. A lot of studios are now going to be busy working out how they can capture this meme-soaked magic in a bottle.Perhaps cinema owners will get wise and organise dedicated autism-friendly screenings, or at the opposite end of the scale, embrace the chaos and do special fan nights. They just need to be prepared to pay the cleaning staff a little extra.What to playLike an old war comic … Commandos: Origins. Photograph: Kalypso MediaA few hundred years ago (well, 1998), my favourite example in the then-crowded real-time strategy genre was Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, a rip-roaring world war two tactical adventure where you directed a group of variously skilled soldiers through covert missions against German strongholds. Commandos: Origins is a reimagining of the series, modernising the original’s intricately detailed isometric landscapes and retaining its focus on stealth and sabotage. It’s like being in your own interactive version of old war comics such as Warlord and Battle Action, and I am fully prepared to lose hours of my life repeatedly attempting to get the sniper into the guard tower without being spotted by the patrolling Nazis.Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readThe Nintendo Switch 2 is still keeping some specs under wraps. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP Polygon has some interesting follow-on from the recent Nintendo Switch 2 announcement: the console’s much-heralded group chat feature won’t be free. Instead, owners will have to pay a monthly fee to talk to pals while playing. Elsewhere, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry team has produced a typically excellent deep dive into the console’s tech specs, which we still know very little about. The use ofAI in game development continues to be controversial and this Aftermath feature talking to game makers who are having to work with artificial intelligence is eye-opening and important. What to clickQuestion BlockNot losing the plot … Dragon Ball FighterZ. Photograph: Namco BandaiThis week’s question comes from StevenMane on Bluesky, who asked:“Fighting games tend to have some of the deepest stories. However, there’s a stigma that fighting games are only about pushing buttons and being hyper-competitive. What could developers and players do to break this stigma?”I think this comes from the disconnect between the action of fighting games and their narrative content: usually, all the story happens in cutscenes and pre-fight taunts, so players can feel disconnected from the lore. A few fighting game designers have started to draw the narrative more into the interactivity, using specific locations, costumes and moves to express the story. I think Injustice and Blazblue do a good job of this, while Namco’s anime-based fighters Dragon Ball and Naruto really cram the ongoing plotlines into the fights. Maybe fighting game devs could look at breaking up bouts to let story sequences in, so players are more heavily invested in the story and understand the stakes. As for players, I’ve always found fighting game communities to be extremely welcoming – that’s all they really need to do.If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

In a video game year dominated by dark, bloody fantasy adventures – and continued job losses and studio closures – it was a cute robot that stole the night at the 2025 Bafta video game awards. Sony’s family-friendly platformer Astro Bot won in five categories at yesterday evening’s ceremony, including best game and game design.The rest of the awards were evenly spread across a range of Triple A and independent titles. Oil rig thriller Still Wakes the Deep was the next biggest winner with three awards: new intellectual property, performer in a leading role and performer in a supporting role. Clearly actors looking for Bafta-winning roles need look no further than the North Sea. The only other multiple winner was online shooter Helldivers 2, which won in multiplayer and music. The night’s most nominated title, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, was victorious in just the one category: technical achievement.Still from Still Wakes the Deep. Photograph: Secret ModeElsewhere, the British game award was taken by perhaps the most British game ever made, the Yorkshire-based adventure Thank Goodness You’re Here. Smash-hit card puzzler Balatro may have won only a single award – debut game – but it was surely also victorious in the non-existent best acceptance speech of the night category, thanks to actor Ben Starr’s appearance in full jester make-up and three-pronged hat.There were a couple of surprise triumphs. Hardcore role-playing adventure Metaphor: ReFantazio won in the highly competitive narrative category, while sumptuous side-scrolling platformer Neva claimed artistic achievement and Vampire Survivors swooped in for Evolving game. The game beyond entertainment award went to Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a magical adventure inspired by the death of creative lead Abubakar Salim’s father and based on Bantu mythologies.Finally, the Bafta fellowship was awarded to legendary soundtrack composer Yoko Shimomura, who has scored games such as Street Fighter II, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XV. “Music has always been there with me, when things were sad or when I was filled with anger, shifting my mood from negative to positive,” she said in her acceptance speech. “I’ve sometimes felt I have no talent for music, when I’ve been unable to write or play in the way I wanted. But now I am working in my dream job, writing music for the games I love.”The full list of Bafta games awards winnersAnimation Astro BotArtistic achievement NevaAudio achievement Astro BotBest game Astro BotBritish game Thank Goodness You’re HereDebut game BalatroEvolving game Vampire SurvivorsFamily Astro BotGame beyond entertainment Tales of Kenzera: Zauskip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionGame design Astro BotMultiplayer Helldivers 2Music Helldivers 2Narrative Metaphor: ReFantazioNew intellectual property Still Wakes the DeepPerformer in a leading role Alec Newman, Caz McLeary in Still Wakes the DeepPerformer in a supporting role Karen Dunbar, Finlay in Still Wakes the DeepTechnical achievement Senua’s Saga: Hellblade IIBafta fellowship Yoko Shimomura

Soaring development costs; protracted production cycles; cautious C-suites looking to deliver reliable returns for shareholders: for many reasons, there is a dearth of original programming in big-budget video games. Already this year we have seen the arrival of the seventh mainline Civilization game, the 14th entry in the Assassins Creed franchise, and, most brain-melting of all, the 27th Monster Hunter title. But look: heres a magical-realist tale set in a moody, hurricane-ravaged imagining of the American deep south, whose title, crucially, bears no numerical suffix.South of Midnight makes a brilliantly atmospheric first impression. Winds bludgeon flimsy abodes; rain lashes down on tin roofs; the world is rendered with the macabre and crooked details of a Tim Burton film. Within minutes, a house that of high-school athlete Hazel and her mother, a social worker is carried away along a roiling flooded river. Playing as Hazel, you give chase, bounding with a lanky teenage gait across various platforms until the storm abates. In its wake lie miles of stagnant, fetid swamps. At one grisly point, you explore a farm stacked with the carcasses of pigs who did not survive the typhoon.As a protagonist, Hazel more than holds her own against this vivid and unusual (for video games, at least) world. With mere flicks of her wrists, connected to which are metaphysical scythe-like blades, Hazel rips through reality itself. For this spunky, determined young woman is a Weaver, adept at magically dispelling unsavoury spirits lurking amid the weeping willows and glinting glass bottle trees of her southern home. As a Weaver, she is able to see an enormous cosmic grand tapestry where myth, reality, time and space collide; peering into the past, she learns of ancestors who helped free slaves and of tragic child deaths.Vivid and unusual South of Midnight. Photograph: Xbox Game StudiosSprinting with energy, South of Midnight lays out its imaginative stall: action-packed chapters whisk the player from sweltering bayous to chilly mountains that feel as if they are edging towards Appalachia. The atmosphere is thick at times, laying it on a little too thick: your friendly guide to this folkloric romp is a gigantic catfish who speaks with a distinct Creole drawl about, among other things, the classic southern dish grits.But in the actual playing, South of Midnight is simply thin. With its mostly linear mix of 3D platforming and melee combat, the game evokes PlayStation 2-era titles. Yet neither element has much personality. The brawling looks stylish, ending with brutal finishing moves in which Hazel unravels her wraith-like enemies very fabric of being. Really, it lacks the depth and expressive possibilities of titles such as God of War. Platforming feels floaty until you are vaulting from one conspicuously painted white ledge to another: then it just feels prescriptive and clunky.What great lengths the team of visual artists, sound designers, and scriptwriters at Microsoft-owned studio, Compulsion Games, went to in creating this rugged, earthy place, only to have it undone by gameplay of often mind-numbing smoothness. At various points, you must flee from a nebulous, mist-like entity. But these sequences are so straightforward as to lack any dramatic tension. They repeat many times throughout the games approximately 12-hour duration, only increasing a little in difficulty each time.Other loops grate as the hours stack up: clear this area of oozing corrupted matter (a visual manifestation of the lands pain and trauma); watch another lightly animated flashback. This lovingly illustrated depiction of the south is rich and arresting yet the game is rote.What youre left with is a game whose best ideas are all optics. The fairytale southern style plays out like a modern, YA take on Toni Morrisons fiction while summoning some of the whimsical, damaged beauty of 2012s Beasts of the Southern Wild. The soundtrack is a rambunctious collage of howling blues, twanging folk and lilting jazz. Compulsion Games bottled much southern magic during the making of this seemingly risky gambit for Microsoft, yet failed to take risks where it really mattered: this unique setting deserved more.

How do you follow a game as complete and extensive as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? Nintendo is banking on the answer being: go bigger. Double the number of racers to 24. Increase the number of characters (60 in total). More weapons. And, most eye-catchingly, more exploration.Thats not a term youd associate with the closed circuit, three-lap formula that the series has perfected over the last three decades, but in Mario Kart World, the flagship launch title for the forthcoming Switch 2, Nintendo is tearing down the tyre barriers and offering players a Forza Horizon style open world. Its not exactly a total reinvention of the wheel, but its as big a change to the format as any since the series began. Given physical copies of Mario Kart World will retail at 75 though, is it enough?I got a chance to spend time playing the new game and my immediate impression was that its what youd expect from a next-gen Mario Kart title. Its familiar, incredibly polished, plays flawlessly no matter what carnage ensues and it looks awesome. As I hurtled through the courses, the temptation was to slow down and take in all the small, quirky details.Internet-famous the Moo Moo Meadows cow. Photograph: NintendoPresumably there will be an opportunity to do just that in the free roaming element of the game. I didnt get much of a chance to explore this it was essentially the lobby while we waited for 24 players to join. What I did get to experience were two modes. The first was Grand Prix. This is your traditional Mario Kart affair: start, three laps, finish. The slight tweak here is that rather than having closed circuit courses, these are sprints across the world map: youll be in Boos cinema one moment, a prehistoric jungle the next. I opted to play as the cow from Moo Moo Meadows, the internet-famous breakout star of the recent Nintendo Direct, driving a tractor called Big Horn.As a seasoned Mario Kart player (to put it mildly), I found that it plays exactly as youd expect. Muscle memory takes over: you skid (though its less agile than in MK8D, presumably to account for wider tracks); you throw shells at opponents; you scream in frustration when you get struck by lightning just as you were about to use a boost. The level design is beautiful and each track seems packed with alternate routes and little secrets. I cant escape the feeling that the wider roads may mean the game loses some of its claustrophobic carnage, and that the emphasis will be on weapons rather than driving skill in this iteration of the series, but I can live with that. Regardless, I win my first race I want that on record and a glorious crown is bestowed upon my cow.In my time with the game, I also had one race in Knockout Tour mode, Nintendos battle-royale-style take on the series. As you progress along the course youll encounter checkpoints on the horizon; when you cross these, the bottom four racers are blocked from continuing and drop out. This continues until the final stretch of track where the remaining four race to the podium. Not realising I would be racing 23 other journalists in the room with me, I opted for the comedy choice of racing as Wiggler in a pink cruiser, which, from a kart configuration standpoint, is a terrible choice. Had I realised the stakes I would have gone Wario/monster bike, but its my own fault for assuming it was a race that didnt matter. They all matter.Knockout Tour mode is exhilarating. If, like me, you believe youve achieved God-like status at MK8D and can run through each course in your sleep, if youre used to cruising in first place without so much as a single banana to your name, then prepare yourself. In knockout mode you can drop from first to 24th in an instant.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThe solution is to embrace the carnage. Weapons feel more significant (I lost count of how many golden mushrooms, bullet bills and star powers I went through), skidding and handling less so, given the greater width of each track. Amid all the frenzied chaos, I had no idea how long the race lasted I think somewhere between three minutes and three hours. Seeing the checkpoints and knowing I was only one horribly timed red shell away from dropping out prompted heart palpitations; clearing the checkpoints brought relief. It was a rush. I finished fifth, failing to qualify for the final section. This mark of shame aside, my initial impressions of knockout mode are that its an exciting reinvention of the format and there is a strong chance its about to become my entire personality.

If youre not familiar with Minecraft as a game then this film, notionally a big screen version of same, wont necessarily solve that. Minecraft, even more than most computer games, is what you make of it, an experience generated by the player. So in a way, the idea of making a film set in the Minecraft world is counterintuitive, because it can never replicate what is good about Minecraft, it can only tell you what is good about Minecraft. In addition to that, this comedy-fantasy takes aspects of the Minecraft world and uses them as building blocks in a rollicking adventure suitable for almost all ages, giving Jack Black and Jason Momoa carte blanche to wild out and be deeply silly. Your affection for and/or tolerance of this latter prospect will dictate to a large extent your enjoyment of this film.Black plays Steve, a crafter who in the game was the original default player, although that doesnt especially matter here. Momoa is Garrett The Garbage Man Garrison, a washed-up video game champ with an aesthetic stuck permanently and delightfully in the 1980s: pink leather fringed jacket and luscious locks flowing down past his prodigious shoulders like the first snowmelt off a mountain range. As this is kinda-sorta an ensemble film, we also have Henry (Sebastian Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) rounding out the good guys squad. Its not the fault of any of the three latter actors, but its hard for them to make an impression alongside Black and Momoa going full-throttle and it would become an exhausting experience if they tried. That does mean their storylines feel like downtime, a chance to relax and catch your breath, rather than providing the emotional core that the writers presumably intended.Used more sparingly, but also firing on all cylinders is a hilarious and when is she not? Jennifer Coolidge, whose teacher character is exactly the kind of breathy over-sharer that Coolidge has made her speciality. She immediately tells Henry, a child in her care, that she stuck it out in a dead marriage for 20 years for the sake of the dogs. Coolidge is, quite simply, a genius at this, and can do this stuff in her sleep, without the slightest suggestion of effort.Black is a very different type of performer; you can see effort in every swivel-eyed tic and line delivery, but thats the whole point: its funny (mostly) to see someone commit that wholeheartedly to the bit. Its a shame the film as a whole doesnt work quite as well as its standout performances, with a tendency to ping pong along from scrape to scrape with little sense that it would matter much if you rearranged the various monster attacks or obstacles to be overcome in a different order. A little more craft on the storytelling side could have elevated this to something special a la Dungeons and Dragons from 2023, but its an enjoyable if hectic experience nonetheless.

By any estimation, Minecraft is impossibly successful. The bestselling video game ever, as of last December it had 204 million monthly active players. Since it was first released in 2011, it has generated over $3bn (2.3bn) in revenue. Whats more, its players have always been eager to demonstrate their fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game tutorials, walk-throughs, homages, parodies had collectively been viewed 1tn times. In short, it is a phenomenon.The Guardians journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.Learn more.Such is the strength of feeling, almost all of it positive, about Minecraft that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to turn it into a film. After all, you have a historically popular product and a highly engaged fanbase: what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot. Last September, the first trailer for the film titled A Minecraft Movie was released, and the reaction was instant and violent. Minecraft fans devastated by awful live-action trailer read one headline the following day. Some called it a crime against humanity; others a soulless neon abomination. In less than 24 hours, the website GamingBible had called it a curse on my eyes and pure nightmare fuel. Within three days of its release, the trailer had been downvoted more than 1m times.If youre familiar with Minecraft, you can probably understand why. Minecraft is a game with a highly distinctive look; everything is made of square blocks, and theres a muted palette. The trailer, however, is insanely garish. Everything looks like it is made of Haribo and, worse, the blocks have slightly rounded edges. Worse still, there are humans in it. Heightened, ironic-looking humans. Jason Momoa is in it, in an unflattering blond wig and hot-pink leather jacket. In other words, it looks like a film made by people who dont understand Minecraft.This is Jumanji but with a Minecraft skin, was the first reaction of Argentinian YouTuber ElVitt0ri0 on seeing the teaser. Minecraft offers an infinite number of narrative possibilities. And yet they decided to go with the we go to another universe and learn about it storyline? What is this? Space Jam 3?ElVitt0ri0s response was to create A Movie About Minecraft (That Doesnt Exist), a version of what the film should have been. The trailer was created with the open-source animation software Blender that was used to make Flow, which won best animated feature at this years Oscars; its a fully animated trailer that retains the look of the original game and features characters recognisable to players. Underneath the video is the comment: This is everything the Minecraft movie should have been, the game elements, the history, the community its so perfect.And ElVitt0ri0 is not alone. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of fan-made Minecraft trailers have sprung up online since the official teaser went live, each trying to find their own way to undo the damage it caused. Vicky Fernandes, who runs the channel Gloomy Animations, made one entitled Minecraft Movie Trailer But Its Actually Good. Her video is explicitly a fix rather than a reimagining; a shot-for-shot remake where everything is animated in a more immediately recognisable Minecraft style. And it is good; so good that the comments beneath the video are full of relieved now-thats-what-I-expected sentiment.For a certain type of fan, the Minecraft look is gospel. Photograph: MojangI think the movie should have been animated, not live action, Fernandes says over email. Mixing CGI cube-looking characters with real humans looks very weird. The CGI characters also look oddly realistic while keeping the cube proportions, making it look creepy. Overall, the film does not have an appealing art style.What ElVitt0ri0 and Fernandes have in common is that they are Minecraft fans first and foremost. Fernandes first started playing the game in 2014, when she was eight years old, and began making fan videos four years later. ElVitt0ri0 started playing at age 11, and quickly got swept up in its peripheral YouTube content. One thing fans have proved again and again is that Minecraft can function as an amazing platform to tell a story, ElVitt0ri0 says. Not just through animation either you can look at whole series and movies that were made in-game.Both YouTubers lament that this sense of history and appreciation seems to have been lost in the official movie. But perhaps that is to be expected, since Warner Bros has been trying to get a Minecraft movie off the ground for over a decade now. In 2014, when the studio first announced a film, it hired Shawn Levy to direct it. But that fell through, so Rob McElhenney stepped in to replace him. When he too stepped away shortly afterwards, Peter Sollett best known for 2008s Nick & Norahs Infinite Playlist briefly took his place. It was only in 2022 that the film found all of its pieces, with Napoleon Dynamites Jared Hess stepping in to direct a script from Masterminds writers Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer.In truth, Hess had his work cut out for him. Minecraft is a game without a traditional narrative. A sandbox game, where players are plunged into a procedurally generated landscape and are free to do whatever they like. If they want to extract raw materials from their surroundings to craft tools, they can. If they want to start fights with hostile creatures, they can. If they want to spend four days using the game to build a giant chicken (as my 10-year-old did this week), then thats up to them.A corpo-vomited product? The Minecraft film. Photograph: Courtesy Warner Bros Pictures/APThe film nods to this with its title its A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie, because it would be reductive to be so definitive and, yet, Hess does appear to have taken the easy path, padding the bones of a Jumanji-style offering with blockier skin. Worse still, Hess has a distinctive visual style (he is essentially the Wes Anderson of ironic haircuts) that doesnt intuitively mesh with the Minecraft look.And for a certain type of fan, that look is not only gospel, but in part fan led. For instance, Element Animation, a YouTube outfit that made its name with lushly animated, absurd Minecraft spoofs were so successful that they ended up being hired by game developer Mojang to make official Minecraft videos. Minecraft is now ultimately a feedback loop between the game and the people who play it, and the movie needed to reflect that.However, the story goes that Hess basically stumbled into making the film when another project he was working on for Legendary fell through, they asked him to pitch for Minecraft and perhaps this lack of familiarity shows. After all, Phil Lord and Chris Miller went out of their way to reassure people that theyd played with Lego all of their lives before making 2014s rigorously faithful The Lego Movie. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic went as far as saying that Super Mario Bros was their main source of entertainment as children when they were announced as directors for 2023s Super Mario Bros Movie.This is the level of familiarity that fans have come to expect, and things have a habit of going wrong whenever directors try to impose themselves too forcefully on a beloved property. The first live-action Mario movie fell apart when it replaced Bowser (a gigantic muscular turtle) with Dennis Hopper in a shiny blazer. Paramount was forced to spend $5m redesigning Sonic the Hedgehog after his appearance in a movie trailer, all tiny eyes and human teeth, horrified viewers. But Minecraft is still a relatively new game. People like Fernandes and ElVitt0ri0, who have been playing the game for long enough to truly understand it, are still only in their early 20s. Maybe one day theyll make a perfectly faithful Minecraft movie that satisfies the fans, but it wont be for years.But, again, this is A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie. Warner Bros may have done enough to prevent this one from completely flopping there is wall-to-wall promotion, both in-game and in the real world, plus a second trailer that seems slightly more faithful to the source material. But hardcore devotees may still feel that its time to put the fans in charge of any future big-screen offerings. An Element Animation Minecraft film is exactly what my children want to see, but perhaps the reins will be passed to someone else with an innate understanding of the game. As ElVitt0ri0 says, a film based on something as beloved as Minecraft should be an actual piece of love towards the fans by fans, not just some corpo-vomited product by a big company.

After Nintendos intriguing hour-long live stream on Wednesday, we now know a lot more about its follow-up to the phenomenally successful Switch. But how does the Switch 2 play? After the online presentation, I got to spend about four hours road-testing the new console at a press event in the Grand Palais, Paris, the box-white exhibition hall adorned in Nintendo red and lined with rows of high-end TV screens and Switch 2 consoles. There was also a 90-minute roundtable with three of the masterminds behind the console: Tetsuya Sasaki (hardware design lead), Kouichi Kawamoto (producer) and Takuhiro Dohta (director). Heres what I learned.The gamesSmooth ride Mario Kart World for the Nintendo Switch 2. Photograph: NintendoMario Kart WorldThe headline feature here (playable cow aside) is Knockout Tour mode, which replaces the traditional three-lap circuits with hefty sprints across a sprawling world map. There are 24 racers, double that of its predecessor, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. As you progress, large checkpoints emerge on the horizon and at each of these the bottom four racers drop out. This continues until the final stretch, when the final four duke it out for first place. Think Mario Kart does battle royale. Its intense. Its exciting. It runs incredibly smoothly and will reinvigorate even the most hardened dare I say jaded Mario Kart player.Elsewhere there is a more traditional Mario Kart experience where everyone gets to finish the race. Youre still sprinting across some configuration of a world map one moment youre driving through Boos cinema, the next youre hurtling through a Toad-branded manufacturing plant. Tweaks from the previous game include: a few new weapons, skidding feels less agile, the tracks feel less claustrophobic and theyve styled Waluigi like Steven Van Zandt.Super Mario Party JamboreeQuirky Super Mario Party Jamboree. Photograph: NintendoMario Party is Nintendos party game franchise board games, mini games, screwing each other over, players taking it far too seriously you get the drill. This series has always allowed Nintendo to showcase the quirkier aspects of its hardware, and the camera works well in the mini games I played. I enjoyed the goomba-catching mini game (named Goombalancing Act): you stand in front of the console and camera, then marvel as youre projected on to the TV, now with a red pedestal on your head; as goombas begin falling from the sky you bob and weave to catch, stack and balance. The player with the most goombas at the end wins.Elsewhere, theres a squatting/standing decision based game (I can already see the camera being incorporated into the next Ring Fit/Wii Fit title) and a game that rewards those who move and shout the most, making use of the inbuilt microphone (this one might quickly grow old). Its all very reminiscent of PlayStations EyeToy. The mouse functionality gets a run-out too tagging Bob-ombs with spray scans is the standout (you literally shake the Joy-Con like a canister when you run out of spray).At the roundtable were told that Nintendo developed the microphone to remove unwanted external noise, but the sound of clapping will still get picked up, to allow the full emotion of the experience to come through. Nintendo is clearly trying to keep the spirit of local multiplayer gaming alive at a time where people are more isolated and less inclined to leave their homes. Theres an option to have your friends appear via camera at the bottom of your screen too. Being able to look people in the eye as you stab them in the back at a digital board game thats what makes life worth living.Drag x DriveDrag x Drive is Nintendos combination of Rocket League and wheelchair basketball. You hold the Joy-Con in mouse mode, one in each hand, and then manouvre as though youre operating a wheelchair. Theres a tutorial which takes some getting used to and at times it makes your arm ache a bit, but thankfully the game itself is less taxing and much more about smaller motions and precision. If you dont have a table in front of you to use the mouse then its designed to work on your lap. I gave this a try, but quickly became conscious of the fact that I was a 35-year-old man furiously rubbing his legs under a table.And the rest There have been concerns that the more iterative approach to the new Switch marks a new age for Nintendo, one where its less weird. Well, look no further than Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. Picture the Switch 2 on its side, then enlarge it to the size of the airport, then turn buttons into kiosks with digital receptionists that you can explore: essentially its a playable guide to your console through the medium of mini games, explainers, tutorials and quizzes. It is more fun that it sounds just.In Donkey Kong Bananza you run around and destroy a lot of rocks. Maybe it was just the early levels I played, but it feels as if it skews toward a beginner audience. It looks amazing though. Then theres Metroid Prime 4. The opening sequence was playable here and all Ill say is it looks and feels exactly like Metroid Prime Remastered (complimentary) but slightly more vibrant, cinematic and busy, with mouse functionality for those who play their shooters that way.The hardwareAn iterative hop Nintendo Switch 2. Photograph: NintendoThe Switch 2 is more of an iterative hop than a grand redesign. The focus is on pragmatic changes that improve quality of life. Its a wider model than its predecessor, and though it feels sturdier it doesnt feel that much heavier in handheld mode. The bigger screen pops, as youd expect; and it all looks very sleek and less like a toy. It all feels like marginal gains, but together adds up to a much slicker, more modern device.The Joy-Con feels more durable, weightier than their predecessors and more comfortable to hold, with bigger buttons that are less awkward to press (the shoulder buttons in particular). I wasnt able to test out the magnetic attach/detach aspect, but I was able to detach the thin case that goes over the edges once theyre no longer docked in the system what a relief to no longer be messing about with those cheap black sliders. As for the dreaded Joy-Con drift, we were told during the roundtable that the new models have been designed from the ground up to account for bigger and smoother movements.The pro controller feels exactly as it did before, albeit with joysticks that feel slightly more durable and comfortable. I have minor concerns about accidentally hitting the new buttons at the base of the controller in the heat of karting battle accidentally firing off a premature red shell maybe but Im sure Ill get used to it. In the developer roundtable it was also confirmed that Joy-Con and pro controllers from the previous generation would be compatible with the Switch 2 (though presumably with some obvious restrictions on functionality).A note on the performance of the Switch 2: in my four hours playtime I remember seeing one loading screen. That was for Cyberpunk and it lasted maybe five to 10 seconds. I only had a few minutes to play, so immediately began shooting Night City cops to start a riot and my brief impressions are that the hardware coped pretty well with the ensuing carnage. Likewise for Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I immediately loaded the save marked Korok Forest and sprinted under the Deku Tree, witnessing the forest for the first time without a single frame dropping.The verdictWhether or not Nintendo can convince diehard fans like me isnt the question here. Nintendo has often struggled with following up its triumphs in the home console market, lurching from runaway success to squandered opportunities. When the original Switch came out in March 2017, it was off the back of the dismal performance of the Wii U, a device that sold 13.5m units in its lifetime. Its job was to move devotees on from a failing system and convince casual gamers to come back. Nintendo has a different job this time around: it now has to convince perhaps the largest install base in its history (150m units sold and counting) to make the switch (Im sorry) to its reasonably similar new model. Its a big ask for Nintendo, and in this climate of home console uncertainty, for the entire industry.

It is a game about love and identity, but it also has forklift truck races. It is a game about bloody revenge, but while youre waiting to retaliate, you can buy lottery tickets and visit the arcade. When Bafta recently asked gamers to vote on the most influential game of all time, Im not sure even the most ardent Sega fans would have gambled on the success of an idiosyncratic Dreamcast adventure from 1999. Yet the results, released on Thursday morning, show Shenmue at No 1, with perhaps more predictable contenders Doom and Super Mario Bros coming in second and third respectively.How has this happened, especially considering the game was considered a financial failure at the time of its release, falling short of recouping its then staggering development costs (a reported $70m, which would now get you about a third of Horizon Forbidden West or Star Wars Outlaws)? Well, nostalgia is a funny thing and so is the concept of cultural influence. When it was released more than two decades ago, Shenmue was an oddity: an open-world role-playing adventure that followed martial arts student Ryo Hazuki as he sought revenge for the murder of his father. But while there were fights and puzzles galore, there was also a lot of other stuff. The game used an internal clock to switch between day and night, and to cycle through seasons. Often, the people Ryo needed to speak to (or beat up) were only available at certain times, so he had to kill time by wandering the streets of mid-1980s Yokosuka. You could go to shops, play old Sega arcade games, you could visit the hotdog stand. The world was filled with eccentric characters and strange mini-games including the aforementioned forklift races.What players also enjoyed were its systemic and narrative oddities. Designer Yu Suzuki, who spent the 1980s making some of the greatest arcade games of all time, including OutRun, After Burner and Hang-On, was a stickler for authenticity and simulation he understood that Ryos life would be boring and mundane at times so thats what the player got. He also loved to experiment with gameplay conventions, which in Shenmue led to the adoption of quick time events, highly choreographed action scenes in which the player dictates the action by following specific button prompts. It was, lets say, controversial at the time, but it was interesting. Even the games rather wooden voice acting and clipped dialogue enraptured players. To this day, the thought of Ryo wandering the docks asking Do you know where I can find some sailors? is comedy gold to those in the know.It was the first time that an epic, immersive role-playing adventure also drew in elements of life simulations and dating games, to expand the interactive repertoire for players. Later titles such as Grand Theft Auto III, would expand on the idea, but we can perhaps say that the concept of living, explorable worlds came from Shenmue and flavoured everything that has followed, from Assassins Creed to Skyrim.Shenmue did end up getting a sequel and, much later, a third title to close the trilogy. I was at the video game event E3 in 2015 when Yu came on to the stage during Sonys press conference and announced that Shenmue III was in development. It was pandemonium. Sure, you could say that Super Mario Bros has been more influential because it popularised the platformer and also the concept of a video game mascot character; you could say it was Doom because it made the first-person shooter the most important genre in PC gaming. But I like the fact that Shenmue has won, and not only because I love Sega and edited a Dreamcast magazine at the time. Its because it shows that gamers still enjoy strange, exotic games, and if thats the case, strange, exotic games will continue to be made. We certainly see that in the success of Shenmues illegitimate children: the Yakuza and Like a Dragon games, where action, dating and silly games still combine to hilarious effect.I like to think that there will always be players willing to just stop fighting for a second, head down to the docks and hunt for sailors.Bafta most influential video game of all time list in full1. Shenmue (1999)2. Doom (1993)3. Super Mario Bros (1985)4. Half-Life (1998)5. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)6. Minecraft (2011)7. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (2025)8. Super Mario 64 (1996)9. Half-Life 2 (2004)10. The Sims (2000)11. Tetris (1984)12. Tomb Raider (1996)13. Pong (1972)14. Metal Gear Solid (1998)15. World of Warcraft (2004)16. Baldurs Gate III (2023)17. Final Fantasy VII (1997)18. Dark Souls (2011)19. Grand Theft Auto III (2001)20. Skyrim (2011)21. Grand Theft Auto (1997)