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As Fortnite's popularity has exploded, so has the rise of scammers who promise free V-Bucks.

If you're a Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or Republic of Ireland fan, you'll need to pick a second team to root for at this summer's World Cup.

Samsung has issued firmware updates that add FreeSync over HDMI support to a number of its 4K TVs. FreeSync is a variable refresh rate technology that allows for smoother, tear-free gaming from AMD Radeon graphics cards, with a slightly different implementation available on Xbox One, One S and One X. Engadget reports that US models Q6FN, Q7FN, Q8FN and Q9FN QLED models get the upgrade along with the NU8000 (we're contacting Samsung to find out which EU/UK equivalents are supported - the firm's model names change according to region). It's a great move for living room gaming, bringing a highly desirable feature previously exclusive to PC monitors to a larger canvas for the first time.

The boss of DICE has said "player choice and female playable characters are here to stay" after some people said they were upset with Battlefield V letting users play as a woman in the World War 2-set shooter.

Narrative RPGs are arguably all about choices and your power over choices. Choosing a class and a background lays the groundwork for the whole experience of a game and provides a springboard for roleplaying. In the first Mass Effect, for example, you're given two key choices at the beginning of the game that effectively select which version of Commander Shepard you want to inhabit. You decide the personal history and the psychology of Shepard. You decide whether they grew up as the nomadic child of navy officers or on the streets, and whether they matured into a scarred survivor, renowned war hero or a ruthlessly efficient commander.

Developer Frogwares has unveiled a teaser trailer for its promising open-world Lovecraft horror, The Sinking City, ahead of a bigger reveal at this year's E3.

Developers Batterystaple Games and Fire Hose Games have announced that their Mega-Man-X-inspired procedural rogue-like 20XX will be heading to Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One this July.

Nintendo has launched its new online Mii creation tool, enabling anyone with a My Nintendo account to fashion their own avatar using nothing but an ordinary web browser.

Exclusive to Xbox One and PC, State of Decay 2 blends four-player online co-op with a well-worn zombie apocalypse setting - and the concept is sound. Survival is the name of the game: you explore a seamless, open area for weapons and items, claim safehouses, and scout new spots for your community of survivors to migrate to. It expands on the original's ideas, but the technology behind it gets a full reset this time. Built on Unreal Engine 4, State of Decay 2 abandons the CryEngine 3.1 of the original game - perhaps partially explaining the five-year development time. It's a fundamental overhaul in rendering technology, but with that transition comes a fair share of teething troubles, requiring some pretty fundamental work in improving what is clearly a lacklustre showing.

YouTuber and video game critic John Bain, better known as TotalBiscuit, has died aged 33.

Mike Laidlaw can still remember his first day at BioWare, even though it was over 15 years ago. He even remembers the date he answered the phone and found out he had got the job: 23rd December 2002. Laidlaw was used to answering the phone; at the time he was working at Bell, Canada's largest telecommunications company, in the province of Ontario. When Laidlaw first joined Bell's call centre, he worked the phones. Later, he got promoted to lead a team on the phones, "which was somehow way worse than being on the phones," Laidlaw told me last March, the day after his star turn at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "I went in and said, I'm sorry, I'm quitting. I'm not coming in tomorrow. They said, 'you can't quit two days before Christmas! If you quit you'll never work here again!' I said, 'that is pretty much the plan, yes.' So I walked out, and a bunch of people high-fived me because - yay! - I got out."

Nintendo's upcoming, utterly ridiculous 3DS and Switch puzzler Sushi Striker - AKA the game with the best theme song of 2018 - now has a Switch-only demo on eShop.

Dark Souls Remastered, the spruced-up version of From Software's methodical action classic, is now available on Steam - a full day ahead of its originally announced May 25th release date. No such luck for console players though.

Far Cry 5's first bit of post-launch DLC, Hours of Darkness, will be coming to PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on June 5th, Ubisoft has announced.

Microsoft has announced that DICE's multiplayer WW2 shooter Battlefield 1943 is the latest title to join its heaving backward-compatibility list on Xbox One.

Microsoft has unveiled the newest arrivals to its Xbox Game Pass service for the month of June, and they include Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 and Wasteland 2.

Apparently speedrunning - racing to finish a game as fast as possible - is quite popular. Of course it is - where have you been? Haven't you heard of the charity speedrunning marathons Games Done Quick?

The main menu screen for Detroit: Become Human - Quantic Dream's new game about androids discovering free will and rising up against their human masters - features the face, stunningly well realised, of an android who talks directly to the player. The android looks like a young, pretty, white woman. She asks if we are enjoying ourselves, suggests we take a survey, jokes about the game save being corrupted. If you leave the menu on long enough, she changes the subject. Did we know about the underground railroad, the secret network which helped black slaves escape the antebellum South of the USA? Then she starts to sing, quietly, pleadingly: "Hold on just a little while longer, everything will be alright." It turns out this is a traditional gospel song. She might as well have burst into "We Shall Overcome."

As big budget triple-A games fixate increasingly on delivering larger, more complex open worlds, we're left wondering - what if all that power was concentrated instead into smaller scale environments with a focus on extreme detail? That's exactly the approach we see with Detroit: Become Human, with developer Quantic Dream delivering its best game yet - and a polished, intricate presentation quite unlike anything else seen on the market today.

UPDATE 24/5/18: The Australian Classification Board has released a new statement, more fully explaining its reasoning for refusing to classify Compulsion Games' upcoming dystopian survival adventure We Happy Few, effectively banning it from sale in the country.

I love Broforce and I'm constantly looking for games like it - fast and fun arcade games I can play with someone else at home. Well, one was released yesterday which fits the bill.

Well, who would have thought it. There's a new Battlefield game coming out this year, and it uses World War 2 as a backdrop for DICE's chaotic multiplayer sandbox, while also folding in features such as a new co-op mode and character customisation - both of which were the focus point for the reveal trailer - and doing away with the series' long-standing premium pass. Shortly after yesterday's reveal event, I got the chance to sit down briefly with DICE's creative director Lars Gustavsson, a long-standing member of the team and part of the franchise since its very beginning, to talk through some of the changes.

Jagex has announced that, after 17 years of operation, RuneScape Classic - the original version of its long-running fantasy MMO - will no longer be available to play on its servers from August 6th, 2018.

Senior figures from four of the world's biggest developers - Bungie, Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and Blizzard - have talked about their studio's take on crunch.

Battle royale game H1Z1 is out now on PlayStation 4 - and it's been an early hit.

UPDATE: While I was writing all that below, Rare sneakily released full details on next week's The Hungering Deep content expansion, due on May 29th - so much of the speculation down there is now confirmed.

Some things in life are so innately delightful that I just can't spend enough time thinking about them. Leaf blowers! Tennis ball lobbers! The little motorised food lanes you get at sushi restaurants. This last one, gloriously, has been the key inspiration for Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido, a puzzle-battler that it's been hard to ignore since its hectic singalong trailer erupted onto Youtube a while back. I'm playing through the game's opening chapters right now - we'll have a review up soonish - and the whole thing is a treat. Sushi Striker does sushi proud, certainly, but it also does those motorised food lanes sushi likes to live on proud too. Hooray!

Nintendo is now offering the option to buy a Switch without a dock in Japan, in a new, reduced-price configuration known as the Switch 2nd Unit Set.

UPDATE 23/5/18: Following the original Banner Saga's launch on Switch last week, developer Stoic Games has announced that part two of its sweeping Viking epic will be coming to the console on Thursday, June 7th.

EA is nearly ready to reveal Battlefield V, the next big game in DICE's blockbuster first-person shooter series.