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I've been playing a lot of Blades in the Dark recently - it might just be the best pen and paper role playing game I've ever encountered. Blades is an RPG in which the players form a fledgling criminal gang in the grimy industrial city of Duskvol, pulling off daring heists and trying to stay one step ahead of their enemies and the long arm of the law. What makes it truly special, however, are the mechanics aimed at making the experience as sleek and swift as possible, because if there's one thing from which pen and paper RPGs suffer, it's an overabundance of planning. No matter the size of an encounter, players love to try and concoct a plan to cover all bases - an irresistible exercise in frustration, as the best laid plans of mice and men and tabletop role players gang always agley.

I have no idea how dunking a bunch of 20-somethings in a hole in a frozen lake helps pro esports organisation Fnatic find a new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive academy team, nor how watching a largely unfit group tackle a kind of special ops obstacle course helps their cause, but it's cringingly fun to watch. And that, I suppose, is what Season 2 of CSGO reality show Gamerz is all about.

Augmented reality app Pokémon Go made around $800m last year - so it's no surprise others are still trying to cash in on the same idea.

A conservative estimate puts the value of the entire Neo Geo library of games - all European, US and Japanese variants - at around a quarter of a million dollars. Some of the games are so scarce that they come up for sale only once a decade. In October 2009, for example, an anonymous buyer paid $55,045.64 for the European versions of the fighting game Kizuna Encounter and the football game Ultimate 11 (as if guided by a scriptwriter's pen, the buyer carried a custom-made briefcase to meet the seller, to ensure the games remained pristinely cosy on the flight home). There are, it is estimated, fewer than ten copies of each game in existence. Even for the wealthiest game fanatic, then, there is almost no opportunity to play these games anywhere outside of a PC emulator.

Undead Labs' long-awaited zombie-survival RPG sequel State of Decay 2 finally has a release date, and will be arriving on Windows 10 and Xbox One on May 22nd.

Hitman Blood Money and Lego Star Wars 3: The Clones Wars are the latest games to make the Xbox One backward compatibility list, Microsoft has revealed.

Rejoice! Bloodborne, a nailed-on cert for one of the games of the generation, is now available to everyone with a PlayStation Plus subscription, and it is soooooo goddamn good; From Software's finest, if you ask me, a razor-edged, blood-soaked distillation of the Souls formula into something that's headily unique. It's a work of exquisite art, basically, yet there are still some put off by it all. There are still those who haven't sampled its delights.

Sony has revealed that a new God of War themed custom PS4 Pro will be launching on April 20th, the same day that Kratos' makes his highly anticipated return on the console.

The Far Cry series' map editor - now rebranded as Far Cry Arcade - is making a big return in Far Cry 5, and will include elements from other Ubisoft series for the first time.

Witcher video game maker CD Projekt Red has teased that star character Geralt will appear - for the very first time - in another game, and this year.

UPDATE 6/3/17: As promised, Nintendo has at last allowed My Nintendo Gold Points to be redeemed when buying games and other content on its digital eShop.

Another day, another Humble sale. The latest publisher to have its wares showcased in one of Humble's discounted offerings is THQ Nordic.

Last week, Blizzard set tongues wagging with an apparent tease for a Diablo game on Nintendo Switch. The image - of a Diablo night light being repeatedly switched on and off - felt fairly deliberate.

Those cheeky Chewbaccas! A modder from the Star Wars Battlefront 2 community has turned EA's infamous - and record-breakingly downvoted - Reddit remark about locked heroes, and the loot box furore in general, into a loot box skin.

Remember Inside Xbox? In the days of Xbox 360, the console's official video show was a fixture of its dashboard.

In Tumble VR and Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Supermassive Games brought us two highlights of the PSVR's launch line-up . But that was then and this is now and Bravo Team, Supermassive's latest release, fails to impress on pretty much every level.

For Honor's dedicated servers roll out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One today. There's maintenance scheduled for 2pm GMT, after which they should be up and running.

Ubisoft has launched a half hour-long film prequel to Far Cry 5 via Amazon Prime.

What's the best title to have come from PlatinumGames? My own answer changes with the wind - sometimes it's the just about perfect third-person shooter Vanquish, other times it might be the outrageously eccentric Wonderful 101 - but when it comes to the purest expression of what the industrious Osaka studio is about, then there's only really one answer. And that's the brilliant Bayonetta, of course.

Developer onebitbeyond has announced that its silly, cyclical RPG The Swords of Ditto will be heading to PlayStation 4 and PC on April 24th.

Ubisoft has announced improvements to Rainbow Six Siege's chat toxicity ban system, specifically intended to combat "racial and homophobic slurs, or hate speech".

Video games, some say, are all about wish fulfilment. And if you've ever wished to be a giant, oozing blob of flesh and tendrils, well, boy, do I have the game for you: say hello to developer Phobia Game Studio's Carrion, in which the monster is you.

The brilliant Bloodborne is getting a new lease of life this week when it arrives as a PlayStation Plus freebie and, to celebrate, fans are planning to flock back to the game to populate its multiplayer features.

70-pence-and-brilliant stickman brawler game One Finger Death Punch is getting a sequel! This is the Xbox Live Indie Game from five years ago - the one Simon Parkin awarded 9/10 in his One Finger Death Punch review.

The trio of Egyptian deity bosses in Assassin's Creed Origins are some of the game's toughest challenges - but fans have been calling for them to be made even tougher.

Sledgehammer Games has insisted custom paint jobs are still coming to Call of Duty: WW2.

Monster Hunter World has become the best-selling game in Capcom's 38-year history - beating every Resident Evil, Mega Man, Dead Rising and Street Fighter (sorry Wes).

The stakes were high. 2005 would kick-start a console generation that would offer a stratospheric leap in processing power and gaming capabilities compared to the ruling PlayStation 2 and its Xbox and GameCube competitors. Just prior to E3 2005, Microsoft had already announced Xbox 360 - bizarrely via an MTV special - but gamers weren't exactly amazed by the preproduction wares revealed therein. All eyes were on Sony for its E3 2005 reveal for PlayStation 3 and when it did eventually kick off, gamers were presented with an unbelievable array of cutting-edge tech showcases. Unbelievable, as in literally unbelievable.

Open world games are hard to make, but it's even harder to make them about something. When a game's scope spreads across tens, maybe hundreds of virtual square miles, it's not surprising that developers can struggle to fill that space. Who can forget collecting feathers in the first Assassin's Creed, or Unity's unique approach of pouring every kind of content imaginable into Revolutionary Paris, as if Ubisoft was making virtual foie gras?

Microsoft restarted its programme of Xbox One X enhancements for Xbox 360 games this week with four new titles - Forza Horizon, The Witcher 2, Crackdown and Fable Anniversary Edition. We're seeing the same 9x resolution boost on all releases in concert with improved performance where appropriate, but it's the first game in this new line-up that's our focus today. Image quality in Forza Horizon is off the charts in the transition to ultra HD and there are a couple of further, surprising enhancements that caught our eye.