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Team Bondi and Rockstar's 2011 detective game LA Noire promised much and achieved a great deal. But it was the reality of playing LA Noire after the hope it would be perhaps the first true detective game, after all those pretty words about fancy face technology and heart-pounding interrogations were said and done, that rubbed developer Sam Barlow up the wrong way.

To paraphrase the legendary Nigel Tufnell, how much retro could Volgarr the Viking be? The answer is none. None more retro.

You can tell a lot about a game by the first thing it chooses to teach its players. Sunset Overdrive doesn't kick off by baffling you with a bunch of pointless upgrades and unlockables that you couldn't care less about. It tells you how to pull off a dodge roll, a punkish splinter of weaponised evasion that gets to the heart of the game's deliriously pleasing traversal system. Then it baffles you with a bunch of pointless upgrades and unlockables that you couldn't care less about.

Sometimes, you need to achieve a little distance in order to get a little perspective. Beyond Earth blasts the Civilization 5 template into space, but it's ultimately less of an offshoot to the main series and more of a measured response. It's a response to the fact that Civ 5, even at its cruellest, is still so often a game for leaders who like to lean back and ponder their actions with a certain kind of holiday cheeriness. It's a battle, but it's also a bubblebath. Annex Te-Moak? Burn Boston to the ground? Go nuclear on Pedro II? Why not, eh? Why not.

The Evil Within opens with the psychologically wrecked detective Sebastian Castellanos arriving at a mental hospital surrounded by the flash and wail of police cars and ambulances. The few seconds it takes for the building's double doors to creak open are all the time that the game bothers to spend on creating an initial sense of tension and dread. Inside the entrance, Castellanos finds a multitude of bloodied, slumped corpses. It's been nine years since Shinji Mikami directed a horror game with Resident Evil 4; none of that game's rhythm and pace has been lost in the intermission.

Nintendo fans have managed to get GameCube classic Super Mario Sunshine running in a smooth 60 frames per second.

I've been trying to figure out what it is about Hotline Miami that really works on me, because something clearly does. Something made me play through it all in one go, which took about two hours, and then go into the kitchen for a glass of water, return to my desk, and play through it all over again.

What a title - and The Wonderful 101 knows it. Every loading screen displays the logo prominently, and each time a different member of the voice cast gives it their all: "The Woonnnnderrfullll ONE-OH-ONE!" The first time the game loads, the attract screen talks of the Wonderful One Hundred, before it flips around and flashes an irresistibly cheesy grin: "I knew we forgot someone... YOU!"

I'm over halfway through Murdered: Soul Suspect when I realise something: I've not shot or punched anyone during the whole time I've been playing. Nor, it turns out, will I shoot or punch anyone for the remainder of the game. It's a testament to the game's peculiar strengths that it manages to feel like an action game while cleverly distracting you from the fact you're not actually getting much action.

At first glance, Hitman GO might seem like a strange departure for the series, a sudden and unusual tangent for the adventures of the cold, calculating killer named Agent 47. We're used to the Hitman games presenting us with a third-person perspective and placing us in environments that, at their best, are an assassin's sandbox, full of deadly tools and vicious opportunities. Our victims are as suspicious or oblivious as our actions warrant, as we don disguises, improvise weapons or engineer happy little accidents that help them meet their end.

"Making games isn't a process of just adding more and more until you have something amazing. Rather, the aim is to be able to take things away and yet ensure it still works." Satoru Iwata was talking about Nintendo Pocket Football Club with creator Hiroyuki Sonobe, but his words could equally apply to the other football management game of the moment, as Football Manager 14 Classic arrives on Vita.

I've got to mow the lawn. This is not, in theory, the toughest challenge I've ever faced. I just need to get the lawnmower out of the shed, and push it over some rather obviously highlighted tufts of grass. It's less easy, however, when you're an octopus in a suit, masquerading as a suburban dad.

There's gold in them there clichés - at least for a game-maker with a talent for subversion and quirky embellishment. This belief has underpinned San Franciscan developer Gaijin Games' past titles, all of which have employed the prefix 'Bit.Trip' and all of which have adopted the fat pixel aesthetic of late 1970s Atari games. Partly responsible for the renaissance in vintage art styling in the independent game scene, Bit.Trip took pixels once viewed as crude and outmoded and made them stylish again, along with the sine-wail soundtracks that gave way to Hollywood orchestras in the 1990s (now an artistic choice rather than a technological constraint).

Darius Kazemi has solved the internet. He's completed it, at least, or maybe he's just performed a dazzling fatality. Whatever: Kazemi's built a bot that scuttles around on Amazon, logging in with its own account, and then buying him stuff at random. Inevitably, I picture one of those spidery, biomechanical things from The Matrix or Minority Report, sneaking over shimmering virtual rooftops, clettering down drain pipes made of pure information, toting little spun-silver sacks filled with loot. Look at him go! Books, CDs, improbable trousers: whenever a package turns up at Kazemi's house, he never knows what's going to be lurking inside. It's ingenious, really: ingenious and oddly troubling. This is an experiment in zombie capitalism: ceaseless consumer transactions with no room or requirement for the consumer themselves.

Two days from Wii U's release in the US, and we still don't quite know what it is yet. We don't have a full picture of its features or its system software or how it will work online. We don't fully understand the digital glue that will stick this beefed-up HD Wii console to its GamePad tablet controller. It's a weird console.

There's a line in the new Grim Fandango Remastered's Director's Commentary that sums it up perfectly: "When you're making something, it should be something that only has been made by you, at the time you made it, in the place you made it." More than most games, never mind adventures, it's impossible to imagine any other team having made the original. It's a credit to every member of it that if this new Remastered edition doesn't seem to have changed all that much, it's because there really wasn't much in need of updating. Like the film noir classics it borrows from, it looked and sounded great at release, and still holds onto its style.

Nintendo's Tokyo studio seems to have a thing about making miniature worlds. Since Super Mario Galaxy's wraparound planets, the team has loved to create game levels as if they were tactile, toylike pocket universes that you could pick up and turn over in your hands. This urge is expressed in the level designs, with their meticulous, playful, tightly condensed explorations of 3D space. It's present in the games' toothsome aesthetic, too: the shiny, candied surfaces, the plump solidity of the little characters scurrying about, the pleasing metallic clicks and clunks of their snap-to systems and clockwork mechanisms. Nintendo has always conceived of video games as toys, but seldom so literally as in EAD Tokyo's games, which it's so easy to imagine coming in large, colourfully illustrated boxes with assembly instructions included, their components packed neatly together in little cellophane bags.

The Crew is an astonishing achievement. The game world takes care of that single-handedly, offering the entirety of the continental United States, masterfully compressed and pruned into a playable, driveable space. But it's not the vastness that's impressive, it's the level of fidelity and the authenticity of its character.

At this stage, the underlying game is almost one of the least interesting things about Super Smash Bros for Wii U. Smash (as it shall henceforth be known, for brevity's sake) is a party game in the sense that it is a game that is also a party. It's a celebration of Nintendo; a get-together for stars of past and present to beat seven bells out of one another. Perhaps more significantly, it's a shindig at which we can be assured of having a good time: we know the guest list is strong, we know we'll get to hear some killer tunes. What we're interested in is the finer details. What surprises will our host Masahiro Sakurai have in store for us this time?

As the remakes pile up, it's easy to become cynical about Pokémon. There's always a young hero, there's always a team bent on world domination, and there's always turn-based combat. It's easy to conclude that every few years Game Freak releases a slightly updated version of what they already have, before dashing off to collect their money.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? If I strap a wodge of C4 to a tuk-tuk and send it trundling off a cliff and into a mountainside military base while hopping aboard a gyrocopter and luring a tiger into the midst of a crowd of armed guards with a piece of meat I've freshly carved from a yak, does the chaos that ensues even count if there's no-one else around to appreciate it?

I was nine years old when I first saw Ridley Scott's Alien. A schoolfriend had taped it off the telly, and one summer holiday afternoon we all gathered in his living room to watch this forbidden fruit, brought to us by the magic of a Memorex E-180.

Despite a myriad of sources to draw from, few games have brought Tolkien's Middle-earth to life. There have been many attempts, from the ZX Spectrum text adventure The Hobbit to endless film tie-ins, but none have quite recreated the spectacle of steel sparking steel, nor the smell of blood and dirt and sweat-through leather in your nostrils as an orchestra swells triumphantly at your back and you charge valiantly towards almost certain destruction. Far from getting there and back again, most games set in Middle-earth fall before they've even left The Shire.

26 years is a hell of a long time to wait for a sequel, though it's arguable that Wasteland 2 is as much an alternate Fallout 3 as it is the continuation of the original post-apocalyptic role-playing game. At the very least, it's the two branches of the family tree finally wrapping around each other. Here, Wasteland's more whimsical apocalypse and tongue-in-cheek style - where you're as likely to face giant mutated rabbits and toads as radioactive scorpions - meet Fallout's combat, exploration and interface. Also its feel. And its moral choices. While original Wasteland was definitely this game's alma mater, it's obvious where it got its PhD.

It's become a clichéd observation, but one that Nintendo nevertheless continues to reinforce: the Legend of Zelda series is not a continuing saga so much as it is a recurring myth. The story never advances. Rather, its tale is retold in fresh ways with each new release, using a cast of recognisable characters and familiar props. It's only Nintendo's restless design and ingenuity that keeps us from tiring of the legend's telling.

In its ongoing bid to clean up the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive eSports community, developer Valve has told all involved with its events to avoid gambling on matches.

For all the countless millions spent on publicity for Bungie's "shared world shooter" Destiny - for all the phrases like "shared world shooter" it has contributed to the video game world's industrious output of meaningless buzzwords - the developer and its publisher Activision have repeatedly failed to communicate exactly what this game is. This is hardly because it is such a novel concept that it has to be experienced to be understood. It's not. It's because they have been reluctant to use the elevator pitch that surely convinced Activision's top brass to open their chequebooks in the first place: "What if World of Warcraft looked and played like Halo?"

Early childhood is a daunting time, full of unfamiliar experiences, bewildering potential and the very real possibility that there are monsters living under the bed. Murasaki Baby neatly encapsulates all of these characteristics, along with the notion that childhood is when most parents stand as infallible bastions of safety and comfort. As such, your overarching goal is to reunite Baby with her mother, but that's a bit like saying that the point of Journey is to reach the top of a mountain.

The latest experiment to pop out of Double Fine is built around a pun so brilliant and so obvious, you wonder why nobody has done it before.

I perform a sort of dance in the desert, careful where I tread. It's a slow dance, in part because there are mines scattered about - so many mines - but also because any misstep I make could offer a dangerous opportunity, could present a sudden vulnerability. The partner I dance opposite is ready to pounce and I never quite know whether to feint, to pause, or whether it's finally, finally the moment where I should make my move.