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"People always bang on about PC dying", Dom Starr, the campaign designer of Total War: Rome 2, told Eurogamer.

Mane6's beloved fan-made fighting game and EVO candidate My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic was shut down last month after receiving a cease and desist letter from Hasbro, but it looks like these water-coloured warhorses aren't entirely being out out to pasture as My Little Pony producer Lauren Faust has teamed up with the indie team to resurrect the fighter in a form that doesn't step on any of Hasbro's hooves.

2013 is an incredibly important year for the company formerly known as RIM. The newly-christened BlackBerry is fighting for its life, having seen its previously impressive market share eaten away by Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Its latest handset is one of its most revolutionary: not only ditches the keyboard interface which has made the brand so famous over the years and but also fully embraces the world of touchscreens after briefly flirting with the concept on the BlackBerry Storm. The Z10 also showcases BlackBerry 10, a complete revision of the company's previous operating system which is based around touch and gesture commands.

The long-in-development Tomb Raider movie set to reboot the franchise will follow the direction of today's just-released Tomb Raider game.

What does free-to-play online PS3 shooter Dust 514 do about PlayStation 4? The game lives on the PlayStation Network and connects to the nearly 10-year-old universe of Eve Online. Dust 514 isn't even out yet: it's in open beta. It can't have been built to simply end when PS4 takes over, can it?

EA has shut down BioWare San Francisco, according to a new report.

This week's system update for the Xbox 360 saw the addition of support for USB drives on the console, allowing players - for the first time, officially - to use their own flash devices for extra storage. The age of the official Microsoft "MU" is finally over. With the new update, virtually any reasonably sized device can be used for all storage functionality the 360 offers.

For PC owners, recording game footage is a piece of cake. You buy FRAPS or check out a free alternative (like the intriguing MSI Afterburner) and a few mouse clicks later you're on your way. But what are the cheapest options for console enthusiasts looking to capture their gameplay on a budget?

Sony's PlayStation Portable redefined the state of the art for mobile gaming technology back in 2004 with its luxurious 480x272 colour screen and custom architecture that powered graphically immense titles like God of War, Ridge Racer, Gran Turismo, LittleBigPlanet and Metal Gear Solid among many others. While many argued that portable versions of home console games were not the way forward, with PlayStation Vita we find that Sony continues to beg to differ.

It's impossible to upgrade the in-game performance on your console, right? Every unit is the same, so the gameplay experience should be identical on every machine out there. While this is true for virtually every games console out there, PlayStation 3 is unique in that you can upgrade the stock hard drive with any kind of replacement you like - and that includes state-of-the-art SSD (solid state disk) technology.

It's that time of the year again. In the next calendar month, Apple is widely believed to be unveiling its third-generation iPad, and the engine at the core of the rumour mill is being cranked up to maximum warp in anticipation. Stalwart news site MacRumors has managed to acquire one of the new displays while Chinese forum WeiPhone has already hosted photographs of what many believe to be the iPad 3 logic board. Combined with other rumours currently circulating, a picture is beginning to form of the kind of device iPad 3 is and the level of power it is capable of delivering.

PlayStation Vita is the most powerful handheld system in world, with titles like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and WipEout 2048 representing the current state-of-the-art in gaming on the go. But what if you could play full PC versions of LA Noire, PES 2012, Batman: Arkham City and Assassin's Creed: Revelations on the move? What if you could play them on your existing mobile phone, with frame rates up to 60FPS? That's the mouth-watering prospect offered up by the mobile version of OnLive, and in Sony's Xperia Play the cloud service has found a perfect companion.

PlayStation Vita has swiftly established itself as the premier platform for the most technologically advanced mobile games, boasting a simply superb hardware spec, a beautiful screen and an excellent array of input controls. The only thing that disappoints is Sony's historical annoyance in insisting upon proprietary memory cards in an environment where almost everyone else seems to get by just fine using SD cards and their micro equivalents. This article asks if they are needed, and whether the big price premium translates into a better experience for the gamer.

Despite the prevalence of retro games on download portals such as Steam, PSN, XBLA and the Wii Virtual Console, many purists will tell you that you simply cannot beat the real thing. No digital service can replicate the reassuring click of a cartridge docking into a system or the authentic feel of original controllers and hardware. The big sticking point here is that vintage hardware is just that - vintage - and no longer in production.

Ubisoft and Nintendo would doubtless prefer that one of the biggest news stories of the week never happened. The release of gameplay video showing off the forthcoming Rayman Legends apparently running on Wii U revealed some great stuff: superbly animated 2D visuals spliced expertly with polygon 3D elements, topped off nicely with beautiful cartoon animation and some lovely dynamic lighting. Not only that but we also were treated to a preview of one of Wii U's new features: the tablet controller's Near Field Communication (NFC) wireless tech.

Apple likes to talk about "magic" in its major keynote presentations. In last night's Microsoft reveal for the new Surface tablets, the keywords were "perfect" and "perfection". While operational faux pas swiftly put paid to these lofty aspirations, Surface certainly looks exciting: quality screens, ultra-thin magnesium casings, innovative keyboards, and built-in kickstands all present a level of finish that compared favourably with the best. Meanwhile, the functionality advantages of the Windows OS position Surface as being equally adept at productivity as well as consumption.

It was supposed to be The Next Big Thing - a perfect storm of movies, TV and games. The future of display technology was stereoscopic, bringing a new level of immersion to both passive and interactive entertainment. James Cameron's Avatar set the stage for a mainstream takeover, sporting events looked phenomenal in three dimensions, while 3D gaming got the best possible backing via exceptionally strong support from Sony. Nintendo even launched its new handheld off the back of its glasses-free auto-stereoscopic display.

"It became very important for us to create a new control scheme where anybody - no matter what your age or gaming ability - can just get in there can play with Xbox. No instructions, just very simple and easy to use. But at the same time we wanted to give extra fidelity for core gamers. So, simple and approachable, extra fidelity - it seems like opposite things, but those are both things we can do with Project Natal."

A full Android 4.0 tablet contained in a PlayStation Vita-style enclosure? That's the promise of the hilariously named Droid X360, which replicates the basic look and control features of Sony's latest handheld, but features standard Chinese budget tablet parts inside the familiar looking shell.

"Really, all we've been doing in first-person shooters since I started is trying to make virtual reality. Really that's what we're doing with the tools we've got available. The whole difference between a game where you're directing people around and an FPS is, we're projecting you into the world to make that intensity, that sense of being there and having the world around you," John Carmack told Eurogamer at E3.

It's not about the spec, it's all about the experience - that's the message we came away with from this week's iPhone 5 reveal. Vague on actual detail about the core innards of its new mobile, Apple's emphasis was on a phone that's obviously bigger but at the same time thinner and lighter, twice as fast as its year-old predecessor, and engineered to a level of precision measured down to the micron. This was Apple doing what it does best: creating a desirable product that excites the mainstream while at the same time generating a state approaching mania among its hardcore fans. How else can we explain the cries and whoops of delight that accompanied the reveal of a new docking connector and sync cable?

Who needs an iFixit Wii U teardown? In a remarkable turn of events, the latest Ask Iwata interview sees the Wii U tech team reveal the innards of its own console - and there are some fascinating aspects to the design of the new hardware.

How fast is the Wii U GamePad? Does the ability to wirelessly stream gameplay from the main console come with any kind of lag penalty? Armed with a high-speed camera, we decided to find out.

After a few weeks of hands-on time with Wii U, it's now pretty much confirmed that there is no revelatory increase in overall processing power compared to the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, but there is one technological element where Nintendo's design is leaps and bounds ahead of its vintage 2005/2006 competitors: efficiency. In terms of performance per watt, Wii U is the clear winner, providing an equivalent graphical and gameplay experience using less than half the power consumed by the other consoles.

An Android gaming handheld with physical controls that can also wirelessly stream PC gameplay, Nvidia's Project Shield is the surprise package of this year's CES show - a portable games machine that supports a massive range of games, from the most basic 2D Android titles through to the power and majesty of top-end AAA epics like Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 via its innovative in-built local cloud gaming technology.

Steam Box is real. Valve is intent on making a series of x86-based living room PCs and prototypes are present at CES 2013. Based on PC architecture and running Linux, the Piston concept from manufacturer Xi3 is an ultra-tiny metallic cube that boasts an impressive array of PC inputs and outputs and is said to draw just 40 watts from the mains - half that of an Xbox 360. It's understood that Valve itself has invested in Xi3 and that the kit is present - along with other designs - in its CES booth.

If CES 2013 is anything to go by, it looks like living room TVs are set to veer off in two different technological directions: screens are going to get thinner with the introduction of cutting-edge OLED panels, while some displays are going to get bigger. Much bigger. This physical increase in the size of HDTVs will be matched by an appropriate boost in resolution, with standard 1080p seeing a 2x boost in both directions, resulting in the emergence of a new 3840x2160 "ultra-HD" 4K standard.

Both the next generation PlayStation - and its Xbox competitor - feature eight-core CPUs clocked at 1.6GHz according to sources trusted by Digital Foundry. The main processor architecture driving both consoles is said to be derived the new "Jaguar" technology currently in development by Intel's arch-rival, AMD. These are low-power processor cores designed for the entry-level laptop and tablet market, offering an excellent ratio between power consumption and performance. The PC Jaguar products are set to ship later this year in a quad-core configuration - next-gen consoles see the core count double with some customisations added to the overall design.

Website vgleaks.com is claiming a world-wide exclusive by revealing the full spec for the upcoming next-generation Xbox, codenamed Durango. While there is obviously no official substantiation for the information posted, key elements of the spec match the overall outline of the hardware we have received from trusted sources and the leaker has come forward with proof about the origins of the information - and it appears genuine.

Despite its general release two months ago, Nintendo's Wii U console would remain something of a technological mystery. We quickly gained a good idea of the make-up of the IBM tri-core CPU, but the system's apparent strengths are in its graphics hardware, and in that regard we had little or no idea of the composition of the Radeon core. Indeed, it's safe to say that we knew much more about the graphics processors in the next-generation Xbox and PlayStation. Until now.