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The best ideas, of course, are the simplest ones and Vorble's core idea is deliciously simple. It's what developer MegaTree calls a "mind sport", a three-dimensional spin on chequers with maybe a bit of backgammon and dominoes thrown in. Play takes place on a sphere made up of geometric faces - some pentagons, some hexagons. It's like a football, a fact the tutorial handily illustrates by temporarily changing the colour of the faces to black and white.

I had to break Tiny and Big in order to realise just how much I love it. I mean really break it, too: dead end, entirely out of options, nothing for it but to restart the chapter and lose 30 minutes of progress. I usually hate this sort of thing in games, but that's because this sort of thing in games is usually the result of a bug.

By the mid '90s, we PC gamers thought we had it all, and perhaps we did. Gaming on a console was almost unthinkable when the holy glow of your monitor brought the divine action of Doom, the coy humour of the Monkey Island adventures, the grim strategy of UFO: Enemy Unknown and the quick-fire tactics of Command & Conquer. We had sports games aplenty and simulators coming out of our ears, games that let us pilot planes, tanks, helicopters, even submarines. We were starting to play these games together through the internet and dedicated graphics cards were just around the corner. It was a glorious, glorious time to be a gamer.

Another year, another Call of Duty - and, from a technological perspective, Black Ops 2 could prove to be the most ambitious yet. Treyarch's latest continues the company's tradition of expanding and improving upon the core Infinity Ward engine, with a host of new engine advancements revealed in the footage seen to date. The question is, at a time where many developers seem to be approaching the limits of current-gen consoles, can this ever-evolving codebase sustain the 60 frames per second update that the series has always aspired to?

The games of this week were really the games of the last seven months, as online updates saw two titles which have dominated the lives of so many return to our screens: Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim. The updates were very different, but neither was exactly a triumphant return.

In the late 1990s, Konami's Bemani division was synonymous with music games, dominating the Japanese arcade scene to the point where its name became a catch-all term for the entire genre. Rhythm games of a form, in truth they were really more like Simon Says elevated to the level of performance art.

It starts with the smell.

Crystal Dynamics has continued to backpedal out of away from comments made by executive producer Ron Rosenberg that Lara would be the victim of attempted rape in the forthcoming Tomb Raider reboot and players would want to "protect" her.

The recent smartphone reboot of classic top down racer Death Rally is coming to PC on 3rd August, developer Remedy has announced.

Yu Suzuki - the former Sega man responsible for Shenmue, Virtua Fighter, Space Harrier and Out Run - is readying a smartphone game called Gan! Gan! Pirates.

The board game Dungeon Twister is making its videogame debut on PS3 next week, Sony has announced.

Guardians of Middle-Earth is a Lord of the Rings game firmly placed within the PC-centric MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre. But it's going to be a downloadable game for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.

The Battlefield 3 Premium service has secured 800,000 customers since launch a little over two weeks ago.

Little Inferno is the first game on the docket for Tomorrow Corporation, the new indie outfit comprised of co-creator of World of Goo, Kyle Gabler, the man behind Henry Hatsworth, Kyle Gray, and Allan Blomquist who used to work at EA before handling the Wii version of World of Goo.

A lavish special edition of bewitching PlayStation 3 RPG Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is on its way, publisher Namco Bandai has announced.

Creative director of Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Clint Hocking has departed LucasArts.

While driving to Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac mastermind Edmund McMillen's home in Santa Cruz, California, I find myself navigating winding highways to the tune of loud, aggressive ska-punk. The music raises a defiant fist against society's ills and screams of fearless rebellion - and while I don't doubt that the inspiration behind those lyrics is sincere, it gets me wondering: how do people who've hit it big going against the grain and making no secret of their disdain for mainstream society actually live? Do they change once the system starts working in their favor? How do they occupy themselves day-to-day? What are their houses like? Do their cats have fur, just like ours?

Be contentious, attempt to destroy Eve Online's economy, milk an exploit for unprecedented amounts of ISK currency - developer CCP isn't scared of notorious player Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco or the antics of his bad-boy alliance, Goonswarm.

PC spaceship MMO Eve Online has "what may be the most crafty players in the world", developer CCP has told Eurogamer.

Kaz Hirai has officially bid farewell to Sony's PlayStation division and, as president and CEO of Sony Corporation as a whole, moved on to higher things.

Compelling - downright addictive - iOS game Hero Academy is coming to Steam.

With Spec Ops, Yager Developments and 2K Games have delivered a thought-provoking, intelligent third-person shooter - one which cleverly blends dark humour with a more serious side that depicts the horrors of war and the effects they have on the human psyche. Morally grey decisions taken by the player affect the characters, rather than just the outcome of the story, while the Call of Duty-style 'stop and pop' shooting is counter-balanced by some chilling scenes of cruelty towards fellow soldiers and Dubai's civilian population. The Middle-Eastern setting also provides some entertainingly varied scenarios, with the use of sand and the ravaged environments giving players a variety of different gameplay options.

Ubisoft has responded to fan demands for the PC version of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier to be patched.

The lineage of almost everything you do in Swords and Soldiers can be traced back to the great RTS games, but this is nothing like an RTS game. Everything's changed by flipping the perspective from top-down to side-on 2D. Swords and Soldiers plays out like a retro beat-em-up, while looking like the best cartoon Saturday mornings never saw.

One year, seven months and 21 days late, Cold War romp Call of Duty: Black Ops has been announced for Mac.

Free-to-play browser-based racer F1 Online: The Game has entered its open beta phase.

Inferno monsters across all Diablo 3 Acts, and Hell-difficulty monsters in Act 3 and 4, now have a greater chance of dropping high-end loot.

Pro Evolution Soccer developer Konami has criticised rival EA's emphasis on aesthetic tweaks for FIFA 2013.

Not content with Peter Molyneux, Randy Pitchford, Dean Hall and Paul Wedgwood (plus all the others), we're happy to announce today that Ghost Recon Online and ShootMania Storm will also be on next week's Rezzed developer session schedule.

The Castlevania: Lords of Shadow DLC add-ons Reverie and Resurrection were "a mistake", developer MercurySteam has now admitted.