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The contents of the Max Payne 3 Special Edition have been revealed, and it includes exclusive multiplayer content.

UPDATE: A trusted source has told Eurogamer that the new Hitman game is for next-gen platforms.

UPDATE: 3G connectivity is not locked to Vodafone. Vodafone is the only network that's been fully quality-assured by PlayStation, however.

Pretty much since I was a child, video games have been full of jerks. Donkey Kong? What a prick. Super Mario Kart? Full of jerks. I wasn't that familiar with the expression "climb a wall of dicks" when I was 10 years old, but if I had been then I would have directed it in Princess Peach's direction almost as often as I burst into tears because she pipped me to the line on Rainbow Road.

Never before have so many had to wait for so little. We don't have to wait for telegrams or letters any more. We don't have to wait for tomorrow's newspaper - we just have to check our answerphone messages. A handful of nimble companies have even ensured that we don't have to wait for somebody to come back from a trip to Blockbuster or Borders (too soon?) if we want to watch terrible films and read wretched books.

It's been an unhappy 48 hours for Nintendo. The 3DS price is being cut by a third, Satoru Iwata's cut his own salary by half, and shareholders have cut the Kyoto company's share price by a double-digit percentage.

It was Oblivion's horse armour that set the alarm bells off for me. There was a mixture of amusement and incredulity, which quickly descended into horror as the numbers started rolling in. It was the beginning of a fragmentation from the boxed product you'd scurried away from the shops to greedily indulge yourself in, towards one where a breadcrumb trail of further expenditure lay between you and completion of an adventure.

Last week, John decried the rise of the free-to-play game and, by extension, its cousins in the murky world of digital business models: micro-transactions and downloadable content.

So the Wii is to lose its backwards compatibility in its slimline Christmas makeover. Thousands of tiny GameCube discs will gather dust as another format slips further down the conveyor belt of history.

Five years ago it was cover systems. Thanks to Gears of War, it got to the point where you couldn't go to the bathroom without being invited to crouch behind something by a whopping red icon. Then for a while it was experience systems in multiplayer. They had been done before, of course, but we can blame Call of Duty 4 for catapulting them to front of mind. Nowadays even 2D platform games on your mobile phone have XP systems.

What's the best story a game has ever told?

The death of the arcade - like the infuriating and thankfully now mute line about the death of the PC - is one of those statements that have become worn down, over-repeated and often exaggerated. But these days it's impossible to deny the stark truth within.

In the past couple of weeks, the launches of two major video games have once more been marred by a controversy that just won't leave our medium alone: they have had accusations of racism and sexism levelled at them. The incidents have led righteous observers to claim that the video games business is institutionally bigoted.

In hindsight, I should have listened to my mum. You see, mum loves Nintendo handhelds, and has owned every single major new model since the original Game Boy.

I love bosses. I always have. I love their blend of spectacle and challenge, and I love their screen-shaking scale or - if it's Treasure - their luminously stupid names. Fatman, Bowser, Pinky Roader - who wouldn't want to hang out with people like that?

Several years ago, some friends of mine bought their first console - a Wii. Then, they went down to the shops to get some games for it. They came back - sadly, I am not making this up - without Mario Galaxy or Twilight Princess. Instead, they'd picked up The Pirates of the Caribbean.

Sometimes it's the flawed ones that make you think the most. During a rare moment of downtime in the disappointing Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, I started considering how developers and publishers reuse content: what represents an acceptable recycling of assets, and what doesn't.

This week marked the fifth anniversary of the release of one of my favourite Xbox 360 games ever made.

"Batman must save Gotham," says everyone's favorite butler/surgeon/IT guy Alfred during the third act of Batman: Arkham City. He's not kidding. If I allow Bats to fail at rescuing even one of serial killer Victor Szasz's hostages it's off to the game-over screen. Retry or quit, there is no fail.

"Do you know what, I don't think Michael Jackson choreographed these dances when he was seven months pregnant," Ellie said to me yesterday. So you'll forgive us, her poor back and her unwilling dance partner if the review of the Xbox 360 Kinect and PS3 versions of Ubisoft's Michael Jackson experience is delayed until next week.

"First-person shooters are in crisis," wrote Dan this week in our Section 8: Prejudice review. "There's a sense that the tide is turning against the market leaders, that too many iterations in too short a space of time have burned out the hardcore, leaving little enthusiasm for new additions to the shooter family tree. We probably won't feel the impact for another few years, but there's a large meteorite headed for these lumbering, violent dinosaurs of the gaming scene."

For the third time in four weeks, our favourite new release is one you won't need to go to the shops to buy. But if you own a PS3, that means you can't currently buy it at all.

The creative and commercial health of the download gaming market has been a regular theme for this column - to be fair, that's usually in weeks when there's not much interesting in the shops. But the day when some App Store or Xbox Live Arcade game trounces a triple-A monster in our little weekly beauty pageant is surely not far off.

Man, I dunno - I leave Ellie, Oli and Wesley in charge of the website for a while and before you know it PlayStation Network's down, Sequence is a Game of the Week and something called "Zumba Fitness" is the most popular thing in the country.

Weeks like this don't come around too often.

Who cares what's out now? E3 is almost upon us! Time to lose ourselves in a frenzy of silly speculation and lust for distant prospects. A real game you can hold in your hands and play seems disappointingly tawdry and prosaic by comparison.

And we're back! Game of the Week has been on hiatus over the E3 period while we concerned ourselves with our assault on Los Angeles. As I noted in our last edition, the release schedule of current games did not let up for the annual bonanza promoting future ones this year. So we return to a towering stack of titles clamouring for our attention in the here and now, especially if we include the previous two weeks. And what an extraordinary few weeks' worth of games it's been.

If you had to choose - really had to - which would you pick? Originality or raw quality?

The games industry ground to a sudden halt this week. At Eurogamer we sat at our keyboards, dazed by the abrupt silence and calm. What happened to all the drama? The chat? The events? The emails? The games?

At quiet times, we often like to award Game of the Week to the fruits of the PC indie scene - avant-garde experiments and one-man labours-of-love that really deserve the exposure. Few of 2011's weeks will be as quiet as this one was, and so it was with grateful relief that I opened up Kristan's download roundup this morning and discovered a 9/10 Proun review within.