If you only play one game today, make it Sepe's Cumshot. In this you control a disembodied hand and stimulate the penis of a man called Sepe. The poor thing starts off limp, but stroke it a little and see what happens. As you work it more furiously, Sepe's cock engorges with blood, and his body hulks up. He's loving it! You can finish him off yourself.

Sepe's Cumshot is a funny game - and a big part of that is how your wrist is moving like it would during male masturbation. By that critical measure of how closely the mechanics and theme intertwine, Sepe's Cumshot is probably the best sex game ever made. But you could hardly call the competition stiff.

Sex in games is generally dreadful, and some of the time it's outright nasty. But these days there's more than ever before. For western developers it's a topic either avoided or incorporated unconvincingly. For indie devs it's less taboo, so smaller 'sex' games tend to be more original. And what about you, the player?

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Candy Train looks so much like a PopCap game that it's practically a parody. The title screen is filled with bright colours and shiny, boiled-sweet textures, the sound track is cartoonishly adorable with its busy chuff-chuff-chuffing and its uncommonly cheery rail whistles.

Even the icon you'll see on your iPhone looks like the kind of thing Willy Wonka might hand out to tranquilise problematic visitors before an Oompa Loompa drops them off in a back alley somewhere. It's PopCap Concentrate, PopCap Imax, and that means it's all the weirder when you actually sit down to play Candy Train, and realise it was designed and built by utter bastards.

Tellingly, the game belongs to PopCap's 4th & Battery brand - a label that was formed to release oddities like the brilliantly nasty Unpleasant Horse. Candy Train actually predates its iOS version, however. After its initial debut on the PopCap website back in 2001, it languished, too hard, too punishing for the Bejeweled crowd, until it turned up on the App Store for free in the middle of last year. I've been playing it ever since, and making practically no headway.

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Forget the past and stop predicting the future - the "golden age" of gaming is now, believes Infinity Blade and Shadow Complex developer Chair.

"I honestly think we're in the golden age of gaming at the moment," declared creative director Donald Mustard to the freshly formed Hookshot Inc.

"There are games for zero dollars that are really worth playing, and then there are these games for sixty dollars which are just incredible experiences. And there's everything in between. It's just an awesome time to be a gamer.

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Last month Apple was accused of turning a blind eye to unacceptable working conditions at supply chain partners such as Foxconn.

A New York Times investigation featured a number of purported former Apple executives explaining why it is often easier to turn a blind eye to abuses at manufacturing plants such as Foxconn rather than attempt to make changes or switch suppliers.

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Recently I was chatting to fellow Eurogamer contributor and official Nicest Man In Games Journalism Christian Donlan about the important issues of the day. Opening with a discussion about Friz Freleng and Robert Palmer - like any good conversation should - the topic then turned to in-game buttons on iOS, and how some are much better than others, even though the interaction itself is no different.

We discussed the way you get a real 'feel' from apps when you press their icon; similarly, both of us felt the swiping motion to unlock an iDevice was somehow incredibly satisfying. We talked about a shared dislike of in-game buttons in titles like League of Evil, and then Chris said something that initially sounded really stupid, but turned out to be actually quite brilliant.

"The best single button-press on iOS is probably Canabalt," he said. "And there isn't a button. But it feels like one. And there's no sound. But you sort of hear it in your finger."

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A general problem among fantasy games is they have incredibly crap titles. It's pretty hard to work yourself up to play something called Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, because it's a formulaic title that suggests the game itself will be similarly uninspired, full of beardy dwarves and willowy nymphs. Ascension has beards, sure - but the game they hide is beautiful.

This is a deck-building card game with hundreds of antecedents, but the one that matters is Dominion. As there, you begin with a deck of 10 bog-standard cards and use them to bag ones from various sections of the board - these cards then enter your discard pile, and crop up in future hands. Your hand is used to build up as much mana and/or power as possible, and these stats are then what can be used to defeat or acquire any of the five cards in the middle of the board.

Building your hand is a tricky business, entirely contingent on what the board shows. Including the expansion 'Return of the Fallen', there are four types of hero cards (Enlightened, Lifebound, Mechana and Void) each of which leans towards a specific playstyle. It's essential to build a deck containing cards that work together, in other words, to enable you to stack abilities and squeeze as much juice as possible out of every turn.

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Balloons are not the most obviously exciting means of video game conveyance - they're not exactly up there with the mine cart or the Warthog for thrill-a-minute returns - and for a while Sir Benfro's Brilliant Balloon seems to fall foul of this, as you stutter gormlessly along beneath a sack of fireflies, snagging on scenery to halt your already ponderous progress. For a generation of smartphone gamers in thrall to running and swooping, floating feels like a backwards step.

Indeed, I more or less gave up on Sir Benfro after 10 minutes of pecking away at my iPhone screen for this very reason, but over the next few days something brought me back. Perhaps it was recollections of the beautiful, pencil-shaded environments that Sir Benfro navigates, which are so warm and teeming with obscure flowers and animals. Or perhaps it was the strings and woodwind that accompany your flight, or the choir of screeching children that cheer as you gather momentum.

Given a second chance at a gentler pace, Benfro made a lot more sense. He floats up when you hold your finger on the screen and descends when you don't, and sustained touches build speed while little pecks arrest it. Once you get used to the behaviour of the controls and the creatures that try to interfere with Benfro's adventuring, you start chaining together majestic arcs that carry you steadily through caves and forests, and you feel a lot more at home with the flow of the game.

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Of all the comic book heroes, it is invariably Superman who ends up with the worst games. There's an inherent problem - how can you build a challenge around a character whose default setting is God mode?

Well, you could make a whole world from blinding fog, as happened with Superman 64, a serious contender for most incompetent game ever made. Or you can forget about it like Superman Returns, and have enemies who can kill him quite easily. Poor as Superman Returns was, however, it had two great ideas - make the flying amazing, and somehow tie Superman's 'health' to the city.

Tiger Games' Superman takes these concepts and soars with them, building a 2D Metropolis that Superman can zoom around and cover in less than a minute, then throwing crisis after crisis at the city rather than the hero. The touch-screen controls are fine, though not quite offering Super Crate Box levels of precision, and one of the two buttons is dedicated entirely to making Superman go faster - whether flying or running.

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The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was crowned Game of the Year at this year's video gaming Oscars, the AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards.

Skyrim won five awards in all, including those for story, RPG/MMO, game direction and gameplay engineering.

Beaten RPG/MMO competitor Star Wars: The Old Republic was recognised for its Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay.

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Given that running games are so prevalent these days, it seems a bit mental that it's taken this long for someone to produce a good one starring a dog. After all, dogs practically invented running. They certainly bang on about it enough, bouncing around the kitchen whenever anyone so much as glances at a wellington boot. But hey, the wait is over thanks to Big Pixel Studios' Off the Leash.

You know the drill by now and this is only a gentle variation. Using tilt controls, you direct a scampering hound up into the screen, swerving to avoid pools, fences and police cars (dogs have been banned, you see - hence all the running away). Or alternatively you swerve towards things - to gather food for levelling up, other dogs for building a merry train of friends, and coins for spending at the in-game shop.

There's a timer on-screen most of the time, ticking down, and you need to hit certain checkpoints before it expires or else you'll run smack bang into a police roadblock. You can better your chances of making it further by levelling up, which increases your speed, and by gathering other dogs to your cause, because as they scamper in your wake they create a wider footprint, which helps in hoovering up collectables. There are also power-ups like a magnet, a chili speed boost and a doggy icon that doubles the number of pooches in your parade.

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Team Meat is currently tinkering around with a smartphone version of its hit platformer Super Meat Boy.

Studio co-founder Edmund McMillen told Eurogamer that it has an idea for how to make the precision jumper work on a touchscreen and is prototyping the concept.

"We are currently developing tech for the next game that might be a touch remake of Super Meat Boy for both [iOS and Android] platforms mentioned," he explained.

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Painfully addictive smartphone timewaster Jetpack Joyride has been downloaded a whopping 14 million times, developer Halfbrick has revealed.

According to a Joystiq interview with the studio's marketing chief Phil Larsen, the game sold around a million copies when it was a premium 69p app.

However, download numbers have gone through the roof since it went free-to-play in December.

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The free download is a multiplayer-only spin-off from last year's DICE-developed FPS blockbuster. The single-player mode promised when the game was first announced last year doesn't appear to have materialised.

Control is via virtual thumbsticks and there are four weapons to get to grips with from the start, with an additional gun unlockable as you progress. Check out the screens below for a closer look.

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As part of the Make Something Unreal Live challenge, it has tasked four start-up studios with adapting one book each, using its Unreal Development Kit.

The books chosen are The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon and Armies of Death.

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A new version, courtesy of UK company Sports Director, launches later this month for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Samsung Bada and Windows Phone 7.

It includes 15 international leagues (four of which are English), live league tables during matches and a "balanced" transfer system.

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Mass Effect 3 will be supported by two iOS apps, BioWare has revealed. Mass Effect Infiltrator is a third-person shooter, while Mass Effect Datapad allows players to stay in touch with their crewmates on-the-go.

Both games will boost players' Galactic Readiness rating through Mass Effect 3's Galaxy at War metagame.

Infiltator sees players freeing prisoners from hostile Cerberus bases and uncovering evidence of the group's misdeeds. It's coming to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.

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Firstly, can the "grizzly old farts" - as Blackley describes the group - who made Asteroids, Missile Command and Centipede possibly have anything new to say 30 years after their original flush of creativity?

Secondly, considering almost all involved went on to have long and lucrative careers in the tech industry, why do they need THQ's help to release a few humble iPhone games? Especially when said publisher appears to be on the brink of financial ruin.

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Activision has announced Skylanders Giants, the follow-up to toy/video game hybrid Skylanders Spyro's Adventure.

It introduces over 20 new figures, including super-sized giants and characters featuring light technology. There are also new challenges, a new story and better integration across console, handheld and mobile devices.

Included are eight new figures that are more than twice the size of the main skylanders cast in both physical and virtual form. These are the Giants.

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Serial copycat developer Anton Sinelnikov has had his range of cloned App Store games culled by Apple.

The brain behind familiar sounding titles such as Plants vs. Zombie, Numbers with Friends, Angry Ninja Birds and Temple Jump has had his App Store portfolio pruned.

Just 11 of Sinelnikov's apps remain on the App Store, down from a previous total of 68.

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With its crisp design-agency visuals, electro sounds and ingratiating, streetwise chatter - it will "punch your brain in the face" and is "rad", apparently - Puzzlejuice is the image of a slick, fashionable iPhone game. Underneath, however, it's just the kind of improvised, cut-and-shut piece of bedroom game-making that has been beaten out of mainstream games, but that the mobile marketplaces excel at.

Developer Colaboratory clearly belongs to the A-Team school of game design. If you can make a serviceable armoured car out of a golf cart and a fridge, why not try making a new game by sticking two existing and completely unrelated concepts together? So Puzzlejuice welds a Boggle-style word game to Tetris in the most blunt manner imaginable, bolts on a few leftover components of Bejeweled, and bursts triumphantly through the suspiciously feeble locked garage door of your mind. The result is as crudely effective as you'd imagine.

It's simple: slot the falling Tetrominos (though smaller three-block pieces do appear on the easier difficulty) together by rotating, dragging and dropping in the time-honoured fashion. However, once you've completed a row it doesn't disappear, but turns into letters. You then have to make words of three letters or longer out of these to clear the screen and earn points.

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I'm somewhat of a specialist when it comes to games starring the order Teuthida, an interest that began when IGN reviewed 'Hail to the Chimp' and claimed squids weren't animals (a line subsequently removed without notice). What can I say? You've got to feel sorry for them after that.

Our ink-loving chums are responsible for many fine games. Aside from scene-stealing cameos, there are brilliant shooters like Squid Yes, Not so Octopus (both SYNSOs can be had online, and are highly recommended), the awesome survival horror Night of the Cephalopods, and now it's time for some turn-based strategy with the defiantly plural Squids.

Squids' levels are top-down arenas filled with spiky obstacles, clamshells, fatal drops, anchors, currents and lots of giant enemy crabs. You'll have four squid most of the time, and during your turn twang them across the place like elastic bands. Each squid has a set amount of stamina per go (a full-on twanging uses roughly half of that), and you can of course control how far and fast they're going.

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It's hard to think of a name that divides opinion quite like Jeff Minter's. To some, his creations are beautifully blended homages, crafted by the loving hands of an old master. To others, they're the emperor's new fixation with retro for the sake of it. From either stance, the other side is considered wrong to an apocalyptic degree, and yet perhaps, like many of Minter's games, the answer lies more within a mixture.

Caverns of Minos is Llamasoft's fifth entry in its Minotaur Project, conceived to highlight the simple pleasures of retro gaming while removing all the irritations of the day - unstable sprites, stuttering hardware and the like. This particular release is a tribute to Caverns of Mars from the Atari 8-bit era.

The idea is that players descend into the depths of a cavern to gather a series of items ranging from a pair of pants to biscuits. Once they're reclaimed, the journey is reversed and these items have to be delivered to - what else - a sort of inter-dimensional sheep that hovers at the top of the screen.

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We all know the clones. And often, we welcome them. After all, you can't play Blizzard's World of Warcraft on a phone, so Gameloft's Order and Chaos seems like it fills a hole and doesn't hurt anyone. Cloning isn't new, either. From Pong, probably the most copied game on the planet and allegedly a copy itself, to Breakout, success has always bred various degrees of imitation.

Cloning is a history full of strands - character mascots, the fascinating story of Tetris and the ranks of imitators birthed by any popular title. But over the last year, clones have multiplied to what feels like saturation point. They're bigger business than ever before - a business that, in some ways, is a guarantee of profit.

At the moment everything is focused on Zynga, an enormous company built in large part through copying popular games, and last week Nimblebit, developers of Apple's 2011 Game of the Year Tiny Tower, released this image. It spoke a thousand words, though it can be whittled down to two: "thieving bastards." Zynga tried to acquire Nimblebit first and, after being rebuffed, simply hunkered down and copied Tiny Tower instead - producing the remarkably familiar Dream Heights.

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A portable version of 2002 arcader DoDonPachi: Dai Ou Jou, it'll cost you £2.99/€3.99/$4.99.

Be warned, it's only compatible with an iPhone 4, 4S, iPad 2 or a 4th generation iPod touch. Not only that, but you'll need to be running iOS 4.3.

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A "dream team" of old Atari heroes who shaped early videogames are reassembling to pump out games for iOS - "the new arcade".

They will be known as Innovative Leisure. Boring - my imaginary dog could do better.

They will be lead by Seamus Blackley, the man who co-wrote the initial Xbox proposal and assembled the original Xbox team. His journalist wife Van Burnham, author of Supercade, will help. Be a bit rude if she didn't.

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There's nothing new under the sun, but the concept behind Bag It is as old as handheld gaming itself. As Alexey Pajitnov discovered back in 1985, organising shapes so they fit snugly together in a confined space is an absolute hoot, and while the graphics are snazzier and the rules are a bit different, Hidden Variable Studios' iOS and Android puzzler echoes a lot of the addictive qualities of Tetris.

The idea is to arrange groceries in a paper bag so that space is used efficiently and nothing gets crushed. Egg cartons, baguettes, melons, squishy fruit and bottles appear on a shopping conveyor belt at the top of the screen and one by one you must drag them into the bag. Once an item is deposited in the bag it can't be removed, so a lot of your time is spent wiggling and rotating things into position and making space without causing any damage.

Bag It rewards your efforts with up to three stars per stage along with a couple of rosettes for optional secondary achievements, such as keeping all your shopping items upright in the bag or cramming everything into just two bags when you have three available. The number of stars and rosettes you accumulate is key to unlocking additional stages.

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Publisher 6Waves Lolapps has denied claims it abused privileged knowledge of iPhone and Facebook game Triple Town to release its own version, Yeti Town.

Triple Town creator Spry Fox is suing Lolapps for allegedly copying its game ideas and business plans.

Spry Fox shared detailed information on its plans for Triple Town when Lolapps was initially signed up as publisher - an agreement Spry Fox say was broken off via Facebook message the day Lolapps rolled out Yeti Town.

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Crysis developer Crytek has unveiled a new online social gaming platform called GFACE.

The service is currently in closed beta, with no firm release date set.

According to its website, it'll offer both casual and core free-to-play games. No specific titles have been confirmed, although Crytek's forthcoming online shooter Warface can be seen in some of the screenshots.

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Artificial life is a weird business. You fling millions of dollars at a game, craft character models composed of several thousand polygons each, throw in motion-capture, cloth physics, and vocal performances from, y'know, proper Hollywood actors, and all that stands out are the things that aren't quite right. The eyes that are too vacant. The lower lip that just looks weird. The fact that everybody sounds like Nolan North.

Then, you get a game like One-Dot Enemies, whose cast, as the name suggests, are each a single pixel high. They skitter around randomly - no polygons, no motion-capture, no Nolan North - and they're entirely convincing. I'm not sure what they're meant to be exactly, but I know I believe in them all the same. I believe in them, and now all I want to do is squash them.

One-Dot Enemies, an odd little timewaster from Kenji Eno, came out in early 2009 and was the first game - I appreciate that this is weird and stupid - to persuade me that the iPhone might be a decent handheld console. Before then, I hadn't really been that interested in iOS gaming, because iOS gaming seemed to be chasing after traditional genres for which it clearly had no obvious aptitude. There was the occasional acceptable puzzler, but everything else seemed to be a rotten 3D kart racer, or a maze game built around horrible tilt controls. Everywhere you looked there were awful virtual thumbsticks and idiotically complex gesture inputs. After all of that, One-Dot Enemies seemed strangely assured. In fact, it felt uncommonly at home on this weird new platform - and it still does.

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Facebook's going public, and the $5 billion (£3.16 billion) IPO filing has revealed all sorts of juicy tid-bits about the colossal online social network.

For starters, the share prices Facebook is asking for (roughly $30/£19) would apparently make the company worth a piddly $100 billion (£63.22 billion) - which is even more than Eurogamer's worth!

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's stake in that would be $28 billion (£17.7 billion). He's 27. It's not fair.

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Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, the rather brilliant DS adventure from the same Capcom team behind the Ace Attorney series, gets an iOS release tomorrow.

As spotted by a NeoGAF poster, the game has already popped up on the New Zealand App Store. The first two chapters are free to download, but you'll have to hand over your local equivalent of NZ$10 (around £5) for the rest of the game.

It's a universal app compatible with iPhone 3GS or above, iPod Touch and any iPad running iOS 4.3. Alas, there's no word on an Android release.

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Disney has bought a controlling stake in UTV, the Indian media conglomerate that owns UK games publisher UTV Ignition.

As reported by the BBC, the news comes a month after India's cabinet approved a proposal by Disney to pick up shares in UTV that it didn't already own.

It appears to be a move on Disney's part to increase its media presence in India, though the buy-out does mean it now also owns Ignition, whose recent releases include hit word game Quarrel, oddball survival horror Deadly Premonition and acclaimed Japanese action title El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.

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How big is your brain? Testing your mental prowess is nothing new in gaming, given that legions of Nintendo DS owners have already consulted a pixellated Professor Kawashima to calculate their cranial capacity, but in an era of global leaderboards and Achievements, even on handheld devices, the ability to simply do something is now only part of the fun.

That's where Quiz Climber Rivals comes in, posing up to 50 general-knowledge questions with machine-gun fire rapidity. It's your job to pick the correct answer from a choice of four. Get the question right and your character, a blue squirrel thing, bounds up a branch on the Quiz Climber Rivals tree. Get a question wrong and it's game over. Players are bound to a 15-second time limit and the questions get harder the higher you climb. It's a test of quick-thinking and reflexes - there's certainly no time to search Google or (if you are somewhere no one can see you) ask Siri.

The four possible answers often begin as humorous riffs on a theme. For example, when asked the name of a famous Christmas bird, you'll be asked to decide between Riddler, Batman, Joker and Robin for the answer. But things get tougher fast, and topics cover everything from science and sport to popular culture.

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The official Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney movie will release outside of Japan, its director Takashi Miike has confirmed.

Miike confirmed plans to release different dubbed and subtitled versions of the courtroom detective drama for each region, during a Q&A session attended by Twitchfilm. This is good news as certain character's names vary wildly from country to country.

The movie's plot follows that of the original game in the Ace Attorney series, first released on Game Boy Advance in 2001.

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It's not about being the first to market, it's about being the best when you do finally get there - that's Zynga boss Mark Pincus' response to accusations that the social gaming giant has been cloning other developers' games.

Following a public complaint from independent developer Nimblebit last week that Zynga's Dream Heights appears to be a straight lift of its popular Tiny Tower game, Pincus sent out a company wide email detailing the company's stance.

That email has since found its way to VentureBeat.

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Where do all those twin-stick shooters go? What fate awaits each but a tiny niche of players and, eventually, oblivion? So it is, you feel, with Solomon's Boneyard - and what a tragedy. Though recent iOS titles offer more precise controls and shinier visuals, I've yet to play one that tops this for sheer craft and a brilliant twist to the usual.

There's a reason behind its portmanteau design, one that mixes RPG elements into an endless survival shooter - Solomon's Boneyard is a spinoff. Back in April 2010, the game Solomon's Keep was released on iOS - a top-down RPG with many of the exact mechanics found in Solomon's Boneyard, which was released later that year. Boneyard junks the RPG trappings but retains the ingeniously worked-out levelling system at its core, then builds the waves around this.

There are initially four characters and one map in Solomon's Boneyard, though you can unlock more of both - just one strand of the game is collecting gold on each playthrough, and saving up for perks and unlocks. Mobile games have been getting brilliant at this recently, with Jetpack Joyride perhaps the best example, and Solomon's Boneyard is a less refined but no less compulsive taskmaster. And on that note, it's currently free - there are two possible in-app purchases, but they're hidden away and neither is crucial.

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Triple Town creator Spry Fox is suing developer 6waves Lolapps for alleged copyright infringement over its game Yeti Town.

iPhone and Facebook developer Spry Fox revealed it had previously worked with Lolapps while Triple Town was in development, during which time Lolapps was privy to detailed information on the game's closed beta and business strategy.

Lolapps had signed up to publish Triple Town on Facebook, but dumped Spry Fox via Facebook message the day it rolled out snowy-themed doppelgänger Yeti Town.

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Tricks of the Reviewer's Trade #116: Start the review with an out-of-context description of a seemingly bizarre but ultimately representative gameplay moment, highlighting the absurdity of the game's premise and/or presentation.

Example: My towering condominium is leaning at an alarming angle. There are three bombs ticking away at various points along its height, and my anxiety is not helped by the fact that Boat Head, a giant radioactive crab, and Reginald Starfire, a giant blue unicorn who used to front a boy band but now works for a self-esteem telephone hotline, are standing to either side of my building, demanding to be fed. If I don't feed them in time, or feed them the wrong thing, they'll have a massive strop and my condo structure will be toppled in the ensuing tantrum. Game over.

Luckily, I feed Boat Head a diamond which makes everyone fall asleep, then shovel some blue condos into Reginald's mouth which causes three yellow condo floors to fall together and form a bronze power-up, which I then feed to Reginald causing the tower to straighten up. Disaster averted, I calmly pocket several million points and continue to build.

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Brink developer Splash Damage has hired one of the key creators of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

The London-based independent developer has hired Marc Fascia, Ninja Theory's lead gameplay programmer, as technical director overseeing all engineering teams.

Fascia will set the overall direction for Splash Damage's programming teams and will support new director of production Griff Jenkins, the former senior development director of FIFA, as the studio grows "to additional gaming platforms".

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A fifth major title in the law-abiding Ace Attorney series is in development, creator Capcom has announced.

No platforms or release date were mentioned in Capcom's reveal, which came at an event marking the series' 10th anniversary.

The first three Ace Attorney games will get a re-release for iPhone 4 and iPad 2, plus later Android, in a special HD bundle, Capcom also revealed.

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Doodle God has been around for a while but, as a discerning gamer who refuses to follow the common herd, there's a good chance you've flicked past it while browsing the App Store or Android Market. After all, only desperate shovelware knock-offs use the ubiquitous "Doodle" prefix to ensnare the undiscriminating, right?

Wrong, at least in this case. Doodle God is actually that rarest of things, a game that refuses to fit into any single genre and so has instead created its own. Despite the title, it's not really a god game, although you will be creating more things than you ever did in Civilization. And it's not really a puzzle game, even though there are times when it will have you scratching your head for days. It's... well, let me explain.

The game starts with just four tiles: earth, air, fire and water. It's up to you to start combining things to see what happens. So, for example, you put earth and water together and - in a quick burst of hallelujah - you've created the concept of "swamp". Combine air and fire, and you create "energy". Now combine energy and swamp, and marvel at the fact that you have called forth life itself.

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How do you feed a dragon? From as far away as possible, says publisher Miniclip. Ideally from the other side of your iPhone screen, via a catapult and some trampolines, skimming through a waterfall and past a couple of black holes.

You'll find all of these items in Feed That Dragon, a cheerful medieval iOS puzzler starring a young knight called McDuff, who has been tasked with keeping the king's pet dragon fully fed.

Levels are filled with obstructions to block or alter the trajectory of your catapulted cakes and donuts, slowly adding to the game's difficulty while at the same time happily keeping you hidden - presumably so your scaly ward can't trace the more appetising smell of your delicious human flesh.

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Long before there was an internet, people were playing chess with each other through the mail. Long before a bunch of MIT hackers made two spaceships move around an oscilloscope screen hooked up to a PDP-1 mainframe, we were gathering around kitchen tables to play games with and against each other on boards or bits of paper. Without these antecedents, video games wouldn't exist in any recognisable form.

It's what games are. In 1962, after getting one spaceship working on that PDP-1, the first thing Steve Russell and co. added to Spacewar was a second player. Even such highly evolved concepts as massively multiplayer online worlds have existed since the Multi User Dungeons of the mid-seventies. And yet, weirdly, connected multiplayer gaming still feels like it's in its infancy.

There are so many game types and play-styles that are underused or virtually unexplored. Meanwhile, publishers desperate to add value and fend off a rapacious pre-owned market are crowbarring online modes into every property they have, regardless of suitability, and causing all kinds of growing pains.

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An email reportedly sent out to all Apple staff from CEO Tim Cook has condemned recent reports that the company is turning a blind eye to unacceptable working conditions at supply chain partners such as Foxconn.

The message, which found its way to 9to5Mac, rejects claims that Apple is sweeping employee mistreatment issues under the rug.

"We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain," it read.

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There are mobile games that make the journey from Android to iOS (or vice versa), and then there are games that jump from AAA console title to handheld spin-off. Those first, purely mobile titles grow their stature by catching a little bit of fire, awarding the developer just enough interest and finance to give their next big thing a shot at a wider audience.

We're going to do our best to highlight those gems that we love which never make that transition - but Triple Town is a little bit different. In this case, both Android and iOS owners owe something to a little known social networking site called Facebook (as well as Amazon's Kindle) where the game launched last year. The objective is to build as fancy a town as you can by combining groups of three or more identical objects into upgradable structures.

Here's how it works. Collections of grass make bushes, which make trees, which in turn can be combined to create houses (themselves upgradeable), while angry little bears that occasionally appear as the next placeable object will wander around the map, getting in the way of everything and making you cross. In order to be stopped they must be fenced in, a process which turns them into gravestones which can then be converted up into cathedrals.

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A Steam smartphone app has just entered closed beta, Valve has announced.

Available for both iOS and Android, it lets you chat with friends, view screenshots, browse community groups, read the Steam news feed and keep on top of Steam sales.

If you want in on the beta, just download the app now and log in to your account. Valve will be adding more gamers to the trial as the service ramps up.

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Foxconn, the enormous Chinese manufacturer that pieces together products for Nintendo, Microsoft and Apple, among many others, has been the subject of numerous recent reports of atrocious working conditions and employee suicides.

With every new story, commentators are invariably quick to ask "why don't the platform holders hold Foxconn accountable and demand change?"

Well, an anonymous former Apple executive has offered a little insight as to why that doesn't happen.

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What a splendid bunch we gamers are when it comes to our furrier, more fragile friends in the animal kingdom. Lemmings? Not a lot going for them in the way of looks or career prospects to be honest, so might as well toy with their natural inclinations for the betterment of our entertainment. Not even the humble slab of super meat is safe from the excesses of our imaginations, and the less said about hedgehogs the better.

Next to step up to the dinner plate is Run Roo Run from 5th Cell, developer of Scribblenauts as well as last year's iOS release Scribblenauts Remix (and if you haven't sampled the delights of that particular game yet, consider it your second App of today).

Roo's on a transcontinental rescue mission across Australia, which on your iOS devices means a journey that starts with a single tap, one that sets off an unstoppable chain of events across each of the game's single-screen levels as he moves from the left-hand starting line to the finishing line at the other end.

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Casual gaming behemoth Zynga has been blasted by Tiny Tower creator NimbleBit following the launch of new Zynga title Dream Heights.

Dream Heights appears to be a virtual clone of Tiny Tower, which tasks players with adding floors of shops and apartments to an ever-expanding towerblock.

"Dear Zynga, (all 2,789 of you)," an open letter from NimbleBit begins.

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Apple has posted a record-breaking net profit of $13.06bn (around £8.36bn) for the last financial quarter.

That's a very healthy increase of 110 per cent on the same period last year.

It sold 37.04 million iPhones (a 128 per cent year-on-year increase) between 1st October and 31st December, putting it ahead of nearest smartphone rival Samsung, which managed 35 million over the same period. Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed it could have sold even more if supply hadn't been constrained over Christmas.

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Brink dev Splash Damage has teased "several significant" announcements for 2012. Among them, the unveiling of new titles.

"We've got several significant announcements to make in the coming weeks and months," wrote Splash Damage CEO and game director Paul Wedgwood. "We've hired some amazing new talent, strengthening our team in key areas."

"We'll be revealing new titles - both on platforms we've previously visited (including the PC and the world's leading consoles), as well as exploring spaces completely new to us.

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In a world where £200 consoles are often packaged up without a bundled video cable, and chunks of games that we used to get for free are now sold to us separately, it's rather gratifying to load up one of your favourite mobile releases and discover that the developers have bolted 32 more levels onto it for free.

Like a lot of freemium add-ons, Whale Trail's Challenge Pack invites you to spend a token amount of money (£1.49) to unlock all its levels, but persistent players who have spent a few months plugging away at the main game should be able to earn them without handing over anything more than the 69p we paid for the game in the first place.

The original Whale Trail was another one-button phenomenon. We took control of a flying whale (obviously), tapped the screen to propel it upwards and released our grip to let it descend. The idea was to dodge through networks of dark clouds and collect a magical rainbow stream of bubbles that fuelled your flight, and the goal was to set high scores by going as far as possible. Like Tiny Wings, Canabalt and plenty of others before it, we chased that goal with every unlikely pound of flying mammalian blubber we could muster.

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You know, much as we all love them, touch-screens are probably beginning to hold up the evolution of our species.

"Huh," you're thinking. "What do you mean by that? Are you referring to the way we've become enslaved to tools that impede our understanding and control of art and the written word by reducing our interaction with them to sliding pictures under glass? Or are you, perhaps, suggesting that by restricting our self-expression to a crude suite of gestures, taps, pinches and awkward attempts at typing, generations to come may find their natural dexterity retarded by the hereditary misconceptions our new behaviour is beginning to program into our genes?"

Sure thing! But really I meant we're too addicted to 'running' games to get off the couch.

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There's always lots of interesting stuff swirling around the traditional pillars of gaming, whether that's the PC and its vibrant independent games scene, the home consoles and their blockbuster action-adventures, or dedicated gaming handhelds with their wacky control concepts. Here at Eurogamer, we've always tried to serve people interested in those formats in a bunch of ways, and we will continue to support them all with as many 8/10s as possible. (Other scores are available.)

But over the last few years, phones - traditionally a rat's nest of rubbish hardware, conflicting standards and substandard experiences - and now tablets have emerged as a new pillar, one that now practically dwarfs the others in terms of volume of users. Everyone connected to games has had to adapt to this, from massive publishers like Electronic Arts down to uppity websites like this one.

And, a bit like those massive publishers, some of us have struggled to discover the right balance. We've done some obvious things - like building a really good mobile version of our own site that just works, which we hope you like using - but in editorial terms we haven't settled on anything.

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Shmup specialist Cave has lifted the lid on two new entries in its vintage DoDonPachi bullet hell franchise.

As revealed on its Twitter feed, DoDonPachi: Blissful Death is currently in the works for iOS platforms, while DoDonPachi Maximum is coming to Windows Phone 7.

Blissful Death is likely a port of Japan-only 2002 PlayStation 2 effort DoDonPachi: Dai Ou Jou.

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Harmonix has unveiled Dance Central 2 Dance*Cam, a free app for iOS and Android devices that lets you create personalised music videos.

Available in the US now and due out in Europe soon, that app lets you record snippets of your Dance Central routines, which you can then turn into mini music videos and post to the web for all to see.

Challenge a friend to a dance battle via Facebook, and a mash-up video of both of your attempts will be created and reposted to the networking site for all your chums to guffaw at.

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Namco's original Soulcalibur is now available on iPhone and iPad for £7.99.

That's the price during the game's current release sale, anyway.

Its standard price is £9.99, 20 per cent more, so if you do want a more portable version of the arcade classic, now is the time to buy.

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Zynga quietly purchased four more companies in the latter months of 2011, the social giant has revealed in an interview with Reuters.

Senior vice president David Ko told Reuters that it picked up German outfit Gamedoctors in December after gobbling up US firms Page 44 Studios, HipLogic and Astro Ape Studios.

Ko didn't say how much the massive social and mobile games company had paid for the studios.

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There are two schools of thought where car games are concerned. You either task players with carefully driving around things, or you actively encourage them to crash into them. Smash Cops sounds like it should be the latter, but is actually the former, and the discrepancy between the two dims the appeal of what should be a brilliant experience.

A top-down police chase romp, it's the first iOS title from Hutch Games - an indie start-up founded by veterans of games such as Burnout and Fable - and their A-list polish shows through. This is particularly true of the controls, which use a simple yet intuitive two-finger system to offer immediate and satisfying mastery of the road.

You place one finger directly behind your police car to start it moving. Moving this finger left steers the car right and vice versa. A second tap anywhere on screen deploys a quick rechargeable turbo boost, which can be used to ram suspects or to catch up to them.

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2012 is going to be a fascinating year as far as handhelds are concerned. iOS continues to screw with the marketplace, for one thing, helping to democratise development while also redefining how much audiences expect to pay for a game. Meanwhile, the 3DS appears to have finally hit its stride - or has it? - and Sony's getting in on the action with the almost implausibly lavish Vita. Is there still enough room for everybody?

If this article seems more preoccupied with a single issue than the rest of Eurogamer's trends pieces, I suspect it's because the handheld industry is similarly preoccupied. Weird as this would have sounded five years back, Nintendo and Sony feel like the underdogs in this brave new-ish world of Apps and freemium releases. That leads us to some interesting questions.

Is there still a place for the bespoke handheld console that allows developers to take a risk on big-budget projects that sell for £30? Will the increasing clutter of the App Store begin to deter teams from putting all their chips on iOS? Will Solipskier ever run properly on the ultra-cheap HTC Wildfire S that I really shouldn't have bought when I lost my iPhone? Will Dale Cooper escape from the Black Lodge and sort things out with Heather Graham?

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Judging by the gameplay demo below, it's a predictably psychedelic mix of Choplifter and Jetpack Joyride, with you guiding your ship down a vertical cavern to pick up stricken minotaurs.

Yep, it seems Minter's Llamasoft set-up is returning to the same barmy universe seen in 2011 iOS release Minotaur Rescue.

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In much the same way that the music industry struggles to define indie music, so indie games is a term that's increasingly slippery in the hands. Most would agree that an indie game is one produced without the financial backing of a publisher, but as the lines of sales and distribution blur with each passing year, so the indie label becomes less trustworthy. Your game may be wearing Converse, but does it bleed My Bloody Valentine?

Where once indie gaming propped up the mid-budget games, which in turn propped up the triple-A blockbusters, there are few rules of scale, budget and polish that can be applied in classifying indie games in 2012. Fez, due for release shortly on Xbox Live Arcade, is a sprawling pixel epic, five years in the making. Likewise, Jonathan Blow's forthcoming The Witness has been financed by the millions he made from the success of Braid, an island founded on mainstream achievement.

If you still consider indie to mean only low-budget or left-field, then you risk overlooking what could be the most creatively vibrant, exciting and ambitious area of video games this year. So what trends can we expect over the next 12 months of indie gaming?

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Celebrated iPhone puzzle game Quarrel arrives on Xbox Live Arcade next Wednesday, 25th January, publisher UTV Ignition has announced.

Quarrel merges, to great success, the lexical-scoring of Scrabble with the territoral acquisition of Risk. Eurogamer's Quarrel iPhone review awarded 9/10, and the Scottish BAFTAs declared it Game of the Year.

The XBLA version of Quarrel will cost 400 MSP (£3.40), and features four-player multiplayer via Xbox Live. There are also leaderboards and Achievements, and you can play the game as your Xbox Live avatar.

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Hero Academy - the new iOS game from the ex-Ensemble team at Robot Entertainment - is a nice piece of game design, but a truly great piece of spot-welding. As a turn-based fantasy battler, it's easy to play yet tricky to play well, it just about survives the implementation of micro-transactions, and it's delivered with a decent bobble-headed art style.

What makes it a little bit more special, though, is the fact that all of this is then stuck behind a front-end that comes straight out of Words With Friends. You search for pals to battle with or select a random match-up, you make a move against your opponent, and then you sit back and wait for them to make theirs. You can message players in-game if you particularly like them (or if you particularly loathe them, I guess), and while you're waiting for a rival to take their turn, you can start a new match with someone else, safe in the knowledge that the familiar scroll-down interface will keep track of everything.

The game itself is pleasantly simple, a multiplayer-only affair in which two teams face each other across a tiled pitch. The object of each battle is to destroy your enemy's crystal(s) before they destroy yours, and you take turns to play: dropping units onto the field, moving them around, attacking or throwing in items. Each turn allows you to make five moves, and that's always long enough to put a plan in motion - bring a new guy in, buff him and get him moving towards the front lines, say - but never long enough to ensure that you haven't left yourself exposed somewhere else.

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The original Soulcalibur will be released on iPhone and iPad this Thursday, 19th January, publisher Namco Bandai has revealed.

You'll need an iPhone 4/4S , iPod Touch 4 or iPad 2 to play it.

The arcade and Dreamcast classic arrives with an impressive roster of modes plus all 19 original fighters, Andriasang reports.

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And we're back! Wait, we've been back a while already? This must be why other people take their phones with them on holiday.

I've been spending the last couple of days trying to remember how to do things like type, use Google and do my job (which involves typing and using Google), so I'm still catching up. Fortunately and unsurprisingly, it doesn't seem like there's a great deal to catch up on.

The solitary boxed release of note this week is Crush3D, a 3DS update of the cult PSP puzzler - worth a look if you missed the original for sure, but perhaps a less polished and satisfying brain-teaser than the considerably cheaper and entirely wonderful Pullblox.

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Update: The speech given by Education Secretary Michael Gove today follows:

"As the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, recently lamented, we in England have allowed our education system to ignore our great heritage and we are paying the price for it."

"Our school system has not prepared children for this new world. Millions have left school over the past decade without even the basics they need for a decent job. And the current curriculum cannot prepare British students to work at the very forefront of technological change."

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According to Gamasutra, 29 per cent of those sales were for iPhone or iPod Touch, while 69 per cent were for the iPad. Mac App Store downloads only contributed two per cent, though a separate Mac version has been on sale since 2008 when the game first launched on PC and WiiWare.

iPhone/iPod sales made up 17 per cent of all revenue, whereas the more expensive iPad version constituted 79 per cent.

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Due out on 12th January, it's an auto-run jumper that sees you attempting to make your way through over 400 single screen platforming stages.

As demonstrated in the trailer below, you'll need to make use of various environmental items and power-ups to do so.

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"The heart wants what the heart wants." -Woody Allen

Love works in mysterious ways. Where logic and hormones duke it out like a scorpion fighting a tarantula, the heart comes in like a jeep, dominating through sheer force and willpower. Alan Hazelden's chilling tale of obsession and romance is an uneasy marriage between a traditional puzzle game and prose. While I wouldn't say these two disparate genres don't click at all, I'd wager that if they had a Facebook page they'd forgo being "in a relationship" for the more tenuous "it's complicated".

Each of the game's 36 levels begins with a line of text telling the story of a couple who discover a robot. Suffice it to say, things get dicey. Their tale is reflected by a series of puzzles wherein you turn cogs clockwise to rotate hearts surrounding them until they're all right-side up. Though adequate, they're not the most rewarding brainteasers. Unless you're a savant who can predict more than seven or so moves ahead, chances are you'll just muck about until you're fortuitous enough to come close to a solution. Deciphering those last few moves can be satisfying, but, like a Rubik's cube, the number of steps required for success can be overwhelming.

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Once upon a time it was easy. Just 15 years ago most games slotted into their categories with librarian-pleasing snugness. Take the adventure game.

In 1985 they were text games with a focus on storytelling and puzzle solving. Five years later it was the same but with animated graphics and mouse clicks replacing the typing.

But defining the genre now is like hugging fog. The once firm borders of adventures have crumbled and their ideas have diffused out into the wider gaming ocean. Today the definition of an adventure game depends on what school of thought you embrace.

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The Call of Duty Elite iPhone app finally goes live tomorrow, Activision has announced.

According to Venturebeat, you'll be able to view your profile via the free app, review recent in-game activity, track multiplayer challenges, study your kill/death ratio and customise your load-out.

"We've always viewed mobile as a big part of the mission of Call of Duty Elite," commented Chacko Sonny from developer Beachhead Studios. "You can have your Call of Duty Experience be with you no matter where you are."

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Mojang is planning an extensive "reorganising" of Minecraft: Pocket Edition via a series of updates, following negative user feedback to a planned content update.

Business developer Daniel Kaplan took to the developer's blog yesterday to concede that the studio had taken the wrong direction with the mobile version of its world-building phenomenon.

"As I stated in a previous post we had an initial plan of making Minecraft: Pocket Edition more like Minecraft Creative," he wrote.

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Vlambeer had promised an update as soon as five million crates had been collected in the game following its App Store release earlier this week.

Sure enough, that milestone was passed within 48 hours of the game going on sale, prompting the developer to post the following on its Twitter feed:

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Technology giant Apple will release two new iterations of the iPad this year, a new report suggests.

Apple will ship the iPad 3 in March, followed by the iPad 4 later in the year - perhaps as soon as October.

The iPad 3 will flaunt an improved display and longer battery life, component makers of the device told Digitimes.

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Tom's already offered you a rundown of this year's Actual New Games - the ones that are offering, in their own ways, something unique - and now here's the slightly less glamorous look at the other side of the coin.

They're big business, these blockbuster sequels, and for all that we lament the lack of innovation it's these big-budget series that inevitably garner the most attention and inspire the most devotion from the majority. That's nothing to be scorned - iteration's an important thing in games development and indeed the development of games - and a composite of evolved features designed to fulfil a particular desire, be that the needs of a sports fan or those wanting a fresh shooter fix, can be just as important to the progression of the medium as the advent of a new game mechanic or control concept.

Sequels take many forms and capture our attention for many reasons. Some build their features up year by year, like FIFA and Call of Duty, and will continue to be brilliant when we encounter them later in 2012. Others build on the storytelling or world-building of games a few years past, like Gearbox's brilliant-looking Borderlands 2 or the sure-to-be-spectacular finale to the Shepard's tale in Mass Effect 3. And some are interesting because of their circumstances - Halo 4, for example, is another big-budget sequel on the near horizon, and with a new and as-yet unproven developer filling Bungie's big boots, we're just interested in that out of morbid curiosity as devotion to the series.

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Green and white supermarket Asda believes there are 12 million "outdated" games consoles lurking in homes up and down the UK.

But what does "outdated" constitute?

"We asked people to quantify how many items (from a list) they owned but no longer used," Asda explained to Eurogamer.

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A free beta version of a Rift iOS app has just gone on the App Store, developer Trion Worlds has announced.

Playable by anyone with an account for the popular MMO, the app offers various social features, including real time chat with friends and guild mates. There are also a number of mini-games included - titled Planar Invasion, Crafty Critters and Shinies - with loot, crafting materials and artifacts up for grabs.

Finally, the app gives you an alert when a Zone Event is getting underway on your shard.

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The Infinity Blade franchise has now raked in over $30 million, publisher Epic Games has announced.

That total includes both iOS games, a tie-in digital novella Infinity Blade: Awakening and arcade unit Infinity Blade FX.

The first game, released in December 2010, has so far earned $23 million, with the sequel adding a further $5 million since it launched last month.

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Back in December the Eurogamer editorial team had a massive public fight about whether 2011 was a good year for games. Well, we had the closest thing we're capable of having to a massive public fight - we wrote polite editorials disagreeing with one another. One thing we all agreed upon, however, was that we would very much like to see more Actual New Games in 2012.

The majority of big games last year - even the very best ones - were regimented and almost processional once they got up and running. When a game presents a list of controls and then shows you a screen filled with things to unlock, even if it does these things by way of a few snazzy cut-scenes and an interactive tutorial level where someone breaks out of a flying prison, an experienced gamer knows how the next 8-10 hours are likely to play out.

There's still plenty of room for those games. As Hideo Kojima remarked recently, there's nothing wrong with giving people what they evidently want. Games like BioShock Infinite, Grand Theft Auto V and Diablo 3 will probably be wonderful experiences that just happen to progress along predictable lines, and you and we will continue to get excited by the ways in which they do that throughout 2012.

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Indie role-playing romp Cthulhu Saves the World will release on iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac, developer Zeboyd Games has announced.

The new versions launch early this year. Exact details will be announced in the coming weeks.

The announcement comes one year on from the enjoyable JRPG pastiche's original release on Xbox Live Indie Games.

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It's hard to believe that Super Crate Box came out on Macs and PCs as recently as 2010. It feels like I've been playing it forever. That's not because I'm any good at it, mind. It's more likely because I'm intimately aware of all the ways I'm not any good at it. I know I lurk too much on the safer mid-level platforms of the Moon Temple stage and then get overwhelmed, for example. I know I'm scared of weapons like the disc gun and the laser rifle, so I've never really mastered their quirks. I know I flip out completely whenever the little floating skull guys turn up and that I often fall in the flaming pit at the bottom of the screen entirely by accident.

There's another reason it's hard to believe Vlambeer's fast-paced blaster is only two years old, though, and that's because Super Crate Box, while oozing with indie credibility, feels like a classic arcade game from the Eugene Jarvis era. It's got a great line in tight, replayable maps, it's got dribbling horrors to populate them with, and it's got some adorable, savagely differentiated weaponry to keep you alive.

Like Robotron or Defender, Super Crate Box is a brisk tutorial in how less really can be more when it comes to design. You could list its handful of ideas on the back of a rail ticket, and yet they provide enough structure to build a game that you can then pretty much play until the end of time.

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Atari has reportedly been throwing its legal weight around on the App Store, forcing out games that resemble its old work.

Battlezone-like game Vector Tanks was removed by Apple after Atari complained, GamesIndustry.biz reported. And Vector Tanks Extreme was also elbowed.

"Anything that has even a passing resemblance to an Atari classic has been issued a copyright infringement claim," said Vector Tanks developer Black Powder in a public statement.

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Smartphone phenomenon Angry Birds was downloaded 6.5 million times on Christmas Day, developer Rovio has announced.

The figure includes all three versions of the game - Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio - and counts both paid and free downloads.

According to The Wall Street Journal, that's more than triple what the game managed on the same day in 2010, when it was downloaded two million times.

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Sega has unveiled Sonic 4 Episode 2 with a new teaser trailer, below.

The game, set for launch at some point this year, features the evil Metal Sonic and Sonic's sidekick Tails.

It launches on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, iOS, Windows Phone and Android. An enhanced version for Android devices with Tegra 3 is in the works.

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