Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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What's New?

Quite literally nothing at all.

Question: What do the Airbus A380, the Bush inauguration, Burnley FC and 24-hour pub licensing laws have in common?

Answer: I've been reading about them instead of writing about this week's new releases. Then again, given that the connection between them is ostensibly "Nothing", you could argue that it's research. There's less fresh meat on the shelves this week than you'd find in a vegetarian butcher's. On the Sabbath. Er, on a planet without carbon-based lifeforms. During an extinction-level event. Etcetera. (I'm just not going to get to the desired word count, really. It's obvious even now.)

Even the yanks have let us down. The Punisher? What's that? A game about a not-very-nice-man who goes around gratuitously torturing people who've wronged society? I'm sure the comic's wonderful, but do we really need games which put you in situations with multiple outcomes along the lines of a) just do his nose, b) just do his legs, or c) just ram the bastard in the woodchipper face first and stop faffing around? Especially if they're not even particularly entertaining?

Then there's Tork: Prehistoric Punk, which after being dropped by Microsoft and rescued by Ubisoft now seems to be dying out of its own accord, earning fairly mediocre write-ups across the board. Several of which presumably include prehistoric puns like "leaves you dino-saw" and mention "how close it came to extinction" during the preamble. We love reviews.

Beyond that I'm afraid we're going to have to make our own fun. I would suggest a competition, but I haven't even managed to go to the bank this YEAR despite having a cheque or two to cash, so the chances of my making it as far as the post office are very small indeed. It's in the other direction, too. I'm not doing both.

So then. I suggest gaming-related jokes. I'll think of one to get you started, and then you can spend the rest of the day making up some more while I atone for my sins earlier this week by sweating them out in the gym and continuing to contemplate whether respawning rabbits in MMORPGs are justification for equipping characters with rabbit-skin mittens. Okay then:

Question: How many SWAT4 players does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: The light bulbs are indestructible.

  • PAL Releases
  • Um...

  • Key US Releases
  • The Punisher (PS2, Xbox, PC)
  • Tork: Prehistoric Punk (Xbox)