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Since mankind first crawled from the primordial ooze, gamers have sought newer and more creative ways to express their love of video games through the subtle medium of haikus (it’s true – shut your mouth). Following in this spirit of literary expression, GamesRadar has unleashed the poet within to provide a more distinguished look into many of our favorite video games. Feel free to let these poetic contemplations inspire your own muse and share your haikus in the comments. Remember, the form is five beats, then seven, and then five again...

Every time a game is successful, critically or commercially, folks start speculating about sequels. Will there be a sequel? How many sequels? When will we see the sequel? What will happen in the sequel? Who shows up in the sequel? Sequel?

Who says a Week of Hate has to be all hurt and no healing? Activision is a company people love to hate, but let’s take a break from dogpiling on the monolithic publisher for its past misdeeds. We thought it’d be more interesting if we could get to the bottom of all the abject ire and the hardcore schadenfreude, to get to the bottom of gamer’s beef with the company. To help us in our quest, Acitivsion’s own community manager, Dan Amrich is going to help us trace back the origins of the anger, where hopefully we can see of how the publisher of Pitfall has managed to cast one of the most negative shadows in the medium. And maybe, just maybe, we can curtail a smidgen of the overwhelming, disproportionate amount of hate...

To clarify, this isn’t about dialog captions, which are also referred to as “subtitles.” This is about the wastes of ink which game publishers love printing after game names. Take “Halo 3: ODST,” for example. “ODST.” What is that? It’s some letters that provide no information other than, “Hey, this isn’t the original Halo 3, it’s actually something a bit different.”

Videogames have always been violent. Violence is inherent in the medium, inseparable from the essential experience of playing games. Without competition and conflict resolved by violence, games wouldn’t be games: they’d be screensavers. Gore is a slightly different matter, though. Better graphics and physics have ushered in a new era of explicit gruesomeness.

December is always good for a fight. We award our favorite games, mock our least favorites and shout at anybody whose opinion differs from our own. The one thing we can usually all agree on, however, is that gaming has progressed. Gaming has evolved. Right? Not this year.

Considering all the attention being directed toward huge, marquee juggernauts like Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, and Beatles: Rock Band, you’d think they were the only games at E3. Not true. Sure, those look fantastic, but we also saw piles and piles of great games that nobody is talking about. Nobody but us, that is.

It's a podcast 'twixt travels this week, as Nathan returns from seeing THQ in New York and Matt and Justin prepare to fly out to Amsterdam to see Nintendo's shiny new 3DS. Expect a rather graphic description of what happens to unsuspecting games journos in Amsterdam, along with an even more graphic description of a special technique that 'gets things moving along'. Eeew.

On the videogaming front (video whatnow?), Nathan's been playing Homefont, Cundy's been playing Brain Training on Kinect and Justin's picked number 12 in his list of 'best games ever' for the Appreciation section. Yes, he made a list especially. Expect gamz jarnalizum, Ali G jokes and already-outdated news from your favourite games podcast, TalkRadar UK.

The whole point of E3 is for publishers and developers to show off their new games under controlled conditions. You know, to let them show them in the way they want them to be seen without journos choosing to show the flaws.

AND YET. We still get sent screenshots that look like someone deliberately picked them to make the game look bad. Look at these amazing examples of fail from this year's show