“We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is? When will we get to the cowboy level?”

– Professor Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Time travel and videogames are a perfect fit. ...

Back before you were a gamer, we didn’t have the multi-button, clickable-thumbstick, solar-powered controller gizmos you have today. We used to have to invite friends over and work together to push down the A-button because it was too stiff to move on our own. If we were lucky, we’d get two, maybe three good presses in before it got stuck and Mario just had to hope the rest of the level was flat. ...

You thought Japanese game design was weird? Ha! ...

We’ve murderised millions of men, killed countless cuddly animals and run over a nursing home’s worth of OAPs. But nothing has ever unhinged us like the computer crappers in the following beastly bathrooms. Unhygienic, grim and often smeared in the sort of bodily fluids you’d associate with Kill Bill rather than the can these are the filthiest game bathrooms we’ve ever seen.

In a tight bind, when ...

If Left 4 Dead has any one problem, it’s the sheer bloody length of its campaign missions. With four chapters in a campaign it’s perfectly possible to spend an hour blazing through zombie hordes, but with eight chapters in a versus match games drag on.

So goes Valve’s justification for Crash Course’s half-hour, two chapter length. It all sounds a little suspect, but it turns out they’re on to something ...

Let’s pretend, for a second, that everything bad anyone ever said about videogames was true. Why, we’d all be suicidal pixel-junkies, protected from our desperate self-hatred only by our own slovenliness! The world would be safe from our sociopathic, car-jacking, handgun-happy death wishes merely because we were too busy installing an IV drip to provide us with the powdered-cheese sustenance necessary to gain another level in World of Warcraft! ...

FEAR 2 is its own metaphor: the baddies are ‘Replica’ troopers: generic cloned soldier dudes. And in this freshly-forged set of new single-player levels, which you can purchase online, you get to play as one of these generic replica troopers. Number 813, to be precise. Oh dear, they’re leaving it wide open for satire, aren’t they? It’s almost too easy. ...

TalkRadar UK episode #9 is here for your pleasure

  ...

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch have no tactile buttons at all for gaming. But it doesn't matter. The ‘prod mechanic’ is ideal for a platform sometimes problematic when it comes to precision controls and the simplistic, single finger approach has given us a whole bunch of addictive, immediate, accessible games. Here are 10 of the best.

Buy it from the App Store 

The Flash sensation makes a ...

It is nothing short of a miracle that the English-speaking world will soon get the fighting-game mash-up Tatsunoko vs Capcom. This brawler has a gathering of Capcom characters facing off against creations from Tatsunoko, a decades-old animation house whose work isn’t well known outside Japan. ...