Sonic the Hedgehog hasn't got a proper girlfriend. Sure, Amy throws herself at him all the time, but Sonic Generations clearly showed him holding her at arm's length while she continued to struggle in his direction. That's one relationship that's never going to work out. And as for Princess Elise… well, when did you last see her? 2006? Exactly. Her friends pointed out why what she was doing was wrong and she finally saw the light. She's asked Google to remove all mention of it. The results are pending.

So, seeing as time keeps marching on and he won't look this good for ever, Sonic has been attending speed dating evenings. In case you haven't experienced its wonders, this involves an evening of three-minute dates. If you like someone, you tick their name. Get a tick back and you share phone numbers. Simple. They say three minutes is enough time to know if you are interested in someone. Well, here's what the ladies thought of Sonic...

"You know that thing where you like a guy, but just wish he would shut the hell up? Yeah, that. He kept saying things like 'hey hey!' and 'Better luck next time'. I mean, I'm all for enthusiasm and a cheerful personality, because those things are great. But they're also SO ANNOYING."

"I think I decided I definitely wouldn't tick him when it got to the end of the three minutes and he stood up and said "Hey, I'll play with you some other time" and just sort of froze. The lady from the speed dating company had to come and usher him along to the next girl because he'd already used up two minutes of his time with her. My next date didn't know what to say - he couldn't get to his seat."

"It started off pretty well. I mean, he looks quite cool with those great big blue spines and winsome smile, but some pretty major red flags were waving as soon as he started bragging about all the gold rings he has. And then he said that if I was lucky, maybe I could have one. I mean, come ON – we only just met and he's already talking about giving me a ring?"

"Sad thing is, when the bell rung to signal it was time to move onto the next person, the guy stood up and banged his head on the light shade above the table, at which point he seemed to drop hundreds of the things. It was quite awkward, really. Nobody helped him pick them up. By the time I realised and offered to help, most of them had disappeared. I don't… I don't really know what I saw. The poor guy almost forgot his chili dog."

"Is nobody else seeing this? This isn't a guy at all. It's a hedgehog. The kind that gets stuck in cattle grids or ends up squashed on the side of the road. I mean, I'm a girl. A human. I couldn't ever get with a hedgehog. Aren't there laws against that sort of thing? If there aren't, there should be."

"The other thing is, even besides the physical aspect, how would you maintain a healthy emotional relationship with a hedgehog? At one point, I joked that he was a funny colour for a hedgehog. It must be a delicate subject for him, because he curled up into a ball and didn't come out for the rest of the speed date. I can't be putting up with that. This evening was a stupid idea, I should never have come."

"It was the strangest three minutes of my life. He sprinted the four feet from the previous table and flung himself down into the seat, throwing down this disgusting chili dog onto the table, which slid off, only for him to catch it before it hit the floor and then sort of twirl it in the air before making it land on the plate. It was like watching a cartoon. I don't like cartoons."

"Surprisingly, he told me he likes speed and running. I don't know why everyone thinks running is such a great and attractive pastime. I've been on all the dating sites and everyone seems to list running as one of their main interests. That and travelling. Me? I like eating cake. But at least by the time I'd thought about all the things I just told you, especially the bit about the cake, the three minutes was up and he ran off to the next girl. I didn't even catch his name. Sanic, wasn't it?"

"I actually quite liked the guy, at first. But then I asked him about his friends and what they do. From what I gather, there's some kid who flies a plane, some boxer-type who likes jewels and a big… cat? I thought he was teasing me. Nobody has a friend called Cream the Rabbit. At least nobody in the social circles I want to associate with."

"I asked him if he was talking about pets but he said no, and showed me a picture. They all look friendly enough, but, to be honest, I couldn't picture myself in that picture too. For that matter, I don't think anyone in the room would have looked right in that picture. I think maybe he should look for someone a bit more like himself."

"This guy is absolutely full of it. You know what he told me? He took part in the Olympic Games – both winter and summer – for the past 8 years. I can sort of picture it going by his physique, but I think I would have heard about a blue dude winning medals at some point in the past decade. I bet they're made of chocolate or something."

"He also said he saves the world every other week. And that he's been into space. And he's a racing driver. Oh, and he plays tennis competitively. And he's into MMA. You know, he also had the nerve to try and convince me he's a time traveller and went back into the past to fix the future, and when he went forward to check, it was all happy and pink and stuff. The guy's imagination is incredible, but it's also disturbing. I think he might be dangerous. Wait, did I mention to him where I work? Oh god, I think I did…"

"You know, after the previous guy had got up, this guy Sonic sat down and introduced himself. I said something like 'Sonic the Hedgehog… OK, let me just write that down' and started to write his name on the little card. By the 'c' I realised he was tapping his foot impatiently, and by the time I'd finished writing the second 'g', he was stretched out on the table, yawning his head off like I'd taken forever. It can't have been more than 10 seconds."

"I can't stand bad attitudes, but he seemed to think it is a positive attribute. In fact, when I asked him what he thought his best features were, he immediately said 'my attitude'. When I suggested maybe that wasn't a good thing, he said it used to make him really popular. Naturally, I picked up on the 'used to', but then the time was up and he said 'Better get going', and left. I don't think we'll be ticking each other."

"I know age is just a number, but it does matter a little bit. This guy said he was out on his own as early as 1991. I wasn't even born until 1997, so he must be almost old enough to be my dad. I know he doesn't look that old (although it's hard to tell because he doesn't look like most people), but the thought does weird me out a little bit."

"I did actually raise it in the conversation, and his response was unnerving. He said "To be this good takes ages". And then he winked. I don't know what he was talking about, but it chilled me to my very core. I think I'm better off with someone closer to my own age."

"I thought he seemed really nice, but he got a phone call right in the middle of our time and I saw the name 'Amy' flash up on his phone. I asked who it was and he said 'oh, no-one'. When I pushed some more, he conceded that he and she used to date, briefly, but that 'now she won't take the hint'. So yeah, I suspect there's unfinished business there."

"Then, after the dating evening had finished, some of the girls were laughing at something on one of their phones. It was a video that looked like that guy Sonic was being kissed by a girl who was dressed up like a princess, with floating crystals or something. It looked like some kind of ritual... and he looked drugged. Even unconscious at one point. If he's an actor or something, then I suppose that's cool, but I'm not really into LARPing. And that looked a hell of a lot like LARPing to me."

Gone are the no-name soldiers, the generic ghillie suits, and the standard issue fatigues. In , you no longer play as a grunt, but rather a highly skilled Specialist soldier. Each of these soldiers will have their own progressions system (of which we have zero details, for now), can equip various special weapons and abilities, and have their own background story. Each Specialist is...well, special. And in this article, we're going to show you why.

In the final game, will have nine total Specialists to choose from. Each has a special weapon and one unique ability you can equip before each match, which can be used once you fill up your ability gauge. As of now, we've only seen four Specialists in action, but we will be updating this article with all of the new faces that pop up from now until the game's release on November 6. Check out everything we know about each Specialist in the following slides.

At first glance, you might think Ruin is just your average futuristic soldier, but this guy is missing a few organic appendages. Ruin was so dedicated to becoming the ultimate super soldier that he got his own arms cut off to replace them with a set or more powerful bionic limbs.

With this newfound bionic tech he likes to approach battles not unlike the Incredible Hulk: get right up in his enemy's faces and smash them. Ruin's first equippable skill are his Gravity Spikes. When your ability gauge is full, activating the Gravity Spikes launches Ruin into the air as he slams the ground, sending a wave of destruction all around him. His alternate ability, called Overdrive, accelerates all movement for a short period of time. Perfect for capturing flags.

Seraph is a brutal enforcer of the 54I cartel. We don't have too many details on the crime syndicate as of now, but we can safely assume it's full of fearsome, militant killers. She doesn't have much in the way of bionic appendages, but she definitely makes up for it with her astonishingly powerful hand cannon.

The Annihilator is Seraph's weapon of choice. It's a one shot, one kill weapon with a sight that allows you to quickly zero in on your target and a kick that lets you know it ain't messing around. This thing is seriously powerful. On the other hand, Seraph can equip her Combat Focus ability, which gives her a bonus multiplier to the score she earns towards Scorestreaks. It makes it easier to reach those expensive (and more devastating) Scorestreaks, or allows you to keep the inexpensive ones coming at a constant pace.

The hooded Outrider looks like she might just be a futuristic Assassin's Creed assassin. She grew up in the mean streets of a Favela; a street rat that eventually ended up using her skills in the Brazilian Special Forces. If the hood and the sneaky demeanor didn't give it away, Outrider is definitely the hunter of the Specialist group.

Outrider plays out the hunter role with her Sparrow, a compound bow that shoots explosive arrows. The arrows have variable range. Quick shots will arch, which creates the potential for impressive skill shots. Fully-charge your shot and the arrow will pick your target off their feet and then explode in mid-air. Outrider's Vision Pulse ability sends a radar pulse out that highlights any nearby enemy for a short time, giving you a huge advantage over the competition.

Reaper's kind probably would have been the beginning of the end for the human race. Sentient machines with gatling guns for arms practically spells armageddon. This soldier is an Experimental War Robot consisting of cutting-edge robotics and weaponry that was supposed to replace humans in the field, only Reaper (the first prototype) is exceptionally expensive, so production was halted after just one was built.

In battle, Reaper brings its Scythe, the aforementioned robotic arm that turns into a high-powered mini-gun. When deployed, the gun takes a moment to rev up and get blasting, making a better defensive weapon than an offensive one. If you don't want to go guns blazing, Reaper also has the Glitch ability allowing it teleport backwards 6 (or so) seconds into the past. It's the perfect way to shake a pursuer, or get out of a tough firefight.

We don't have the details on all of the Specialists yet, but Treyarch has teased that there will be nine total multiplayer characters, each with their own abilities, to choose from. From the reveal of the first four, it's tough to predict who or what may be coming next. But stay tuned, we will be updating this article will all of the latest info on every new face that gets announced as we get closer to Black Ops 3's release this winter.

Game advertising is all but inescapable these days, with promotions for big franchises taking up space in everything from mall kiosks to thousands-of-dollars-per-second Super Bowl ads. It's gotten to the point where even those who don’t really play games still have some familiarity with the sequel-laden mainstays that you and I know so well. But even amidst all the hype trains and ridiculously expensive marketing campaigns, some entries in the most universally recognized game franchises are all but forgotten to time.

There's been plenty of discussion about the , but many of those hail from Japanese franchises that might not register with players from other parts of the world. So instead, here are the most delightfully obscure games from the most recognizable Western-made franchises on the market. Mention these to your parents, siblings, friends, teachers, whoever; you'll see their eyes light up in understanding when you say the series name, only to shift to utter befuddlement when you reach the actual title.

As you'll soon find, some of these little-known games have been buried under layers of history, from the days before the brand name blew up. Grand Theft Auto 3 is really when the masses started paying attention to Rockstar's brand of open-world crime sprees, so the original top-down GTA from 1997 is already pretty obscure. Even fewer people have played GTA: London, 1969, a UK-themed expansion pack that adds the entire series' only real-world location to the base game. Then, on top of all that, sits GTA: London, 1961, an expansion pack to the expansion pack. It's enough to make your head spin.

So, is it any good? Since there's barely any plot to the early GTA games, London, 1961 can't offer the same level of backstory-revealing goodness as later spin-offs like Liberty City and Vice City Stories. But if you just want to add some more content to your retro car thieving, then you might as well enjoy the extra missions added in this bit of PC-exclusive freeware.

Contrary to what Activision would like you to believe, not every Call of Duty game is an instant best-seller. Black Ops: Declassified was put in a pretty unenviable position, releasing as a PS Vita exclusive on the same day as . That meant that it targeted a demographic that largely prefers its military FPS action on consoles, if they even owned Sony's struggling handheld system to begin with. Of course, it certainly doesn't help things when your game is horrendously buggy, has broken AI, and gets critically panned for boasting a single-player campaign that can be completed in less than an hour.

So, is it any good? No, unless you're a diehard CoD lore buff who's desperate to know what kind of mass murdering went down between the events of Black Ops and Black Ops 2. If Declassified has taught us anything, it's that CoD's speedy gameplay was never meant to accommodate touchscreen controls, and having two colons in your game titles looks a bit silly.

Kratos is a legend among gamers, known far and wide for his ability to be unreasonably angry at all times and turn any violent action into a quick-time event. Excessive bloodshed and gore has always been crucial to God of War's brand of combo-centric combat, so you might wonder how all that could possibly work on a tiny, narrow screen. God of War: Betrayal aimed to find out, plopping the Ghost of Sparta onto Java-compatible flip phones in a time before Apple's App Store even existed. Though the action shifted from 3D to 2D, there were still plenty of mythical monsters to slice through and execute with carefully timed button presses.

So, is it any good? Depends on your expectations. It's certainly a bit strange to see Kratos reduced to a dinky pixelated sprite, and the lack of music or sound effects beyond the occasional, singular drum beat makes the brutal beatdowns feel about as epic as a stroll through the library. But given the limitations of the Java engine, it's impressive that Betrayal still manages to retain the pace and flow of God of War combat on a 2D plane, even if you're mashing the 'OK' button instead of Square.

Over 30 years later, stacking blocks and making them disappear in Tetris still hasn't gotten old. The formula is almost too perfect, since any attempts to jazz it up usually end up feeling convoluted or gimmicky. That didn't stop the N64-exclusive Tetrisphere from trying, taking the basic tetromino-dropping gameplay and wrapping it around a giant orb of colored blocks. In addition to the procession of shapes, you can also use an array of unorthodox puzzle power-ups like magnets and ray guns to bore to the center of the Tetrisphere a little quicker. And for whatever reason, you've got a bunch of bug-eyed androids to keep you company (none of which seem remotely Russian).

So, is it any good? Yes, actually. Having to manipulate pieces in a 3D space bends your brain out of its Tetris comfort zone, and there's a lot more blocky real-estate to cover in search of the perfect fit for your current piece. Also, the techno-rave soundtrack is pretty rad.

The Madden NFL series spans a whopping five console generations and counting, which is pretty staggering to think about. And at the same time that the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were getting annual Madden sequels starting as early as 1990, only one entry in the series ever made it to the Turbo Duo console. To understand why, ask yourself: did you or anyone you know even own a Turbo Duo? If you answered 'yes', then you might also be familiar with that GI Joe reject . But what was I talking about again? Oh, right: 16-bit Madden on an unpopular console that tried implementing disc drives just a bit too early.

So, is it any good? Not unless you're a sucker for FMVs peppering all the sluggish gridiron action, including such riveting live-action scenes as the game-opening coin toss (complete with slow zoom on the quarter) and three-second-long endzone celebrations. But I can safely say that there is no greater virtual representation of John Madden than .

The Sims is one of the most successful game franchises of all time, delighting players with just the right mix of mundane suburban life and godlike power (including, but not limited to, trapping your Sims in the bathroom until they die). For those who prefer the chibi style of character design in something like MapleStory, there's MySims, a spin-off full of super-deformed denizens to occupy your virtual dollhouse. And beyond that is a series of spin-off spin-offs that have nothing to do with domestic life. Instead, these games involve minigame parties, kart-racing, kid-friendly espionage, or - in the case of SkyHeroes - full-on aerial dogfighting and races through mid-air checkpoints.

So, is it any good? Heck yeah. For my money, I'll always go with a goofy, colorful flight combat game over something that aims for photorealism like Ace Combat, especially if it can tap into the nostalgia of Star Fox and Diddy Kong Racing. Plus, those little customizable jet fighters are just adorable.

A full year before Uncharted: Fight for Fortune turned third-person action into a surprisingly fun card game, Assassin's Creed took a stab at the world of CCGs with the Recollection app on iOS. The game itself is actually just called Tactics, to be exact: a real-time duel where players summon Animus memories instead of casting spells. Despite there only being three main areas on the board, the strategy is quite complex, since you'll be micromanaging your agent cards to vie for territory control all while a day-cycle timer constantly ticks down. Outside of the matches, there's also plenty of opportunity for creative deckbuilding, given the sizeable 200+ card pool.

So, is it any good? Yes. Like any CCG, this game makes its money through in-app purchases used to buy card packs, so stay away if you can't use your virtual wallet responsibly. But for any AC fan craving a strategic change of pace, Tactics (alongside all the other supplementary concept art and cutscenes in Recollection) makes for an impressively worthwhile companion app.

You can't make it ten clicks through the internet without someone cracking a (very likely weak) Half-Life 3 joke. But everyone's who's clamoring for fresh, unfamiliar content in Valve's seminal FPS series should take it upon themselves to seek out the little-known Half-Life: Decay. It's understandable that PC-centric players might've missed it, since this expansion was developed exclusively for the PlayStation 2 port of Gordon Freeman's first interdimensional escapade. Here's the thing: instead of controlling Freeman on his lonesome, Decay is actually a co-op campaign starring two female scientists - Colette Green and Gina Cross - that occurs parallel to Gordon's adventure during the Black Mesa Incident.

So, is it any good? Most definitely. Defending yourself against Xen aliens and the military clean-up crew is just as fun with a buddy by your side, as reinforced in Half-Life 2 - and unlike Alyx Vance, this player-controlled teammate doesn't have to deliver dialogue that awkwardly dances around the fact that you never speak. And Decay's emphasis on two-woman, first-person puzzles almost seems like a precursor to Portal 2's co-op. Plus, there's a secret mission that lets you can play as a Vortigaunt. Oh yes.

This impressive recreation of the International Space Station by Jack Parsons, an environmental artist from Galactic Cafe’s The Stanley Parable. “It’s about 1.33 times larger than life,” he says. “Making it to the exact dimensions makes it feel way too cramped inside.” Construction of the ISS involved using ten stacks of quartz, a double chest of white wool, and about 60 stacks of nether brick slabs. “Half a nether fortress went into those solar arrays,” he says. It took about two days to design in Creative mode, and then he spent three days building it in Survival using netherrack scaffolds. Parsons says that he plans to carry on tweaking it to correspond with events that happen to the real-life International Space Station, “adding and removing docked vehicles and even rearranging modules when the time comes.”

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The solar panels generate 160 volts DC for their systems. When the Earth eclipses the Sun, rechargeable batteries keep the station ticking over.

The Cupola module hangs below the ISS, giving the best views of the Earth’s surface 431 kilometres away. Astronauts sleep next door.

The Zvezda module contains the life-support and communications systems, as well as docking points. It can also sleep six crew members.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, a series that started with the events of the Vietnam War then moved to a near-future timeline, is going even further down the road of tomorrow. Even though last year's Advanced Warfare from Sledgehammer also introduced a high-tech, militarized era, that future isn't Treyarch's Black Ops 3 future. Black Ops has its own timeline, and the sequel's setting introduces new characters, advanced gadgets and tech, and gameplay features the series hasn't seen before.

With Treyarch at the reins, the first dedicated, new-gen Call of Duty may just be the most massive to date. Once again, Treyarch's new Call of Duty game contains three different parts: the story campaign, competitive multiplayer, and the horde-style Zombies mode. As we wait for Black Ops 3 to release on Xbox One, PS4, and PC this holiday season, check out the following slides for everything we know about the upcoming shooter's game modes, story, and more.

The last time we left the Black Ops series was with David Mason shoving his GI boot up antagonist Raul Menendez's butt. But that battle has long passed by the time Black Ops 3's events come along. The year is 2060, more than three decades after the events of Black Ops 2. So far, the Masons are nowhere in sight, but in their place you'll create and take control of your own soldier as you battle the new age's military threats.

The specifics of the global threat are still unknown, but where Black Ops 2 saw the world's military forces being devastated by city-destroying, weaponized drones, that world-ending situation will not repeat in the upcoming sequel. The world's nations are now outfitted with a whole lot of anti-drone defenses, putting an emphasis back on having strong ground forces to settle political differences - which is, of course, where you come in.

Black Ops 3 is set pretty far into the future, so physical and neural enhancements are no longer a thing of science fiction. Soldiers are often more machine than man, using cybernetic arms and legs to improve their strength and mobility. In addition to enhanced body parts, soldiers also have computers attached to their brains allowing them to use new Cyber Core and Cyber Rig abilities.

Equipping Cyber Cores gives you skills to do things like remotely hack robots and small drones with your brain at any point in the battle, while Cyber Rigs are passive abilities that can improve your soldier's mobility and defensive capabilities. The soldier you equip and take into a campaign mission can be vastly different from anything your friend might bring to the same situation, and yes, what your friends equip will matter because...

Up to now, Call of Duty campaigns have been single player-focused, on-the-rails, highly scripted rollercoasters with lots of corridor shooting and big-ass explosions. In Black Ops 3, there are still big-ass explosions, but Blops 3's campaign is giving up to four players a bit more room to explore different ways to attack their objectives. The mission environments are larger and wide open, the enemy AI has been revamped to account for multiple players and open levels, and new co-op features allow players to effectively communicate and work as a team.

The one mission shown so far was in an open plaza in Cairo, Egypt populated with human enemy soldiers, robot enemy soldiers, mini flying drones, and multiple mission objectives. The players could approach each objective as they liked, hack drones with their Cyber Core abilities, and even highlight threats, danger zones, and tactical opportunities in their co-op buddies' HUDs. The new mission style seems to emphasize player exploration and emergent tactics over setting up blockbuster set pieces like previous games, though there are sure to be massive set pieces sprinkled throughout. This is Call of Duty, after all.

Soldier customization appears to be a major focus in Black Ops 3. In the campaign, players can outfit their soldier with Cyber Cores, Cyber Rigs, weapons, and equipment before they head into battle. But you won't just be scrolling through a menu to equip those items, you'll do all that in your very own Safe House where you can customize the layout and socialize with other players.

On top of that, the multiplayer mode has cranked weapon customization up with the Gunsmith feature. Gunsmith allows you to make your weapon look unique by equipping weapon attachments and creating your own art on a predetermined section of your weapon using various unlockable symbols and shapes. Creating your weapon art is similar to using the series' emblem editor, except you're making dirty images on a 3D surface rather than a 2D plane.

With the advanced technology at the Black Ops 3 soldier's disposal, your trooper's ability to move quickly around the battlefield is even more efficient than before. You get the speed boost by using the new thrust jump, powersliding, mantling, and Titanfall-style wall running capabilities of your combat suit. This enhanced mobility works quite a bit differently than Advanced Warfare's Exo jump and dashing abilities, giving you a more controlled way of moving your soldier around the environment.

The thrust jump allows you to boost yourself into the air with both long, extended thrusts for higher altitudes and short bursts for prolonged airtime and maneuverability. This lets players bounce around corners, change direction in mid-air, and perform maneuvers in any direction at any time. Coupled with the other movement abilities, you're able to chain thrust jumps, wall runs, and powerslides to really jet across the map quickly and perform some truly amazing acrobatic kills.

It wouldn't be a Treyarch Call of Duty game without the game-within-a-game Zombies mode. As of now, there aren't many details on the specifics of this year's zombie-infested offering, but one little tidbit the developers did reveal is that the Zombies mode will include its own version of a progression system.

Whether that progression system will be as extensive as the multiplayer mode's - allowing players to unlock weapons, skins, and equipment - is yet to be seen. But given the developer's dedication to the Easte-egg-turned-full-blown-game, Zombies is sure to be a substantial part of the Black Ops 3 package.

Treyarch is adding quite a few new features to make the multiplayer experience feel much different than it has in past games. For example,Black Ops 3's Specialists are multiplayer characters with unique abilities and looks, and the maps have been designed around the new traversal abilities of the players. There are obvious flat walls to wall run on, tight spaces to powerslide under, and ponds to jump into for underwater battles.

That's right, you can swim in Blops 3's multiplayer. Making the transition from dry land to underwater gunplay doesn't have any jarring control changes, so it’s easy to jump in for cover and boost out of the water at a moment's notice. That's just a small portion of what we know about the multiplayer mode so far. Check out more details on the game's competitive component in our

Treyarch has dedicated a full 3-year development cycle to Black Ops 3 and the extra time seems to have spawned quite a bit of innovation in both the campaign and multiplayer modes. To allow players to personally experience the game and its many changes before launch, Treyarch announced that there will be a Black Ops 3 multiplayer beta made available to all who pre-order the game. And the developer will be bringing the multiplayer to E3's show floor, so you can look forward to even more details on the game in June.

That's everything we know so far, but there are still plenty of questions to be answered and Black Ops 3 features to be unveiled in the future. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to the November 6 launch.

Perfecting your twitch reflexes, precision accuracy, and run ‘n' gun skills in Call of Duty multiplayer is what gets you to the top of the scoreboards, but in Treyarch's upcoming , you have a few new skills to learn if you want to be the best. The developer has made some significant changes. A new traversal system makes the game faster and more acrobatic. There are multiplayer characters with unique weapons and stories attached to them, and the customization options seem almost limitless.

With all of that, the competitive mode still feels very much like Black Ops multiplayer. It has all of the familiar gunplay, map styles, and gameplay modes that would make any CoD player feel right at home, but the changes to the pacing of the matches, abilities, and map design also give the online gunfights a fresh spin over the recent series entries. We've played the game and secured the intel on the new multiplayer features coming to Black Ops 3. Check out what's new in the following slides.

Black Ops 3's future setting enables your soldier to have access to futuristic weapons, and super advanced, cybernetic enhancements that improve your mobility. Every soldier is equipped with a thruster on his or her back, allowing you to move through the environment using extended or short burst thrust jumps, speedy powerslides, and map-spanning wall runs.

Your movement is momentum based, meaning you can rotate your view and not disrupt your movement while you chain together wall runs, powerslides, thrust jumps. Thrust jumps can boost you in any direction at any time in mid air (you just need to have enough power in your meter for a burst) and you can powerslide in any direction - even backwards. This allows you to track your target, center them in your reticle, and fire on them from any movement state you're in, which can result in some spectacularly complicated (and really cool looking) kills.

With all of the thrust jumping and wall running capabilities available to players, the multiplayer map design has also seen its share of modifications. To cater to players’ mobility, there are fairly obvious traversal paths throughout the maps' layouts. For example, in the Combine map, there are paths that allow players to circumnavigate heavily trafficked foot paths by wall running over bottomless pits. A skilled parkouring soldier can chain powerslides under obstacles, wall runs, and jump thrusts to surprise other players, and zip across the map faster than ever before.

Using the new abilities feels like an extension of jumping and vaulting in the previous Black Ops games, so veteran CoD players will most likely get used to the controls within the first few matches. Once you do get a hang of the new mobility, you’ll develop the urge to explore the map to find the fastest shortcuts to flag captures, and discover the best areas to set up incredible acrobatic kills.

Water has really only been a decoration in previous CoD multiplayer maps. You'd either die instantly if you fell into it, or it would be ankle deep and affect nothing. In Black Ops 3 you can finally jump in, swim around, and have underwater battles. And before you say, "But guns can't shoot underwater!" remember this the future, and there's probably all kinds of water ballistic science in the future.

Jumping into and boosting out of the water isn't just for the fun of it either; water can actually factor into your battle tactics. In the Hunted map, there is a pool of water in the center of the map with a large waterfall flowing into it. In a match, you can avoid gunfire by taking a dip. Once you're in, the wavy water distorts the view from the surface, allowing you to sneak away, or pop back out for a surprise attack.

The above screenshot is from Call of Duty: Ghosts

Treyarch seems to have taken the phrase, "this is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine" to heart. In Black Ops 3, there are tons of options to make your weapon look unique to your soldier. Every attachment you equip on your weapon changes a specific part of the gun. Plus, each attachment has aesthetic variants, allowing you to choose between styles. For example, you can choose between a classic style cylindrical silencer or rectangular boxy version, just for visual variety.

Gunsmith also gives you the option to paint a three-sided section of your gun using an art editor similar to the previous games' Emblem editor. You'll have 64 art layers to work with (double what was available in Black Ops' Emblem editor), so there's plenty of room to be creative. On top of all of that, there is a full set of unlockable camouflages for every weapon. The visual combinations seem almost endless.

It seems a few MOBA influences have seeped their way into Call of Duty multiplayer. In Black Ops 3, you won't just be playing as a nameless soldier; before each match you'll choose from one of nine characters - called Specialists - who have their own progression system, story background, and skills attached to them. As you go into battle, you'll choose one of your character's available skills, and your character and skill choices will be locked in for the entire duration of the match.

In the match, your character's chosen ability will activate when your ability meter completely fills, but you aren't required to score kills or points to fill it (though, participating in the match helps fill your meter faster). As time goes on, your ability meter will fill itself, giving you at least one chance to use your super move per match, whether you're getting massive kill streaks or not. If you want formation on the new characters, check out our complete breakdown of Black Ops 3's Specialists.

If you're looking to get your hands on Black Ops 3's competitive multiplayer, Treyarch will be running a multiplayer beta for those who pre-order the game. The exact dates for the online event are still under wraps, but the game is said to be playable at E3, so expect to hear more on Black Ops 3's multiplayer when E3 2015 rolls around. Until then, be sure to check back for formation on Black Ops 3's multiplayer as we wait for the game's November 6, 2015 release.

If you like scaring off potential lovers by turning your bed into a sea full of stuffed animals, then have I got the list for you. Video game land is filled to the brim with critters ripe for shrinking down into huggable plushie form, so I’ve collected a list of the very best so you can remind your crush that you’re also a gamer /thank you very much/ as they slowly back out the door.

From Mud Crabs to Piranha Plants, here are the ten most unusual, yet massively desirable video game plushies you can buy right now.

This handsome beast has been “scientifically engineered for maximum huggability and affection.” He also talks.

Lovingly: take my money.

You can .

Just look at that round squishable face! Those beady little eyes! Those pathetic little wings! Who wouldn’t want this spherical yellow chubster taking up all the room in their bed? Your partner can sleep on the floor.

You can .

Not only is this friendly monster adorably fuzzy, he also acts as a handy storage device. His gaping maw opens up at a terrifying angle, gifting you with plenty of storage space for your beard clippings.

You can .

Those cold, dead eyes have seen a lot of unspeakable things. This Silent Hill series memento totally won’t murder you in your sleep…

You can .

Bethesda really know how to make a good plush. They’ve got so many great additions that it’s was too difficult to narrow it down to just the Elcor, so here’s a cuddly Mud Crab that you can prop up on the shelf next to him.

You can .

Nintendo does an incredibly strong line in huggable things, but this toothy little bastard chomped the rest of the competition. Just don’t get your fingers too close to his mouth.

You can .

Always there for you in your darkest hour, the companion cube is a classic that will never let you down… unless you’re near an open flame.

You can .

The chick transforms into an egg. Nothing more needs to be said.

You can .

They missed a trick by not making this out of velcro, but at least you won’t have to worry about being rolled into a ball of miscellaneous household objects any time soon.

You can .

Ok, so the pig’s vacant stare freaks me out even more than meeting the gaze of an Enderman, but this colourful menagerie would be right at home in anyone’s collection.

You can .

When you live in a country that seems to get every game by default, it's easy to take things for granted. Sure, we've had a history of congresspeople attempting to demonize video games, but our self-regulating ratings board is surprisingly lenient compared to countries like Australia or Germany, who decide what games consumers can and can't purchase. Plus, if a game ever leaves Japan, there's a damn good chance it's going to come stateside before other territories.

Except for when it doesn't. There are quite a few games that got fully translated into English, though for whatever reason, didn't make it outside of Europe - or hell, even Japan. North America is massive in comparison to other English-speaking territories, and maybe trucking games cross-country just to sit on store shelves doesn't make a lot of sense. Whatever the reason, make sure you brace yourself for disappointment (or prepare to shell out the cash for region-specific hardware), because these are some of the teresting games we North Americans are missing out on.

Here it is, folks: one of the few Zelda games that will never make it to North America. OK, well, technically it's starring everyone's "favorite" 40-year-old human fairy, Tingle. Even though you're not playing as Link, it still feels like a Legend of Zelda game in many ways. There's an overworld to explore, dungeons full of puzzles to solve, and tons of rupees to snag.

In fact, rupees are an important part, because they're not just a currency you can use to purchase items and haggle with Hyrule's inhabitants - they're Tingle’s health bar too. Run out of cash and it's lights out for our green-tighted hero. This game probably could have had an honest shot here, if not for the fact that pretty much everyone thinks that Tingle is one of the creepiest characters Nintendo's ever made.

Remember Hotel Dusk: Room 215? That Nintendo DS game that looked like it came right out of an ? Well, its now-defunct developer Cing actually made a sequel a few years later that was fully translated and released in Europe.

Last Window: The Secret of Cape West continues the story of Kyle Hyde, the police officer-turned-delivery man as he unravels yet another mystery. According to reviews, Last Window is supposed to be just as good as its predecessor, filled with memorable characters and a unique graphical style, but the text-heavy adventure is perhaps a bit too niche for North American audiences. Much like...

Oh look, another Cing joint! This time, it's a sequel to the the DS adventure game Trace Memory (or, as it's known in Europe, Another Code: Two Memories). Trace Memory plays out like an interactive storybook, with some brisk puzzle-solving to keep things interesting. You play as a young Ashley Mizuki Robbins, as she explores the mysterious Blood Edward Island, looking for clues as to the whereabouts of her missing parents.

Unfortunately, some pacing issues and a lack of replayability led to middling reviews, which ultimately doomed its sequel, Another Code R, from ever seeing the light of day in North America - which is a shame, because it's largely an improvement over the original in many ways. It didn't help that the sequel was a Wii game, and by the time it finally launched, the Wii's software sales all but dried up for anything that wasn't a Mario game.

Here's another Nintendo-published Wii game that would have likely tanked in North America. If you're wondering why this game sounds familiar, you probably recognize it from Nintendo's E3 2006 presentation. Nintendo revealed the trailer for Monolith Soft's bonkers action title, then never spoke a single word about it. That's right: the same studio responsible for sprawling JRPGs about robots and swords and robot swords also worked on a QTE-laden survival game in which massive earthquakes and tsunamis wreck a coastal city in North America.

Nintendo quietly released Disaster: Day of Crisis abroad in October, 2008, but poor sales and middling review scores ensured that we'd never see the once-promised game grace our shores. It's weird that a game as gung-ho-America as Disaster: Day of Crisis would never get released here, but it's nothing compared to...

. Before crushing our souls with games like Bloodborne, From Software loved making mech games, like Chromehounds and Armored Core. But none of them compare to the sheer jingoistic audacity of Metal Wolf Chaos. Vice President Richard Hawk usurps the Oval Office from current president Michael Wilson (relative of Woodrow Wilson, naturally). How does he attempt to regain control of the White House? By piloting a giant mech, that's how. Eventually the two battle in space - because of course they do.

While its menus are in Japanese, the entire game is dubbed with gloriously terrible English voice acting, and it's pretty easy to figure out how to press A to America without having to study a second language. It is a crime we never got a localized version - it could have been video gaming's Team America: World Police, and there's no way translating everything would have taken longer than a Coca-Cola and apple pie-fueled fortnight.

Oh dear, this one is going to break more than a few hearts. Phantasy Star Online was an action-packed MMORPG for the Dreamcast released in 2000, a time when hooking your console up to the internet was a strange concept. Despite a relatively complicated set-up process compared to most modern-day online console titles, it garnered a decent cult following over its lifespan.

So of course fans were excited to hear that a full sequel would make its way to PC and Vita… and have continued to wait patiently for the game to ever make it to the West. Currently, Phantasy Star Online 2 is only out in Japan and the Pacific Southwest, but if you're willing to jump through some hoops, you can actually that will translate nearly everything for you. The fact that Sega hasn't done anything to block its use might as well be confirmation that we'll never get it.

The SNES is arguably one of the best JRPG machines on the planet, and North America actually got a fairly surprising amount of them, all things considered. But there's one in particular that stands out as one of the finest we'll probably never get to play: Terranigma.

Terranigma is the third entry of a loosely connected trilogy, developed by Quintet, the studio who brought us classics like ActRaiser, Soul Blazer, and Illusion of Gaia. In many ways, Terranigma is Quintet's magnum opus, a combination of complex religious themes and action-RPG concepts introduced in prior titles. So why didn't we get it? Turns out Enix wasn't doing so hot in the US, and had closed its North American subsidiary shortly before its localization was completed. That didn't stop Nintendo from taking it and publishing it on its own - but only in Europe and Australia.

If this article seems particularly Nintendo heavy, it's not because I'm bashing them. They just happen to make a habit of putting in a ton of work to make games readable by a Western audience then not releasing them in their largest English-speaking territory - or simply not releasing them at all. Case in point: Mother for the NES.

In Japan, what we refer to as EarthBound is known as Mother 2, the sequel to the original Mother game released in 1989 on the NES. Plans were set in motion to make Mother available to a Western audience, and the game was fully translated into English, until Nintendo of America decided (for whatever reason) that releasing it would be commercially unviable. Lucky for us, someone found a prototype and dumped the ROM files online, where it has since been dubbed EarthBound Zero by those who have come across it by less scrupulous means.

Mother 3, a game which many believe to be the finest (and most heart-wrenching) in the series, has been . Of course, Nintendo still has no plans to officially bring this title to the West, despite constantly taunting us with the inclusion of Mother 3 hero Lucas in Super Smash Bros. Sigh.

Being part of a creatively-driven fan community is a fantastic experience. Everyone shares a common passion - be it a movie, book, or game - and channel that energy into something constructive. Some people make art, others create music. And a few bring all those creative efforts together into something massive. Each entry on this list features a fan-developed game years in the making. Years spent toiling away in the developer's free time, hundreds of hours fueled by all-consuming fandom. And then poof all that work was undone.

The threat of a cease and desist letter hangs heavy over the heads of all fan developers working with someone else's creation. It is the Sword of Damocles, the Eye of Sauron, the all-powerful force that at any moment could shut the project down - but so often waits until the last minute to do so. Here are seven lovingly crafted fan games sunk by such letters.

It's only natural fans would want to spend more time exploring one of the Super Nintendo's most beloved JRPGs. While Chrono Trigger had an official sequel - Chrono Cross - it wasn't the direct sequel some wanted. Enter Kajar Laboratories, the fan-driven developer behind , an extensive ROM hack that looked and played just like the original. Set five years after Lavos' demise, Crimson Echoes finds the original cast on a new adventure involving alternate timelines, reptilian AI, and a resurrected king from the past. These plot points help set up the events of Chrono Cross, thus bridging the gap between the two games.

And here's the worst part: the game was cancelled just weeks before its release. After five years in development, Crimson Echoes was officially shut down in early May of 2009, mere weeks before its planned release date. By this point, the game "35 hours of gameplay and 10 separate endings" along with some new modes and other extras. Basically, everything you could have wanted from a Chrono Trigger 2.

The extensive fan-community surrounding My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is one of the most creatively-driven communities out there. So it should come as no surprise that - between all the music, artwork, and movies - a few fan-made MLP game have popped up as well. Fighting is Magic was a 2D fighting game from MANE6 who hoped to marry the spirit of My Little Pony with the high-speed action of Capcom's Vs. series. The result was a light years away from anything you'd find on MUGEN.

And here's the worst part: Fighting is Magic got hit with a cease and desist letter shortly after helping raise over $200,000 for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. In 2013, the organizers behind EVO on their Facebook page to determine the eighth game in their fighting game tournament lineup. Fighting is Magic was on that list, and drummed up a fair amount of support, but that didn't save it from getting shut down shortly thereafter.

Kids and adults the world over have been capturing pocket monsters for almost two decades, and yet we still don't have an official Pokemon MMO. In 2009, a small team of independent developers sought to fix this glaring omission with Pokenet. Players were able to battle, train, and level up their Pokemon, even though the game was still technically in beta. In essence, it looked like a really crowded version of the Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen games, with dozens of trainers wandering the Pokemon wilderness.

And here's the worst part: Pokenet was shut down on April Fool's day. What kind of a sick joke is that? Plus, if you do a simple search for 'Pokemon MMO' you'll discover Pokenet isn't the only Pokemon MMO in town. So why did it have to be canned while all these others live on? Your guess is as good as mine, and mine is 'bad luck'.

This one is a real heartbreaker. After eight years toiling away on their own time, Spanish developer Bomber Link finally released Streets of Rage Remake. This massive game was a glowing tribute to an arcade classic. It contained over 100 stages, 19 playable characters, and a 76-song soundtrack remixed by five different musicians. It was a beast and, according to the developers, designed completely from the ground up. According to , "It does not use reverse engineering nor a single line of code from the original games. It's all based on visual interpretation."

And here's the worst part: Not only did Sega can this glowing endorsement of their own franchise, they shut down their own as well. A video of a prototype Streets of Rage remake hit the web in 2012, courtesy of developer Ruffian Games. The footage shown was of a playable demo thrown together in six weeks. It was all for naught, however, as the project was apparently scrapped for unknown reasons.

The story of this fan-developed Metal Gear remake helps highlight just how arbitrary the whole cease-and-desist process appears. In 2014, a fan-developer Outer Haven announced it was halting development on its remake of the 1987 classic, Metal Gear. This came as a bit of a shock after the same developer just a few months prior announced that they had received Konami's blessing to move forward with development. For Pete's sake, they even got David Hayter himself to supply some voice work for their trailer. These guys were dedicated.

And here's the worst part: they had the green light from Konami, or so they thought. Originally, the developers and are working on a new game that's Metal Gear-free.

Super Mario 64 is one of the most beloved 3D platformers of all time, and a testament to Nintendo's skill at game design. Even so, if you want to play the game today there are only a few ways to do so. Developer Royston Ross offered a new alternative earlier this year with , a high-definition remake of the Bob-omb Battlefield using the Unity game engine. You could even play it in your browser. But after about a week in the spotlight, the game was taken down at Nintendo's request.

And here's the worst part: the entire thing was a tease within a tease. Not only did we get a very limited taste of the Bob-omb Battlefield in HD - remember, it wasn't up for long - that stage in itself was a tease of a fully realized Super Mario 64 HD, something that should really be in our lives. I guess we'll just have to make due with our $10 ROM dump on Virtual Console.

What's especially odd - and/or maddeningly frustrating - is that the likelihood of a company issuing a cease and desist letter appears almost arbitrary. Why did Pokenet get singled out as the PokeMMO to axe? Why did a remake of a Super Mario 64 stage get shut down when there are hundreds of Mario 64 hacks and remakes out there? And here's the big one: why is there not an industry-wide standard covering this sort of thing?

Look at Valve: they embraced the fan-developed, HD . If all companies required all fangames to be shut down, that would be one thing, but instead it appears the decision hinges on the personal whims of the companies themselves.

So I say embrace the creativity. These fangames are a testament to the rabid devotion of their communities; not to mention an excellent source of good PR. You don't build a loyal community by stifling its creative efforts.

The first time I saw a tiny man pop up onscreen and yelp "Toasty!" during a brutal fight to the death, I instantly understood that the Mortal Kombat series likes to have fun with its secrets. What started out as a few easter eggs - a fleeting glimpse of Reptile here, Santa Claus flying in front of the moon there - has grown into a massive collection of clever throwbacks and cameos that'll skewer your brain's nostalgia receptors and splinter your funny bone (in a good way). And has over two decades of franchise history to reference, so you better believe it's got tons of amusing secrets and nods to the previous games.

In fact, some are so well-hidden that most players probably won't even notice them. I've rounded up the coolest (and most obscure) tidbits I could find in MKX, and you should know that many, many fighters died to bring you this information. Revealing these to your uninformed friends is sure to recall that old-school feeling when you knew the Fatality inputs and they didn't. Read up, then pass it on to your fellow kombatants.

If you've played through MKX's story mode, you might remember the scene where Sonya visits Jax as one of the least violent moments in the entire game. The grizzled Special Forces veteran clearly wants a simpler life, clad in farmer's overalls, tinkering away at an old tractor. But it seems like Jax also has a soft spot for two of the most advanced pieces of technology in the Lin Kuei ninja clan, judging by the 'Uncle Cyrax Stone Ground Mustard', 'Old Sektor's Ketchup', and 'LK-4D4 Engine Oil' posters hanging on the wall of the Briggs family's barn. Who knew these cyborgs were in the condiment and car repair businesses?

MK diehards will likely know that Tremor - a forthcoming DLC character with the power to cause earthquakes - is actually a throwback to Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, a spin-off brawler starring Jax that's among the . But what you might not know is that Tremor was actually playable once before, in a very unlikely venue: the handheld arena. By plowing through the Challenge Tower in the PlayStation Vita version of the ninth Mortal Kombat, you'll eventually reach Challenge #100, which (very briefly) puts you in control of the brown-clad, earth-bending ninja. And of course, he's going up against Jax.

This bit of character development is done in such a low-key way that 90% of players will probably miss it entirely. But kudos to Netherrealm Studios for debuting their first gay fighter in the Mortal Kombat franchise: Kung Jin, the smartaleck younger cousin to Kung Lao and an ace with his magical bow. During the story mode's that this dialogue is indeed a bit of very subtle exposition.

Whenever this pale-skinned Netherrealm sorcerer warps onto the scene, he's usually carrying a dagger and the severed head of an ogre-like creature. Those aren't props he bought from Party City in an attempt to psyche out his opponent - that poor decapitated monster is actually Modoch, the giant Oni sub-boss from Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. It's never stated why Quan Chi felt the need to behead his minion 25 in-game years after the fact, though. Maybe Quan Chi decided that Moloch was too generic an MK character to keep on living.

Erron Black, the cowboy-looking bounty hunter loyal to Outworld's Kotal Kahn, typically relies on his trusty pistols during combat. But Erron can also switch to his Outlaw variation, where he brings a sword into battle to do a little stabbing in between all the shooting. This blade is actually formed from a Takartan's arm, the creatures (like Baraka) who can pop giant cleavers out of their forearms, Wolverine-style. Hopefully, Erron posthumously removed that Takartan's arm-blade, because otherwise... ouch. Also, the animation when Erron does his Takartan Stab command grab bears a striking resemblance to Sub-Zero's from the 2011 Mortal Kombat.

The MKX cast is chock full of talent, including some actors who you probably know from their many video game voiceovers. See if your ear picked up on all of these: Shinnok is voiced by Troy Baker (Joel from , pretty much anyone from any AAA game ever). Cassie Cage is played by Ashly Burch, who you probably know as Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2 or the titular sibling from Hey Ash Whatcha Playin'. Tricia Helfer, aka Number Six from Battlestar Galactica and EDI from Mass Effect 3, does an excellent Sonya Blade. And then there's Steve Blum, the Guinness World Record holder for most video game roles, doing his trademark gravelly voice for Sub-Zero (and a raspier tone for Reptile).

If you haven't seen the live-action Mortal Kombat flicks, you missed out on a particularly outstanding example of a cheesy video game movie one-liner. When Johnny Cage goes up against the hulking Goro, the four-armed brute snatches the shades off the Hollywood star's face and crushes them with a scoff. Johnny's retort during the ensuing fight scene is priceless: "Those were $500 sunglasses, asshole." Cut to 25 years later, and Cage is still bitter, saying "Don't you owe me some sunglasses?" before a match with Goro, or referencing .

Let's cap things off with a trio of easter eggs all related to Cassie Cage, daughter of Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade and the de facto leader of MKX's new generation of fighters. First up, you might've noticed that Cassie always removes some iPod-esque earbuds before a fight, which are presumably hooked up to an MP3 player tucked away in her gun holsters. And if you listen very, very closely, you can hear those earbuds blasting tunes from Mortal Kombat 3. Not a bad choice as far as prefight pump-up music goes.

Of all the Fatalities in MKX, Cassie's 'Selfie' finisher might be the most gruesomely hilarious. Long story short, she smashes her opponent's jaw till it's hanging by a hinge, then grabs their going-into-shock body and snaps a picture posing with her kill. The camera then zooms out to show that she's shared this mortifying image on her Facebook-parodying Friendships page, which has a rainbow logo in reference to . If you give it 30 seconds or so, you'll notice a stream of randomized comments popping up under the post, including (but not limited to) a Stryker cameo, a message from Noobde (the Twitter handle of MK co-creator Ed Boon), and Cassie's mother asking why she's friends with Kano on social media (y'know, the Cage family's most hated rival).

The Klassic tower is essentially MKX's arcade mode, and completing it rewards you with a brief slideshow ending for your chosen character. These are filled with cameos from old MK characters, like MK4's Taven in Kenshi and Takeda's epilogues. But the most interesting run-in happens in Cassie's ending, where Raiden tasks her with "hunting down a soul stealer." The intended target is implied to be Shang Tsung, but Cassie tracks down and offs an old man who, with his dying breath, identifies himself as Shujinko. If you played Mortal Kombat: Deception, you'll remember Shujinko as the protagonist in the expansive Konquest Mode single-player campaign, where he had the power to steal his opponent's moves (just not their physical form). An unfortunate case of mistaken identity, then.

And of course, there's Johnny Cage's alternate Ninja Mime costume, where he reprises his most well-known Hollywood role. Have you found any other excellent secrets or references in Mortal Kombat X? Share them in the comments, and we'll be sure to update this list with your suggestions!

And if you're looking for more, check out .

Oh, Twin Peaks – you keep breaking our hearts.

We were devastated when the show was cancelled back in 1991, so the news that David Lynch and Mark Frost were working on a new season of the surreal murder mystery was one of the delights of 2014. Alas . Whether that will hold remains to be seen – Showtime are keen to tempt him back – but right now we're very, very sad.

Still, it's known that the scripts (all penned by Frost and Lynch) exist and it seems likely that a third run will happen, with or without the Man With The Hair From Another Place. And if it does, there are some questions that we'd like answered... Spoilers for the show and Fire Walk With Me from here on in.

This is our main concern. The TV series ended on the mother of all cliffhangers, with plucky FBI agent Dale Cooper trapped in the Black Lodge and his doppelgänger – actually the demonic Killer BOB – running loose in the real world.

Now, Fire Walk With Me obliquely suggests a way that Cooper might be released (“My name is Annie. I've been with Laura and Dale. The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can't leave. Write it in your diary.”) and you can bet that Harry would cotton on that something was wrong with his BFF, but it's all very vague. We need to know that our very special agent escaped somehow. And we want to know what BOB's been up to while wearing his face...

Related to that last point, we can assume that Killer BOB will be back in some shape or form. He's the show's primary nemesis – a force of evil who moves from host to host. So while it's sad that we won't see former set dresser Frank Silva again (he passed away in 1995), the character can still appear by wearing the face of one of the people he has possessed. The question is, which one?

Coop is obviously a possibility, though we hope they don't go down that route for too long. It's perhaps more likely that we'll see BOB in the form of Leland Palmer. As the person who murdered Laura, it would make sense. Plus, we know that Ray Wise is likely involved in the new series, and also that he's very good at playing bad.

A bomb went off in “Beyond Life And Death”, apparently killing Andrew Packard, Pete Martell and Audrey Horne. But did any of them make it out alive?

Jack Nance (Pete) and Dan O' Herlihy (Andrew) have both passed away, so that kinda rules out their return. But Audrey presumably survived – she was one of the show's most popular characters, after all. She has to come back.

The same goes for her dad, Ben (played by Richard Beymer). Last time we saw him, his head had been split open by Doc Hayward. It'd be a damn shame if that was the end of Twin Peak's most venal businessman.

But that raises another question. Assuming that Ben did live, which version will we see in season three? The selfish manipulator, or the carrot-munching environmentalist he later became.

Twin Peaks without Laura Palmer is inconceivable – just look at how the show floundered after her killer had been revealed in season two. The character is the key to the entire series: an apparent innocent with some dark secrets. Tellingly, when Lynch returned to this world with Fire Walk With Me, he made sure the film was all about her.

Sheryl Lee has indicated an interest in returning to the role, but the question is how? Not only is Laura dead, but so is her identical cousin Maddy. Now the obvious answer is that we'll probably see her in the Red Room again, which makes sense. Perhaps she's been keeping Coop company all this time. That said, the fact that her spirit will have aged probably needs to be addressed...

This is one of the most hotly debated areas in Peaks lore, and one of the most intriguing loose ends.

In Fire Walk With Me, Laura obtains a ring bearing the mark of the Owl Cave, which has some connection to the Lodge Spirits. The ring passes from Teresa Banks (dead) to Laura (dead) and then to Annie (still alive – just). In The Missing Pieces (the deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me) we see that it was taken from her by a nurse. So what happened to the ring, and what was its purpose? Who made it? Does it protect its wearer from possession by BOB, or make them more of a target? Hopefully we'll find out more about this next year...

It seems unlikely that we'll see ever rock's greatest chameleon reprise his role as FBI agent Phillip Jeffries. But then again, stranger things have happened – not least the likely return of Twin Peaks

Whatever, his brief scenes in Fire Walk With Me are tantalisingly weird, adding time travel to Peaks' already stacked roster of strange occurrences. It was intended that Jeffries would be a central part of future films or episodes, but the commercial failure of Fire Walk With Me scuppered that. Perhaps now he can be and we'll finally find out more about Judy...

Assuming that both Coop and Audrey are in the show, and not possessed by an evil spirit or, y'know, dead, then will we see them rekindle (or even just kindle) their budding relationship? It was called to a halt in the TV series because Kyle MacLachlan felt it would have been inappropriate for an FBI agent like Coop to start dating a high schooler. A fair point, though Sherilyn Fenn disagreed with the decision back in 1992, saying “I think Kyle blew it, because Dale and Audrey were so great together”.

Well, that wouldn't be a problem any more. Perhaps it's time for the two to give things a shot. That said, things were going pretty well with Annie (Heather Graham) before the last couple of episodes, so maybe he's all settled down with her. Assuming, of course, she survived and that BOB hasn't murdered her in the intervening years.

Twin Peaks is full of strange subplots and odd ideas that were probably never intended for the sort of deep analysis they've received over the last 25 years. Aside from all the big plot stuff, here are a few more of the things we'd like answers to:

How's Annie? Will Donna Hayward be played by Lara Flynn Boyle or Moira Kelly? Did Lucy and Andy ever sort their tangled love-life out, or is Dick Tremayne still being a nuisance? Was Josie ever released from the door knob? Is Chester Desmond still in the Lodge? Is Invitation To Love still on the air? Who, exactly, put the fish in the percolator? Did Little Nicky grow up to be the Antichrist? What has the Pine Weasel been up to for the last two-and-a-half decades?

Star Wars: Battlefront has arrived. At this year's Star Wars Celebration convention, we got the chance to see Battlefront in action and speak with the developers about what to expect from this new game. There's a lot to comb through, but at the top of the pile is the release date, which is currently set for November 17 in North America and November 20 in the UK. It's coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC through Origin.

Not long after that, the first DLC pack will be released, but we'll get to that in just a moment. Did you know that you can play in either first or third-person? We've got those details and so much more straight from the show floor, so read on and prepare yourself for the intergalactic battle of a lifetime.

If your favorite skirmish from the Star Wars franchise is the Gungan battle on Naboo, well, I've got some bad news for you. Star Wars: Battlefront will focus primarily on the original trilogy, with warzones across four planets: Endor, Hoth, Tatooine, and Sullust. Those first three should come as no surprise to Star Wars fans, as we've seen 'em all before. But that last one, Sullust, is largely unknown outside of the now-defunct expanded universe.

According to Wookieepedia, "All of Sullust was composed of multicolored rock, veined by lava channels; the planet went through atmospheric blackouts caused by gouts of smoke and ash." It's basically a hellish volcano planet, neat. The developers also revealed their first free DLC update for the game, which will be the Battle of Jakku. Naturally, this will take place on Jakku, and will help explain why the planet looks the way it does when you see in it Episode VII.

This DLC will be released to all SWB players on December 8, though if you pre-order the game you'll get the DLC a week early on December 1.

If you were hoping to hop in an X-Wing and fly from the jungles of Endor to the Death Star's core, well, maybe next time. Similar to the developer's own Battlefield franchise, Battlefront will feature three primary ways to wreak havoc on the other teams: troops, vehicles, and aircraft. In the demo we saw, X-Wings, TIE Fighters, Snowspeeders, AT-ATs, AT-STs, Speeder Bikes, and the Millennium Falcon were shown - all of which will be fully playable. They'll also be confined to the planet they're currently stationed on, so don't think you can just bail on a fight by flying into the stratosphere.

Star Wars games, especially the multiplayer ones, have all faced the same problem: everyone wants to be a Jedi (or Sith). Who has time for a lowly Stormtrooper when you could be a lightsaber-wielding, lightning-shooting badass? All the footage we saw featured Stormtrooper and Rebel Alliance soldiers fighting with various blasters and other ranged weapons - that is, until freaking Darth Vader popped in at the end a ripped a few Rebels a new one.

No, there's no Darth Vader character class or anything like that. By fulfilling certain conditions (that are still unknown), players will be able to spawn in as an iconic Star Wars character, such as Darth Vader or Boba Fett. Each of these legendary warriors will be packing their own special weapons and abilities (yes, Vader can force choke people). As for those certain conditions, DICE couldn't confirm if these transformations will be earned as Killstreak rewards or via some other means.

If you and a friend want a more relaxed Star Wars: Battlefront experience - meaning you're not dying over and over in multiplayer - then the co-op missions might be more your speed. These are specific challenges that recreate iconic moments from the original trilogy, such as the battle for Hoth. They're designed to be highly replayable with various customization settings, and can be tackled online with a buddy, or offline via split-screen (also with a buddy).

Partnerships are a sacred contract between you and another player, and once you've entered one you're entitled to certain benefits. For starters, you and your partner can always see each other on the minimap, and you can always spawn on that person so that you're never apart. Presumably, this only applies if both players are on the same team; otherwise, this could lead to some real unfortunate respawns.

Partners can also share unlocks with each other. While the developers weren't ready to talk about all the character progression options in the game, they did note that if one player had unlocked a special, high-powered weapon, they could share that weapon with their partner, even if they're at a much lower level. In this way, players can use partnerships to boost others up who are perhaps new to Battlefront.

Not much more to say about this one. Unlike developer DICE's Battlefield 4, which capped out at 64 players, Battlefront will feature games that hold up to 40 players total. If you're looking for something more manageable, the game will support multiplayer with as few as eight players (or those two-person missions mentioned earlier).

During our demo of the game, we noticed the person playing earned more points for scoring headshots, grenade kills, or other extravagant executions. And then there was the ominous 'Nemesis bonus'. DICE wouldn't comment on what the Nemesis bonus entailed, or if it's attached to a larger Nemesis system, but all those secrets will surely be revealed in the coming months leading up to Battlefront's release.

And for more on all things Star Wars, check out our .

And when it comes to the bare bones of open-world RPGs, ‘what if’ is their ammunition; the sheer scope for exploration, both of geography and interactive possibility, adds rocket fuel to our weirdest and most wonderfully nerdy desires. But the land of wizards and swords doesn’t own that, , when played like a RPG, is the master of ‘what if’ seduction. What if we were rewarded for our murderous delinquency? What if our sprees of carnage lead to random new adventures and unexpected NPC encounters? What if we could skydive off that mountain after eating a Peyote and transforming into a chicken?

GTA 5 hooks us, and coerces us to push the boundaries of human limitation in a virtual and recognisable world, and far beyond any other entry in the series, it gives us a vast bank of tools (some big, some subtle) with which to interact and manipulate the flow of the world around us. But what if GTA 5’s dynamic, open world complexity was attainable in a gritty and beautiful fantasy setting. Then we’d truly have a world without limits. Dragon flying lessons, fully emergent battles with town guards, real-time, party-based class mechanics that let you storm castles and manage battles with total control. I lead you into the realm of GTA 5 mechanics in a fantasy RPG. Here are eight that’ll make you wish this game into existence.

It’s been done before, and we’ll worship Skyrim until the end of days for gifting such ambitious means of travel. But imagine taking dragon flying to the involved level of GTA 5’s piloting. IMAGINE stealing dragons of different shapes, sizes and abilities. Imagine training them (plural because you can never have too many) to further increase and specialise their skills. Imagine having dragon flying lessons. Imagine falling in love with your dragon.. What? I mean, um…

Without getting too carried away, adapting GTA 5’s various open-world transportation methods into a fantasy setting is excitingly plausible. Along with various mounts, we could have horse and carts instead of trucks, Black Flag-style ships instead of yachts, even giant Mûmakil to roam through treacherous wastelands. Akin to GTA 5, each unique mount and vehicle could have its own handling system, in addition to upgradable stats, and different uses for exploring different terrain. Stealing would be a fun, albeit dangerous ,endeavour, but getting being set on fire during the hijack would totally be worth traversing through the skies on a stolen, military grade dragon, with bright pink wings and tinted wings.

Fantastical advocates of justice who’d relish punishing our potato stealing, our RPG lawkeepers would easily be just as intimidating and furiously dedicated as GTA 5’s police and army punishment system. As each star increases with the severity of our crimes, the force, number and strength of our punishers would rise. At the bottom tier we’d have village and town guards replacing police, and following that, hired mercenaries pursuing us for murder on horseback. At three stars, we’d face off against experienced warriors with better weapons and scarier mounts, leading us into four star territory, where famed knights would hunt us to the edge of the earth.

Finally, for the slaughtering-a-village-and-its-entire-flock-of-chickens tier of crimes, we’d have the ruler’s army knocking on our back door, asking us to kindly repent for our sins with one thousand arrows to the knee. No longer would the RPG town be a safe, but rather static haven. With GTA-style justice enabled, our indiscretions in civilised areas would spill out into the wilderness, covering miles of open ground and leading to all kinds of dynamic adventures and discoveries along the way. Blend Skyrim’s density of hidden areas with that classic ‘Hang on, where am I now?’ moment at the end of a big GTA chase, and you have scarily great possibilities.

Initially, I was dubious of GTA 5’s three character set-up. Could the interwoven stories fit together without undermining our connection with the playable characters? In actuality, Rockstar ensures the opposite. The entwined stories here are effortless, with real-time actions and consequences we invest in, due to our deep integration with the multiple storylines, the likability of each character, and the unique relationships we are encouraged to explore. Not to mention the building narrative tensions we get to perceive, unbeknownst to the protagonists, thanks to our uniquely omnipotent perspective. It’s an amazingly rich storytelling device.

I also love the way Trevor, Michael, and Franklin are utterly their own, from their taste in shoes to their individual mid and early-life crises. With fantasy, we can take this multiple character system further, using all kinds of old and new races to explore, in as much depth of GTA 5, the different cultures, behaviours, and moral compasses of each unique, playable character. Imagine the friendships we could forge; elf, man, dwarf. Well, it’s difficult to compete with the likes of Legolas and Gimli’s bromance, but damnit, if any game can pull that off, it’s a GTA-style RPG.

GTA 5’s three character infiltration missions are what I live for; the thrill of meticulously preparing and orchestrating heists from various angles and strategies gives me all kinds of scary-good palpitations. So, what would happen if we put these types of missions into a fantasy RPG? Magical things, that’s what. You know how Lord of the Rings’ stand-out moments giddily amplify the action through their constant switching of different perspectives? Helm’s Deep, anyone? Now imagine that in a fantasy RPG, in which every key player is you.

Embracing each character’s individual strengths, we would utilise different skills during assassinations, robberies, getaways, and large battles, at different times, and often in different locations. Whether it’s scouting from afar with a bow, commanding armies with brute force on the frontline, or executing Assassin’s Creed style infiltrations on castles, dungeons and scalable fortresses, the gameplay and narrative scope would explode in unforgettable ways. And we mustn’t forget the dragon factor. Never forget the dragons. Because why bother using explosives when we have balls of fire?

Down-time in GTA 5 is ample, and with so many hobbies to choose from, in-game procrastination can get pretty addictive… even if you just stick to the bars, for excessive cocktail consumption, awkward drunken banter, and dangerous driving. If you’re the type of person who daydreams about frolicking at cute village festivals and partaking in the odd dragon flying lesson (yeah, I really am into that idea), then having such activities readily available in a fantasy world, whether Witcher dark or Final Fantasy pretty, would be the ultimate nerd-dream.

This fantasy open-world, replicating Los Santos’ jocular environment, would be our very own magical playground. Stunts and races involving mounts would supply hours of fun, in addition to agility tests like GTA’s triathlons, board games, archery competitions, and watching medieval plays instead of movies. The village inn would no longer be a sterile environment of looping conversations and unchanging clientele. You could even take Trevor the elf to village dances! Throw in enough mead, and the aforementioned law enforcement, and that’s going to make quite the weekend escapade.

I remember looking at my GTA 5 Achievements and spotting ‘You have spent over £30,000 on clothes'. £30,000 ON CLOTHES. Good god, I'm such a fashion whore. But having the right shoes for murder is imperative, right? Imagine if a fantasy world had as many shopping choices as GTA 5; from cloaks, to boots, to badass weapon belts. Imagine if the look of your character wasn’t simply defined by your current best armour set-up, but fuelled by just as many, if not more, options designed for pure aesthetic fun? Character attachment would skyrocket, and real-world shopping would never be the same again.

Though obviously we’re not going to be all spending our cash on new threads, since GTA 5 also incorporates property investment, from cinemas to golf clubs, in addition to purchasing expensive merchandise from in-universe online stores. Translate this into fantasy speak, and we’re talking about buying pubs, bakeries, apothecaries, and forges (no doubt taking discount supplies from their various storerooms), and then moving on to bigger, more financially rewarding stuff, such as mines and wilderness forts. Investing in stocks might be tricky without an in-universe internet (just imagine Gerald asking for the WiFi password), but players could visit banks for this purpose instead, and enjoy the many insane luxuries a fantasy world has to offer.

In GTA 5, phones play a crucial role in missions, as our most reliable source of communication and information in tricky, escalating situation. Impossible to realise that dynamic, organic vibe in a world in which rocks are the height of technology? No. I have a viable fantasy alternative to cell phones, and I’m not talking about cans and string. Magic is our best friend here, since really, there are no limits to possibility when it comes to doing the impossible.

Portable magic mirrors would allow us to talk and send messages to other characters in-game. Small portals and telepathy would do the job as well. We could use seer abilities during assassination and search quests, and occult abilities aside, important mail could be dispatched by eagles, for surprise story pay-offs later down the line. And we mustn’t forget an alternative to GTA 5’s phone camera, which is one of my most consistent sources of fun. Using a sketch book and some magically accelerated drawing abilities, you could capture those all those magical moments - from discovering magnificent waterfalls to pillaging the poor - and adorn the walls of your customisable castle crib with permanent records of your adventures.

One of the most absorbing aspects of GTA 5 is its environment; a world with a perfect balance of scale and detail. Every region is teeming with life and vibrancy, packing with fully fleshed areas that you won’t even see if you just stick to the main story., making the city, natural landscapes, and ocean feel impressively organic. Take that, along with the abolishment of loading screens, and it’s extremely easy to get lost in the stunning, thriving, damaged world of Los Santos.

It would almost be dangerous to experience a similar environment in a fantasy setting, owing to the genre’s flexibility when it comes to imagination. We could scale active volcanoes. We could search for rare beasts in all-enveloping forests. We could explore uncharted oceans brimming with aquatic nightmares. It would be an unkickable open-world drug addiction. We could also build upon what GTA 5’s world lacks, such as a Witcher 3-style weather system with the ability to change the landscape, animals we can tame, and a vastly more varied array of structures to interact with. Yay for tree climbing!

It's amazing what players can do when you give them a way to channel their creativity. Following in the footsteps of Valve's Source Filmmaker, Rockstar Games added the power to make in-game movies to the PC version of lets you record whatever kind of chaos or goofy mundanity you want in the city of Los Santos, then trick out the footage with all manner of camera angles, filters, and editing tricks. And already, the results are magical.

We've sifted past hours of pointless test clips and virtual animal abuse videos to find the very best works made in the Rockstar Editor, and we've shared their greatness with you. Pop some popcorn, crank up the home theater system you made for the express purpose of watching YouTube videos, and please enjoy these shockingly funny and entertaining short films. They could very well change the way you see Grand Theft Auto forever (particularly the mimes).

While not quite as polished as some of the later edits in this collection, this is the first piece of work that really convinced us of the creative potential in GTA 5's PC video editor. A million smart little things just add up to make it fantastic. The intimate, unspoken tension, built up through close shots at the start. Those brilliant transition edits, where the camera lingers in just the right way before a cut, or zooms and pans to make wonderful, often hilarious changes in subject. That choice of soundtrack. It's great. It's great and we love it.

Mimes are creepy in demeanour, upsetting to look at, and just flat abhorrent in every single meaningful way. You know that. Trevor Phillips certainly knows that. Strike first. That's how you stay safe around mimes. But what if you try to take the passive approach? What if you just ignore them and hope that they'll go away?

Well then you are a goddamn fool. Duggy Duggy knows the score.

There are a lot of action edits around for GTA 5 on PC. There are a lot of comedy slapstick edits too. But JUMP, by the poetically named bitches, is by far the classiest piece of pure mood editing we've ever seen. Go full screen, turn the sound up, and get it watched.

Speaking of slapstick, this. Short, desperately to the point, and with a hell of a punchline. This is damn smart, conceptual use of game, editor and environment. You don't need to be Michael Bay to impress in GTA 5. Hell, you just don't need to be Michael Bay. Ever.

‘Scuse the abrupt ending on this one. As the official title suggests, it was made as an initial test of the editor's capabilities. Fortunately, it was made as a test by someone who seriously knows cinematography. By focusing on depth of field effects and just the right amount of free-aimed shaky-cam, Womble turns a very simple action scene into something with raw power and serious kinetic impact.

There's probably a painful, yearning metaphor in here about the impotent, directionless striving of modern humanity's mindless, empty ambition and the mechanical, isolated nature of our daily lives. Probably.

So, so dark, but so, so well directed.

But yeah, really dark. And stabby.

This is a bit of a special one, in that creator Danz Newz has gone the whole hog and created a proper script and professional sounding voiceover to create a bona fide short film. It's so well put together that, unlike most of the rest of the pieces in this list, after a minute or so you'll entirely forget that you're watching something created in a game, and instead see it simply as a great animated short.

A generic title belying two minutes of killer content. On the Michael Bay end of things - but, you know, Michael Bay if he was good - rechyyy's piece is a masterclass in smart camerawork and effective pacing. Watch it. Watch it now.

Made by PC Gamer's Andy Kelly this very afternoon, PUMP is a masterpiece, a twisting piece of existential reflection wrapping in and around itself to present a stark and primal view of the modern human experience. The question of whether games can be art has finally been left behind, choking in the primordial ooze as work like this launches us all into a gleaming, truly evolved future.

We'll keep updating this collection as we discover - and players make - even more amazing GTA 5 videos. Have these inspired you to join the moment-capturing fun? Do you know of any other unforgettable Rockstar Editor flicks? Let us know in the comments below!

And if you're looking for more GTA hilarity, check out .

You probably think online worlds shut down because no one's playing. Actually that's rarely true. Often, when servers finally wink out, there's a thriving community patiently waiting for the end and making sad faces at the sky. Most recently it was PlayStation Home, a game that no-one apparently played but which still managed to have millions of inhabitants waiting out their own personal apocalypse on the last day.

In some cases (like Home) it's sad in a heartbreaking way - just a bunch of friends, waiting for the thing that brought them together to disappear into the void. In other cases, spectacular fictional armageddons are arranged as a send off. And, sometimes, it's like the last guy out just switched off a bunch of computers. Let's take a look at how some digital worlds saw the end of days, and who was there to witness it.

Coming in a close second for saddest end ever after Home is Galaxies, with its almost torturous use of the 'sad Star Wars music' as that lady and her droid watched fireworks heralding the end. One thing this game managed that few MMOs ever achieve was the ability to declare a 'winner' with each server stating a final breakdown of numbers for Rebel and Empire players. (Back in the day, PC Gamer finished on a final count of Imperials 28%, Rebels 72%, likely a fair representation of the scores overall. GO REBELS!)

So the good guys won, even if the game lost. The final hours saw the MMO throw out all sorts of entertainment for players, with massive fights all over the place, including one on the forest moon of Endor to recreate the final battle from Return of the Jedi. There were also an assortment of oddball enemies to fight that, at one point, included a giant Ewok called the Megawok. The Force ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi even popped up to see everybody off.

A bizarre browser-based social MMO... thing, Glitch is probably best known for briefly having Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi on its design team. Even the people who liked it admitted it was weird, but despite its oddball charms and cult status not enough played it to keep it alive. Glitch did at least look after its fans as it gasped its last, refunding purchases, giving players all the in-game currency they could spend, and reactivating popular rare items for them to play with one last time.

It also worked the closure into the world, with the 'Forehorsemen' appearing in game, crying "The end is neigh!". Player greetings changed from 'hi' to 'bye' on the last day and god-like giants also appeared to talk to the players. Everything finally ended to the tune of 'Goodnight, Groddle', a popular in-game lullaby written by one of the players.

No, not the Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn that everyone currently loves. The first version launched on PC and had so many troubles that Square-Enix launched an in-game cataclysm to wipe the world clean for a new start. It also replaced most of the key developers. There's reason for that 'Reborn' bit.

The short version of the reason behind this is that the game sucked. There was almost consistent negative feedback from beta through to launch, so Square-Enix salted the earth and started over. That involved something called the Seventh Umbral Era, a fictional apocalypse using the game's lore to end everything without breaking character. Bahamut got loose, everyone had a big fight, and it all ended with players looking at a giant angry red ball in the sky. That ball, actually a moon, eventually crashed into the planet and triggered a trailer for the new game. On message to the end.

Despite great reviews and plenty of players, Warhammer Online somehow never quite managed to make enough money. Although what finally did for it was that famous slayer of worlds: expired licensing agreements. The game was based on Games Workshop's Warhammer table top RPG, and when the deal ended, so did the world.

The game ultimately met an orderly closure, with the inhabitants following the 'lets get everyone in one place' style of send off. In the final few months, the developer stopped charging to play, and introduced some new NPCs to engineer one last big clash between the forces of Order and Chaos.

Despite relatively good reviews, it was a "lower than expected in-game population" that ultimately did for this one, two years after launch. There was also the bizarre situation where Ultima creator and co-designer Richard Garriott was booted from the project while in quarantine after returning from space. Not a joke, that happened. He took the publisher to court claiming his 'resignation' was faked, and the game fell apart not long after.

Tabula Rasa at least had a pretty good end-game set up though, playing on its original 'last stand against an alien invasion' plot. To finish, they just let the aliens win. In the build up to the final server shutdown, the developers increased the alien activity so that players were slowly forced back, losing planets and locations to the encroaching invasion. The last few hours saw everyone mounting a final stand on Earth before a 10 second count down ended the world.

Another NCSoft apocalypse, with the publisher shutting studio Paragon and canning its MMO. Players tried to save the game: they protested, they rallied, and, weirdly, at one point bought the developers dinner to say thank you. Most prominently they gathered everyone in one place - an in-game location called Atlus Park - to show support for the closing studio and game.

It wasn't enough, and Heroes still died, with 'standing around a bit' becoming a theme. There were no fireworks or spectacular events at the end (rumour has it many of the devs worked for free to keep it running). Just servers clogged with lurid heroes waiting it out at city hall. The sad irony in some cases, however, was that the huge turnout of players meant several servers collapsed and some missed the final moments as they frantically tried to log in.

Famously referred to as 'PlayStation's most successful failure', Home had the confusing status of being the game everyone believed no-one played, which also having millions of subscribers. At its peak there were 19 million active accounts (although the term 'active' was likely pushed to its limits), and yet if you ask most people around they'd be surprised it was still a thing.

That said, for most of its seven year life it was a busy place for those who cared, and the game made a lot of money for people selling pretend clothes and fake furniture. There are a few studios out there that more or less made a living from Home and nothing else. But despite all that cash floating around, it was still down to Sony to develop and maintain it, and clearly bringing it over to PS4 wasn't a popular option. Home was finally gone on March 31st. You might not have played it, or cared, but watching that last stuttering frame as people danced and said goodbye to soon-to-be obliterated virtual friends, it was hard not to feel a little sad.

It would cost you a fortune to buy every Star Wars game ever made. Not that you'd necessarily want to, either; for all the greats like Knights of the Old Republic and Rogue Squadron, you've also got time-forgotten stinkers like Super Bombad Racing and Masters of Teras Kasi. But what if you could add a dash of Star Wars goodness to the PC games you know and love - even the ones that have nothing to do science fiction? That's where these mods come in: free downloadables made by Star Wars aficionados for the benefit of their fellow Empire/Rebel-loving fans.

Provided you've found the right mod, you can transform a game you already own into something reminiscent of George Lucas' seminal sci-fi universe. Something as simple as a carefully modeled vehicle or the glow of a lightsaber can bring on a rush of Star Wars nostalgia. Other ambitious mods offer complete conversions that can live up to the quality of bona fide Lucasarts games <(a href="http://www.gamesradar.com/star-wars-doa-what-we-wanted-lucasartss-20-cancelled-games/" target="new">rest in peace, by the way). If you consider yourself a Star Wars fan, these are the mods you're looking for.

The denizens of Liberty City are constantly worried about being the victim of yet another carjacking, but until now, they never had to deal with a maniac zooming around on a laser-blasting speeder bike. Grand Theft Auto 4 mods offer myriad options for custom character models and cars, and it just so happens that two of the greatest user-made vehicles are Star Wars-related. First off is that iconic Return of the Jedi is any indication.

When you're ready to move up a weight class or fifty, you can spawn a to-scale version of the , which makes all those other rides look like little baby toys. You're sure to gain a newfound respect for Han Solo's piloting skills when you try to fly this thing between skyscrapers, given that you'll probably be crashing this behemoth of a spaceship into buildings nonstop. But thanks to the limitations of the mod, you won't get a scratch on the Falcon no matter how poorly you drive it. Not a scratch.

Shoutouts are in order: commenter LordZarlon turned us on to this massive mod, which puts the 'Empire' in Sins of Solar Empire. This galactic RTS is already epic in scope, but when you toss in a couple thousand TIE Fighters and the Star Destroyers to back them up, the amount of space battle fantasy fulfillment goes off the charts. The mod adds a staggering amount of content, from new ship types and planets to subtle touches like character portraits and additional music tracks.

While the Star Wars films do a great job of making you feel like you're right there alongside the pilots during those Death Star-orbiting dogfights, you rarely get a chance to take in the battle as a whole. But this mod lets you zoom out to appreciate the Imperial and Rebel Alliance armadas in all their glory, or get up close and personal with the fleets as they exchange endless barrages of laser-cannon fire. It really puts into perspective just how massive the Star Wars conflicts (and the ships themselves) really are.

Here's another excellent reader suggestion, courtesy of Jesse1066: a complete overhaul of Unreal Tournament 2004 that puts you in the boots of a Rebel or Imperial footsoldier. If you didn't already know from playing Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast or Rebel Commando, taking the first-person perspective behind a laser rifle feels incredible. And just because you can't use the Force doesn't mean you don't have a part to play in the battle for the galaxy.

With the mod, you'll be armed with tons of meticulously modeled blasters that you can put to the test in a variety of Star Wars-themed maps. But the best part might just be all the additional radio chatter, which includes fresh, made-for-the-mod voice-overs mixed with death screams straight out of the movies. Those pained grunts and crackly screams almost make you feel bad for shooting so many faceless Stormtroopers. Almost. Oh, and Troopers even has ship-flying segments - including the legendary Death Star trench run - for those times when you want to take a break from the FPS action.

What's this? A Star Wars game made better with a Star Wars mod?! If you weren't aware, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 was originally going to have a lot more content, a huge chunk of which ended up getting cut when Obsidian Entertainment had to get the game done by deadline. This helps explains why so many players felt a little underwhelmed by the story's conclusion - but this mod helps bring the bulk of that lost content back to light.

The consensus is that allows you to experience the game as it was originally meant to be played, with additional cutscenes, loads of headache-averting bug fixes, and more plot resolution via extra scenes in the ending. If you played KOTOR 2 before and weren't thrilled with how it compared to BioWare's original, you owe it yourself to give this mod a try.

Open-field battles weren't much of a thing in the Star Wars universe until Attack of the Clones. But after seeing an army of proto-Stormtroopers clashing with a massive host of droid Separatists on the big screen, who wouldn't want to see those types of battles play out in a game? Well, give that idea to a modder, and you know it's going to get made.

The mod is among the best Star Wars Mount and Blade mods out there (yes, there's more than one). It not only gives you lightsabers, Jedi powers, and open battlefields - you also get to choose from multiple grunt classes, including Mandalorians, Stormtroopers, and droid units. Each class has several weapon options, including a vibroblade / blaster combo and a variety of explosives at your disposal. Nothing beats running across a field brandishing a lightsaber and watching blaster bolts whiz past your body, which you can experience for yourself in Bear Force 2.

If there's any game to mod, it's Skyrim. You can find a for almost any fantasy you could think of, and Star Wars is no exception. From Imperial armor sets to lightsabers to fully functional blasters, modders have added tons of awesome stuff from Star Wars.

One of my absolute favorites is subtle, but no less amazing. The is a must-have addition to Skyrim, especially if you've loaded up a ton of Star Wars mods. This places the Death Star into the beautiful skybox, leaving it to float there while you put on your downloaded Jedi robes and slice up enemies with a modded lightsaber. It looks just like a moon, until you realize that... oh no. It's a space station.

If you had Call of Duty 4 on PC and didn't download the , you missed out. Unfortunately, the mod is basically dead outside of a clan of diehards. But this Call of Duty reskin definitely captures the spirit of the most uncivilized aspect of the Star Wars universe: blasting Stormtroopers and Rebel soldiers with an arsenal of space-age weaponry.

The mod plays like the source title, requiring your twitch reflexes to be at peak performance. Galactic Warfare has just about everything a Star Wars fan could want: You get to hold the iconic series' weapons in your hands, fight in locales like Mos Espa and Bespin, and even use Star Wars-inspired killstreaks and gadgets. For real. TIE Bombers strafe the map when you call in an airstrike.

Before you start getting all riled up saying that zombies have no business mixing with the sci-fi universe of Star Wars, the series actually has . I love Star Wars, and I also love zombies. Lucky for me, several genius modders decided to mix the two with Left 4 Dead 2: Star Wars Edition mods.

Tired of fighting the same old Infected? You can swap them out for bum-rushing undead stormtroopers. There's an option to turn the Tank zombie into a yoked, mutated Darth Vader (who plays the Imperial March theme upon spawning). You can even play as Imperial survivors, changing out the classic characters with a Scout Trooper, Dark Trooper, TIE Pilot, and non-infected version of Luke's dad. Heck, you can even change the weapon sounds to blaster sound effects, and carry the Sith Lord's lightsaber.

Okay, yes. Faster Than Light's gameplay is probably line with the Star Trek brand of starship action, but it's still freaking awesome to use the classic Star Wars ships to explore the galaxy. With the , you can choose various capital ships from the beloved movies (and the crappy prequels) to destroy space pirates and escape the nigh-unstoppable enemy fleet.

You finally have the chance to command the crew of the Millenium Falcon, various Star Destroyers, and even Boba Fett's Slave 1. There are also nice touches to some of the ship systems, like FTL's drones. Instead of the drones being some arbitrary droid, the original art is replaced by starfighters for the respective capital ship. For example, if you choose a Mon Calamari ship, the drones will be squadrons of X-Wings, Y-Wings, or B-Wings, and Star Destroyers will launch various TIE Fighters.

Ah, yes. Once again, brutal melee combat is made better with the inclusion of lightsabers. Chivalry already has all of the intricate combat systems needed for a lightsaber duel. There's blocking, dodging and dismemberment. You can cross blades with several different types of longswords and two-handed claymores. All that needs to be done is swap the Medieval weapons out for laser swords, and it's a Star Wars fan's dream come true. As if in response to my nightly prayers, some modders did just that.

, and you're all set for some epic lightsaber battles.

The Star Wars Battlefront games have been some of the most memorable Star Wars games, and many a fan has been waiting for the series' next release. If you really can't wait for DICE's new-gen sequel coming in 2015, you might want to check out this Battlefield 2142 mod, .

Everything you would expect from a Battlefront title is here. There are multiple expansive maps, ranging from the deserts of Tatooine to the forests of Endor. You can hop into the classic vehicles like speeder bikes, AT-ST walkers, and T-16 Skyhoppers at any time during land battles. Plus, you can engage in full-scale space battles that allow you to pilot TIE Fighters, X-Wings, and other spacecraft. But the best thing about this mod? People are still playing it. Even now, the team is working on bringing it to the Unreal 4 engine. It seems this is going to get support for a very long time.

Oh, and then there's .

Those are just a few examples of some of the amazing mods out there. There's no way I could fit them all in here, so let me know what your favorite Star Wars mods for non-Star Wars games are in the comments below.

For more on mod-related stuff and Star Wars games, check out our article on .

Learning from failure is an important part of life and, consequently, video games. Getting killed by a tricky boss teaches you how to recognize patterns and to respond with correct timing. Losing all of your troops gives you a valuable lesson on prudence and strategy. With a lot of time, effort, and perhaps a little help from your friends (or a strategy guide), you can finally overcome a game's most arduous challenges and earn yourself the bleakest, most depressing ending ever. Wait, what?

Most of the time, failure is the result of an inability to complete certain objectives, not having enough supplies, or poor decision-making skills. But if you want to fail in these seven games, you really need to work for it, fighting absurdly difficult bosses or making wildly counter-intuitive choices, all so you can watch the world burn. Caution: I'm gonna be spoiling like mad up in here. You've been warned.

If you've played Spec Ops: The Line, you know exactly how meta its ending already is. Commander Konrad, the man you were sent to rescue, has been dead for weeks, and your brain has been messing with your perception of reality to rationalize the atrocities you've committed to complete your mission. By confronting and 'killing' the projection of Konrad, you give yourself a chance to atone for your actions. Or... you can take the hard way out.

After the credits, you're confronted by squad of US soldiers. You can drop your weapon and go with them, thus giving yourself a chance at redemption, or you can open fire on them and attempt to take them all out. I say 'attempt', because this is actually much harder than it sounds, considering you're one shell-shocked mess of a human going up against an entire platoon. If you're able to kill everyone, you grab the walkie-talkie off the nearest dead body, and utter to your superiors the same words 'Konrad' said to you when you first arrived: "Gentlemen, welcome to Dubai." So much for atonement.

Like Drakengard before it, spin-off Nier's endings start off bittersweet and get progressively more bleak as you unlock them. In order to earn the final (and most depressing) ending of the bunch, you'll have to go through several rounds of New Game+, then commit the most eternal of video game acts: deleting your save file.

Once you beat the game the first time, you can use your save file to continue playing, starting over from the midpoint of Nier's story. Completing it a second time will unlock a different ending, providing a little more context to the story, but still not really resolving anything. Completing the game a third time will finally give you a chance to choose one of two final endings: do you kill one of your friends and then live the rest of your days waiting to die from a plague known as the Black Scrawl, or do you sacrifice your entire being to save her? If you pick the second option, all memory of your existence is erased from everyone you've ever interacted with - and all of your save files disappear along with it. It's actually kind of poetic. Still doesn't make playing through a game three times any less of a time sink.

Harvest Moon certainly isn't an easy game by any means. There are so many different tasks to juggle as you tend to your farm, like milking cows, rotating crops, and wooing one of the locals. But even if you flail about with no plan or routine in mind, you're still bound to get something done. But in order to get Harvest Moon's bad ending, you're not allowed to do anything for an entire in-game year.

In order to get Harvest Moon's bad ending, you have to make sure that your farm is barren by the end of the year. This means no planting or selling crops or buying any animals. Heck, it's probably best if you just don't talk to any one at all, lest someone actually form an opinion about you. After twiddling your thumbs and resisting the urge to do something, anything, other than waking up and going to bed for an entire year, you get , leaving your whimpering dog behind on the front steps as you run as far away from this hick town as fast as your legs can carry you.

Bioware made a big deal out of how Commander Shepard could die during the final suicide mission in Mass Effect 2. What they didn't mention was how difficult it was to actually make that happen. How hard is it? Let's just say that Emmet from The Lego Movie could have stumbled his way to victory with more grace.

If you want Shepard to bite the bullet (along with else in your squad), you have to completely forgo completing any of your companions' loyalty missions. This not only puts your squad at a disadvantage (because they won't be able to access their best upgrades without completing them), but it also means abandoning some of the best content Mass Effect 2 has to offer. Then, simply ignore your squad's suggestions during the final mission and assign the worst possible soldiers to complete the required tasks (Jacob for hacking, Miranda to handle the biotic shield, etc.) Pull off all of that, bring two disloyal team members with you for the final battle, and voila, . Congratulations?

Like Mass Effect 2's ending, you have to be very deliberate with your choices if you want to see the Origami Killer get away scot-free. It also helps to know who the Origami Killer is, a fact that you probably won't realize until you've seen the plot hole-laden twist near the end of the game. But once you know who the Killer is (spoilers: it's the private detective Scott Shelby), you can then put all the pieces in place and help him get away with murder.

Essentially, you need to make sure that all of the people Scott meets during his investigation (parents of previous victims and potential witnesses) end up dying. That guy in the convenience store? If you rescue him during the stick-up, you're actually hurting yourself, so just don't do anything and the situation will… resolve itself. Also, playable characters Madison and Jayden have to die, but in very specific points in the story. You know what? Just read this , because there's no way you'd be able to get this without obsessing over a corkboard covered in pictures and bits of string.

Because of its arcade roots, House of the Dead was designed to suck as many quarters out of your pocket as possible. It's a difficult game, and enemies are relentlessly gnashing and clawing away at you in an attempt to take a bite of your tasty brainmeats. But if you want to see the game's bad ending, you need to be flawless in your execution; good enough to beat the game without using a continue, but not so good that you score over 62,000 points.

House of the Dead's good ending is surprisingly easy to get in comparison. All you really have to do is play the game with a modicum of skill, and you'll easily score over 62,000 points by the end of it. But if you want to see lead hero Thomas' fiancée turned into a zombie, you're have to be much more judicious, only offing the demons that will either progress the scene forward or are about to kill you. And you can't just refrain from killing anything; the number of continues used has to end in a zero, so you're better off not dying at all in order to guarantee that you see the bad ending.

The Disgaea series is known for ridiculous difficulty spikes and for turning level grinding into an artform, and hey, if that's your jam, these turn-based RPGs will eat up hundreds of hours of your time. But even the most ardent Disgaea die-hard has to admit that trying to earn the bad ending in Disgaea 2 is borderline Kafkaesque.

You need to accomplish two things before going into the final boss: you need to have over 99 ally kills (and one of them has to be main heroine Rozalin), and you need to have earned over 99 felonies (which are granted by fulfilling certain requirements in the Item World). Oh, and you need to make sure you're powerful enough to beat the level 2000 boss (which replaces the level 90 boss you'd normally fight to watch the good ending). After dozens upon dozens of hours of grinding just to stand a fighting chance, you're finally rewarded with an in which the hero kills and (quite possibly) eats his friends. Yaaaay...

Congratulations! You made it to the good ending of this article simply by clicking those little arrows. There is a bad ending, but it requires finding a hidden pixel somewhere on this website, then muttering the secret passphrase under your breath three times while spinning around on one foot (which you'd only know if you bought the GamesRadar+ Official Strategy Guide, of course). If you've got an obscure downer ending you'd like to share, let me know in the comments!

Looking for more? Be sure to check out these .

Using environmental storytelling in a game is a bit like raising a pet tiger. It takes a lot of work to pull off, but if you manage, the result is beautiful and will capture the imagination of anyone who lays eyes on it. But if something goes wrong, that project will destroy everything you love and probably rip out your throat. Well, maybe not that last part, but that still gives you a pretty good idea what havoc bad environmental storytelling can cause. Doing it well can improve a game immensely, but doing it poorly can undermine everything you tried to build. Not deadly, but not pleasant.

The reason environmental storytelling can have such a big impact is that it's meant to build up the world by embedding visual stories into the setting. When it's done right, the environment feels as alive and complex as our own world, which pushes us to explore it more. But done badly, it makes the setting feel flat and fake, ruining our immersion and loudly saying this isn't real, nothing to marvel at here. To show what I mean, I've gathered some of the best and worst examples of environmental storytelling in all of gaming, where relying on the environment helps or hurts the game world as a whole. Let's see how nasty a metaphorical tiger bite can be.

The idea of high-society types lugging around giant tape-recorders might seem odd (sorry, eccentric), but BioShock's audio diaries serve such a useful function that you can forgive them for looking clunky. Specifically, they give you small peeks into the world of Rapture to help you unravel the mystery of why everyone's either dead or trying to murder you while their flesh melts off.

The diary-and-note mechanic (building the world up through first-hand accounts from people who live there) can be difficult to manage without giving too much away, since many games get too obvious and use them as big red X's to mark the plot twist. Thankfully, BioShock sidesteps that problem by using most logs to flesh out the world of Rapture, from a parent whose daughter has been turned into a Little Sister or a police chief who watches Andrew Ryan's transformation into a vicious tyrant. There are clues about the plot buried in there too, but since those decorative diaries seem just as important as their story-focused cousins, you won't realize what you've heard until you're curled up in a ball wondering how you could have missed it.

The hidden diaries in Murdered: Soul Suspect give collectaholics something to do, and do a good job of not blowing the plot, but in the end they swing too far the other way and end up being irrelevant. Most hone in on the lives of various characters, like Ronan's wife Julia and his nemesis Baxter, which sounds like it should enhance the game's noir vibe. But it quickly becomes obvious that those characters have little connection to the world around you and don't affect the plot much, so any examination of their lives is largely a waste of time.

Granted, some of Murder's notes do contain fun tidbits, like the fact that Ronan named his gun after his mother for reasons he should probably work out with a professional. But the moment you put that note down it disappears from your mind, because it doesn't have any real impact. We're given no real reason to care about these characters, since they barely affect the plot and aren't particularly interesting, so their observations about the world don't end up meaning much. As a result, the level of attention they get from these notes feels wasted. The magazine in the basement of the apartment building looks like a better read, and you can't even pick it up.

If you don't think a child's Crayola masterpiece could leave you misty-eyed, find one the next time you're playing The Last of Us. This game gives you plenty of space to poke around the remnants of the old world, and it's not just generic piles of trash or overgrown cars either. These are detailed environments that demand your attention and a little somber thought.

Maybe it's a busted-up library, or an office full of simple trinkets, or a kid's room with posters, books, and toys still in place. The fact that each location is unique and familiar in a way that's inconsistent with the hellhole Joel and Ellie are swimming through highlights how important this stuff is, since it's all that remains of the lives that unfolded here. That in and of itself is a story, of the things we take for granted and the people who left it all behind. You can't help but wonder what happened to them, and that's how the world grows inside your mind.

You know how in driving scenes in old movie (or bad modern ones), you can tell that the world out the back window is just a picture on a green screen and there isn't really anything there? The world of The Order: 1886 feels like that, where decorations meant to flesh out fantasy-London are flimsy and paper thin, and if you're not careful you might punch through them and ruin the whole shot.

As opposed to The Last of Us, where every picture on an old desk has meaning, set-pieces in The Order are all fluff and no substance. Sure, that poster of a man on an oversized bicycle is cool, but all it does is shout "SO VICTORIAN" without actually telling you about the bizarre, werewolf-y place you're supposed to be in. Even actionable items have this problem, because when the game encourages you to inspect a random smoking pipe with no clue why you're doing it, you're going to be a lot more confused than enlightened. Is it special somehow? Who does it belong to? Is there a clue inside about where the werewolves are? What's the answer??

Jet Set Radio may be grinding toward its fifteenth birthday (which is like 107 in video game years), but it still has plenty to teach contemporary games about the art of tagging. Jet Set uses graffiti not just as a gameplay mechanic, but to tell you something about the world of Tokyo-to and the West Side Story back-up dancers - I mean gang members - who occupy it.

Each gang you encounter has their own unique style, and while that's apparent in their elaborate fashion choices (it takes confidence to wear a mummy costume out in public everyday), each group's graffiti helps strengthen their sense of identity and gives the world more flavor. You can also add your own art to the game's original version, letting you inform the style of the game in a way that's specific to you. And yeah, you spend a lot of time painting over as much of your rival gang's street art as possible, but that doesn't take away from the impression you get from their style and where their work pops up. A mummified cube painted at the pinnacle of a skyscraper? What an artistic/completely badass soul.

Oh my God, we get it already. Almost any game where society has collapsed due to some sort of apocalyptic happening has so much graffiti scattered around the world that it ultimately stops being meaningful. Sure, it's cool the first time you see a compelling message like "No One Leaves" or "You'll Die Before We Starve", but after finding it written three or four times in the exact same configuration, it starts to lose its oomph.

While making the most of resources is fine (it's unlikely any player is going to see every place where "Rats are eating our babies" is scrawled across the wall), many games get too comfortable with the idea, so if you're paying attention to the environment at all you're going to be sick of it halfway through. Now suddenly an attempt to make the world feel more organic and alive has backfired, and we see that texture asset for exactly what it is.

Silent Hill is creepy 100% of the time, but sometimes it's a bit less subtle about it than others. While the foggy, largely-deserted landscape of the 'normal' Silent Hill is unnerving, the 'nightmare' Silent Hill is a hellscape of blood-splattered torture machines and that removes any uncertainty about whether or not you're in a safe place (you're welcome). Plus, the whole town likes to shift from one to the other at random, taking you out of an already uncomfortable situation and spinning you around so you're lost and confused and terrified. It's like the world's worst game of pin the tail on the donkey, except the donkey's a mutilated corpse.

This spontaneous world-shifting is used , establishing the town's sinister nature without giving away what's causing it or what murderous healthcare professional is going to fall on your head next. Even without being explicit, the changing environments communicate that something is very amiss, ensuring that you're appropriately scared without having to rely on anything cheap.

As ambitious as Final Fantasy VIII tries to be with its story and its many, many, many different plotlines, some of those choices don't exactly pan out. One of the most obvious is the concept of Time Compression, which is confusing from the get-go and not explained very well. Instead, the game tries to convey what Time Compression is while it's happening, through a series of rapid environmental shifts as our heroes catapult toward the future. And it does not work at all.

While the changes in setting might have been all right if there was context to show you where you'd landed, the game moves so fast that it never really gets around to it. All you see are psychedelic and/or featureless landscapes that give you no idea where you are, so you completely miss out on everything that's happening in your confusion. Apparently there's a lot going on too, because at that moment you're hurtling along the timestream and fighting every sorceress that ever lived, so that when Ultimecia dies she has no other body to jump into. Did you get that? Yeah, me neither.

One of the keys to making a game world feel alive is to create the sense that you aren't the center of the universe. You may be a world-renowned hero or a dreaded assassin who gets a lot of lips flapping, but real people are going to talk about things that are in no way related to your latest exploits. Dishonored makes a point of inserting those conversations into every location you visit, and even if people share a word about the bloodthirsty killer who's roaming the street, they spend a lot more time talking about whiskey and cigars.

While Dishonored does have its fair share of repeated dialogue (I wonder if that one guy ever got his own squad), most of its NPC exchanges are unique, focusing on some aspect of Dunwall that gives the world character and meaning. You learn how the working class is treated by listening to maids complain about their bosses, and see how deep corruption runs by hearing guards bully a woman out of her rations. And yes, some of those conversations are mission-relevant, but you have to know what you're looking for to figure it out. Oh, a brand that marks anyone stamped with it for instant banishment? Do go on.

Hearing NPCs spout the same bit of dialogue over and over again isn't ideal, but it won't necessarily bring your disbelief crashing down in a hail of arrow-to-the-knee memes. That is, until you've heard every bit of NPC dialogue a hundred times over, the way you do in Assassin's Creed. That flattens the world faster than if it took a Leap of Faith off the tallest building in Jerusalem and completely missed the haystack.

While each entry in the series is guilty of this to a degree (with Unity doubling down, though that might've been a glitch), the platonic ideal of this problem is the very first AC. You'll often hear NPCs giving sermons and talking amongst themselves, which is meant to show there's a whole world outside of your existence and you're just a silent knife in the crowd. But those digital folks are limited to a few set remarks, so you'll probably hear most of what they have to say before you're done with the first mission. Eventually you can tell what someone's going to say after a single word, and it reminds you that as big and pretty as this city is, its inhabitants don't have much going on under the hood.

As video game stories grow in complexity and the worlds that contain them get more elaborate, we can probably expect these touchstones of environmental storytelling to survive into the near future. But every new release that passes through our consoles makes us that much better at detecting what works and what doesn't, and the evolution of these techniques will be interesting to watch. Which of these examples do you think worked the best? Which annoy the heck out of you? Did I miss your favorite aspect of environmental storytelling in my fixation on copy-paste graffiti, because it's seriously everywhere? Tell us in the comments below!

Don't want to put this collection of words down just yet? Read on with .

You remember the bits at the end of Police Squad where everyone would freeze frame except for one guy? That's exactly what the passenger in the back there must feel like in the HD port of Crazy Taxi. With all the conversion staff's names making the credits roll way longer, the old 'beckoning to the camera' shot stays on the screen way too long. A passenger hops in, then starts tapping Gina on the shoulder asking why they're not going anywhere. Eventually, she drives off. Into a wall.

Clearly, we were never supposed to see that bit. The original credits sequence was a finite length, so all the 'strings' were hidden behind the scenes. But it got me wondering: What else can we all see in games that we were never supposed to? This is my pick of the forbidden fruit...

Note: A previous version of this feature was posted in April, 2014 but has since been updated.

The developers of Skyrim made a secret room full of awesome. Sadly for console gamers, this room is only accessible in the PC version of the game. And that is a pity because it's got everything in it. All the weapons and enchanted versions of them. And all the armour too. In fact, one box in the room contains so many items, you need a massively high-spec PC just to open it. The list alone will crash lesser machines. That's some serious loot.

How to get it: You need to open up the 'console' prompt by pressing ~. Type in "coc qasmoke" (without the quote marks) and you're in! You're now stuck there forever unless you also use the console to teleport to a different location because there's no exit door. So type "coc rivertown", for example, and you'll arrive at Rivertown, over-encumbered with all your new loot. Yes I appreciate that was Oblivion's wording. I used to be an adventurer too, you know. Before I took... (*gunshot*)

Restricted-area demos of unfinished games are always goldmines for anyone seeking extra tidbits of information that hasn't officially been revealed. There was a trick in the original Saints Row demo that allowed you to use a car to get past the demo's boundary… and you know what? The Final Fantasy XV demo suffers from the exact same problem!

How to get it: Simply jump into the path of a car as it drives through the demo's perimeter barrier. Do it correctly, and you can get out of the intended area and into the (unfinished and incomplete) world beyond. And there, you'll be able to get up close to the dinosaurs you could previously only see in the distance, and even find a massive titan (pictured), among other things you weren't supposed to see just yet.

Apparently, there are several pies hidden throughout Dragon Age: Inquisition. Whether you're supposed to find them or not is debatable. The developers responsible have said they didn't expect anyone to find them quite so soon. Graham Kelly, environment artist at BioWare Edmonton, said on YouTube: "It is.... The Lord of the Pies. I may or may not have hidden some of his smaller flock around the rest of Skyhold."

How to get there: Sometimes the scenery doesn't load correctly in Skyhold, allowing you to step through a door and fall through the stonework, where you end up in a glitchy area underneath the castle. There, you can see the Lord of the Pies, biggest of all the hidden pies in the game. Yes, really. Look, it's wearing a top hat. It vanishes when you get too close. It's got its own music, too, which does suggest you're meant to find it… but there's no way to get there 'officially'. It isn't meant to be seen... although I think the team hoped it would be.

There are loads of extra areas dotted around Destiny. They're not supposed to be accessible, but if you know where to go and what to do, you can glitch through walls and into new areas. Many are simply empty, full of half-finished scenery. But some areas are actually functional. There are enemies, collectibles (dead ghosts you can actually revive) and even never-before-seen foes like this Ultra Captain.

How to get it: While it's a glitchy process, you can follow videos like if you want to get there for yourself, but keep in mind that tricking your way into non-official content runs the (small) risk of Bungie thinking you're a hacker and blocking your account. It's entirely likely this is actually content that was held back for release as part of a future DLC package, so you'll surely be able to play it 'properly' soon. Still, look at that Ultra Captain. Oooo.

This is brilliant. Gothic 2, like pretty much every RPG, gives the impression of a greater world beyond the boundaries of the game through its lore and conversational references. But then, should you manage to somehow get outside of the wall that surrounds the playable area, it's all revealed as being a sham by this single notice. By a 'mighty alien dwarf', which likely refers to a development team member of relatively minor physical stature.

How to get there: Follow the long river down from the old ruins and the stone dragon until it ends at a wall. This wall can be climbed (with practice and regular saving). Once you're over, there's not much to see or do, although there is a cave full of ostensibly dead NPCs. They're actually living NPCs who have travelled from the Valley of Mines to the Khorinis. During the transition, the game's programming 'kills' the first instance and sends it to the cave, before creating a new instance of the NPC that continues to live. You can loot the old versions' corpses. Waste not, want not.

A secret, looped version of the totally normal water level 2-2 is not very exciting. UNTIL you give it a name like 'World -1', which gives it such amazing mystique, it will go down in legend as one of the greatest secrets ever seen in a video game. Maybe that works for everything? Maybe I should call myself 'Minus Justin Towell'... There, my charisma and legendary stats have just skyrocketed. Incredible.

How to get it: Jump backwards through the wall (yes, it is possible) at the end of World 1-2 and enter the first pipe. Having circumvented the regular Warp Zone message, you are sent to the wrong level. Minus World, baby!

This strange area is full of what looks like a playschool's recreational apparatus. Coloured blocks with numbers on them, walls at various angles... it's all just part of the developers' creation process, allowing them to test out new moves for Sonic and set his jump height and acceleration instead of loading a whole level every time. Trouble is, they didn't take it out.

How to get it: There is a convoluted method of jumps too complex to list here, but the simplest way is to play the PS3/360 HD port and pick up a Chao Garden Key while playing as Eggman in his final stage. At the end of the level, you'll find yourself here. Simple!

Sonic isn't the only platform character to have a test level left in his game. Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine both have them too. This one is the second of two in the DS version of Mario 64, allowing you to test out your jumping, character hats and everything else. But all it does is make me realise how flaky DS' polygonal 3D is. Crikey, that's primitive. Hooray for 3DS, eh?

How to get it: On the PAL version, use an Action Replay to input this code, then hold Select while you load an existing save file:
94000130 fffb0000
02097360 00000000
d2000000 00000000

Pre-release versions and developer/journalist hearsay suggested there was another multiplayer level hidden away in Goldeneye on N64. It was then totally denied by Rare, but that didn't stop people trying to find it. Eventually, they did--and it only took six years! Well done, all concerned. But Oddjob is still banned. Shame the level is barely textured, hardly playable and essentially broken. See and hear it in 'action' .

How to get it: You'll need an Action Replay cartridge and the following code:
8005883E FFFF 8005883F FFFF 80058840 FFFF 800588A5 FFFF
800588A7 FFFF 800588AA FFFF 800588AC FFFF 800588AF FFFF
800588B1 FFFF 800588B4 FFFF 800588B6 FFFF 800588B9 FFFF
800588BB FFFF

Before you get all excited, this has long-since been patched out of GTA Online. But, for a time, gamers could revisit the snowy landscape of North Yankton in online multiplayer simply by tricking the game into keeping the area loaded from the prologue mission. It appeared in the sky in the south-east corner of the map, but was totally accessible with a helicopter.

How to get it: As I say, you can't get to it any more. Meh. But explains the sequence of trickery that was required, which is still well worth a look. If only to see (ahem) the world's biggest beaver.

A city filled with the wrong graphics, the wrong collision detection, glitchy (surprise) visual stability and floor that often isn't the floor, actually acting like water instead. Obviously it's completely broken and was never intended to be a place you could visit during normal play. But you can!

How to get it: The trick is to get out of the Safari zone while its step limiter is working. Get into the Safari zone, try to leave but then say you want to stay. Then save your game, reload it, exit the zone, tell the guy at the desk you don't want to play, then head to Cinnabar Island (or some others) and surf until your steps are up. Boom! Glitch City.

Maybe at this point, we should be more surprised to see 3D games that don't have a test room ostensibly hidden away yet easily activated with an Action Replay/Gameshark. But still, it's amazing to see familiar Kiddy Link running around colourful boxes like a kid who's gone on holiday but wants to spend the entire time climbing around in the play area. "Come on, Link, we're going to the beach! You love the beach! Oh fine, stay here then, ya little sod..."

How to get it: Fart on a donkey, whistle Saria's Song while staring into the center of a waning moon and then hold Z while the game loads. Nah, I'm just kidding. Get an Action Replay and input the code ZY1N-AGX5-MMCY0 94HP-XPKH-WQXF7 3Z3C-ZZVX-C21YN 1X90-8QQU-REZG3. Though that is just one test level. There are loads more .

OK, so it doesn't have any textures aside from the racers and it may be whiter than a polar bear who hasn't seen the sun all winter, but that is the Mario Circuit from Double Dash on Gamecube. It's just one of several unfinished tracks hidden away in Mario Kart DS' code. But you can actually drive on it, which is pretty awesome.

How to get it: You guessed it! Action Replay time. Use the code 023cdcd8 00000002 020484a0 d0002a00 020484a4 e0052321 and there it is.

I just *had* to end the article with this one, even though we've had an entry from Mario Kart already. There is no way anyone anywhere would see this by chance. Those numbers and letters up there are used as memory filler (all memory needs to hold data of some sort), but if you squint a bit, you can see that they act as ASCII art and show the Super Mario Bros sprite version of Mario.

How to get it: Um... you just have to look at the picture above. I'm not sure you needed this section on this slide, to be honest. But you're very welcome all the same.

Yeah, that weird white-eyed child is a deleted boss from Mother 3. The developers removed it probably because it shouldn't be viewed by anybody, ever. Having trouble sleeping? Looking at that thing will not help. Having trouble staying awake? Problem solved! Ye gads...

And if you're looking for more, check out .