The Legend of Zelda game franchise was created by Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, with the first game launching in 1986. Since then, the franchise as remained one of Nintendo's best known brands, and has sold more than 150 million copies across its multiple instalments over various consoles. Video game adaptations have had a mixed reception at the box office over the years. Many, such as Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat, were not always as well received as their source material. But more recently, the success of The Super Mario Bros Movie, Sonic The Hedgehog, A Minecraft Movie and Uncharted, along with the TV adaptation of The Last of Us, has gone some way to turning the tables.

In 2017, a game design thinktank called Project Horseshoe gathered a group of developers together to define the concept of cosiness in video games. Games, of course, have had non-violent elements since the medium was invented. Early life simulators such as 1985's Little Computer People, a low-stakes game in which the player interacts with a man living his unremarkable life in a house, could fit the bill; then there was the proliferation of social farming simulations after 1996's chibi-adorable Harvest Moon. But the resulting report, Coziness in Games: An Exploration of Safety, Softness, and Satisfied Needs, is probably the first organised effort to define a then-emerging genre. Cosy games (cozy in US spelling) don't have high-risk scenarios: "There is no impending loss of threat," they wrote.

What if you were a tiny, vegan vampire? That's the question posed by Moonlight Peaks, the gen Z-coded, achingly TikTok-ready supernatural life sim. Inspired by the popularity of "cosy games" such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, Moonlight Peaks drapes you in the cape of Dracula's daughter, who has fled her father's corpse-ridden home to start a new, peaceful life. Soon, she settles among werewolves and witches in the supernatural farming town of Moonlight Peaks, where she grows crops and rears animals instead of subsisting on the blood of innocents. Both cosy and creepy, the game has you creating your own plant-based blood substitutes, befriending the town's residents and fixing a whole host of problems left in daddy Dracula's wake.

Let's say, as a thought experiment, that you're a malware developer. You can choose to target specific groups of people to distribute your nefarious payloads. You might just go for a scattershot approach, but that's less effective. You might aim for the technologically unsophisticated, or older people who aren't as engaged. Or you can go for the lowest-hanging fruit: kids playing video games.

We love finding great deals on great laptops, and this 770 HP Victus deal at Best Buy definitely checks both boxes. That's a 400 discount for an entry-level gaming laptop that'll serve you well for some years. You could spend an absolute fortune on a top-of-the-line gaming laptop--even one that's on sale--but you don't really need to if you aren't an upper-rank competitive gamer or someone who chases hundreds of frames per second at Ultra settings. If all you want is reasonable gameplay with Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and the like, then you can get it at an excellent price with this 15.6-inch It ain't the brightest with 250 nits, but you'll be pushing decent graphics at decent frame rates with the RTX 4050 graphics card and Intel Core i7-12650H processor. It'll also be able to keep up with your daily workload with 16GB of RAM, though we do wish the 512GB SSD was more spacious.

Last week, the Guardian spoke to the team behind Lili, a video game retelling of Macbeth, shown at the Cannes film festival. The headline quote from the piece was "Shakespeare would be writing for games today", which I have heard many times, and does make a lot of sense. Shakespeare worked in the Elizabethan theatre, a period in which plays were considered popularist entertainment hardly worthy of analysis or preservation – just like video games today! The authorities were also concerned about the lewd and violent nature of plays and the effect they may have on the impressionable masses – ditto! But if we agree that a 21st-century Shakespeare would be making games, what sort would he be making?

The video game with the cult-following among Gen Z and Alpha took over the box office last month. Now the blockbuster film adapted from the game, dubbed A Minecraft Movie, is headed to households everywhere. From creepers and piglins to villages and the Nether, the film is full of staples from Mojang's crafting game. But that doesn't mean you need to have played the game before to see it (although a primer wouldn't hurt). It stars Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Sebastian Hansen and is directed by Jared Hess -- the man known for Napoleon Dynamite, the kookiest film of the 2000s.

When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris at the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he immediately knew it was special. "It was just the perfect game," he recalls. "It looked so simple, so rudimentary, but I wanted to play it again and again and again … There was no other game demo that ever did that to me." Rogers is now co-owner of the Tetris Company, which manages and licenses the Tetris brand. Over the past 30 years, he has become almost as famous as the game itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to buy its distribution rights from Russian agency Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) were dramatised in an Apple TV film starring Taron Egerton.

If rom-coms taught us anything, it's that you never know when you might meet the love of your life. Well, it's time to add the world of Minecraft to that list of potential meet-cute spots. A couple not only met but also actually got married in the world of Minecraft. The story centers on Sarah Nguyen, 24, from Oregon, and Jamie Patel, 25, from England, who met playing Minecraft as kids. That eventually blossomed into a romantic relationship and a beautiful wedding...hosted in the world of Minecraft.

Intel said Wednesday that the company is adding its XeSS 2 technology to even more games, including top-tier titles like Diablo IV and Assassin's Creed Shadows -- pushing them into the "definitely playable" category by increasing framerates up to a whopping four times higher. As part of the announcement, Intel also revealed that some sort of XeSS support now exists in over 200 PC games. XeSS 2 was added in conjunction with the 250 Intel Arc B580 ("Battlemage") architecture at the end of 2024, a "budget" graphics card that certainly helped alleviate some of the sticker shock that accompanied cards from AMD and especially Nvidia. It combines upscaling, frame generation, and latency in reduction, and doesn't necessarily require an Intel GPU, either. The most important thing about XeSS is that it applies additional frames where it's really needed -- at the low end.