When we think of Nintendo we picture serene and cosy cartoon adventures filled with cute creatures and lovable Italian stereotypes. But while there is plenty of Mario on the Switch, the console offers a diverse range of delights for newcomers and longtime gaming veterans. Here are the 15 essentials. The cosy life sim returned with new characters, chill activities, and endless knick-knacks with which to decorate your own virtual paradise. Create a dream island and then invite friends over for tea.

Coping with lockdown life is hard enough without having to listen to other members of your household while you are trying to work. If you can't get away physically, a set of noise-cancelling headphones could be just the ticket to isolate you just enough to concentrate. Most cheaper noise-cancelling headphones are terrible, but the Lindy BNX-60 are actually pretty good. They're a little old, originally released in 2016, but having been reduced to just £50 they offer incredible value. The noise-cancelling handles background drone fairly well, while the ear cups enclose your ears to help quieten the rest of the world.

Elon Musk took the stage about 30 minutes late at the Moody Theater in downtown Austin, Texas, and when he finally appeared, the sold-out crowd cheered and jumped to their feet, smartphones glowing. His conversation at SXSW was a surprise, announced late the night before, and the talk itself was just as casual. Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan took pre-written questions from the audience and asked Musk for his thoughts on a vast array of topics, covering everything from colonizing Mars to the benefits of a carbon tax and the future of artificial intelligence.

Nintendo's bright, brisk take on the fighting game has a range of outlandish characters engaging in lighthearted fisticuffs with customisable robotic arms. The Switch motion controllers make it a ridiculous physical workout. What we said: Arms is unique, colourful, and accessible, with enough complexity to tempt a competitive scene but not so much to make anyone feel alienated. Game designer David OReilly produced one of the most unusual video game releases of the decade with this exploration of time, space and being, all set to a soundtrack of quotes from philosopher Alan Watts. What we said: Everything takes the strange comfort of the procedurally generated personal to a universal scale, and it is good.

For years, it gave the impression that it was content to live in its own little corner of the gaming world, making well-received updates to its own franchises, without really caring about what the wider industry was doing. Now we know that for all that time, it was watching and learning. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the result of that examination: a game that marries the best bits of the franchise's long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts. At its heart, Breath of the Wild is an open-world exploration game, in the vein of titles such as Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and FarCry 4. After completing the small starting area (and these things are, of course, relative: that area feels about as large as the entire Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time), Link is thrown into a world scattered with quests to complete, people to meet and monsters to defeat. He can find and climb towers to mark new areas on the map and travel at speed between them.

It came from beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud. The signal, a mere 20 milliseconds long, captured the moment when two black holes slammed together – a cataclysm that sent ripples through spacetime and onwards to Earth, where they made instruments chirp and scientists cheer. "We have detected gravitational waves," said David Reitze of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo). The announcement ranked as the physics discovery of the year, confirming Einstein's century-old theory of gravity and putting the Ligo team on course for a Nobel. But the real excitement is yet to come.