If you are in Cologne this week, you will find the place overtaken by cheerful nerds, as Gamescom, the world's biggest gaming event, descends upon the city once again. Over 300,000 people are expected to visit the Koelnmesse to play upcoming games and enjoy each other's company, to the extent that it's possible to enjoy anyone's company in a giant crowded convention hall with woefully insufficient food options. The event began, as is now tradition, with a showcase of games (pdf) whose publishers could afford the hundreds of thousands of euros necessary to show a trailer on an official livestream. As ever, I am here to spare you from watching a full two hours of trailers and pick out the most interesting stuff. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was the big opener: our reporter Alyssa Mercante got a full introduction to its futuristic military paranoia, which you can read about later this week.

It is an interesting quirk of video game history that one of the greatest ever horror titles debuted on the Nintendo GameCube, a toylike console better known for the cutest titles in the Zelda series and Animal Crossing. But in 2002, Capcom revealed five exclusives to boost the beleaguered platform – and among them was Resident Evil 4, technically the 13th title in the franchise, which on its release three years later would be considered its zenith. It was an exciting new lease of life for the survival horror genre. Not that you'd guess all this from the game's extraordinarily pedestrian setup. Six years after the fall of the Umbrella Corporation smouldering cop Leon Kennedy has been dispatched on a mission to retrieve the US president's kidnapped daughter, who has been spotted in a tiny village in rural Spain.

The market is already crammed with open-world multiplayer survival games, but this post-apocalyptic epic adds cosmic horror to the mix. Its huge world is crammed with grotesque Lovecraftian monsters – including a living bus like the benevolent catbus in My Neighbour Totoro, but just horrible. You use an axe, dodges and a pistol to interrupt your powerful enemies' attacks and gain the upper hand – but this animated world is much brighter and less bleak, inspired by its developers' antipodean surroundings. I have never seen anything quite like this forthcoming game from Capcom: you control a warrior protecting a priestess as she slowly dances her way through monster-infested Japanese mountain scenes, purifying her surroundings as you go. During the day you rescue people and station your troops; at night you attack the monsters, hoping to keep her safe.

Staple 1990s yoof TV show The Word has just finished with a raucous live performance by some up-and-coming grunge band and now it's time to play video games. In the decade of the original PlayStation and the Sega Saturn, there was no online multiplayer – if you wanted to compete against human beings, you did it in your living room with friends, and anyone else you found in the pub at closing time. It had to be something accessible, something competitive, something that allowed two or even four people to play at once. It needed to have short rounds, because everyone wanted to play. Invariably that would mean one of two options: a footie sim or a fighting game.

PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC A game about the importance of cooking and the immigrant experience, in which we see vignettes of the daily life of a family who have emigrated from India to Canada. The mother uses food to keep herself and her son connected to their homeland and as a distance grows, perhaps inevitably, between parent and child, we see the consequences. The Tamil language, film, music and cuisine are depicted here with affection, lending emotional weight to the story. PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC As a traveller in foreign lands, with no knowledge of the local languages, you must piece clues together from context, making this part puzzle game and part adventure game. The beautiful, minimalist art is reminiscent of Monument Valley and the contrasting colour palette creates a sense of otherworldliness.

E3 is canceled this year due to both the pandemic's effects on development schedules and the success of events elsewhere in the year, like The Game Awards. As such, expectations are higher than ever for Summer Game Fest (SGF). It's now the biggest mid-year opportunity for developers to reveal new games and hype up their upcoming releases. At the same time, you might not see absolutely everyone. Don't worry if it's all a bit overwhelming -- we'll let you know how to watch, and what you'll likely see when Geoff Keighley and partner studios take to the stage.

When I got my first job on a games magazine, there were a few games on constant rotation at my grubby office, and at after-pub gatherings in the even grubbier flats my colleagues and I lived in: Pro Evo, Bomberman, and Street Fighter. Street Fighter was especially embarrassing for me, as an eager-to-prove-myself 16-year-old, because I could just never get my hands around the movesets and controls for all the different characters. I was a perennial button-masher, and I was humiliated so regularly that it put me off fighting games for life. That said, I have always greatly admired Street Fighter, and its players. It is a stunningly energetic game full of stylish caricatures whose movement and swagger are fascinating to look at, especially in the hands of skilled competitors.

It's June, and video game fans across the globe know what that means – it's not E3. The old, in-person gaming show has been canceled for the third year in a row, but this summer will still be filled with news and virtual events, thanks in large part to Canada's sweetheart Geoff Keighley. It all takes place in early June, which is like right now, so let's take a look at the schedule for Summer Game Fest and break down what to expect from the studios involved. Summer Game Fest is less a singular event and more a state of mind. It comprises a handful of virtual shows spread over 10 days, starting on June 2nd with the PlayStation State of Play stream.

The perfect Resident Evil game doesn't exist. The series, among the most consequential in gaming, has shifted its focus so often, a "Resident Evil fan" could be many things. One player's definition of a perfect Resident Evil game is another's mark of where the series went astray. Like the Zelda or Mario series, Resident Evil is due some credit for innovating and becoming an industry leader, even if it eventually began to borrow from its action-adventure peers. Still, there are plenty of ideas that persist through each game.

The 3DS's multiplayer Zelda game wasn't so much bad (unless you tried to play it by yourself, laboriously switching between all three characters) as eminently forgettable. Its weird, camp send-up of Hyrule and three-player puzzles have slipped almost entirely from my mind in the years since I played it, and what I do remember mostly involved shouting impotently at the screen as some online playmate entirely failed to see the solution to a puzzle that was staring them in the face. I maintain that hardly anyone has actually finished this needlessly opaque side-scrolling follow-up to 1986's The Legend of Zelda, because: a) it's incredibly hard to figure out what the game wants you to do; and b) the final dungeon has TWO bosses, and if you can't finish it then you're turfed out to attempt the whole thing again. Long considered the worst game in the Zelda series, it hasn't improved with age. The touch controls were cool, but what everyone remembers about Phantom Hourglass is being sent back to the same dungeon again and again every time you threatened to make some small amount of progress.