If university lecture halls and offices looked a little quiet on Friday, it may be down to Nintendo. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – the latest in Nintendo's long-running series of vast, life-absorbing adventure video games – has launched for the firm's Switch console to a chorus of critical praise. On review aggregation site Metacritic, it currently has an average score of 97/100, putting it comfortably in video games' top echelon. That makes it a game worth taking a day off work to play – or maybe even a week. If Mario is gaming's most recognisable face, the medium's equivalent of Mickey Mouse, Zelda is more like Indiana Jones – clever, swashbuckling and much imitated.

The start of a new year is a good time for reflection, and as we head into 2018 I think it's time to take on a big one: How much do a game's graphics actually matter? Around the time of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launch I remember a lot of discussion about whether we needed new, more powerful consoles. That was four years ago and even then the conversation was old. And as a PC gamer primarily, I can understand the counterpoints--there's a thrill to good-looking games, to those "Can it run Crysis?" But 2017 marked the confluence of two opposing trends coming to a head, and as such is a uniquely appropriate moment to resurface the discussion. On the one hand, you had the industry's giants resorting to underhanded monetization tactics (mostly loot boxes) to ostensibly offset the ballooning costs of development.