Square Enix wants a hit Final Fantasy game that's just as popular as any game in the storied history. It's taken seven years to get from the tepidly-received Final Fantasy XV to Final Fantasy XVI, and the company continues to wrestle with what a FF game is in 2023. The company courted nostalgia with FF7 Remake (and the Pixel Remaster series). At the same time, its MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV, continues to be a huge success – but what about the prestige title? It has a plan, and it involves giant-summoned monster battles with different styles of play, a single controllable protagonist with guest-star allies, a support dog that grows up with you, horny antagonists, wicked moms and several bleak plot twists to help establish the plot and characters relatively early on.

If the recent Jumanji film reboots have taught us nothing else – and they haven't – they have demonstrated how much fun there is to be had with dropping characters from our familiar world into outlandish fantasy settings. Forspoken has the same potential: its protagonist Frey is accustomed to the harsh realities of surviving in the scruffier corners of Hell's Kitchen, New York, and her problems gravitate around harbouring debts to petty criminals and remembering to feed her cat. So when Frey puts on a bracelet in an abandoned tenement for reasons best not examined too closely and she's transported into the quasi-medieval world of Athia, you think to yourself: here we go. It's a great fish-out-of-water setup that allows for witty observations about video game fantasy worlds and the bizarre tropes within them that we generally don't bat an eyelash at. And with a writing team including Uncharted's Amy Hennig and Rogue One co-writer Gary Whitta, expectations are pitched high.

February sees the introduction of a new game to the roundup, the eye-catching but temperamental Forspoken, and some surprising framerate gains for a staple title. Plus, some exciting news that occurred mere hours after Keith's video published: Intel is slashing the Arc A750's price to $249! Compared to last month's driver release, the Arc A770 driver didn't change much for most of our testing titles. In GTA V, Counter-Strike GO, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: Troy, Borderlands 3, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Watch Dogs Legion, and Cyberpunk 2077, the results for the three-month test were in line with (or slightly behind) the two-month test. That's a particular bummer for Cyberpunk, which just got a DLSS boost on the latest Nvidia cards. There was one standout: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Whatever special sauce Intel put into the new driver, it's showing about a 5-10 percent improvement across the board, while 1 percent lows saw a noticeable bump up to 51 frames per second at 1080p and 36 frames per second at 1440 -- that's some solid performance for such a new, graphically-intense game.

If 2021 was a bit of a nothing year for video games – the tentative first year of a new console generation, the second year of pandemic disruption, a year of delays and false starts enlivened briefly by the amateur traders giving Wall Street a shoeing via the medium of GameStop "meme stocks" – then 2022 has seen the games industry gradually get moving again. Our picks for best games of the year was published this week, and there are some proper greats among them. It's also been an interesting year for games news. The stories below are my highlights – the memorable moments from another year on this niche, unpredictable beat. No company is ever pleased when information about an in-progress game gets out ahead of time.

Forspoken, the action role-playing game from Final Fantasy XV studio Luminous Productions, will hit PlayStation 5 and PC on May 24th, 2022. Publisher Square Enix revealed the release date in a new trailer during The Game Awards, showing off fresh gameplay and world-building elements. In Forspoken, protagonist Frey Holland is transported from her hometown of New York City to the fantastical land of Athia. "Frey soon learns this beautiful land once flourished under the reign of benevolent matriarchs, called Tantas, until a devastating blight relentlessly corrupted everything it touched," the new video's description reads. Frey agrees to help save Athia from corruption, and in the process, tries to find her way home.