Grand Theft Auto VI, left, and Lenny Kravitz as the villain in 007 First Light. Grand Theft Auto VI, left, and Lenny Kravitz as the villain in 007 First Light. Live your mountaineering fantasies and brave the elements in a wonderfully illustrated climbing game. You must carefully place climber Aava's hands and feet to make your way up a forbidding mountain, camping on ledges and bandaging her fingers as you go. Like real climbing, it is challenging and somewhat brutal.

A game so impenetrable that it seemed designed to make you walk away ... Demon's Souls. A game so impenetrable that it seemed designed to make you walk away ... Demon's Souls. What does my love for impossibly difficult video games say about me? From Demon Souls to Baby Steps, challenging games keep a certain type of player coming back for more. Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox?

During my three-decade career as a games journalist I have written a lot of "most anticipated games of the year" articles, and they nearly always have a familiar theme: "Well, the lineup is dominated by sequels (yawn), but at least there are one or two original titles to look forward to!" From today's vantage point that ennui over the predictability of the games industry looks incredibly quaint. We didn't know how good we had it. The past five years have seen seismic shifts in the mainstream industry, mostly connected to the irresistible rise of "live service" games such as Fortnite, GTA Online and Genshin Impact, which survive over multiple years through voracious subscription models. The biggest are insanely profitable: since its launch in 2017, Fortnite is estimated to have earned 20bn ( 15.7bn), maintaining 500 million player accounts into its sixth year. GTA Online still makes an estimated 500m a year ( 399m), more than a decade after its initial release.

After a slow month in the world of video game marketing, things are starting to pick up. The past week has given us a first look at the new Fallout TV show, a few release dates and a trailer for a little game called Grand Theft Auto VI -- and the Game Awards are still to come. What good timing for us to launch a weekly video game show to dig into the news. The Game Awards will go live on Thursday, December 7, at 7:30PM ET. Expect a few hours of game announcements, new trailers, awkward interviews and musical performances, including one by the fictional band from Alan Wake 2. Amazon dropped the first trailer for its live-action Fallout series -- and, man, it sure does look like Fallout.

It's been a giant week for video game news. Nintendo announced a release date of 5 May 2023 for the next Legend of Zelda game (now titled Tears of the Kingdom, certainly not an intentional reference to the death of the Queen); we've seen a new God of War: Ragnarok trailer in which The West Wing's Toby Ziegler shouts at Kratos; and we learned that the beloved N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 is finally, finally coming back. But it was all overshadowed on Sunday, when a hacker posted more than 50 minutes of in-development footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, stolen from Rockstar's internal Slack channel. The hacker claims to have possession of the game's source code, too. This is, along with the theft of Half-Life 2's source code from Valve in 2003, one of the biggest data breaches in video game history.

The highly-anticipated next installment of the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise will feature a playable female protagonist for the first time, according to a report. Developer Rockstar Games first announced it was working on GTA VI earlier this year, writing in a February statement that'active development of the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is well under way'. Now a report in Bloomberg reveals that GTA VI will be the first to let players take on the role of a female lead character in its story mode. The woman, who is said to be'Latina', reportedly will be one of a pair of leading characters in a story influenced by the bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde. People familiar with the game told Bloomberg that developers are being cautious not to'punch down' by making jokes about marginalised groups, in contrast to previous games.