The second season of Fallout - Prime Video's mega-hit based on the popular video game series - has landed. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where Earth has been ravaged by nuclear war, the first series was a commercial and critical hit, impressing long-time fans and viewers who'd never played before. Its surprising success had a huge impact on Bethesda Softworks, the developer of its source material, bringing back lapsed players and creating new ones along the way. Key creatives from the company have told BBC Newsbeat about working with the show's producers, and what the success of the programme means for the future of the games. The first season of Fallout arrived at a turning point for Hollywood video game adaptations.

After fifty years of books, games and movies, what more could the Aliens franchise deliver? The description "genre-defying" gets thrown around a lot these days - it is a convenient sticking plaster for any film or series that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to be. That said, it is an apt term for the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien, in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is part of a crew trapped on a spaceship with a salivating, scorpion-like "xenomorph", had such blood-curdling visuals that it made an indelible impact on both science fiction and horror films. But while the deadly parasite and its psychosexual torment were ever present, subsequent instalments tried their hand at being everything from a blockbuster to a prison flick to a philosophical drama.

In early August, just days before a major Black Ops 7 preview event in Los Angeles, former Blizzard president and Microsoft executive Mike Ybarra called the Call of Duty franchise "lazy". Posting on X, the veteran exec wrote that EA's upcoming Battlefield 6 would "boot stomp" CoD this year and force the team to make "better FPS games". And with Splitgate 2 head Ian Proulx mocking Call of Duty in his Summer Game Fest presentation just two months ago, it seems the blockbuster series has become the butt of an industry joke about endless franchises. It's not the only flak the 20-year-old brand has drawn. Though it sells millions of copies with each new release (Black Ops 6 was the bestselling game of 2024), accusations of predatory monetisation, pay-to-win skins, swarms of in-game bugs, and the recent use of AI to create in-game, paid-for content have understandably irked many players.

Many years ago, when Civilization II was on its way, I'd just started as a writer on the video game magazine Edge. As a fan of the original Civilization, a complex turn-based strategy sim about building vast kingdoms through thousands of years of human history, I was keen to review the sequel and my editor let me. Reader, I became completely addicted. I played the game for two weeks non-stop, leaving many pages of the magazine unwritten. This earned me a very severe written warning.

Game development is an expensive and time-consuming business. Right now, 2,000 people are working on the next instalment in Ubisoft's blockbuster Assassin's Creed series, across 18 studios around the globe, and it's a project that will take 2 to 3 years. Imagine how any of those people might feel to learn that last year, a self-taught programmer racked up nearly 280,000 from a series of games he made while sitting in his pants on hot days in a two-bedroom flat in Harlesden. And that each one took him about 30 minutes. "The first one, I'll be honest, probably took seven or eight hours," says TJ Gardner.

A six-year wait has come to an end for "Zelda" fans across the world following Nintendo's release of the long-awaited next instalment of its 40-year-old gaming saga. The series featuring the exploits of Princess Zelda and the elf-like warrior Link has sold 125 million copies worldwide since its first edition in 1986. But its main challenge this year will be to boost earnings for the Japanese gaming giant and prolong the life of its Switch console, which experts say is in its dotage after seven years on the shelves. In Paris, fans who lined up late at night applauded as a shop opened. They streamed in – some clutching Link toys or wearing elfin ears – to snap up the saga's latest instalment, Tears of the Kingdom.

Designed by ex-Atari luminary David Crane (Pitfall, Decathlon), Activision's wonderful tie-in captured the humour and spirit of the classic comedy. Players set up their own ghostbusting franchises, buying equipment before setting out to capture spooks. With its use of digitised speech and a jaunty reproduction of the film's soundtrack, it showed that games really could provide an authentic movie experience. Developed by the UK-based movie tie-in specialist Probe Entertainment, Die Hard Trilogy is three games in one: a third-person action adventure, a light-gun shooter and an arcade driving challenge, each based around consecutive instalments of the film series. Though the visuals were rough, the game perfectly captured the locations, themes and black humour of the movies, providing a real bargain for early PlayStation and Saturn owners.

Crash Bandicoot is back, and it's about time. No, really – the latest instalment, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, picks up where Crash Bandicoot: Warped left off 22 years ago, back when every other game had to star an anthropomorphic animal. This is actually the eighth Crash game, for anyone keeping track, and the first proper new instalment for over a decade. It reinvigorates the bandicoot's gameplay while remaining true to the original classics, but why is now the time for the return of this inexplicably underloved 90s video game icon? The game's director, Paul Yan, explains: "Part of the reason why it's now is because Vicarious Visions and Beenox did such a great job with the remasters [of the original Crash Games and Crash Team Racing]. It really confirmed that there is an appetite to revisit the world of Crash … The trilogy that Naughty Dog developed was certainly the high point of the series, both critically and commercially, so we thought, let's start from there."

Each new year brings a frisson of excitement among book lovers as they anticipate the happy hours ahead absorbed in a library's worth of fresh reads. And 2019 looks to be bumper year. To whet your appetite we've picked a selection of fiction titles from a range of established and new authors. The list is by no means exhaustive. It may not even end up tempting you.

Sony has announced it is bringing back its original PlayStation games console – to the joy of 30-something gamers everywhere. The PlayStation Classic will be a miniature version of the company's first generation model, which represented the next evolutionary step forwards from the 16-bit Sega MegaDrive and Nintendo SNES when it first went on sale in Japan in December 1994. To celebrate, here's a look back at the games that defined that joyous machine, the best thing to happen to the 1990s outside of "Kiss from a Rose" and Gladiators on ITV. This racing simulator was admired for its sleek graphics and buffish attention to detail and became the best-selling game in PlayStation history, shifting 10.85m copies and setting up a series that is now deeply associated with Sony's home consoles. Precision was everything for players of this favourite.