Destiny is 10 years old, which is an aeon in video game terms. On the surface, this is a lavish online prog-rock space shooter made by Bungie, the creators of the Xbox classic Halo. You bundle together with friends, deploy somewhere amid the glittering vistas of a futuristic version of our solar system, and then shoot people/aliens/robots to get better loot. None of this is exactly unprecedented, and that's maybe the point. You could argue that Destiny's touchstones are games like Halo, for its gunplay, World of Warcraft, for its persistent online spaces, and – this is where it gets a bit odd, granted – the deathless British retailer Marks & Spencer.

Recently some members of the video-game community were enraged by news that FromSoftware's oblique open-world adventure Elden Ring has been nominated in the best narrative category at the forthcoming Game Awards. Like the developer's other titles (the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne, for instance), this complex game tells its story through short snippets of dialogue rather than long cinematic cutscenes, and via objects in the world, rather than endless scrolls, audio messages or emails. The player has to do most of the work in assembling a cogent narrative, which suited me fine, because, through the 200-hours I've spent with the game, I simply do not care about the plot – I have my own. I wander the dangerous lands of Caelid and Dragonbarrow as an existential assassin, like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter or Mad Max, not bothering to try and make sense of the world, just keen to explore and fight and survive. I like this story better – especially when my son joins me and we take on foes together, revelling in the story that builds of is own accord as we play.

"Lost Ark" has silly quests that add levity. Like many multiplayer games, it has a quest introducing pets to players. The game has fun with it, asking you to pick up loot (grains and rice) by hand until you acquire a pet that can pick up loot for you. Another quest entails obtaining carrots and herbs to woo a character who is a terrible cook. After you try her cooking, you must decide to lie to her or tell her the truth.

In the 1990s, before hitting at infinitely repeatable success with the action-adventure formula of the Lego Star Wars games, Lego used to put out a lot of videogames. Under the Lego Interactive banner, the company released a diverse slate of PC and console titles, in a variety of genres. If you were a kid with a PC in the late '90s, your first introduction to real-time strategy might not have been Starcraft but Lego Rock Raiders. These games were all aimed at kids, and at their best they made hardcore gaming more legible to kids by--and this is a terrible phrase, apologies in advance--leveraging the Lego brand. Lego aesthetics met fun, straightforward takes on interesting corners of the videogame universe.

The Borderlands video game franchise, which kicked off a decade ago, is one of the most innovative around in terms of gameplay and gear progression. Gamers quickly fell in love with the game's first installment because of all the loot, shooting, and enemies the developers packed into a dynamic world. So the news that "Borderlands 3" was in development was met with much anticipation. Developed by Gearbox and published by 2K, "Borderlands 3," arrived Sept. 13 ($60-up, for Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PC). How does the game deliver and add to the franchise's stellar reputation?

"Fallout 76" was a buggy, listless wasteland and became an industry laughingstock. "Anthem" barely got off the ground. Recent updates to "Red Dead Online" are causing players to lose faith as they're nickel-and-dimed for dirty clothes and dances. It's a dark coincidence that a video game about abandoned and lost communities could be host to millions of adrift gamers, outraged and disappointed by the recent dud parade of massive, open-world online shooters. In Washington, where the game is set, Ubisoft held a preview event for "The Division 2," the sequel to the company's most successfully launched game ever.

Almost every video game is designed to make you want to play it. Fortnite, though, is especially good at keeping people coming back, week after week, match after match. This "stickiness", as game designers call it, is not down to some revolutionary new game design factor. Instead, Fornite has improved and repackaged ideas, creating an effective evolutionary step rather than a leap. While improving shooting skills and chasing a Victory Royale is satisfying, what keeps Fortnite players engaged second-to-second is loot, the items and weapons that can be found all around the map.

The scale of money laundering globally is estimated to be as large as $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually. The overwhelming majority of this money is channeled to organizations trafficking drugs, weapons and human beings, or used to finance terrorist activity. However, despite the fact that almost 70% of that illicit finance flows through legitimate financial institutions, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that less than 1% of the global trade is seized and frozen. In light of that, it's perhaps unsurprising that regulators are stricter today when it comes to enforcement. Since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators, particularly those in the U.S., have been handing down record fines to financial institutions seen to be trading with sanctioned parties and countries, or failing to appropriately comply with anti-money laundering (AML) initiatives.

"WHY CAN'T YOU JUST LIKE THINGS?" one of my Twitter followers yelled at me yesterday as I tweeted about how the Switch seemed a bit too big to be as portable as many would like. It's true that I am on the glass half empty side of analysis more often than not, and as such, I was expecting that I may not be quite as over the moon about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as most reviewers, handing the game so many perfect 10s it's now one of the best-reviewed games ever made. But even cynicism has its limits, and so far, after a manageable learning curve, Zelda has broken me. I don't want to give a full review right now of how all the mechanics work and this and that, I want to explain how and why it made me a convert, after I felt a bit weird about the game initially. In short, playing Breath of the Wild feels like I'm being cured of an addiction I didn't know I had.

In financial terms, Tom Clancy's The Division is a hugely successful video game. Released in March by French publisher Ubisoft, this New York-set third-person shooter quickly became the best selling new franchise of all time, generating more than 330m in sales in its first five days. But, just over a month after release, the best selling game in Ubisoft's 30-year history looks to be heading for catastrophe. The Division has a cheating problem. Not just one, either, but a critical mass of glitches, exploits, and hacks that – in the eyes of the playerbase at least – threaten the game's immediate and long-term future on the PC.