When you think of Nintendo, it's almost impossible not to picture Donkey Kong. Yet despite Donkers' undeniable place in gaming history – and obligatory appearances in Smash Bros and Mario Kart – for the last few console generations, Donkey Kong platformers have been MIA. Enter DK's first standalone adventure in 11 years, Donkey Kong Bananza. While Mario's recent adventures saw him exploring the reaches of outer space or deftly possessing enemies with an anthropomorphic hat, DK's grand return is all about primal rage. As you smash and punch your way through walls, floors and ceilings, you can burrow all the way to the ground below, forging new paths and unearthing hidden treasures.

This year may not have been as jam packed as 2023 was for gaming, but there were still plenty of amazing new releases. Whether you love a good indie or a big-budget production, this year had you covered. All you needed to do was look a bit deeper than you might have in 2023. The core of Animal Well isn't that structurally complicated: It's a lock-and-key Metroidvania. You go to places to unlock other places and abilities. Beating the core "story" opens up a couple layers of admirably elaborate and increasingly meta secrets, but let's be real, most people interested in those are just going to look up the answers online. And yet, you play it, and you can't help but think there isn't much like it nowadays. It's the fact that you never learn what your little blob guy is. It's giving you a map to mark up yourself instead of providing any instructions.

The latest Day of the Devs showcase has come and gone, but the stream placed a spotlight on a whole bunch of promising indie games. The event is curated by Double Fine and iam8bit and this digital showcase highlighted dozens of in-progress titles to keep an eye on. The virtual show included some world premieres and release date announcements, along with a bunch of new trailers about games we already knew about. These are all vastly different titles, with their own publishers, genres, budgets and visual styles. They have just one thing in common.

If you were an obsessive video game fan in the summer of 1994, you'll remember where you were when Edge magazine's August issue dropped. By then, Sony had already announced its intention to develop the PlayStation console – the previous October – but it was the cover feature in the world's most forward-looking game publication that really blew open the possibilities of the machine. As well as listing its specifications in full, Edge secured enthusiastic statements of support from Capcom, Namco and Konami. One breathless developer told the mag: "It's going to revolutionise the way computers are at the moment." Suddenly, the whole structure of the console games business was being threatened. All it needed was a push.

When I say that Astro Bot reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy, I could pay it no higher compliment. It has taken me around its own small galaxy of planetoid-style levels, from bathhouses to diorama-sized jungle temples to rainy islands, each host to a brilliant one-shot idea, such as a pair of frog boxing gloves or a backpack monkey or a time-stopping watch that lets you freeze giant zooming darts in place so you can jump on them. It is splendid to witness this development team's creativity let loose. Team Asobi has previously made a couple of short-form Astro Bot games – one for the PSVR, Rescue Mission, and another that came packaged with the PS5 at launch, Astro's Playroom – but this one is full-length, complete with challenging bonus levels that play out like electrified skill-check gauntlets for the generation raised on 3D platformers. It is supremely funny and characterful, thanks to the titular chibi blue-and-white robot and his crowd of friends, many of whom are dressed up as characters from the most obscure crevices of PlayStation history.

When it comes to video games, one thing is universal: releasing one is tough. This is the challenge for the team behind UFO 50. This much anticipated 8-bit anthology of retro-styled games is finally due to release this September, seven years after its announcement. With 50 games included, the wait is justified. UFO 50 is a jumbo variety pack of complete video games, each with its own title, genre and story. "They're not minigames," asserts developer Derek Yu and creator of 2008 platformer Spelunky, named one of the greatest games ever made.

There are only two video games my wife has ever enjoyed: Mario Kart, in which she has gleefully brought up the rear for the entirety of our family life; and Crash Bandicoot, of which she was, at one stage, the greatest player in the world. She completed every molecule of every Crash game in the 90s. I swear I saw her get 105% on one of them, but this being the 90s, I have filed that memory under "things I may have hallucinated in an altered state", along with Gary McAllister missing that penalty at Wembley, and the band Menswear. I have never been a completionist like her. For me, platformers are the greatest video game genre that I absolutely hate – be it manic miners, plumbers, hedgehogs, Mega Man, Aladdin or Earthworm Jim.

Genie often adds this effect to the games it generates. While Genie is an in-house research project and won't be released, Guzdial notes that the Google DeepMind team says it could one day be turned into a game-making tool--something he's working on too. "I'm definitely interested to see what they build," he says.

We present latent combinational game design -- an approach for generating playable games that blend a given set of games in a desired combination using deep generative latent variable models. We use Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders (GMVAEs) which model the VAE latent space via a mixture of Gaussian components. Through supervised training, each component encodes levels from one game and lets us define blended games as linear combinations of these components. This enables generating new games that blend the input games as well as controlling the relative proportions of each game in the blend. We also extend prior blending work using conditional VAEs and compare against the GMVAE and additionally introduce a hybrid conditional GMVAE (CGMVAE) architecture which lets us generate whole blended levels and layouts. Results show that these approaches can generate playable games that blend the input games in specified combinations. We use both platformers and dungeon-based games to demonstrate our results.

My favorite video game of 2023 involves a portly, balding pizza chef named Peppino Spaghetti scaling a medieval tower to defeat a sentient floating pie threatening to blow up his pizzeria. It was developed by a small independent studio named Tour de Pizza, led by a designer named McPig. Its soundtrack was largely composed by a first-time composer and a high school student. Its art style is at once expressive and grotesque. It's called Pizza Tower, and it is, in all seriousness, one of the best 2D platformers I've played in a long time. I'm late here, as Pizza Tower arrived on PC in January.