Why does GTA 6 keep getting delayed? When Grand Theft Auto 6 was delayed on Thursday, the famous quote from the series perfectly captured the feelings of many video game fans. It's the second time maker Rockstar Games has told players they'll have to wait even longer for what is likely to be one of the biggest entertainment releases ever. The notoriously perfectionist developer has a history of holding on to its blockbusters until it's happy with them, so the news wasn't a complete surprise. But it has got millions asking what's taking so long, and why. Rockstar Games officially confirmed it was working on GTA 6 in February 2022 and an initial trailer, released almost 18 months later, said it would come out in 2025.

I am 85 hours into Death Stranding 2, an apocalyptic nightmare about Earth becoming infected with death monsters, and I've realised that I'm playing it as a cosy game. For hours at a time, I trundle along the photorealistic landscapes in my pick-up truck, delivering parcels to isolated communities and building new roads. The only reason I complete the main story missions is to open new areas of the map so that I can meet new people and build more roads. I find it blissfully enjoyable. Of course, I am far from alone in playing video games this way.

Happy Monster Hunter Wilds week to all who celebrate: Capcom's thrilling action game has sold 8m units in three days, which means that quite a lot of you are likely to be playing it. I'm a huge fan of this series and am delighted by the latest entry, but after filing the review last week, I've barely had a minute to play it since it came out. Regular readers will know that this is a familiar problem for me: I have two kids, so my gaming time is tight, and the living room TV is very often in use. I anticipated this, so in the run-up to Monster Hunter Wilds' release, I spent 200 on a PlayStation Portal – essentially a screen sandwiched between two halves of a PlayStation 5 controller. I can't decide whether it's one of the most unwieldy things that Sony has ever come out with, or one of the most elegant.

I had to give up on Pacific Drive, the weird-fiction-inspired driving survival game I recommended the other week. Not because it's bad – it's great – but because it needed 20-plus hours from me that I just do not have right now. It's a game about probing further and further into a long-abandoned exclusion zone in a beat-up old car, and the anomalies you encounter. These range from pillars suddenly thrusting themselves from the earth to alarming hurricanes that shove you around the road, and all are excitingly inventive and creepy. But it was the tourists that finished me off.

A day earlier than teased, Rockstar has released the first official trailer of Grand Theft Auto VI, the next installment in arguably the biggest AAA game series. As indicated by a recent teaser image, GTA VI will be set in Leonida, Rockstar's take on Florida, and largely centered on Vice City, the series' stand in for Miami. The game will have a playable female character for the first time in the modern incarnation of the franchise, and we get swampy areas, inspired by Florida's National Park, and almost as swampy strip clubs. It is GTA, after all. The game will launch in 2025.

Cormac McCarthy, one of the most significant figures in modern American literature, died last week aged 89. While the tributes have mostly come from within the literary world, he had a huge impact upon modern culture as a whole – including video games. McCarthy's work reshaped the way that the world looks at the post-apocalyptic genre, a flavour of fiction that video games have long called home. And Rockstar's western opus Red Dead Redemption vividly recalls the Border Trilogy – particularly the twisted figure of Dutch van der Linde. The developers of The Last of Us have specifically cited The Road as a key influence, and it's easy to see why Naughty Dog drew upon McCarthy's parent-child journey across a post-apocalyptic America to inform their own.

A lot went on in the gaming space this year, with the industry seeing waves of acquisitions, the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, some game releases that took the world by storm and a casting choice for a video game movie that we all came together to dunk on. Think you can remember all the big stories? Try our quiz below to see how well you know the gaming news of 2022. Nintendo showed the first trailer for "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" in October, giving all of us an earful of Chris Pratt (of "Parks and Recreation" and Guardians of the Galaxy fame) as the iconic plumber. Many fans were swift to decry the choice for the snub to Mario's longtime voice actor, Charles Martinet, and for what they felt was Pratt's uninspired voice acting (not to mention his ties to the controversial megachurch Hillsong).

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But litigation against game companies using real buildings and places as inspiration is not unprecedented. In 2008, Rockstar Games was sued by ESS Entertainment for its depiction of a gentleman's club in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." ESS, the operator of the real Los Angeles establishment Play Pen Gentlemen's Club, alleged that Rockstar infringed upon its trademark with its virtual club, Pig Pen. The court ruled in favor of Rockstar.

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.