Call of Duty's Vince Zampella was a video games visionary O n Sunday, Vince Zampella, the co-creator of the Call of Duty video game series, died in a car crash in Los Angeles at the age of 55. Though best known for that series of blockbuster military shooters, Zampella touched a huge number of lives - not only the hundreds of people who worked at the game development studios he led under Activision and EA, but the millions of people who played the games that bore his imprint. A lifelong gamer, Zampella had a Pong console as a child, then an Atari 2600 and a Commodore 64. He told IGN in 2016 that his favourite game from childhood was Donkey Kong: "I would spend hours at the arcade playing it." Zampella's first job in the industry was at GameTek in Miami, which specialised in video-game versions of popular US quizshows.

The unlikeliest project to emerge from Electronic Arts's decade-long oversight of the Star Wars video game franchise, Squadrons is a spiritual successor to the much-loved X-Wing series of space combat simulators. Squadrons offers a decent facsimile of X-Wing's granular space battles, from its carefully crafted missions to its hallmark power-shunting mechanic, which lets you divert your ship's power to different systems for a tactical advantage. What earns Squadrons a place on this list, however, is its VR functionality. Plugging a VR headset into this game transforms it from a glossy throwback into an essential experience, bringing Star Wars' space dogfighting to life like nothing else. If you want to know just how massive a Star Destroyer is when you see it up close with your own eyes, this is the game to play.

As is now tradition, an enormous piece of gaming news landed right after last week's Pushing Buttons went out to readers: Microsoft's huge $70bn purchase of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush owner Activision Blizzard, a deal that has been in the works since January last year, was unexpectedly blocked by a UK regulator. This might not seem interesting to anyone except those involved with the business of video games, or people with an inexplicable interest in the actions of regulatory authorities in Britain, but wait! It is quite interesting, because the response from these two giant companies has been entertainingly petty. All corporations are entitled brats. For decades, US- and UK-driven neoliberalism has empowered them to consider themselves legally equivalent to actual people, and deserving of privilege, ostensibly because they create wealth and jobs.

Be forewarned that "Squadrons" is a game where players' enjoyment will hinge on how much effort they're willing to put into playing. If you delight in tinkering with settings and honing tactics (such as angling deflector shields and shunting power from the engines to the lasers then back to the engines) instead of simply zooming around in space blasting bad guys, you will embrace "Squadrons" like Chewbacca squeezing Han Solo. If your idea of a good time in the cockpit syncs more with the flying dynamics found in EA's "Star Wars: Battlefront 2," you're likely better off sticking to that title. "Squadrons" demands a lot from its players, but it also returns that love with an incredibly immersive starfighter experience.

It's all fun and games until you have to pick the Game of the Year. Looking back, this year certainly had its share of contenders for the top spot in our annual video game list. From new gaming IPs such as "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice" to older stalwarts making a return to form like "Resident Evil 2," there was no shortage of games worthy of the crown. Like every year, however, we have to pick one title as the best of the best. Then again, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't recognize all of the other great games that came out, either.

Amid the onslaught of announcements during Sunday's Xbox briefing, it would have been easy to miss this fascinating experimental game from coder and artist Luis Antonio, who previously worked on Jonathan Blow's acclaimed adventure The Witness. You play as a nameless man stuck in a 12-minute time loop involving his wife, their apartment and some unexpected visitors. Seeing things from a neat top-down perspective, the player has to untangle the series of events, discovering more about the mystery with each short lifespan. Channeling Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, this is a truly intriguing project. Considering how large a role death plays in video games, it's rare to find one that explores the concept in a meaningful way.

This week, some of gaming's biggest franchise names are in some questionable places. We've got the trials and tribulations of Star Wars games, the questionable sexual politics of Assassin's Creed, and some weird advertising for Kingdom Hearts. I sense a disturbance in the Force--something has gone wrong with the Star Wars license at Electronic Arts. According to a report from Kotaku, EA has canceled an open-world Star Wars game in progress at EA Vancouver. In fact, you may remember mention of the game last year, when EA shut down Visceral Games, which was also developing a now-canceled Star Wars project; EA Vancouver took over the project.

It's Tuesday, which means the E3 show floor is now open. It also means we're finally at the end of a four-day slog of press conferences from some of the gaming world's largest publishers. While Activision Blizzard still doesn't do its own pre-E3 event, just about everyone else does, which means these 96 hours have been a deluge of announcements and reveals that we did our best to get our arms around. We didn't even cover them all: the Square Enix press conference was basically devoid of new information, and the PC Gaming Show, while compelling, was mostly a long list of indie game announcements--some of which we'll be getting to later this week. So, for now, here's everything you need to know about every press conference you need to know about.

On October 27, three of the biggest videogames of the year arrive, all at once: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, Assassin's Creed: Origins, and Nintendo's Super Mario Odyssey. Together, these three titles represent a cross-section of the big-budget gaming industry, from a family-friendly run-and-jump romp to a bloody rampage through a Nazi-filled alternate history. From power fantasy to primer on Ancient Egyptian architecture, this one day showcases much of the best of what triple-A gaming--the biggest, costliest games by the biggest, wealthiest publishers--can do. It represents enough money to balance the budget of a small country. Accounting for years of development time, bleeding-edge machines and software, and astronomical advertising budgets, these three games, all told, are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. None of this is new, of course.