Spider-Man 2 was even better than the original. Not knowing who the antagonists were going to be was truly exciting, and that feeling of swooping through the streets of New York City was even more exhilarating! The side missions were full adventures with their own cutscenes and unique objectives. The performers were all superb and the twists and turns of the plot were exciting. It has to be Tears of the Kingdom. I was never a Nintendo kid – always Sega – and I bounced off of Breath of the Wild in 2017 and haven't touched my Switch since.

Like several million other video game players, I spent many hours last week travelling the galaxy in Starfield, the latest adventure from Bethesda, the creator of Fallout and the Elder Scrolls. But as with a number of my colleagues in the games press, I have spent much of this time wondering what it is about the game that's not quite right, that's lacking somehow. The consensus – summed up neatly in Eurogamer's review and this PCGamesN op-ed – is that the game adheres too closely to the well-worn structure of modern open-world games, where an inescapable main narrative is bulked up with optional side challenges that give the illusion of freedom, without any of the substance or unpredictability, or indeed actual freedom. Starfield represents a highly commodified form of exploration in which player adventures are channeled into endless fetch quests and box-ticking busywork. You're free, but you're unable to create any meaning or narrative of your own.

For the past five years, the YouTuber Bacon_ has been uploading funny video game clips, nearly all of which come from titles made by Bethesda Game Studios. With the release of Starfield this week, Bacon_ has new fodder. "Just trying to get through my shift," which was posted four days ago, shows a Starfield NPC pounding a mining laser into his colleague's crotch. "So Starfield is out, and it's definitely a Bethesda game," Bacon_commented. For video games, technical difficulties come with the territory.

The Guardian's review of space exploration epic Starfield, Xbox's big game of the year, went live this morning – almost a week after other outlets published theirs. This is because Bethesda did not give our reviewer an advance copy, as publishers usually do. Along with several others, including the greatly respected games publications Eurogamer and Edge, we were left waiting until the game's early access release last Friday to play it. Bethesda's reasons for cherry-picking reviewers are known only to itself, but it's far from the only publisher to do this. Sometimes, controlling early reviews is a way to manipulate a game's Metacritic average in the crucial first week of release.

One of the only announcements at this year's Gamescom, an event replete with games to play but usually light on news (as Keith wrote in last week's newsletter), was that the demon-killing, time-deleting action RPG Diablo IV's second "season" would start on 17 October. That means new stuff for its 12 million players to do – vampiric powers feature heavily. But given that this game only came out in June and its first season of new content started in late July, it also means that its developers will have been working nonstop since its launch to get yet more game content ready to go. I have often wondered how the makers of live service games – "forever games" that essentially wish to monopolise a player's attention over an extended period of time, a still relatively new genre and business model that's emerged in the last 10 years – manage these brutal schedules. Twenty years ago, studios would release a game and that would be it; 10 years ago, they'd be on the hook for a patch or maybe a downloadable expansion, but not such an endless stream of content. So I asked Diablo's GM, Rod Fergusson – who has been running games teams for more than two decades, most famously with Epic Games on Gears of War – how they manage it.

Rivalry is a vital element of fandom. Whether its punks v rockers, Star Trek v Star Wars or Marvel v DC, subcultures have always defined themselves by what they're not as much as what they are. Which is why I'm secretly delighted that Sega and Nintendo are apparently releasing their new Sonic and Mario games within days of each other this October. Both Super Mario Bros Wonder and Sega Superstars are nostalgic callbacks to the era of 2D platforming. Both games allow players to select from a range of classic characters and take on the rich, lushly colourful environments in cooperative modes, and both supplement the retro aesthetics with new abilities.

Combining elements of popular world-manipulating puzzlers such as Monument Valley and Chicory, Viewfinder has you exploring a lush, possibly post-apocalyptic environment, where you're able take photos, paintings and sketches and superimpose them on to the world to change the layout, reach fresh areas or open new explorable domains. You may have heard of this one. Bethesda's staggeringly ambitious sci-fi role-playing adventure promises more than 1,000 explorable planets, customisable spacecraft, weapons and outposts, myriad side-quests and an epic story about mysterious alien artefacts. To say this game is important to Xbox would be an understatement of galactic proportions. Set entirely within the walls of ninth-century Baghdad, Mirage has been designed as a condensed Assassin's Creed adventure, following street thief Basim on his quest to become a master hitman.

It's early Monday morning for most of you, but the work week started early for Engadget, with Xbox's big Summer Game Fest showing. Given how many game studios Microsoft now has for its consoles and game streaming service, we were expecting a whole bunch of announcements, trailers and things to have strong opinions on. There were plenty of familiar Xbox reveals -- more Forza announcements, for one -- as well as major updates from Blizzard Activision (soon to be part of the Microsoft family) regarding Overwatch 2 (free to play!) and Diablo IV. Bethesda finally had something more substantial to reveal for its next big game, Starfield. A first look into the game had a lot of No Man's Sky vibes, but with this studio's flair for glossy world-building and narrative.

It's June, and video game fans across the globe know what that means – it's not E3. The old, in-person gaming show has been canceled for the third year in a row, but this summer will still be filled with news and virtual events, thanks in large part to Canada's sweetheart Geoff Keighley. It all takes place in early June, which is like right now, so let's take a look at the schedule for Summer Game Fest and break down what to expect from the studios involved. Summer Game Fest is less a singular event and more a state of mind. It comprises a handful of virtual shows spread over 10 days, starting on June 2nd with the PlayStation State of Play stream.

Patient receives the world's first fully 3D-printed prosthetic eye, Russia may press criminal charges in 2018 ISS pressure leak incident, UK competition regulator orders Meta to sell Giphy.