It's a question that's plagued our greatest minds for almost three decades. Yes, she appeared on the cover of the Face magazine next to the tagline "bigger than Pammy" in 1997, and yes, in 2006 lad mag FHM created a whole TV special designed to find the "real" tomb raider. But what does science say? In a world where American academics can't use the word "women" without jeopardising their scientific funding, it's a relief that a gambling site called Casino Days is willing to do this important work, recently ranking "The Top 10 Most Attractive Video Game Characters According to Science". Using the so-called "golden ratio" – which determines how beautiful someone is by measuring their facial features – the company has found that Lara Croft is the second most attractive video game character in the virtual world.

Welcome to the whimsical world of topiary with bushes, inspired by the beloved characters of Nintendo and Sega! Topiary is the art of shaping plants, such as bushes and trees, into decorative or ornamental shapes. With a little creativity and some pruning shears, you can transform your garden or landscape into a fun and playful homage to your favorite video game characters. Let's explore some topiary ideas for your garden or landscape, inspired by the colorful and iconic characters from Nintendo and Sega! The Mario brothers are some of the most recognizable video game characters in the world.

AI image generators have been responsible for so much in the last few months. Barely a day goes by without us discovering some new experiment, whether it's resurrecting late celebs or creating a tool so we can turn anyone into a Pokémon. Now someone's used them to enhance what 30 years ago was the cutting edge in video game graphics. An artist has fed the characters of Sega's nineties fighting game Virtua Fighter through an AI image generator, turning the original 3D polygon graphics into photorealistic images (well, almost). To see how this technology works, take a look at our piece on how to use DALL-E 2 (opens in new tab).

Your partner asks you why the little, evil dudes in a certain game called Overlord speak as if they were stolen from a Monty Python sketch. Your terse response--being an evil Overlord while commanding a horde of unruly minions is hard goddamn work, after all--is that someone was paid a good amount of money to make them sound that way. But the question sticks in your mind as the in-game banter continues to amuse, so much so that you find yourself laughing out loud. As the credits roll, you make sure to note the person responsible for the quips and barbs: Rhianna Pratchett. After a quick Google search, you find that she's the daughter of the famous Discworld author Terry Pratchett, and that she began as a gaming journalist before crossing over to write for games rather than about them.

It sounds like the set-up for a violent revenge movie. Low-ranking yakuza Ichiban Kasuga takes the blame for an inter-clan assassination and does 18 years in prison to protect the organisation's patriarch. But, on his release, the gang disowns him and the boss, who he considers a father figure, shoots him and leaves him for dead. Surely, the stage is set for bloody retribution? Kasuga is not that kind of protagonist.

If the idea of navigating through dense character customization menus in a video game is too daunting, fret not! A team of artificial intelligence developers is on the case, Synced Review reports. A new AI tool can take a picture of your face, map your features, and automatically turn them into a video game character, according to research shared on the preprint server ArXiv last week -- a fascinating preview of how AI could come to create richly personalized digital content in gaming and beyond. Specifically, the AI generates characters in the style of the popular Chinese game "Justice Online" -- half the AI developers work for NetEase, the company behind the game. The researchers write that their tool was first integrated into the game in October. Since then, they report that it's been used by over 1 million Chinese gamers who wanted to create as lifelike a character as possible.

The current wave of virtual assistants owes a lot to a sidekick from one of the most popular video games of all time. The release of Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001 introduced Master Chief's AI partner Cortana, popularizing a lot of the common characteristics that are now shared by real-world AI helpers. Cortana was a friendly, helpful female voice in your ear, one who blurred the line between companion and digital tool. She sounded an awful lot like Siri -- and she did it a decade before virtual assistants became indispensable features of our smartphones and homes. Halo didn't invent the concept of an AI helper.

Note: This article contains spoilers for the show Westworld. Imagine you find yourself in the middle of the Wild West in the 1850s, a rifle at your side and a sweaty ball of cash in your fist. You strut into a shanty saloon like everything in the world is yours. While you wait for your shot of whiskey, an indescribably attractive dark-haired stranger approaches you. Your significant other is nowhere in sight.