This post was originally published on November 30 2014

A few days before my dad died in August, I got the call I'd been dreading from my mother. She told me it was time to come home for my dad's last days. I live in California, and they live in Alabama. I packed up my PS4, super slim PS3 and PS Vita -- alas, my desktop PC was too big -- and made the journey.

Two weeks ago at EVE Fanfest, a convention for players of space MMO EVE Online, I began hearing odd snatches of conversation: "Dude, the pope's in our hotel." "Did you kiss the ring?" This is at the same time as the real pope is out in Greece meeting with refugees, so, clearly, we're talking about a different pope.

On 5 November 1995, a gamer called CJayC created the Video Game FAQ Archive. Later known as GameFAQs, the site was a hub for video game walkthroughs and FAQs, and later cheats, savegames, screenshots and so on. And that's what it is today, only it's a lot bigger than it used to be.

In the West, Twitch is an internet superpower. In Japan, things couldn't be more different. Mainstream success will be tough, but not impossible. Nothing is impossible.

I played the opening few hours of Batman: Arkham Knight in August. You know what I did after that? I opened up the map, saw that it was forested with icons, and then turned the game off forever.

Some of the games industry's most talented and experienced designers are making the leap from game development to academia. But how do you teach the art of making games?

Sometimes it's censorship. Sometimes it's unfortunate implications. And sometimes it's straight-up unexplainable. But whatever the justification may be, games get renamed all the time when they're released across different regions.

Late last year, it was revealed that Link would become a racer in Mario Kart 8. But that wasn't his first Mario rodeo. Nor was it the first time Zelda crossed over into the Mario series -- far from it.

Games have -- to put it mildly -- a weird approach to love. But love is weird in real-life too. In time for Valentine's Day, this is a celebration of video game romance in all its strange, stalkery, even inter-species forms. Enjoy -- and maybe don't try them out in real life.

Dayshot: Steam sales are good, provided you have self-control. If you don't, you might feel like the Scout above whenever a big sale rolls around.

Featuring excellent pixel art and some self-deprecating humour from the very talented Paul Robertson.

Wandering around New York earlier this week, I found myself in the vicinity of the Nintendo World Store. I thought I'd pop in and have a look. I did not expect to encounter over 300 people queuing around the block.

Dayshot: They should have brought a couple dozen more people. Titled "Level UP", this rather beautiful piece of art was drawn by DeviantArt's deadslug, where it even became a Daily Deviation (i.e. it was featured on the site's front page).

Back in the early 2000s one company ruled when it came to getting attention. From pigeons trained to ruin Wimbledon to people paid to change their names to Turok, Acclaim was the king of press-baiting PR.