New issue on sale now, with Nintendo’s ever-cheery mascot gracing the cover in celebration of his 3DS debut in Super Mario 3D Land. Elsewhere, we look at what the next few years may hold for the Halo franchise, pit Nintendo against Sony as we analyse the handheld market’s future and speak to prolific Japanese developer Level-5 about its finest achievements.

Relive the golden videogame years with this classic book

After the lacklustre celebration of Mario’s 25th anniversary, Nintendo has bounced back with an incredible line-up of releases and events to commemorate this year’s 25th anniversary of The Legend Of Zelda. Here we catalogue every single thing you can look forward to between now and the end of 2011.

New issue on sale now, featuring in-depth coverage and hands-on verdicts on all the biggest games that E3 2010 offered up. Gears Of War 3 leads the charge as we speak to Cliff Bleszinski about what Marcus did next, followed by a round-up of all the big annnouncements and major sequels – with new Zelda, Call Of Duty, Final Fantasy, Halo, Rock Band, LittleBigPlanet, Killzone and Portal games and a host of fresh IPs as well, could the next 12 months be gaming’s finest yet?

One of the most inventive games of recent times appeared on precious few end-of-year lists. It combined classic gameplay with procedural generation, and offered the sort of compulsive challenge that is lamentably absent from modern game design. With the Xbox Live release of Spelunky almost upon us, games™ sits down with its creator, Derek Yu, to talk about the past, the future, and how one can very often lead to the other.

Reviewed