Five of the Best is a quite-new weekly series celebrating the incidental details in games we don't celebrate enough. Things like maps - everyone loves maps. They're the kind of things we can't do without, the kind of things which give games so much flavour and charm.

It's also designed to promote discussion because, let's face it, it's all subjective, what someone thinks is best. I have different ideas to you and, um, most people, apparently, and that's OK! I think. I hope. So join in. We've had some lovely discussions so far and you've reminded me of so many things. It's Friday after all, what else are you going to do - work?!

You can find all the previous Five of the Bests in a handy archive.

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Ubisoft has given us our best look yet at Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered, which will launch 29th March on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

It looks like it'll also be available on Nintendo Switch too, although Ubisoft doesn't want to announce that yet.

Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered is, as its name suggests, a shinier version of the series' North American set entry, originally released back in 2012.

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UPDATE 14/2/19: Ubisoft has now confirmed Assassin's Creed 3 for Nintendo Switch, with a launch date of 21st May.

This is a little later than it will be available on other platforms as part of Assassin's Creed Odyssey's season pass. But, of course, Odyssey is only available on Nintendo Switch in Japan where it is a special streaming-only game.

Here's a trailer with a slightly choppy frame-rate:

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Spurred by last week's announcement of an Assassin's Creed 3 remaster, the game's director Alex Hutchinson has reflected on what he would change - and keep the same - if he made the game now. One of the biggest changes? That six-hour opening prologue.

Assassin's Creed 3 opens with a big surprise - that you do not initially play as Connor, the character on the front of the game's box, but his father Haytham. You're not even initially in America, either. What follows is a slightly overlong but genuinely surprising opening - but one some feel holds the rest of the game up. It's something Hutchinson now agrees with:

"We should have broken up Haytham's intro into chunks and interspersed them throughout the game to get to Connor faster," he wrote in a lengthy thread on Twitter. "The shock reveal of another playable character was great, but the start was too slow."

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Word has it that Assassin's Creed Odyssey is shaping up to be a bit good. But if its speculated 100+ hour playtime somehow isn't quite enough Assassin's Creed for you to be getting on with, there's some extra good news: Ubisoft has outlined its post-launch DLC plans for Odyssey.

Ubisoft's post-release DLC will take two forms: there is, as you probably already guessed, a Season Pass in the works, and that'll be joined by free content for all users.

Free stuff first, Odyssey is set to receive a constant flow of new story content, in-game events, and other assorted additions. The Lost Tales of Greece, for instance, is a series of regular episodic quest lines that will feature "familiar faces and new characters from the world of Assassin's Creed Odyssey". These will be joined by weekly events which introduce a powerful new ship or mercenary to the world for players to hunt down, plus daily and weekly Contracts.

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Assassin's Creed Odyssey features two playstyles to choose from: Guided Mode, described as the "more traditional" experience, and Exploration Mode, labelled as "a newer approach".

Exploration Mode, its description continues, is "the way Assassin's Creed Odyssey is meant to be experienced".

So what is Exploration Mode? I've seen a few references to it online describing it as a "Breath of the Wild" mode, reminiscent of Nintendo's organic approach to open-world design seen in the latest Zelda. And it sort of is - especially when compared to the old-school Assassin's Creed games released before last year's Origins - but there are still differences.

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There's been a lot of talk lately about how long Assassin's Creed Odyssey is - more than 100 hours, its developers say - and it's been interesting to see the response. Time was, you'd ask how long your 40 was expected to last, hear a large amount of hours and think, great - the longer the better. But for me, anyway, having less time to play games these days is certainly a thing. And I think the games we all play are more demanding of the time we have to spend with them. Perhaps demanding is the wrong word, but more and more, I feel like each game I enjoy playing is trying to be the only game I enjoy playing, with little time to play anything else.

So maybe that 100 hours number sounds great - or maybe, like me, you still have side-missions from last year's Origins sitting around to mop up. Will it really take 100 hours to finish Odyssey's core campaign? It's something I had in mind while playing the game's first eight hours at a lengthy preview session last week. It was really only just enough time to get properly bedded into Odyssey's various gameplay loops, but more than long enough for the game's brilliant story to deliver its first couple of gut punches.

Odyssey delivers some of the best writing in the series by a country mile, evident from the three hours of mid-campaign missions I played just prior to E3, but noticeable too even in the brief lead-up to the Medusa boss fight on offer at gamescom. I've been impressed by the nuance and dry humour present in Odyssey's storytelling, and in particular I've been blown away by the delivery from Kassandra's voice actor Melissanthi Mahut, who puts in a passionate performance which easily rivals that of previous franchise bests. There's a lot to work with here - Odyssey definitely lives up to its name - and I've been hugely curious to see how the game kicks off. These first few hours deal with that series-first choice of being able to pick between siblings Alexios and Kassandra to play as throughout the rest of Odyssey, and lay out the family-related drama this latest Assassin's Creed protagonist is set to deal with. The following paragraph discusses some of these events - so skip over this if you want to remain completely unspoiled.

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An enormous boss fight against Medusa is not something you would have expected from an Assassin's Creed game a few years ago. God of War? Of course. Castlevania, sure. But to face off against the mythological monster in a series so concerned with history as Assassin's Creed? You'd think the developers had spent a little too much time in the Animus for their own good.

And yet it fits this new breed of Assassin's Creed - one unashamedly wearing its RPG systems as obviously as Ezio draped that cloak over his shoulder before you followed yet another NPC over a rooftop. Assassin's Creed has always dabbled in myths and conspiracy stories, but never quite this overtly. Since last year's Origins, however, the series has embraced ancient times and allowed itself a little more wiggle room to work in its fantastical elements. It fits - featuring the importance of the time period's Gods and other legendary figures and explaining their feats using connections to the series' own legendary First Civilisation.

Assassin's Creed has often used the First Civ as a creator of macguffins (the various Apples of Eden, for instance, First Civ objet d'arts which control human will) - but has also often kept the really wacky stuff at arm's length - hidden away for hardcore players to find, and rarely if ever mentioned during the game's marketing campaign. But this is a different Assassin's Creed era - and especially so with Odyssey as it takes place before the actual Brotherhood was founded. Fans have asked Ubisoft what Odyssey has to do with the Assassins if it does not include any. Ubisoft's answer is that Odyssey features the mythological elements the series has established over the past decade - which may well be why our Gamescom demo is all about the First Civ now.

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There will be no new Assassin's Creed game released in 2019, publisher Ubisoft has confirmed.

Ubisoft boss Yves Guillmot confirmed the news today at Gamescom 2018, Gamespot reported.

It comes after 2017's Origins was praised for reinventing the series after taking a unique yearly break in the formerly annual franchise.

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Apple has given the go-ahead for a new comedy set in a video game studio.

The half-hour scripted comedy is from Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day, the writers of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Variety reports. McElhenney will also star in the show.

The show doesn't have a name yet, nor has it been officially announced. But according to the Hollywood Reporter, it will "explore the intricacies of the human condition through hilarious and innovative ways".

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