If the excitement surrounding Borderlands 3's announcement hadn't already shown you the scale of the hype behind this game, look no further than past entries in the Borderlands series. Despite Borderlands 2 having been released all the way back in 2012, the game still has a surprisingly large player base - with over a million unique users playing the game every month.

The figures come from Take-Two Interactive's latest quarterly earnings report, which along with details on Red Dead Online has provided us with some neat information on the Borderlands series. Along with the stat on monthly player numbers, Take-Two revealed the Borderlands series has sold-in 43m copies, with 20m of these made up by Borderlands 2.

Sold-in, by the way, means units sent to retail - so this figure includes game copies currently sat in shops.

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Despite a campaign of review-bombing from disgruntled Borderlands 3 fans upset the game will be a timed Epic Games store exclusive, old Borderlands games have enjoyed a huge surge in popularity on Valve's platform.

Fuelled by the announcement of Borderlands 3 and the release of the free The Handsome Collection Ultra HD Texture Pack, Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Borderlands Game of the Year Edition have all seen a massive uptick in concurrent players.

According to Steam Charts, Borderlands 2 enjoyed a whopping 89.25 per cent gain in average players over the last 30 days, with an impressive peak of 59,333 concurrent players.

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I love Civilization 6, but sometimes I pine for the art style of its equally wonderful predecessor, Civilization 5. Civilization 6's cartoony vibe is all well and good, but when you've got an entire civilisation's worth of people resting on your every decision, a serious look is sometimes required.

Thankfully, there's a mod for that - and this one's from a developer at Firaxis.

The Environment Skin: Sid Meier's Civilization 5 mod for Civilization 6, by the game's art director Brian Busatti, changes the visuals of the game to better match the colours and tones of Civ 5.

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Steam's new anti-review bombing measures appear to be working.

Borderlands 1 and 2 suffered review-bombing on Steam after 2K announced Borderlands 3 will be a six-month timed exclusive on the Epic Games store.

But Valve's new anti-review bombing measures have kicked in, and these "off-topic" reviews are excluded from the review score by default.

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As part of its live, onstage presentation at PAX East, Gearbox confirmed that its long-rumoured Borderlands 1 remaster is real and will be launching on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC next Wednesday, April 3rd.

Gearbox is calling the remaster the "definitive version" of its much-loved 2009 loot-and-shooter. It includes the base game and all DLC, and introduces new weapons, "substantial" visual upgrades (with better lighting, textures, and character models, as well as 4K and HDR on supported consoles), plus various gameplay enhancements and quality of life improvements.

You can, for instance, expect a new mini-map, character heads and skins, gold chests and keys, plus support for 4-player split-screen co-op, up from the original's two.

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For the first 5000 years, nothing much happened. We must have embarked on our epic enterprise sometime in late 2013, though neither of us suspected we were about to spend the next five years embroiled in a seemingly never-ending coop hot-seat game of Civilization 5. If we had, we'd probably have played something else instead. It was folly, but by the time we realised, it was too late; we had become thoroughly invested, the game had taken on a life of its own, and there was nothing else but to see it to its (eventual) end. On and off, we kept chipping away at our task, sometimes meeting every few weeks for a couple of hours, sometimes once every couple of months. But soon our time with the game had to be measured not in months, but in years, and our game of Civilization had become a sort of parallel history to our personal lives.

When I sat down to prepare this article, it felt like historical or archaeological research. My friend and I compared notes, trying to reconstruct what had happened years ago. We gathered our save games from several machines, flash drives and Google Drive. I even rifled through ancient emails which mentioned our game in passing in the hopes of pinning down the timeline. In the end, the oldest save game we could find dates back to January 2016. After about 200 turns (and more than two years of playing), we had just entered the 1860s. After that point, our game is fairly well documented. Before, however, lies nothing but vast stretches of prehistory, a long dark age illuminated by nothing but the faint and flickering spotlights of our unreliable memories. It's easy for beginnings to get lost in the mists of time.

We started our game on either side of a vast lake set in a subcontinent, the south-eastern-most part of a Pangean super-continent. My early empire, Carthage under Dido, occupied the parts between the western shores of the lake and the ocean farther west. My friend's and ally's Celtic empire, led by Boudicca, lay to the east of the lake. We know for certain that soon after our early expansion, we ran afoul of another confederacy, consisting of Rome to the north and Greece to the west, for reasons largely lost to time (possibly, it was the Celtic annexation of the city state of Z rich which exacerbated tensions). Rome declared war against the Celts, dragging Carthage as well as Greece into the conflict. The Celtic city of Truro bore the brunt of Caesar's aggression. Over the course of several thousand years, Truro was taken and eventually retaken again and again, its population decimated in the process.

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There is a saying in architecture that no building is unbuildable, only unbuilt. Structures may be impossible in the here and now, but have the potential to exist given enough time or technological development: a futuristic cityscape, a spacefaring megastructure, the ruins of an alien civilisation. However, there are also buildings that defy the physical laws of space. It is not an issue that they could not exist, but that they should not. Their forms bend and warp in unthinkable ways; dream-like structures that push spatial logic to its breaking point.

The Tomb of Porsena is a legendary monument built to house the body of an Etruscan king. 400 years after its construction, the Roman scholar Varro gave a detailed description of the ancient structure. A giant stone base rose 50 feet high, beneath it lay an "inextricable labyrinth", and atop it sat five pyramids. Above this was a brass sphere, four more pyramids, a platform and then a final five pyramids. The image painted by Varro, one of shapes stacked upon shapes, seems like a wild exaggeration. Despite this, Varro's fanciful description sparked the imaginations of countless architects over the centuries. The tomb was an enigma, and yet the difficulty in conceptualising it, and the vision behind it, was fascinating. On paper artists were free to realise its potential. If paper liberated minds, the screen can surely open up further possibilities. There's no shortage of visionary structures within the virtual spaces of video games. These are strange buildings that ask us to imagine worlds radically different to our own.

Whilst many impossible formulations are orientated towards the future, there are also plenty from the past. The castle in Ico is one example of this. During the Renaissance, Europe was obsessed, not with future utopias, but with ancient Greece and Rome. While the box art of Ico is famously inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, the long shadows and sun-bleached stone walls only make-up a portion of the game's mood. It is the etchings of Giovanni Piranesi that best capture what it's like to explore the castle's winding stairs and bridges. Piranesi's imaginary Roman reconstructions were absurdly big - so colossal you could get lost in just the foundations. In a similar way, Ico's castle is impossibly large, the camera zooming out in order to overwhelm you and build up the unfathomable mystery of its origin and purpose.

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"I forget everything between footsteps.

"'Anna!' I finish shouting, snapping my mouth shut in surprise.

"My mind has gone blank. I don't know who Anna is or why I'm calling her name. I don't even know how I got here. I'm standing in a forest, shielding my eyes from the spitting rain. My heart's thumping, I reek of sweat and my legs are shaking. I must have been running but I can't remember why.

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Actor and voice actor William Morgan Sheppard, known for his work in video games and sci-fi television series, has died at the age of 86.

Those familiar with Sid Meier's Civilization series will best recognise Sheppard as the narrator of Civilization 5. He also voiced Colonel Hargrove in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and Medal of Honor: Frontline.

Outside of video games, Sheppard took on several notable roles in Star Trek, such as Quatai in Star Trek: Voyager episode Bliss, and Data's grandfather Ira Graves in The Next Generation episode The Schizoid Man. He also played the older version of Canton Everett Delaware III in Doctor Who episode The Impossible Astronaut.

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For a very limited time (just over a day and a half at the time of writing), PC owners are able to snag a free copy of what I, personally, would deem one of the most overlooked games of the last few years - The Darkness 2.

Head over to Humble today and you can claim a free copy of the 2012 paranormal mafia shooter for absolutely nothing. Your game will be delivered as a Steam key and is compatible with PC or Mac.

For those unlucky enough to have not played The Darkness 2 when it launched, the game tells the story of Jackie Estacado, head of a brutal New York crime syndicate who also happens to be host to a ruthless demonic force known only as The Darkness. This means that in addition to battling rival mob bosses and his own personal struggles, he also has to quite literally battle for control of his own body.

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