My Friend Pedro is a side-scrolling action game in which you kick skateboards at gangster's heads under the guidance of a talking banana. Would you like a longer introduction, or shall we crack on?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Your nameless protagonist (Pedro is the name of the banana, just in case "the talking banana" wasn't specific enough) awakes rather inconveniently in the basement of a mafia hideout. He has no memory of how he got there, and his only companion is a floating piece of fruit that strongly encourages him to kill everyone, which I suppose is as good a motivation as any.

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This week, Mortal Kombat 11 received its first DLC character, the brilliant villain Shang Tsung. I've spent some time getting to grips with his unique moveset, working out cool combos and stealing souls all over the shop.

Shang Tsung is a lot of fun to play, has a wonderful design that incorporates the likeness and voice of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who played Shang Tsung in the '90s Mortal Kombat movie, and has flashy Brutalities and shocking Fatalities. He's everything I could have wanted from Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat 11.

And yet, I've run up against a big problem, and it has to do with Mortal Kombat 11's custom variations system.

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Amidst the chaos of the E3 show floor, dipping into the quiet, colourful world of Journey to the Savage Planet feels like a breath of fresh alien air. Savage Planet has the colour palette and creatures of a particularly designed No Man's Sky planet, the exploration of a classic 3D adventure game, and the campy humour of a Russell T Davies-era Doctor Who episode. And that's all very much my space jam.

Over 45 minutes of playtime, I slowly get to grips with the game's systems. Emerging from my crashed spaceship, I explore, I observe strange bird-like aliens which look like something from Monsters Inc., and then I fall off a cliff and die. I respawn back at the ship, the game's chatty AI narrator telling me a bit of disorientation is natural after being transferred to a freshly-printed new body. I explore some more.

There's some light puzzling here and there. For example, at certain points you need to punt some of those bird aliens into larger, carnivorous alien blobs that block your path. After chowing down, these blobs recoil into a passive state, allowing you to pass. There are resources to mine with your laser tool, and a couple of objectives which require you hunt down enough of these deposits to craft new exploration tools - such as a grapple - so you can explore further.

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UPDATE 20th June 2019: Sega has been in touch to say it still owns the Alpha Protocol IP, and to clarify the game was pulled from Steam due to the expiry of music rights.

Last night, Sega issued a statement saying Alpha Protocol was removed on Steam "following the expiry of Sega's publishing rights". This was incorrect.

Sega didn't expand on its statement about the expiry of music rights, but it probably has something to do with scenes like the boss fight in the video below, which includes Turn Up The Radio by Autograph. Given Alpha Protocol is nine-years-old, re-licensing music for the game probably didn't make much sense to Sega.

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R. Talsorian Games is having a pretty big year. The studio is riding high on the release of The Witcher RPG last year, with expansion Lords and Land in the works. Cyberpunk Red, the latest edition of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG is releasing in August, 15 years after Cyberpunk V3.0. And, of course, Cyberpunk 2077 played a starring role in this year's E3.

Cyberpunk creator and tabletop industry veteran Mike Pondsmith was at the show, mirrored sunglasses and all, so we sat down to talk about Cyberpunk Red, netrunning, that poster and sending CD Projekt Red back to the drawing board on guns.

So, exciting times for R. Talsorian right now...

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The Monster Hunter World Iceborne beta gives you an early hands-on with the upcoming expansion, which releases in full on September 6th.

Exclusive to PS4 players, the Monster Hunter World Iceborne beta is playable without needing to own the base game - and offers several of the expansion's new beasts to fight against.

Here's everything we know so far on Monster Hunter World Iceborne beta - including access, start times, new features to sample and some beta rewards to take into the full release.

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PES 2020 - sorry, eFootball PES 2020 - is rebranding, in case you hadn't noticed. Konami wants this game to be known as the go-to football esport, built on its reputation as the go-to football sim: the serious one for serious football fans, as any Mundial-reading, Italia '90 shirt-wearing, Borussia M nchengladbach scarf-waving hipster would tell you.

Only, until now I honestly thought that was a load of rubbish, because I am not a PES - dammit, eFootball PES 2020 - man, and no it's not just because of the licenses, either. The eFootball game formerly known as PES, for me, has always felt a bit lightweight, a bit too slip 'n' slide. Dare I say it, but to me it's always felt a bit arcadey. I've always felt the ball would ping about a bit too erratically, like one of those flat-surfaced plastic petrol station jobs you used to toe-punt at your little brother - but also still fire into your teammates' feet with unnerving reliability. I don't love how you could get sent off after thirty seconds because every slide tackle lasts at least as long as that Sol Campbell one against Croatia in 2007, where he started in the 18 yard box and is still sliding to this day. I'm not a fan of how you've always had to wait about six seconds, every time the ball went out of play - goal kick, corner, throw in, someone sent off for slide tackling forty yards into a player off-screen, etc. - because the PES logo has to do that annoying swishing thing every chance it gets. Most importantly and more seriously, I've always felt it was too fluid, too open to be a sim. It was arcady - and arcadey is fun, absolutely, but a wild, ludicrous kind of fun. PES hasn't been a sim in years, by my watch, and no amount of you cereal caf flat white sippers could convince me otherwise - but eFootball PES 2020? eFootball PES 2020, I think, is a sim.

I only had a couple of games to judge it on at E3 this year, mind. I played as poster boys Barcelona, obviously, against a decent AI that didn't fall into any of the usual traps of ball-hogging or fun-sapping. One of the headline additions is a kind of close-control dribbling, where you're able to hold a trigger to tease defenders by rolling the ball sideways in front of them before releasing it and sprinting for a sudden burst of pace. The change of pace only really works if you're using a fast enough player, which makes sense, and it's fairly obvious it's been modelled around Lionel Messi, the alien boy face of Barcelona, eFootball PES 2020 and just being good at dribbling in general. Using Messi in particular to test this out feels great, at least in the brief chance I got, and looks remarkably true-to-life, all low-centre-of-gravity wriggling and jittering through lanky defenders, but without that sort of impenetrable reality distortion field that certain football games add to their highest-class dribblers.

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Consistency is everything. Nailing one hot lap is fine - the real trick is stringing together a succession of scorchers all within a split second of one another. That's the essence of endurance driving, really, and it's something that's baked into Assetto Corsa Competizione, a racing-focussed spin-off from Kunos Simulazioni's sensational driving sim Assetto Corsa. It's an officially-licensed take on the Blancpain GT series, which itself feels quietly remarkable; racing games rarely look beyond top-flight series such as F1, but when they do - as in TOCA or GTR 2 - the results can be incredible.

So that's the developer of one of the most satisfying driving sims of recent years picking up the faint lineage of some of the greatest racing games of all time. That's setting some expectations...

And Assetto Corsa Competizione comes so close to delivering on them. It helps that its subject is one of the most vibrant, healthy motorsport series around at the moment - there aren't many places you can see marques such as Aston Martin, Ferrari and Porsche going toe to toe - and Kunos plays to the strengths of GT racing. The cars are sublime in sound and vision, modelled with an enthusiast's eye for detail. Assetto Corsa Competizione has so much of what makes GT3 racing a joy nailed down pat; the door handle-to-door handle racing, the assorted barks and bites of engines, the slapback reverb when coursing down the enclosed concrete walls of the pit straights, and the astounding sensation of pushing a squat GT car to its limits and feeling the heavy splash as it rides out over kerbs.

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This piece contains significant spoilers for Observation!

I doubt it's a common occurrence for people, but for anyone with mental health issues, there's a familiar situation to find yourself in: you're in the aftermath of something you did and you're not sure what it was. You have to pick through the wreckage.

Even without the experience of a dissociative episode, Observation is a tense, sometimes mind-boggling thriller in which you take on the role of a HAL 9000-esque AI, piecing together their space station following an unseen incident. If you have that experience though, as I do, then Observation becomes a weirdly relatable game despite being all about inhabiting a disembodied computer.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops' Zombies mode has been unplayable on PC for a week now, leading to a glut of negative reviews on Steam.

Last week, players noticed a server error message pop-up when trying to access Zombies from Black Ops' main menu. Zombies is a co-op focused mode, but this issue prevents players from playing solo, too.

Here's how it looks:

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