Minigames are the coffee Revel of videogames. They are harmless, infrequent and unpleasant to think about. We accept their presence, yet no one has ever eaten a pack of Revels and wished for more coffee nuggets. Nobody completed Final Fantasy X and thought: Needs more Blitzball . That minigames exist as a mild distraction inside the glowing guts of other games is itself ridiculous. Imagine you were on a golf course, and hole 12 turned out to be its own 8-hole pitch n putt. This is stupid, you d think, and then you would play pitch n putt for the rest of the day in a mindless stupor.

Here are the 7 most gratuitous minigames – but do they all deserve to be here?

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It’s finally happening. After 12 years, Valve are making another Half-Life game. It’s called Half-Life: Alyx, it’s a prequel set between Half-Life 1 and 2, and it’s only ever coming to VR.

There was a bunch of information released about the game yesterday, via its official site, interviews with press and so on. If you weren’t desperately sucking up every morsel like a sewer barnacle, then I’ve rounded together the most important snippets for you below.

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Earlier this week, a rumour hit the internet – as it has many times before – that a new Half-Life game was going to be announced at The Game Awards next month. That turned out not to be true, and Half-Life: Alyx was revealed today instead.

Although the initial reveal didn’t end up belonging to The Game Awards and Geoff Keighley, he is involved. He’s producing another ‘The Final Hours Of’ story on the game, as he did on Half-Life 1 and 2, to be released next year. Right now however you can watch a 22-minute conversation about the game between Keighley and Valve developers Robin Walker, Dario Casali and David Speyrer. They discuss the origins of the project, why it’s VR only, their excitement about doors and – most candidly – Half-Life 3.

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Well, ain’t this cute. Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling came out today, planting a microscopic adventure in a fantastical world of insects. It’s unashamedly “a bit like the Paper Mario RPGs”, but those games never came to PC and I hear the last one was a bit naff. I’ll let it slide for now. If Bug Fables manages to capture the charm of a series that made a soulless plumber mascot likeable, though, we could have a family-friendly winner on our hands here.

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Now Valve have formally announced the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx, we can pore and coo over its first screenshots in shiny 4K resolution. The VR exclusive (which Valve tell us really does need to be VR, else “for all intents and purposes it would be an entirely different game”) is set a few years before the return of Gordon Freeman and stars Alyx Vance as she helps build resistance against City 17’s alien occupiers.

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“VR is essential to the experience of Half-Life: Alyx,” Valve have told us following today’s formal announcement of the new VR-only game starring Alyx Vance. Our Graham got to ask a few wee questions of animator Christine Phelan, who explained a fair bit about the game’s origins. She told us it began as an experiment in virtual reality using bits and pieces of previous Half-Lives, then the possibilities of a VR environment became so intrinsic to the game that “for all intents and purposes it would be an entirely different game” without VR and Valve “ultimately decided that doing two versions of the game would diminish both of them.” That’s a shame for me, as someone unlikely to ever own cybergoggles, but I get it.

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Valve today formally announced Half-Life: Alyx, a “full-length” game exclusively for VR. Half-Life is returning after 12 years, though Gordon Freeman seemingly is not and this isn’t Half-Life 3. Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, this one stars future sidekick Alyx Vance in the years before Gordo’s return when she and her dad were building the resistance. And yes, this really is only for VR. Come watch the announcement trailer.

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There are less than three weeks left ’til Father Battlemech’s big steel arse comes down the chimney, kids. A mere two decades after Mechwarrior 4 left off, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries arrives next month. While there’s plenty of big robot fights to look forward to, developers Pirhana Games released a new trailer showing off what would-be space pirates will be doing all that smashing and crashing.

Expansive star maps, complicated loadout screens and constant financial peril? Yup, it’s a MechWarrior game all right.

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I have never watched Narcos, the television program about bad drugsmen with guns being stopped by maybe-not-as-bad lawsmen with guns. After playing the recently-released turn-based tactics ’em up Narcos: Rise Of The Cartel, I have little desire to. I mean, this could be one of those times where TV is all nuanced and considered, while videogames just toss out lines like “pick off those rats one by one until the country is free of vermin,” then hope you delight in shooting Colombian gangsters in the face – but I wouldn’t bet on it.

In any case, watching the show would only serve to remind me of the miserable few hours I have now spent shooting Colombian gangsters in the face. The main problem (of many) is that you can only boss around one unit on each turn, and I’m struggling to imagine a version of this that works.

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I’ve always been drawn to competitive videogames. It’s not hard to see why. They’re the best kind. Competition can be exciting, rich, varied. It gets you interacting with people, pitting your abilities against thinking, improvising, engaged and pivotally human opponents. A competitive context can be both a wonderful generator of interesting decisions, and a platform for genuine connection. I believe in and value these things wholeheartedly, because I’ve extensive experience with both.

I also believe competition has a dark side. It can be the kindling to incendiary ego, stoking a way of looking at the world that leads to, or is at least bound up with, insecurity and distress. I’ve experienced this, too.

Let’s start with me thrashing my Dad at Need For Speed 2.

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