Martin Sandwich. What a guy.

Mr. Sandwich is your next Resident Evil hero: he'll be playable as one of the characters trying to escape in Resident Evil: Resistance, the multiplayer component of the upcoming Resident Evil 3 remake.

In Resistance, four human players try to escape a scenario infested with zombies, while a fifth enemy player places zombies and other nasty things around the map to kill the escapees. Mr. X is just one of the many things that'll be trying to kill Martin Sandwich.

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Lizzie Carmine gets some amazing new lines in Gears 5, one of which has provided plenty of speculation about the Carmine family at large.

If you get a headshot in Gears 5 multiplayer while playing as Lizzie, she sometimes says "this one's for you, uncle Anthony". This is a reference to Anthony Carmine, the OG Carmine who met his demise at the hands of a Locust sniper in the original Gears of War.

This has some intriguing implications. In Gears of War 2, if you opt to train new recruit Ben Carmine, Dominic Santiago asks Ben if he's got a brother, referencing Anthony. "Yeah all four of us, well three now," replies Ben.

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AMD's Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 have dominated performance in the lower end of the enthusiast graphics card market for a while now, so the announcement of a successor in the form of RX 5500 earlier this year drew a lot of interest. The RX 5500 has since made its debut as an option for pre-built desktops from vendors like Acer and HP but the promised standalone cards never materialised. That changes today as custom designs from a range of AMD partners debut under a new name: the Radeon RX 5500 XT.

So what differences exist between the RX 5500 and 5500 XT? Looking at the reference specifications, there's only a couple of changes - a slightly higher power target of 130W for the XT compared to 110W for the vanilla model, alongside tweaks for clock speeds. However, the custom boards produced by the likes of PowerColor, MSI and Sapphire are free to made their own modifications and both of the cards we were sent by AMD to review are overclocked models with beefy cooling solutions and higher TDPs.

Like the RX 570 and RX 580 before them, both 4GB and 8GB variants are available, priced at 159/$169 and 179/$199 respectively. AMD supplied one of each to test: our 4GB model is the Sapphire Pulse overclocked to 1815MHz, while the 8GB model is a PowerColor Red Dragon running at 1830MHz. One of the biggest questions we want to answer with this review is whether the 8GB model is worth the extra cost as the 4GB option is otherwise just as powerful as its bigger brother. Through testing a range of games at different resolutions, we can show just how important that extra VRAM is - plus where it doesn't make any difference at all.

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Planet Zoo is getting a festive update next week to bring in the holiday season.

The Arctic Pack launches for Planet Zoo on 17th December, and adds four new animals: the arctic wolf, polar bear, reindeer, and dall sheep.

Two new arctic scenarios will offer a host of new challenges in the paid DLC. Additionally, you'll be able to expand to locations in Norway and Mexico in the Arctic Pack, which will cost 7.99.

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UPDATE 5.05PM: In a surprise move, Epic has cancelled its recently-revealed plans to release a Fortnite Annual Pass.

In a statement passed to Eurogamer this evening, the developer said it now had "no plans" to launch it.

And in an even bigger news for Fortnite fans, Epic has confirmed the release of its long-lost Bao Bros skin - which many have been waiting to appear in the game's daily shop for months.

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RuneScape was the introduction to the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games for many gamers; where many of us met our first online friends and learnt about that MMORPG levelling grind from hours of fishing. Even if you've never played RuneScape, then you probably had a friend who did, or maybe there's a chance that, like me, you're still playing to this day.

I've been playing RuneScape, with the occasional break, for over 13 years. Throughout these years I've witnessed both the lows, such as the removal of PvP in the Wilderness between 2007 to 2011, and the highs, such as the release of Old School RuneScape in 2013. I've completed fantastic quests filled with rewarding challenges and great storylines (my favourites are Ritual of the Mahjarrent and While Guthix Sleeps). All the time I've spent in Gielinor also means I've seen the rise of microtransactions and monetisation in RuneScape.

As a subscription based game, RuneScape has had an element of pay-to-play since the membership program was first released in February 2002. Since then the membership cost has slowly risen, but it took 10 years for developer Jagex to introduce a new form of monetisation and it was called Squeal of Fortune.

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Editor's note: Shenmue's a game that can do funny things to people. First time round I was obsessed with AM2's detail-rich world, and its take on a place that seemed oh-so-real - Japan in the mid-80s, specifically life in the unremarkable town of Yokosuka. So obsessed was I that when I first made it over to Japan some years later, the first thing I did was drag my partner to the location that inspired it all - a short hour's ride from Tokyo itself - and was impressed how Shenmue had captured the place.

The sequel went to Hong Kong, while the third game finds itself in rural China, out in Guilin. How faithful exactly is Shenmue 3's take on that world? British-Chinese journalist Lu-Hai Liang was born there at the very time the game takes place, so I was fascinated to get his take on how well Shenmue had captured his birthplace.

I didn't expect to like Shenmue 3. I'd been warned that the game is slow and creaky, and from images I'd glimpsed, the visuals looked like the graphical equivalent of North Korean fashion - simple and outdated. I never played the original Shenmue or its sequel, which came out in 1999 and 2001 in Japan, respectively, on the Sega Dreamcast. Back then I was watching my friend play through the four discs of Final Fantasy 8 on my PlayStation, dreaming of playing football for England, and wondering when the PlayStation 2 was going to come out, with its mythical Emotion Engine. Over the years, I'd heard of the awe and fondness this series evoked in the people who'd played it: the sense of atmospheric reality that Yu Suzuki, the creator of Shenmue, had conjured.

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According to new figures released by Capcom, this year's superb Resident Evil 2 remake has now sold more copies than the PlayStation original's lifetime sales.

Squirrelled away in Capcom Japan's release date announcement for the freshly unveiled Resident Evil 3 remake is word that, as of 4th December 2019, the acclaimed Resident Evil 2 redo has sold "more than 5 million units" on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 since launching in January.

By contrast, the original Resident Evil 2, which initially released in January 1998 on the first PlayStation, has sold 4.96 million units according to Capcom's official figures, placing it at number seven in the publisher's list of best-selling titles.

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Tomorrow marks the return of the annual Game Awards and, as part of the accompanying festivities, it'll be possible to play demos of 13 upcoming indie games, including the long-awaited System Shock remake, Skatebird, Carrion, and more.

The Steam-based event, officially known as The Game Festival, begins tomorrow, 12th December, at 6pm in the UK/10 am PT, and all demos will be available on Valve's platform for 48 hours before they're whisked away forever - even if you have them installed.

Hopefully 48 hours will be enough to get through everything, as there's a load of interesting stuff on offer, including The Game Bakers' co-operative love story Haven, Nightdive Studios' much-delayed System Shock remake, Sundered developer Thuder Lotus' "cozy game about dying" Spiritfarer, be-the-monster 2D horror Carrion, and more.

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In news that manages to be simultaneously surprising and, also, not remotely surprising at all, Microsoft has announced that Forza Horizon 4 is getting a battle royale mode. It's called The Eliminator and it's out tomorrow on Xbox One and PC.

The Eliminator, which comes to Forza Horizon 4 in a free update, pits 72 players against each other as they thunder around Forza 4's open-world Britain, competing in head-to-head races in a frantic attempt to secure new pick-ups and faster cars.

Initially, everyone is seated in their own 1965 Mini Cooper, but upgrades can be earned by locating Car Drops around the world or by coming first in a head-to-head race against another challenger. Once an individual race is complete, the loser is disqualified and the winner can either select an upgrade or steal their opponent's car.

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