If you were fretting about having to abandon your Warzone progress for the next Call of Duty, then here's a surprise for you: Black Ops Cold War will share progression with Warzone, including battle pass progression - and many of your current unlocks will carry across.

The information comes from Activision's FAQ page, which details that Warzone and Cold War are going to be rather intricately linked. Warzone will share content with Cold War, while Black Ops will include "shared progression features" to add inventory items that can be used in both titles. (In fact, we may have already seen a hint of this with the Bay of Pigs SKS that Warzone players were able to acquire during the in-game Cold War reveal event.)

On top of this, Warzone players "will still have access to Modern Warfare content they earned previously, like Operators and weapon blueprints". It seems this is linked to a shared battle pass system between Warzone and Cold War, which will unlock post-launch content with "unified progression" across both games. This will likely take a similar approach to the way the battle pass currently works in Warzone, with "base weapons, customisation items and more" unlocked by playing.

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Netflix has released new details of its upcoming live-action Resident Evil TV series, which will star a set of familiarly-named children.

"When the Wesker kids move to New Raccoon City, the secrets they uncover might just be the end of everything," Netflix's description of the series states. "Resident Evil, a new live action series based on Capcom's legendary survival horror franchise, is coming to Netflix."

We've been hearing about Netflix's plans for a Resident Evil TV show for 18 months now - though this concept sounds different to the one which was previously floated. In February, word of a series set in a location named Clearfield was published and then pulled by Netflix. Its description suggested it would involve Umbrella Organisation and its links to a decommissioned asylum, as well as to politicians in Washington DC.

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Hotshot Racing finally has a release date and it's only a few short days away, with the 90s-styled arcade racer from Lucky Mountain Games and Sumo Digital hitting PC, Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on September 10th.

It marks the end of almost a decade long journey for what was once known as Racing Apex, with the title changing as arcade racing experts Sumo Digital came onboard to help out. It's a fairly expansive thing, with multiplayer for four players in local splitscreen or for eight players online, and with a suite of game modes - oh, and it's 60fps on all platforms (though I'm not sure if that's across all modes).

We'll have a review up for you a couple of days before Hotshot Racing comes out early next month.

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Valve will release a new update for Left 4 Dead 2, almost 11 years after its co-operative zombie shooter was first unleashed.

The Last Stand does not yet have a release date - the finer details are still on their way, Valve has said in an official blog post - but the update is very real.

It is, as Left 4 Dead 2 fans will likely know, a community-made effort (this isn't the first time Valve has approved community content for a long-dormant game and released it under an official guise).

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Confirming a leak that emerged before the game's reveal, official listings have now verified that Black Ops Cold War has a "cross-gen" bundle: meaning you'll have to pay more for a next-gen upgrade. And boy is the upgrade path complicated - although at least it's all coming with cross-generation cross-play.

Pages on the PlayStation and Microsoft stores price the cross-gen bundle at £64.99, compared to the standard current-gen edition which costs £59.99. Buying the digital standard edition means you can later upgrade to the PS5 or Xbox Series X version through either the PlayStation Store or Microsoft Store, likely for a fee given the standard edition is cheaper than the cross-gen bundle.

When it comes to physical editions, things get a little more complicated: the standard physical PS4 version will be upgradable to the PS5 version through the PlayStation Store (probably still for a fee). The standard physical Xbox One version, however, cannot be upgraded to the Xbox Series X version - so you'll have to buy the more expensive physical next-gen edition. Not that they look all that different.

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To me, Frostpunk is a game about pressure, it provides the context for everything you do. What you build depends on where you're being stretched thinnest. Are you running out of coal? Research and improve your coal production. Are you out of food? Do the same for food. Has the temperature dropped and you need better insulation? You'd better hurry up because it definitely isn't getting any warmer. It never lets up. When you think you've solved one problem, Frostpunk provides another two, and every time it does, it dangles a horrid solution in front of you.

Do you want to pass a law enabling child labour? I know you wouldn't normally but look at the situation you're in: children could collect coal, is that really so bad? How about cooking the odd corpse? No one needs to know and you don't have any food. Gradually you find yourself down a road you never thought you would be until you're suddenly staring dictatorial rule in the face. Then again, would it really be so bad?

Frostpunk was thrilling, but in On the Edge, the game's just-released second expansion,
things work slightly differently. The old pressures are still there but they're rejigged because now, there's something else to contend with: inter-settlement relationships. You see, you're not the only people out there. In fact, you're not even in control of the main settlement, New London, any more. You're an offshoot of it, an outpost, established around an Army Warehouse (a new kind of building) where you're to extract materials from it.

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Fortnite's Marvel-themed Chapter 2 Season 4 launches today on all platforms except iPhone, iPad and Mac - but developer Epic Games has still snuck in one final update for those devices.

Tucked in last night under the radar was a small "adjustment" patch for the game on iPhone and Android which added... the evil Tart Tycoon character seen in the game's #FreeFortnite video.

This video played in-game to all players on the evening Fortnite was delisted by Apple (and on Google Play) for circumventing both platforms' official payment methods. An in-game tournament held last weekend then allowed players to earn the Tart Tycoon skin for free relatively easily.

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When Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was first asked to fly the mail from Alicante to Casablanca, he asked another pilot, Guillaumet, to talk him through the terrain in advance. This was 1926 and aviation was a somewhat magical business. "Guillaumet didn't teach me about Spain," Saint-Exupéry later wrote, "he made Spain my friend. He didn't talk about hydrography, or population figures, or livestock. Instead, when talking about Guadix, he spoke of three orange trees at the edge of a field."

The world looks very different from the air. Different priorities and different readings emerge. Three orange trees can take on supreme importance. "Little by little," Saint-Exupéry concludes, "the Spain on my map became a fairytale landscape."

Saint-Exupéry went on to write an actual fairytale, of course, and The Little Prince is a book in which the thrum of early aviation is always present, a constant warm purring at the threshold of hearing. But in Wind, Sand and Stars, the memoir in which he describes his work on the mail route, he goes on to suggest that, in the decades since those early rattling adventures, something has been lost. Wind, Sand and Stars was written only 13 years after his Spanish gig, and yet: "Today...the pilot, the engineer and the radio operator aren't embarking on an adventure...but shutting themselves in a laboratory. They respond to instrument needles, not the unfolding of a landscape."

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Grounded, Obsidian Entertainment's delightful (and occasionally terrifying) game about inch-high garden survival, has just received its first major early access update, adding a big scary bird, water fleas, a new perks system, new craftable items, and more.

Obsidian's plans for Grounded have so far remained somewhat shrouded in mystery, aside from the developer's pledge to keep expanding on the game's already enjoyable core until full release with the likes of new features and story content based on community feedback. Today's update, however, brings something tangible to the studio's expansion plans, introducing a broad range of new features touching on all areas of the game.

Robo pal BURG.L, for instance, now offers two new types of quests - Chipsleuth quests which require players to locate chips in specific locations around the yard, and Artificer quests that task players with crafting specific items - with both rewarding Raw Science.

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If, like me, you foolishly forgot to update Modern Warfare in time for this evening's Black Ops Cold War reveal event, then worry no more - this recap of events is for you.

Players who logged into Warzone at 6:30pm this evening were presented with a "Know your History" playlist, which popped them into Verdansk... but not as we know it. Glitchy Cold War images appeared in the loading screen, and all location names were blacked out on the map. Then the game began in earnest, with players required to complete tasks on a checklist such as looting and killing for intel, and hunting down keys marked on the map. Respawns were on, mercifully.

A particularly cryptic task asked players to "wield the weapon", but gave them only the map coordinates rather than a marked map location. It was a true treasure hunt that kept players on their toes (and gave me flashbacks to my DofE expeditions), but those who were successful found Black Ops character Frank Woods hanging out in Verdansk - and a special Bay of Pigs SKS blueprint for their troubles. Woods is also coming to Modern Warfare as an operator, by the way.

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