It never occurred to me that the herbs might be real. Why would it? I was used to picking things like Ghost Mushrooms and Dreamfoil, and I'm pretty sure they're not real. And so to me, walking around the wilderness of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion - what a lovely game that was, and what a lot of walking I did, like some kind of possessed rambler in plate mail - there was nothing particularly notable about ripping handfuls of St. Jahn's Wort and Bergamot out of the ground while I explored. Just another made-up herb, I thought. And who came up with the name St. Jahn's Wort anyway? It sounds disgusting. What is it, shavings?

Chokeberry, Cairn Bolete, Elf Cup, Lady's Smock, Monkshood: they all sounded made-up to me. I mean Elf's Cup for Christ's sake! (It'd be a good cup to toast with, though, wouldn't it? "Here's to your good elf!" and that.) They're all straight from the pages of fantasy, surely?

Then one day everything changed. I was in a health store, don't hold that against me, when something caught my eye: a packet on a shelf claiming to be able to heighten my mood. St. John's Wort. I practically fainted into the Rescue Remedies. It's real?!

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If you've been wondering how Call of Duty's long-running wave-based Zombies mode will manifest in Black Ops Cold War when it launches in November, developer Treyarch is finally ready to share some answers, and, as luck would have it, a bunch of gameplay footage too.

This year's undead narrative, introduced as Die Maschine, whisks players back to the 1980s, to a world where the multiverse has now been unified - if not quite scrubbed free of the zombie menace - following the conclusion of Black Ops 4's Zombies mode.

Die Maschine pays homage to Zombies mode's very first map, Nacht der Untoten, sending players - serving as part of Grigori Weaver's CIA-backed international response team Requiem - deep into a derelict World War 2 bunker to uncover its terrifying secrets.

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Google Stadia finally gets the Crowd Choice feature this week.

Crowd Choice, a kind of choose your own adventure system for those watching streamers play Stadia games on YouTube, goes live alongside the release of Dead by Daylight on 1st October 2020.

It'll also be available with Baldur's Gate 3 when Larian's hotly-anticipated role-playing game launches on Google's streaming service on 6th October.

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Grounded, the light-hearted Honey I Shrunk the Kids-style survival game from Obsidian, is rolling out a big Halloween update today around 6pm UK time.

Download it and you'll get new building items, decorations and bug fixes (by which we mean... literal fixes for bugs).

Grounded's garden gets a new world landmark, Frankenline, a creepy discarded Etch-a-Sketch you can actually draw on, a Jack-o-Lantern and edible candy corn you can forage. The map's Hedge area has also been reworked.

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Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has told employees it will require them to work six-day weeks until the game's November launch, breaking a previous promise not to force compulsory overtime to finish the project.

"Starting today, the entire studio is in overdrive," CD Projekt Red boss Adam Badowski told employees via email on Monday, as revealed by Bloomberg [paywall].

"I take it upon myself to receive the full backlash for the decision," Badowski continued. "I know this is in direct opposition to what we've said about crunch. It's also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while back - that crunch should never be the answer. But we've extended all other possible means of navigating the situation."

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When it came time to choose our top 4K TV for HDR gaming, there was only one real option: the LG CX OLED. It boasts impressive contrast, low input lag and pixel response times and support for the latest technologies - including the HDMI 2.1 standard that allows 4K 120Hz HDR gameplay. Today, the 55-inch CX has dropped by £300 to its lowest-ever price of £1399 - just in time for Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Here's why we think this TV is so good, where to find it and how much cheaper it's likely to get.

First of all, let's cover where this deal is available. We've spotted the same £1399 price at three retailers so far: Amazon, Currys and John Lewis. While the first two may be the most obvious choices for most people, it's worth mentioning that John Lewis do offer a five year guarantee on their TVs, including the CX. You'll also get a free LG FN4 true wireless headphones with the CX from Currys or John Lewis, worth £99.

Anyway, here are links to the CX at each retailer:

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Assassin's Creed Valhalla will include the logo of the AC Sisterhood fan movement, which players will be able to wear as a tattoo.

Ubisoft team members working on Valhalla reached out to the AC Sisterhood group to request the use of the logo.

The AC Sisterhood is a fan initiative created over the summer in the wake of the wave of sexual assault and misconduct allegations involving Assassin's Creed developer Ubisoft, and after reports of how the series had suffered from repeated high-level interference to minimise the role of multiple female main characters.

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I used to live on an island. What I loved most about that temporary home was the very particular geography. The Outer Hebrides are flat and relatively barren, save for a few dark hills squatting on the horizon. There's a real mood to the place, and an uninterrupted horizon - somehow the sky appears bigger than anywhere else in the world. Probably because of the lack of trees. Everytime my grandad arrived at the airport from the mainland, he'd make the same comment on this absence - "It's quite bleak, isn't it?" It was hard to argue the point. Also unique to these Scottish isles (and the west coast of Ireland) is the "machair", which is Gaelic for a type of low lying grassy plains. Because of how exposed the land is there, sand continually blows ashore - swept up by great Atlantic gales - and so you get this habitat of flower blooms and abundantly rich insect and bird life, stretching up and behind the island's long coastlines.

And it's those great coasts and beaches that the isles are best known for. You could spend hours scouring the sands for lost treasures. One moment you would discover the venerable carcass of a dolphin or whale, hauled up onto the land by wild waves. Just along from that the ocean has spat out a different kind of carcass... some rusted ship engine, hoisted up onto a group of jagged rocks. It's a striking contrast. Decomposing machinery crashing against raw wilderness. The sublime sitting besides the mundane.

The Outer Hebrides are full of these little juxtapositions, and I'm not the only one to notice. Jonathan Meades toured Scotland in his 2011 documentary, Off Kilter, and fell in love with the "unsurpassable strangeness" of the islands. Last year, he collaborated with photographer Alex Boyd on a book - "The Isle of Rust". Based on Meades' episode on the isles of Lewes and Harris, the glossy tome is filled with images that set our rusty leftovers against an impressive backdrop of austere landscapes. Old farming equipment withering away on a wind-blasted hill.

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Pirates looking to give themselves an aesthetic boost upon the ocean, while also doing something for a good cause at the same time, can now purchase Sea of Thieves' striking new Sails of Union, with proceeds going to Stand Up To Cancer.

By day, the Sails of Union are pleasant enough affairs, providing an appealing splash of yellow for tastefully minded crews to admire and enjoy; by night, though, they're something a little bit special, resembling a beautiful star field shimmering against a darkened sky.

You can watch the Sails of Union work their magic in the trailer below, and if your head is suitably turned as a result, or if you simply fancy supporting a good cause, they're available now on Steam and the Microsoft Store for £4.99/$5.99 USD.

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Come the arrival of Elite Dangerous' major Odyssey expansion early next year, Commanders suffering from a severe case of butt-clench will finally be able to clamber out their cockpits and step foot on solid ground; planets we've already had a glimpse at, but now Frontier has offered a more thorough look at the interstellar japes awaiting players as they first-person their way around social hubs such as space stations and settlements as part of its latest developer video.

Players wanting to stretch their legs somewhere a little more lively than the relatively barren wastes of Elite Dangerous' new explorable planets can disembark at the likes of outposts, planetports, spaceports, even dustbowl-like settlements back on terra firms, and here they'll be able to find work, undertake missions, or simply do a bit of socialising with NPCs.

Odyssey will, of course, mark the first time Elite has had fully modelled and animated NPCS in-game (they'll be generated based on Elite's background simulation to reflect the dominant faction in a particular area), and they're able to move around, adding a bit of personality to the world, and giving players the opportunity to speak and interact with them.

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