To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the entries in the Games of the Decade archive, and read our thinking about it in an editor's blog. Meanwhile, here's a little something extra.

It's been a wonderful decade for video games, and no messing. But not everyone has been invited to the party. Here we're taking a few minutes to remember a few of our most notable absences of the last ten years.

This should have been the decade for TimeSplitters. Cruelly canned for being too comedic a shooter without a serious, gruff bloke to bung on the box, this franchise's death dates back to a time when the only shooter on the menu was forced to grow a beard to suit a suit's idea of manpoints.

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To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. This is the last entry - you can now find all the articles in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog. Stay tuned for a couple more special articles tomorrow.

Fez is one of those magic-trick games. You could call it a gimmick without being disrespectful - a good gimmick can enliven any game - but I'd define a gimmick as a novel, repeatable concept that gives you a little jolt of satisfaction when you encounter it. What Fez does is different. Its trick is very simple, but has deep implications. It defines everything about the game. It constantly changes the way you think. Playing the game, you perform this trick all the time, and yet every time you do it you still do a little internal gasp as it reorders your perceptions. It's impossible, but it's real. It's magic.

The trick is this: Fez is a two-dimensional platform game set in a world where three dimensions exist, but only two of them can be perceived at once. This fact is so brain-scrambling that the inhabitants of this world have forgotten it, or repressed it. It is revealed to our hero Gomez when he puts a magical red hat on his head. From then on, he - you - can rotate his world through four viewpoints, snapping it back into a flat plane where everything is reordered and much is revealed. The game world's three-dimensionality, its solidity, is real - it looks like pixel art, but is actually built out of cubes - but it can only be seen fleetingly as you flick from one plane to another, the way an illustration in a pop-up book leaps from the page and then collapses back in again. You have to hold it in your head.

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You'd be forgiven for missing it, but ex-Westwood Studios developers quietly announced a spiritual successor to Command & Conquer: Renegade this month.

Petroglyph Games is the Los Angeles-based studio founded by the last group of ex-Westwood employees who left when EA shut what remained of the Command & Conquer developer down in 2003.

Petroglyph has released a number of real-time strategy games over the years, including Star Wars: Empire at War, Rise of Immortals, Grey Goo and, most recently, Conan Unconquered.

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Broly (DBS) comes out as a DLC character for Dragon Ball FighterZ on 5th December, Bandai Namco has announced.

Broly (DBS) - aka the Broly seen in the Dragon Ball Super anime - is the sixth and final season two DLC character for Arc System Works' superb fighting game.

The video below shows the powerful saiyan in action.

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In hindsight, and with all apologies, Spelunky is like smoking. I got into it in part because it's what all the cool kids were doing at the time. It was embarrassingly easy to get wrong at first, but quickly became a soothing, easily-consumed daily habit. This lead to an effortless-seeming fluency, internalising both the basic routines and the nuanced flourishes that come from years of increasingly instinctive repetition. And it kills me. Death is certain, usually accidental but never escaped - if you reach either of the game's endings, something it took me about three years and perhaps five hundred hours' play to be able to do more than one in every twenty tries, the final score screen lists cause of death as "old age".

The magic comes from the ingredients being so simple. At heart, it's a roguelike disguised as a basic and sweetly-styled platformer: you run, you jump, you have a simple melee attack and you have some bombs you can throw. Everything you encounter has a very simple moveset, and kills you. Spikes kill you instantly if you fall on them. Blocks kill you instantly if they fall on you. Bats drift towards you on a shallow diagonal trajectory, and can easily nibble away your health points if you don't hit them just so. Frogs hop, and do the same. Small aliens zap you from their saucers - although you can bring the saucers down by throwing something, which causes them to explode and kill you. This can happen on the other side of the level, without your involvement, and you only know it from the sound of a distant explosion from which a landmine comes flying out, and hits you, and kills you.

On each death, the world is remade: each cutely-themed level randomly regenerated, the enemies randomly placed, the route to the exit strewn with challenges that are individually very simple but combine in endlessly treacherous ways: the bat which knocks you into a tiki trap, the monkey that knocks you into a spike pit, the yeti which smacks you into the void. The appeal of Spelunky is the same live, die, repeat routine so cherished in the Souls games, but with a platformer's simplicity that makes it far easier to understand and far more appealing to retry.

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The boss of the Atari VCS has said the console is on track for launch in March 2020 - but Indiegogo backers face yet another delay.

Over 11,000 people backed the Atari VCS on Indiegogo in 2018 to the tune of 2.3m, but the controversial console has faced a number of delays and tough questions about the viability of the product.

In a new self-published Q&A on Medium, VCS boss Michael Arzt insisted the machine was set for a full retail launch in March 2020, and even published pictures of the first Atari VCS pre-production units, fresh off the assembly line.

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Lucas Pope's dystopian document thriller Papers, Please is, on the face of it, a puzzle game about catching people out, but I think it's actually a game about coping with being punched in the gut, over and over again, with the relentlessly regular beat of a bass saxhorn playing a slow march rhythm.

Bowm! Bowm! Bowm! Bowm!

Amid the stress of trying to catch travellers out as an immigration officer working at the border crossing between fictional Eastern Bloc-style countries Kolechia and Arstotzka (glory to Arstotzka), Papers, Please forces you to decide the fate of not only strangers, but your loved ones. It is impossible to earn enough money to feed, heat and nurse your entire family. So you must decide who should live and who should die in your house. My wife is cold, sick and hungry. My son is cold and very sick. My mother-in-law and uncle are already dead. My son will die without medicine. If I spend the $5 I have spare after paying rent on medicine for him, my wife will probably get very sick and die. Both will get very cold because I can't afford to pay for heating.

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Alright, confession time: I have never finished a runthrough of FTL.

FTL is probably my favourite game. I listen to the soundtrack every day, as I work, or unwind, or try to concentrate for just a minute. But the game? I can't finish it. In fact I'm not even getting close to finishing it, am I. The first run is just the beginning. There are all kinds of variations on your ship, that you unlock by beating that impossible final boss, that I've never used, or even really seen. But I don't care. FTL is not a game I play to finish, it's a game I play to feel at home.

For some reason, I feel incredibly calmed by the fact that space is infinitely, infinitely big and I, as a result, am infinitely, infinitely small. I know some people whose stomachs turn at the thought of that, and to be fair to them I completely understand why. It's not comforting, at least on the surface, to be told that you're insignificant, or that you don't matter, or that, I don't know, everything you've ever thought or said or done will be long, long forgotten soon enough, your hopes and dreams lost to time immemorial, your friends and family gone, your legacy dead, all things meaningless for infinitely longer than they ever had meaning. I do get why you wouldn't want to be reminded of that.

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I'd forgotten how funny The Witcher 3 is.

I laughed a lot while playing this game. I feel like an idiot telling you what amused me because it makes me look simple - but it's the random things people would say. Things like a boy running past me and declaring, "You're grey like my grandma," or the plague cart guy suddenly realising, "Fucking hell that stinks!" I snorted when the guy I took a dive for, in a boxing match, called me a prick afterwards, and I'm still laughing remembering the person who passed me and farted.

I don't want to paint the game as a crude comedy - it's nothing like that - but what I want to get at is how refreshingly unfiltered it all is. The Witcher 3 isn't the fantasy costume party you've been to so many times before. It's a world, like our own, where hard work makes hard people who ain't got no time for pleasantries, and it feels so real because of it.

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Ubisoft's sublime platformer Rayman Legends is currently free to download on the Epic Store.

Granted, you might already be up to your nose-pits in free games by this point, slowly sinking beneath the unstoppable deluge in flailing terror, but there's no denying that Rayman Legends is a worthy addition to any collection, even if it did come out 2013.

Unsurprisingly, Rayman Legends has much in common with its delightful predecessor Rayman Origins, dressing up the series' classic 2D platforming with some breathtaking presentational trimmings. Quite aside from its gorgeous facade though, Rayman Legends is a wonderful, ceaselessly inventive thing (this is still one of my favourite bits of video game silliness ever).

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