Toys! If only we'd kept all our toys in their original packaging, we'd be cleaning up right now, thanks to eBay. And when we say "cleaning up" we mean "making enough money to afford to buy a mop, to wash that putrid filth, whatever it is, off our bedroom floor".

Frankly, toys have never been more popular. Thanks to the invention of irony, you can now get action figures of everyone from Albert Einstein to Sigmund Freud to Steve "Big" Jobs.

Oh, how we all laugh at such unlikely collisions of pop culture. Quick! Let's stick a plastic lobster in a typewriter, and drink some microbrewery craft beer!

Here are 13 action figures and dolls that weren't ever intended to be ironic; they're merely the product of toy company idiots, who thought somebody might actually want to play with them.

Games have ripped off games ever since the dawn of gaming.

Indeed, ripping off other games has become as ubiquitous within the games industry as Christ's body was - both physically and spiritually - at the Lord's Supper, as referred to in the Lutheran doctrine of Consubstantiation.

Still... much as we're often taken aback by the wholesale ripping-off that goes on between games companies, not everyone has left themselves open to it.

To further illustrate that of which we speak... here are eight or nine solid gaming patents that you might not know about.

Games are cheaper than they used to be. That's a simple fact of economics. 

Yet there seems to be something of a debate raging right now about the cost of games, particularly those which stem from the indie scene.

​On Steam, or the PlayStation and Xbox stores, there's a definite trend towards shorter, sweeter experiences. More concentrated doses of story and/or gameplay. 

Some have argued that a game such as Superhot - currently £16.19 on Steam - is too much to pay, when the main story mode can be finished in around two hours. If you're a super-sizing fatpig like I am, £16.19 roughly equates to two trips to Burger King. 

I can't quite wrap my head around this grumbling, given that there's a lot of extra content in Superhot... not to mention that the developers have promised free updates in the months to come. Also, given that it's one of the cleverest, most original, first-person shooters in living memory, it manages the trick of sticking in the memory. What's to complain about there? Why are people so stupid?

Oh. Hang on. Now my brain is telling me that they're not...

I had a poo earlier. Don't judge me on this; we all do it. Even you, madam.

As usual, I took a magazine in there with me (specifically, an issue of How It Works, if you must know). If you'll excuse the phrase, it runs in the family; my grandad used to take a paper in with him, and do the crossword.

He'd be gone for up to an hour. I'm not quite that bad, but I still like to take my time.

I have done this all my life. Through good times and bad. It's a refuge. A chance to de-stress, and come out feeling a couple of pounds lighter, both physically and psychologically. These days, it's about the only time I can switch off enough to read.

On this occasion, I couldn't focus. I tried to read an article about Vikings, but it wasn't going in. I ended up throwing it across the bathroom. The reason? I could only think about one thing, and that thing was this thing: Superhot. As I have done every moment since I started playing Superhot. And when I'm not playing Superhot, all I want to do is play Superhot, and if I can't play Superhot, all I want to do is talk about Superhot.

​We can scarcely comprehend that Pokemon is 20 years old this week. That's 4,368 in Bulbasaur years! 

What better way to celebrate this milestone in the life of the so-called "Pocket Monsters" than with a cake?

In fact - why don't we celebrate with some 17 Pikachu cakes? That's one cake for every year of the Pokemons' life, barring the last three! Happy birthday, the Pokemon! Here's to another 20 glorious years. 

I'm not sure I ever finished a game on my ZX Spectrum. Playing those games now, as I do from time to time, it's pretty clear why.

​Many of them may be charming, they might be great for their time, but they're not particularly playable. 

Even classics like Knight Lore and Underwurlde are an exercise in endurance: just how much death and battling with the controls can a person stomach?

​The hardware - playing on a little rubber keyboard - wasn't really suited to gaming, ironically.

​It's little wonder that games were considered anti-social for so long: they were barely accessible, and you needed to have a particularly psychotic degree of patience in order to stick with them through the repeated deaths.

These days, games have learned the lessons of the past, they've built and improved on what went before, and for the most part they're broadly accessible. If anything... they're a bit too accessible.

To the rest of the world, the USA's presidential election process is utterly terrifying. A bewildering, drawn-out, jamboree of abuse, shouting, far-fetched claims and lying, it seems less like democracy, and more like anarchy.

Pointless debates between candidates repeating entrenched opinions, speaking to supporters with equally entrenched views... frankly, why do they even bother?

But the important question that has yet to be asked of the candidates is as follows: what video game would you play if you played video games? We imagined their answers.

If you've played the video game Far Cry Primal you'll know how useful bees can be.

​Not only can they do honey and buzzing, but stuff them into a thing and they become a type of bomb.

​We all knew that bees were da bomb - but thanks to Far Cry Primal, they are now literally A bomb (note: not an A-bomb).

But what else can be done with bees? Here are 10 un-bee-lievable facts that you never bee (knew)! 

I've probably mentioned before how I killed a big rat a couple of years ago.

To recap: it wasn't in, y'know... a sort of fit of spite. It had gotten into the cavity wall in the extension, because an idiot builder repositioned an outside tap without me asking, and then forgot to bung up the hole.

The rat was getting from there into the kitchen, before retreating into the walls. You could hear it at night, doing the rat things. The rustling and the scratching.

​Putting down a trap was the only option... and... by Wozniak... when I retrieved it the next morning, I swear the thing was the size of a toddler. It was the largest thing I'd ever killed, and I felt terrible about it (though not as terrible as a friend of mine after he drowned a squirrel in a bucket, because it had been chewing through his electrics). 

Anyhow, the short of it is... I felt so bad, that I have barely killed any animals since. Apart from a dog. And a couple of gnus. And 5.5 worms. But they were for food, sort of. I'm not a vegetarian, but my other half and one of my daughters are both one of these vegans they have nowadays, and I do sometimes eat Quorn, when I'm forced to, and I'd never go up to a horse and just hit it in the face with a shoe anymore. So... y'know... I'm practically the new Linda McCartney.

Therefore, you might want to know how I coped with the wanton animal slaughter in Far Cry Primal.

If you were squatted atop Twitter last night you'll know I was watching The Brit Awards.

Quite why this ceremony is given such blanket coverage - two and a half hours on primetime TV, national newspaper headlines, the BBC news - is baffling, given that it's an industry-voted exercise in keeping its biggest stars sweet.

There's no actual meaning to The Brits. Y'know, Adele won the "Global Success Award", for - presumably - most global success.

Surely, global success is a reward in itself, along with the millions of monies she'll be getting? Why would you need a shiny ornament too, least of all weep when receiving it?

​Unless the people giving it to her want to keep her happy and compliant, of course. It's like giving a kid positive affirmation, so that they're more likely to clean their room. 

The caveperson is the ultimate "That'll do" fancy dress outfit, second only to an off-the-shelf vicar costume.

It requires the minimum of creative effort, yet you'll find one at every fancy dress party. Typically, they'll be the ones getting absolutely smashed, to numb their feelings of insecurity, so un-used are they  to doing something so tentatively wacky.

Yet because of them, the market for ready-made caveperson outfits is healthier than ever - some are sexy, some are whimsical... all demonstrate a lamentable lack of ambition, imagination, and inventiveness. And here, in the week that Far Cry Primal is released, are 10 of them.

Far Cry Primal is the first bona-fide caveman game for several years, though one that's woefully historically inaccurate, given that it doesn't include a single dinosaur or volcano.

Thats like releasing a cowboy game which didn't feature a chiropractor who lives in a motorised fish tank.

Still... as the history of caveman games shows us, not every game has been so liberally lewd with prehistoric fact. 

All these big, Ubisoft, map-mopping games make it hard for a hack like me to lazily knock-out a review after 10 minutes play.

Nevertheless, being the world's greatest philanthropist, I wanted to share my experiences with Far Cry Primal, now that I'm about four hours in.

As I wrote yesterday, it's a game I've really been looking forward to.

​I've loved some of the earlier Far Cry games, and the notion of a cavemen-based romp using that model got me right fired up, in a way that most would deem unsavoury. ​Unfortunately... maybe I'd bigged it up too much to myself, but thus far... I'm a bit disappointed. Read on for the why of this. And!

Want to live longer? Kick your fear of the unknown in the neck, and do things you've never done before. Stop buying stuff that'll clutter up your home, and buy experiences. Go on holiday somewhere new.

You might not actually live longer in a strictly chronological sense, but your life will feel longer. It's simply a scientific fact that our perception of time speeds up as we get older.

Due to a phenomenon called neural adaptation, our brain starts to edit out the familiar routines - the brushing our teeth, taking the kids to school, doing the same job year in year out, going to the gym - simply because we don't need to pay so much attention.

What does this have to do with games? Allow me to explain.

You must've seen That Picture by now. The one of Mark Zuckerberg at the Samsung Galaxy S7 launch, striding triumphantly through a sea of mostly white men wearing virtual reality headsets.

Many have drawn comparisons to the world of The Matrix, signifying that we are living in nothing less than The End of Times. They say that this photograph marks the point at which our connection with the real world evaporates forever. Not only is it crushingly awful that we spend our lives staring at screens, they say... now Zuckerberg and his ilk want us to stare at screens which block out all peripheral vision, and buy our souls into the bargain. 

But what is really going on in this photograph, and what can it tell us about the terrible new VR world which awaits? We broke it down so that you didn't have to.