By SUPER BAD ADVICE

Right off the bat, let me say this...

I think the Mirror’s Edge games would have sold millions more if they’d called them ‘Runny’, and they’d featured the flailing parkour attempts of an uncoordinated teen trying to impress his mates by jumping about in a disused car park like an idiot.

But no, we get some poncey ‘hip and edgy’ name instead and a sterile, dystopian future where everything is run by corporations and everyone who isn’t one of the rebel cool kids sticking it to ‘the man’ is basically a git. Stupid games designers.

​Anyway, amazingly it’s been almost a decade since we last scraped an eye over a Mirror’s Edge game. 

Since my brief jaunt to the Gamergate frontlines a couple of weeks ago, I've kept a close eye on events through my special telescope.

I probably shouldn't - even from a seemingly safe distance it still somehow seems to stoke my ire. And yet it continues to fascinate me, like a rotting fox on a windscreen.

It has been quite the busy couple of weeks in the ongoing culture war, but I'll do my best to try and summarise the main event.

You may be aware of a Kickstarter for something called Social Autopsy. It was designed to be a database of harassers - exposing the real identities of trolls and cyberbullies. It was unique in that it united both Gamergaters and anti-Gamergaters alike in condemning it. 

And then it all kicked off, and the most unlikely thing imaginable happened: Candace Owens, the founder of Social Autopsy, became the new face of pro-Gamergate.

It's all Nintendo at the moment. The NX has been officially confirmed for March 2017. As has a brand new Zelda game. As have smart device versions of Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem. 

However, Nintendo has also announced that it expects to sell less than a million Wii U consoles this year, having today posted year-end earnings of $150 million. That's a fall of 61% on the previous year.

The company is braced for a further 1% fall in sales over the coming year, while expecting a 37% rise in operating profits.

Er... okay. Optimistic.

It remains to be seen how Nintendo intends to achieve such a rise. The 3DS continues to sell reasonably well - though its 6.79 million sales were down by a couple of million on the previous 12 months.

There's also no clear sign of a resurgence in Nintendo's Wii U business, with its customers looking towards the NX, and no major game releases on the horizon. Nintendo appears to be pinning its hopes on sales of existing software; Splatoon for the Wii U shifted 4.27 million copies, with Mario Maker close-ish behind on 3.52 million.

Compare that, however, to the 12 million sales Fallout 4 made in its first 24 hours alone, and the picture for Nintendo is far from fragrant.

Consequently, all eyes are now on the NX. With Nintendo putting more of its eggs in the smart device basket, the NX is destined to be the machine that decides, once and for all, whether Nintendo stays in the hardware game.

​I just have one tiny request...

So, Nintendo will be releasing its new console, the NX, worldwide next March. We have just under a year to guess what it's going to be called.

Because, you see, the Nintendo NX won't be called the Nintendo NX, probably.

Nintendo has a history of giving its consoles codenames which bare little resemblance to their eventual name.

​The Super NES was SFX; the Nintendo 64 was Ultra 64 and Project Reality; the Gamecube was called Dolphin; the DS was both Iris and  Nitro; the Wii was Revolution. The Wii U, absurdly, was Project Cafe.

Taking what we know about the NX and Nintendo's history, we gift to you a list of the most likely names for Nintendo's successor to the little-loved Wii U.

"The next generation of #Nintendo is coming March 2017! #NX"

So read the tweets from Nintendo's international subsidiaries this morning, suggesting this: a global release for the next Nintendo console in ten months time.

Additionally, Nintendo has announced that its new Zelda game - originally scheduled for this year - has been delayed until 2017.

​Though due to be a title for both the Wii U and whatever the NX is, there is now speculation that the delay is to ensure it will be a day one launch game for the latter.

​Did that sentence make sense? To be honest, we started to drop off about midway through, and remain so bored by it that we can't be bothered to go back and check.

But anyway. Picture a year from now: you're going into your local games shop. You want to buy a Nintendo NX. This is how we suspect it might play out.

Let's get this out of the way up front: the Wii U was a flawed design from the off.

​Ever since Nintendo started adding gimmicks to its consoles there was always a risk of a gimmick too far.

And, let's face it, it isn't like they don't have form with missteps: for every DS there is a Virtual Boy, for every Wii a Power Glove or Robotic Operating Buddy. 

You remember the Robotic Operating Buddy don't you? It was this little robot guy who held an NES pad in his claws and assumed the role of a second player for multiplayer games. Nintendo had to withdraw them from the market after a load of them malfunctioned and tried to invade Lichtenstein.

It seems that rarely a day goes by when there's not some new drama in the games industry. Sometimes it seems like gamers simply enjoy arguing with one another, about the most trivial of matters.

If only there was somebody we could turn to when all seems lost, somebody who could have the final say on the important issues of the day. An oracle, a prophet, a moral arbiter...

Somebody, in fact, like Boris Johnson - London's self-styled "buffoon mayor", a man who hides his true face behind a harlequin's mask. 

We put to him several of the most important gaming issues of the day.

Few movie franchise have squandered their potential as much as the series that began with Alien and Aliens, before veering off into succession of cinematic disappointments.

​However, due to that promising start, fans still have much love for the world begun by Alien - indeed, social media has declared today to be "Alien Day 426" - named for today's date, and the planet LV-426 where the Aliens were first discovered.

​To mark this most special and arbitrary of occasions, here's a brief history of the key moments in Alien gaming.

The greatest evil to ever befall our society? The Amazon one-click order button. Who among us can say they've never succumbed to its easy lures?

Drop your guard, and before you know it you've ordered a diamond-encrusted duck call... which arrives the next day in a box the size of a bungalow, stuffed with inflatable packaging pillows.

Here are 25 things you might only buy in your darkest moments. Suffice to say, one or two of these are a little on the NSFW side...

As you might've read, Microsoft has  stopped manufacturing new Xbox 360s.

With over 80 million sold worldwide over its 11-year lifespan, it remains the most successful console Microsoft has made to date.

I bought an HD flatscreen plasma TV the day my Xbox 360 arrived. It was purely for the Xbox 360, of course, and the most absurd expense - a couple of grand at least.

It's a real mark of how my priorities have shifted as I've gotten older, and life has settled down; I'd never spend that much on a thing anymore.

Looking back at it, I'm bewildered by how far technology has progressed across what feels like a heartbeat. 

That TV weighed about the same as a family car - and none of its guts were contained within the TV itself. ​Instead, it came with a separate, console-sized, box, which plugged into the screen. The crispness of the visuals were immediately obvious to me. Which was frustrating, as nobody else in the house could tell the difference between SD and HD. 

Regardless, my daughter ended up breaking the single HDMI port after a year or two. I found only one company willing to try and fix the set - apparently, it was a particularly complex model - which cost several hundred quid... Only to have it break again a month or so later.

The result was that my two grand HDTV remained SD for much of the time I had it.