"Nicolas, Nicolas - please won't you tickle us?"

Thus wrote William Wordsworth, in his poem, 'Ode to a Mortal Actor'. Indeed, long after we all are gone, the works of Nicolas Cage shall continue to echo across time, his works etched into the granite of eternity. The very being of this philosopher, raconteur and thespian is now hewn into our DNA.

Here are 11 Nicolas Cage pillowcases that you can buy - today! - on Amazon.com, for some reason.

Alright. I've tried. I've really, really tried to give Virtual Reality the benefit of the doubt, but the reality is this: it isn't happening for me.

Don't get me wrong; I've pre-ordered a PlayStation VR, and I hope to scrape together enough coins to bring you PC reviews later in the year. And maybe that'll even stretch to an Oculus and Vive.

I'm trying to remain optimistic that PSVR will represent some sort of tipping point for VR, in terms of it going mass market... but I just don't know. I really don't. 

You hear this talk of the VR version of Resident Evil 7 making people want to throw up, and it all comes back to the reservations I wrote about a year or more ago.

VR just doesn't seem suited to extended play. When you add up all the negatives - the eyestrain, the sensory deprivation, the social awkwardness of thrashing around at thin air - and people aren't going to want to be locked into a virtual world for hours at a time, the way they currently are with regular games. You know: playing games while their senses can still detect reality. I know I don't want that. 

Especially not if it my eyes are watering, and I have a headache, and there's vomit spurting from my mouth.

Many are suggesting that VR is best for short experiences. You know: like the sorts of games you get on smartphones. Which is fine, but - let's face it - that's a lot of money to pay just to play a stereoscopic version of Fruit Ninja. And currently, I'm unconvinced that there's a single VR experience which justifies the expense.

And so begins the summer, a time for us all to scratch at the surface of our lives, in the vain hope that there may be something better buried beneath.

Many of us shall descend upon the seaside in the months ahead, those resorts that dot our coastline like benign tumours - a warning to any foreign invader that there is nothing here worth invading for.

Here we present a gallery of such resorts, with a specific focus on the faded glory of their arcades... WARNING: This might be the most depressing article you ever read.

If music is what feelings sound like, then the history of gaming is littered with the feeling of a digestively-challenged shrieking cat squatting above your head, while its warm diarrhoea drips into your ears.

Great songwriting and great video games rarely go hand in hand - as anybody who heard Paul McCartney's contribution to the Destiny soundtrack will attest. Here are another 12 times that the worlds of songwriting and video games collided - with varying results.

Have you played Lumo yet? You probably should, as it's splendid, and a love letter to a genre and style  that, for many of us, defines the moment we fell in love with games. And that style is this style: isometric graphics.

Though isometrics can most commonly be seen these days as throwaway map screens, for a time it was the go-to default for anybody who wanted to go: "Look what we can do!".

Because, y'know, why not... here's a brief history of isometric graphics in the 1980s.

One of the less surprising surprises to come out of last week's E3 show was the revelation that there's a new Resident Evil 7 on the way. Furthermore,Capcom dropped an egg on us all when it announced that a playable teaser was available already on the PlayStation Store.

Though the content in the teaser won't feature in the finished game, it exists as a sort of proof-of-concept, demonstrating the atmosphere that they're aiming for with the finished product

Here are all the thoughts and faces I made while playing it... 

I've always been politically apathetic. I've mostly always voted Lib-Dem - that's how much I care.

I grew up in a household where politics were never mentioned. I kind of knew my dad voted Labour, but he complained about the unions, and read The Sun. The closest I ever got to a political education was alternative comedy: "Mrs Thatch = bad", I learned from Ben Elton.

That might be why I voted Labour a couple of times.

On the whole, though, I've just never been angry enough about anything, never liked being lectured to or ranted at, always been too suspicious of the motives of those who seek power, to ever pin my colours to one mast or the other. 

Neither ideology on the left or the right ever really spoke to me - the class of person that's sort of neither here nor there. It felt like the only ones shouting were on opposite extremes, because they were the only ones stoked up enough to make noise. The rest of us were sufficiently comfortable and sane to not engage with that sort of rabble-rousing, and were happy getting along with our lives while ignoring them.

​I no longer feel I can do that. And so... sorry... but this piece has nothing to do with video games. It's not funny. It's just a bit depressing. But I need to get it off my chest, because I'm livid.

I'm old enough to remember when home video was so new that you rented VHS tapes from the local white goods shop. Nowadays, with virtually the entirety of the past 100 years of popular culture available at the tickle of a nubbin, I feel I've become more discerning in my tastes.

I spend far longer browsing the virtual shelves of Netflix and the Apple Store than I ever did Blockbuster. Frankly, back in the day, I'd rent any old rubbish, particularly if it looked a bit sci-fi-y.

That was precisely what appealed to me about Far Cry: Blood Dragon - the remix of Far Cry 3, which turned it into a low-fi, 80s-ish, straight-to-VHS, sci-fi movie, complete with knowingly trashy story, John Carpenter-esque soundtrack, a voice-over from Michael Biehn, and lashings of neon.

All of that is present and correct in this semi-follow-up, therefore it's a terrible shame that the rest of it is a load of horrible nonsense.

It took me about five hours to download Trials of the Blood Dragon last night. It would've been quicker to go to the shops and buy it. Except it's not out in the shops - just for download on the PC, Xbox One and PS4.

During those five hours, however, I set myself a challenge: could I find a photograph of Ronald McDonald which didn't seem to suggest some disturbing subtext?

​Suffice to say... I failed spectacularly. 

Look. Look above. That is a picture of Shigeru Miyamoto, arguably the greatest video game designer who ever did live, a man who has done more to define the Nintendo brand and philosophy than any other. What's he doing in that picture? Devil horns. Illuminati, see.

Though not directly involved in many games these days, Miyamoto's legacy continues to live on in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which was unveiled this week. 

Donkey Kong, Mario, Star Fox, F-Zero. The list of franchises he created is legendary. We all know his games. All his games. All of them... or do we?!?

Here are six more that Miyamoto worked on in his early years at Nintendo, which you may not know about. Or maybe you already do. Frankly, we don't really care.

As E3 starts to creak to its foregone conclusion, and the ash settles on the major press conferences, the world is trying to get a clearer sense of Microsoft's strategy for its Xbox One. 

​And that strategy is this strategy: turning it into a PC, by stealth. Albeit the sort of stealth which involves breaking into a building via an open window, putting your foot in a metal bucket, walking face-first into a mop, and pulling down a bunch of shelves.

It makes a certain degree of sense, given Microsoft's history, and the fact that the Xbox One has the heart of a PC. Also, you can't blame them for retreating to their safe space, given that they've struggled to compete directly with the PlayStation 4.

However, whatever it is that they're up to, it isn't entirely clear what Microsoft is trying to achieve, and the message it's sending out seems confused, now that the fanfare has died down. The days since it unveiled the Xbox One S have only obscured that message further.