Eating rubbish is one of the great joys of life. Eating junk food while playing video games is even better. Now imagine eating junk food while playing video games inspired by junk food - that really is living the dream. Except: it isn't, because most of the games based upon corporate junk food mascots were terrible.

Here are ten games from the days when advertisers got around restrictions on selling artery-clogging, tooth-rotting, nutritionally-challenged fare, to kids, by hiding their message in the form of video games.

M. Night Shyamalan knows how hard it can be to follow-up a twist.

The poor guy spent most of the last 20-odd years failing to live up to the revelation in the third act of The Sixth Sense that Bruce Willis is <SPOILERS> a dog. 

Sadly, the same thing happened to the Bioshock series - Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite arrive with the expectation that there would be some sort of twist. And there sort of was in the latter, but - much as there were lacklustre twists in M.Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable and The Village - it was nowhere near the level of bona-fide, rubber-limbed, genius that the original Bioshock displayed.

Rather than surprise players with a logical curveball that works on several levels simultaneously, Infinite drags its twist in from left-field, with some guff about parallel universes. It's always a cool sci-fi sort of idea, and rendered in Infinite in a visually engaging way, but it pales next to the way its predecessor pulled the rug out from beneath its players. 

​Prepare for spoilers. 

Animals! They're nature's lovable idiots, and never cuter than when they're pretending to be people. Here's a gallery of animals pretending to play video games - which you'll probably be so excited about that you'll want to show them to your dad while he's on the toilet.

The other day I got a message from a Digitiser2000 reader pointing me towards a Polygon article about Sony's PlayStation Pro strategy. Said piece was highly critical - though, admittedly, no more than other articles I've read - and I actually agreed with all of it.

However, the Digi reader suggested that it was further evidence of the website's bias against Sony. I don't read a lot of Polygon - if I'm honest, the layout of the site sort of confuses me - so I wasn't aware of any bias. And if I was, I wouldn't have really cared anyway.

Nevertheless, I did look into this accusation and discovered... well... I discovered accusations that Polygon was anti-Sony, pro-Nintendo, anti-Microsoft... and on and on. Surely, they can't be pro and anti every gaming format simultaneously? Can they?

It's a familiar story - back in the original Digitiser days, we would get letters accusing us of exactly the same thing. We ended up coining the phrase "We hate everyone equally", because we grew so weary of being accused by gamers of having a bias against their particularly console or computer. To which, obviously, they had their own bias.

​Frankly, I don't think we ever cared enough to actually have any sort of uncontrollable bias. A bias is quite a lot of work. It was, as stated, much easier to hate everyone equally.

There's a thick streak of format loyalty running through most gamers - I'm still a ZX Spectrum fanboy, even after all these years - and it's hard to see something you love being criticised. Especially when you've paid hundreds, or thousands, of pounds for it.

​So are games journalists biased? Maybe some of them. It's inevitable. But it might not be to the degree you suspect. And it isn't actually a bad thing. Wha... wha... whaaaaaa?!

The 70s and early 80s were a time of great hardship for many; fuel crises, recession, industrial action, and powerful witches. And yet it was during this era of austerity that video games rose to prominence. Here's a gallery of people enjoying their gaming, despite the tough economic times. 

It's odd to think that my first experience of Tomb Raider was on the Saturn. We forget that for a long time Lara Croft was so synonymous with the PlayStation - becoming an icon of mid-90s Cool Britannia - despite hitting Sega's doomed console first.

Inevitably, Tomb Raider would look and play better on the PlayStation and PC, but I was none the wiser until later. That brief period of Saturn exclusivity certainly propelled the machine to strong early sales - but the later comparison between versions became yet another step on Sega's endless death march to hardware oblivion.

For most of us in the UK, it was the first proper 3D platformer; Super Mario 64 was still some months off a European release when Tomb Raider came out.

Suffice to say, it was a revelation - and every single plaudit that was lobbed its way was earned and justified. Including all the ones calling into question the assertions from Ian Livingstone and others that the hot-panted Lara Croft was a feminist icon.

The amusement arcades have evolved through the decades, and yet there is one constant, one staple, which remains unchanged: the Penny Falls. It was there before we arrived, and it shall remain long after we are gone. Here, Digitiser2000 pays tribute.

Amusement arcades have been around far longer than any of us give them credit for. Dating back to the "What The Butler Saw"-type games, they've come a long way in their century or so of existence. Here are ten examples of early mechanical slot machines, before the rise of video games.

Could the gaming tides be turning against Sony and the PlayStation 4? For the past two months, the Xbox One has outsold the PS4 in North America - the first time it had sold more than its rival in almost a year. Admittedly, price reductions - due to retailers clearing stock to make way for the Xbox One S - most likely contributed, but it does indicate a general upward trend in the Xbox One's fortunes.

Sony's bad news continues, however, in the wake of its "PlayStation" meeting last week, where it unveiled its own slimmed-down console, and announced the PlayStation 4 Pro - a machine that, if you read the news sites and social media - nobody really wants or understands.

A further test of Sony's hardware will arrive next month in the form of the PlayStation VR, which, by all accounts, is having something of a "soft" launch. For "soft" read "snuck out".

Is it game over for Sony? Not yet. But you only need to look at the history of gaming to know how relatively quickly the fortunes of a market-leading console giant can turn. And perhaps the greatest series of bad-wrongs ever perpetrated by a games company was the litany of errors which led to the decline of Sega. Here are their five biggest mess-ups.

​So, World War 1 eh? I think it’s fair to say that unlike the obvious bad guys of A.Hitler and H.Goering etc. in World War 2, most people would look at WW1 and think "What the hell was all that about?".

And now, thanks to DICE and EA, you too can experience complete bewilderment as a prelude to being shot.

Yes, it’s the Battlefield 1 beta. And by criminy, it’s a beta. While some stuff is obviously 100% done and looking great, there’s a lot of rebalancing and glitch fixing needed: graphics occasionally go a bit freaky, logging in to the servers can be excruciating, and some of the team ‘balancing’ leads to horrifically one-sided contests where it’s you and a handful of people who play like they’re straight out of Dad’s Army vs the whole Turkish crack military.

​But we’ll put that (mostly) to one side given it is unfinished, and concentrate on the good.

Yesterday was a big day for people who love slightly dull presentations. First up: Apple's annual festival of self congratulation.

It opened like a beautiful flower (albeit one of those ones that give off the stench of rotting meat) with an ill-considered sketch featuring Apple boss Tim "No Steve Jobs" Cook and James "Big in America" Corden.

As he took to the stage following the clip, Cook - looking rather too pleased with himself - told us that there'd be brand new episodes of Corden's Carpool Karaoke arriving on iTunes. Cook paused after the announcement, primed for applause. Instead, he was hit in the face with a tumbleweed.

Which is odd, as by all accounts America has clutched Corden to its bosom. Perhaps there were more British journalists in the audience than Cook had counted on.

Obviously, not all of you will be able to make it to Block Party - the first ever Teletext and Digitiser festival - on October 1st, but here's a brief taste of what guests will be treated to. 

Doors will open at about 10am, giving early birds time to explore the museum's many treats, before the first recording of the TeletextR podcast - hosted by Dan Farrimond and Carl Attrill - welcoming you to Block Party. Topics covered will, I'm sure, include the history of teletext... and should doubtless be a laid back and banter-fuelled affair.

At 11am teletext archivist Jason Robertson will be demonstrating how he has managed to recover so many lost Digitiser, Teletext, Ceefax and Oracle pages. Bring your old VHS tapes, and you never know what he might unearth before your very eyes. The second TeletextR panel happens at 12.30pm, and is dubbed "Meet the guests".

We'll be running our teletext designers panel - featuring myself, Dan and Steve Horsley - twice, at 2pm and 4pm, so that everyone with an all-day ticket will be able to sit in on one. If you want to add some spice to proceedings, you can probably ask Steve and I about our school days: we've known each other since we were kids, and were in the same art class together. In addition, there'll be a Make Your Own Teletext Art drop-in workshop running throughout the day, 

Today's the day that Apple unveils the next iteration of its iPhone. Five years on from the premature passing of company visionary and founder Steve Jobs, Apple is still driven by his genius. The world remains beguiled by this enigmatic personality, and his shadow looms over everything Apple continues to do. 

Jobs was only 56 when he died - barely older than you are now - but in his lifetime he achieved more than most of us could hope to achieve in six or seven lifetimes. Here are ten inspirational and illuminating photographs of this great man.