Final Fantasy is about as Japanese as Yakitori, karaoke, and knowing full well that tentacles don’t belong in animated series. Fans of the franchise over in Japan recently voted for their favourite games and characters in the franchise, and guess what? Final Fantasy X came out on top.

Amazon’s officially getting into the cloud gaming space, a field of interactive entertainment that no other monopoly on a specific industry that has formed an essential part of our lives has ever done.

Final Fantasy VII Remake isn’t the retelling of a cult classic that you’re expecting it to be. It’s a lengthy and deliberately slow-paced walk down the Midgar memory lane that leisurely basks within the warm glow of nostalgia, but at the same time it’s an exhilarating and cinematic explosion of action that not only celebrates the impact of the game which rewrote the rulebook for an entire industry in 1997, but also everything else that followed in its genre-defining wake.

Video games have and always will be dominated by giants. Provided that said corporation has the cash to splash on developing a new game and getting the word out via fancy marketing that dials the hype up to eleven, those massive brands with plenty of bank aren’t going to vanish overnight. And who has deeper pockets than Amazon at this point in human history?

I’m still riding a Materia high after having experienced the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo, a slice of game that allowed to not only wield Cloud Strife’s infamous Buster Sword with subtle hints of Crisis Core gameplay, but also allowed me to switch things up and try my hand at a more classic RPG approach. The game is looking good, the visuals are impossibly spectacular for a base PS4 title and if this is but the first chapter in a massive saga that retells a classic tale then I’m ready to rock and roll.

Microsoft is headed towards the cloud and while Nintendo and Sony will always be primary competition in the gaming space, they won’t be considered rivals to the Xbox brand in the decade to come.

Twitch is the de facto spot on the internet for watching games. Whet5her those be from professional and amateur streamers, or for professionally-broadcast gaming leagues. That’s changing a bit, as Activision has inked a deal with Google that’ll see the video game company jump exclusively to using Google-based tech for its gaming in the future. Not only will Activision’s multiplayer games be hosted on Google’s Cloud, but its streaming proclivities for events and leagues will be exclusive to YouTube. That means Hearthstone, Call of Duty, Overwatch and future games will use YouTube for broadcast.

Even though nobody’s talking about it (positively that is), Google’s Stadia service is still a tantalising glimpse at the future of gaming, one that it’ll face some stiff competition in as the technology improves and other companies learn from the mistakes made by Google with their initial soft launch of the service. Microsoft has its Project xCloud in development, but it looks like a new challenger has arrived!