The past three months have been pretty much the best ever for Microsoft’s Xbox One. Not in terms of absolute sales – nothing tops the holiday season sales, after all – but in terms of finally getting a solid run at the top of some major markets, ahead of Sony’s thus-far dominant PS4. The enormous amount of hard work that the Xbox team has put into recovering from the console’s disastrous announcement and muted launch is finally starting to pay off, and a console war that’s so far seen Sony win almost every round by default is finally starting to heat up.

If the Xbox can maintain much of this inertia in the UK and USA over the coming months as we approach the holidays, it should have a very, very solid Christmas, and start to look like a realistic competitor to PS4 rather than an also-ran.

Xbox Play Anywhere is a cross-buy program that will allow gamers who digitally purchase games to play them on both their console and PC at no extra cost.

This means that if you’re tired of playing a game on your Xbox One, you can pick it up where you left off on your Windows 10 PC, taking your save games, add-ons, and achievements with you.

To make Play Anywhere work for you you will, of course, need access to a PC running Windows 10 and an Xbox One. Once you have these then all you have to do is make sure that the Windows 10 Anniversary update has been installed on your PC and that your Xbox One is running the latest update.

Then it’s simply a matter of logging into your Xbox Live/Microsoft account and downloading your Xbox Play Anywhere games!

The Mario series has been consistently great since its inception and has maintained (and in some cases, improved) from console to console. The NES/SNES classics built the foundation, the N64 launched with arguably the series’ best game, the Gamecube era more or less continued what worked without ruining it, and both Mario Galaxy titles have proven that Mario is still relevant in the current console generation. There’s a lot of pride in that: you can’t take longevity for granted here. Consider this: Sonic the Hedgehog has been a werewolf. A werewolf.

Give props, folks; you can’t take this kind of production for granted. Mario has had an unprecedented streak of success and continues to hit new peaks. That’s unheard of considering the years that Mario has been under those overalls. I mean, It’s not like Conker is still having bad fur days.

After months of rumours and speculation, Sony has finally confirmed the existence of a high-end PS4 – you know, the one that’s codenamed NEO. The only bad news is that it won’t be shown at this year’s E3 gaming expo.

It will be compatible with all existing PS4 games and support “all or a very large majority” of future releases, as well as PlayStation VR games.

As expected, the high-end PS4 will support 4K output and offer improved visuals, although from a developer’s standpoint, it only requires a “small but manageable” effort to get games working across both platforms.

Unfortunately, it will cost more than the current PS4, because Sony doesn’t want to sell the console at a loss.

Here’s a bit of good news for retro game lovers: Shadow of the Beast on PS4 comes with the Amiga original.

But you’ll have to unlock it first, because the emulation of the Amiga classic is burrowed away somewhere in the main campaign.

“As fans of the original, we wanted to offer new players to chance to experience first-hand the game that inspired us and offer fellow fans of the original a chance to re-live it,” reads a statement by Heavy Spectrum founder Matt Birch.

“To that end, we’ve included a full emulation of the original Amiga game (we think this might be the first time an Amiga emulation has been published on a Sony console!) as an unlockable bonus in the main game – that means you’ll get the entire original Amiga game alongside the new Shadow of the Beast!“