Pushing Buttons: the viral music game that revived my teenage obsession

This ridiculous Trombone Champ is an encore to all of the wild rhythm games I grew up on - and a fitting return for a forgotten genre

• Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

So, by now we've all seen Trombone Champ, right? The music game - in which you play a cartoon trombonist making noises that bear only the vaguest resemblance to music - went viral last week; if you've not seen it, here's the tweet from PC Gamer that started it all. I promise that your day will be vastly improved by watching this video.

This game is very, very funny. It's a joke first and a game second," its creator Dan Vecchitto told the Guardian. Part of its comedy is in the presentation - the discordant visual details, the random made-up facts on the loading screens - and part of it is in the sheer ridiculousness of what you're doing and how dismal it sounds. Here's the thing, though: I'm a specialist in music games, with ateenaged obsession that lasted at least a decade, and Trombone Champ is genuinely a good and challenging rhythm game, as well as a good joke.

Released in 1982, The Hobbit was an extraordinarily influential game that did more with the format of the text adventure than anything that had come before: players remember it not just for the colour of its descriptions, but the creative way that the game would respond to what you typed. Its visionary designer Veronika Megler talks about its making in this feature.

HBO's The Last of Us show finally has a trailer, in which we get to see Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie. Thankfully, it actually looks really good.

The once-beleaguered game Cyberpunk 2077, which you might remember from its shambolic launch at the end of 2020, is enjoying record player numbers following a well-received spinoff anime series on Netflix, Cyberpunk Edgerunners. If you liked this game's vibe but were put off by the bugs, this might be the time to give it a second chance, though my colleague Keith Stuart reckoned its problems were more than skin deep.