Superheroes and videogames should be a match made in heaven – the primary colour characterisations; the non-stop action and combat; the backstories sketched on a napkin, but then gradually filled in over multiple issues; the superpowers, analogous to classic videogame "power-ups". It's strange then, that videogame superheroes have had such a tough time of it in general.

In a Q&A at the London Screenwriters' Festival last year, Welsh writer/director Caradog James and producer John Giwa-Amu already had fans. If that Q&A is any indication, the team at Red & Black Films have a brilliant career ahead of them, all thanks to The Machine, a dark science fiction tale of artificial intelligence and human scheming that is finally released this week.

Flow states – experienced by athletes, religious zealots and videogamers playing Titanfall. This explosive action game is the most eagerly anticipated and hyped-up videogame of the "next generation" console war so far. It could singlehandedly transform Microsoft's slow start for its new Xbox One console. And while being deeply dull and reactionary in many ways, it encourages a gaming flow state of constant fun like little else in some time.

José Padilha’s glossy reimagining of RoboCop is entertaining but mostly forgettable. Geared towards the profitable 12A market, its good looking but illogical action sequences are no replacement for the grimy, grubby and magnificently realised dystopian world from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 scathing satire.

You are staring at your computer screen; you are literally you. And now, through the wonder of modern technology, you can jump into the mind of, and take over, the security head of a near-future corporation's flying fortress. You control his speech, movements, decisions. That's how Consortium starts.

You jump into Bishop 6's head just as he wakes up for his first shift on the Zenlil plane/fortress of the global Consortium security force. The game uses Bishop 6's status as new kid, and your status as new kid inside Bishop 6, to toy with you throughout.

Upstream Colour charts the stages of a relationship. First, Kris is introduced as external forces impact on her, turning her life on its head. She then encounters Jeff. As they get to know each other, a medical crisis brings them closer together and they get married. They then realise these forces are affecting them both and are drawn towards a way of taking control by eradicating them. The film ends with them, and others also affected by what was out of their reach, taking charge of their own destiny.

As ever with videogames, one great success can lead to many failures. The success in this case was the breakout "sandbox" genius of Minecraft. On its surface, Minecraft is essentially a faithfully blocky attempt to bring Lego bricks into games. But unlocking both the power of collaborative working and the sheer size and scale of Minecraft's possibilities has allowed people to build all sorts of insanely grandiose designs within their virtual worlds. Of course, where Minecraft led, others followed – more's the pity...

This might be the best smartphone first-person shooter (FPS) yet. It's a tricky genre to get right on a touchscreen. Above all the usual FPS considerations of 3D frame rate, varied levels and enemy AI, you need a well thought out control scheme that responds to the touch. Neon Shadow nails the latter and doesn't do too badly on the others.

Plot-wise, Neon Shadow is a dud. Something about a rogue AI on a space station. Or something. You are a Dude who must go and shoot it in the face. Standard.

Well, wasn't that fantastic? Three Doctors; guest appearances from just about every fan favourite you could think of and enough in-jokes to satisfy even the most committed Whovian. Plus, anybody whose interests incorporate the musical career of one John Barrowman certainly wouldn’t have been disappointed.

I’m talking, of course, about The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, a half-hour Red Button special written and directed by fifth Doctor Peter Davison. This little treat, intended to reward those of us with the dedication to sit through the truly terrible Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty on BBC Three, featured Davison and his successors Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy trying to right the injustice that resulted in them being left out of the 50th anniversary special episode. With so many laughs, whether they succeeded or not is irrelevant.

Allowing the current Doctor to come to terms with adulthood again paves the way for Peter Capaldi’s entry as the 13thBesides, it’s hard to imagine that showrunner Steven Moffat could have crammed much more into The Day of the Doctor, a near-perfect opus that will likely be remembered as some of his finest work when the time comes for him to hand over the reins of Doctor Who. (Incidentally, although I have always come down firmly on the side of avoidance when it comes to spoilers, I have come to the conclusion that it is nigh-on impossible to do in this case. So, for those of you who were waiting for the verdict of theartsdesk before picking up the episode on iPlayer - let those five stars down the right-hand side be your guide, and we will speak again in 75 minutes.)

The special incorporated the last two doctors, Matt Smith and David Tennant, the latter slipping effortlessly into the quirks and tropes that defined his tenure as if he had never been away. Casting screen legend John Hurt as the forgotten "War Doctor" was also an inspired choice, even if it was hard to escape the nagging feeling that most of his lines would have worked just as well - and, perhaps, were originally written - in the Northern tones of one Christopher Eccleston.

That said, if Moffat had pulled off the ultimate coup and tempted back the Whoniverse’s original conscientious objector I daresay we wouldn’t have received such a convincing explanation for the recent trend towards the Doctor’s ever-more youthful appearance with each regeneration. Transported from the middle of the last day of the Time War, in the style of A Christmas Carol, to be shown the man he will become by a weapon so terrible it has developed its own consciousness - which it has chosen to manifest in the shape of Billie Piper - Hurt’s Doctor meets his future selves for the first time in a wood in Elizabethan England. Here, he rips into the whimsy - sandshoes, “dicky bows” and ridiculous catchphrases - which have come to define the Doctor since the 2005 reboot. It becomes obvious that “the man who regrets and the man who forgets” have thrown themselves so completely into the character of the mad man with the blue box because to do otherwise would mean embracing an adulthood in which genocide of their own people was the only choice.

The Gallifrey that we see in The Day of the Doctor - a chaotic, war-stricken hell; full of suffering, screaming children and close to rubble - is at odds with the portrayal of the power-hungry Time Lords led by Timothy Dalton’s Rassilon in David Tennant’s final episodes. On that occasion Tennant’s Doctor reaffirms that he had no choice but to push the button. By the end of The Day of the Doctor, it’s a choice that all three versions of the man have embraced - before, in the style that has come to define Moffat’s tenure, Smith’s version finds a way around it.

In the end, the Elizabethan England thread of the story was a plot device only necessary to show the effectiveness of a plan 400 years in the making - the be-suckered Zygons waiting for Earth to be "worthy" of invasion versus the centuries that the Doctor has had to mull over another way to resolve the Time War - as well as to give Tennant another pretty lady to kiss, in the form of Joanna Page’s Elizabeth I (pictured with Tennant). Stored inside paintings in the National Gallery, the shape-shifting beasties emerge into present-day London and promptly take the forms of UNIT staff, including Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave). Deep underground in the Black Vault, the Doctors force humans and Zygons to negotiate by wiping enough of their memories so that they can no longer tell which is which - preventing the humans from detonating a nuclear warhead under London to destroy the Zygons, or killing millions to save billions in a mirror of the Doctor’s own choice four hundred years ago.

Seeing the men that he will become gives Hurt’s Doctor the impetus he needs to go through with the destruction of Gallifrey, while getting to know their former self allows Tennant and Smith’s versions to accept, and collude in, that choice. Until Clara (Jenna Coleman) steps in and insists that there has to be another way - a way which involves all of the Doctor’s past selves, plus his future self (because who could resist?) doing something with their TARDISes which may or may not have made Gallifrey disappear, to be kept safe - possibly - inside a painting.

Whether or not the humourless Time Lords, whose demise was perhaps the wisest choice Russell T Davies made when originally rebooting the series, have actually survived - and what the consequences of that could be - now remains to be seen as the show moves forward. It’s a clever trick which, as the previous Doctors will not remember it - and Smith’s has only discovered it now - does not negate or rewrite anything that has gone before but gives the show a fresh new direction. And allowing the current Doctor to come to terms with adulthood again paves the way for Peter Capaldi’s entry as the 13th, and possibly - but surely not - final Doctor at Christmas. If the rest of his tenure is as exciting as those five seconds of his eyebrows there’s plenty to look forward to.

All this, plus all the in-jokes and winks you’d expect from an anniversary episode including the original title sequence; the opening scene at Coal Hill School; Tennant’s final words as the Doctor - again - and a Tom Baker cameo. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to watch it again…

Overleaf: watch The Day of the Doctor trailer

The Hunger Games franchise is blessed with Jennifer Lawrence as its heroically defiant protagonist Katniss Everdeen. No matter how much darker, more drastic and deranged developments get in the world of these Games, Lawrence is a touching, authentic and watchable focus for our sympathetic attention.

This second instalment — in what will be four films from the phenomenally popular Suzanne Collins book trilogy — finds Katniss, haunted by the ordeal of her inspirational victory in the 74th Hunger Games, back in dystopian, post-Apocalyptic Panem’s miserable mining community District 12 with her mother, sister and stoic sweetheart Gale (Liam Hemsworth). When she and devoted comrade Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are dragged on a victory tour it becomes apparent revolt is brewing and Donald Sutherland’s coldly calculating President Coriolanus Snow is unsettled by the public’s embrace of charismatic Kat.

Appointing a devious new game maker in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Plutarch Heavensbee (dig those wacky Romano-Rowling names) he announces a shock twist in the rules: the 75th Anniversary "Quarter Quell" will pit 24 past champions against each other to the death in the ultimate merciless smack-down. It’s abundantly clear to the canny Kat that these games are rigged to soil her image, or at least kill her. Her independence served her well the first time around, but interdependence becomes a principal theme here, with Kat needing friends and allies to survive.

So confident is this in its brand appeal after the success of the first film, there’s not a lot of re-capping exposition (prepare to be mystified if you didn’t actually read or see The Hunger Games; I was wishing I had seen it again more recently to get back up to speed). And still it takes ages to get going. This plays very much like the bridging “middle bit” in a multi-part epic, complete with cliffhanger ending. After an hour and a half of youthful angst, fascistic oppression, love triangle teases and sinister exchanges with Snow, one shares with the ridiculously decadent elite of Panem and Stanley Tucci’s hyperbolic TV presenter an unbecoming enthusiasm to get on with the killing.

Inheriting the franchise from writer-director Gary Ross, music video veteran Francis ‘no relation’ Lawrence (claims to fame, er, Constantine and I Am Legend) enjoys a budget nearly double that of the first film. The costume and visual effects teams work hard for the Oscar nominations that eluded them last year and there's spiffing handheld IMAX camera action in the arena where our heroes - a few mean-looking bad-asses and a bunch of other contestants we never actually meet - find themselves in a  tropical jungle dome laid out like a clock with a wicked surprise in every sector. The more fun competitors, Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer — who obviously won their Games with brains not brawn — are memorably eccentric.

Can I just say that a society that has the technology to create and fund this horribly thrilling murder-dome, with its blood rain, poison gas, mutant psycho-killer ape animatronics and sundry other extravagantly lethal gizmos, ought to be able to provide a few more amenities to appease the starving enslaved masses simmering with rebellion. But the satirically depraved ruling class will surely get their comeuppance in The Mockingjay, Parts I and II, currently filming. Meanwhile, amid the adolescent mythology there is some real emotion and character development, especially from the tough, transfixing Lawrence, who keeps us hungry for more.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire