General rule of thumb is that if you like video games and enjoy purchasing DLC then you're a huge fan of zombies. Or at least, a fan of killing zombies. Now Sledgehammer has confirmed what many have long suspected: that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will get its own zombie horde mode much like in previous instalments, except this time the zombies will be in exoskeletons. Double jumping zombies are inbound, then.

Sensibly titled Exo Zombies, the first chapter of the co-op mode will come with the Havoc DLC pack, which releases some time early next year. The pack is the first of four spread out across 2015, including Ascendance, Supremacy and Reckoning. Each will feature zombies, because y'know. Zombies.

Valve has made changes to Steam gift trading in response to a nasty exploit which allowed users to trade games they do not rightfully own. Users were able to purchase games using false credit card details before trading them for legitimately purchased games. The exploiter was able to keep the fully paid game, while the person on the receiving end of the dodgy trade would find their game inaccessible once the credit card details were found to be fake.

But not any longer. According to Valve s Tony Paloma, games purchased as a gift will not be tradable for 30 days. All new games purchased as a gift and placed in the purchaser's inventory will be untradable for 30 days, Paloma wrote. The gift may still be gifted at any time. The only change is to trading.

We've made this change to make trading gifts a better experience for those receiving the gifts. We're hoping this lowers the number of people who trade for a game only to have the game revoked later due to issues with the purchaser's payment method.

It's a good time to be ironing out these creases: the Steam sale is currently in progress, which means our piles of shame are growing exponentially. 

Sometimes, when the screen freezes up or something crashes, the only possible solution is a hard reset (holding your power button until your PC shuts down). But I always cringe when I do it. It feels like putting down my loyal and innocent dog. So my question: Can this really cause problems, if done too often? Thanks and greetings from Germany. —Christoph

Hallo, Christoph! My advice is not only to hit the power button, but to laugh as you do it and shout "I am the lord of electricity" at your PC. It needs to know you're in charge or it won't respect you.

I guess that latter stuff is optional, but my point is not to worry too much. You don't want to make a habit of hard shutdowns, but if your PC locks up (which is your bigger problem), what other option do you have? Sometimes it's the only way, and it's very unlikely to damage your hardware.

All the reading I've done on the topic suggests that the worst thing that may happen is that you'll mash the power button while Windows is busy writing delicate data, which can corrupt the OS and require you to repair or reinstall Windows. If you habitually bypass Windows' shutdown routine while programs are busy tinkering with the registry, it wouldn't be a surprising result, but it sounds like hard resets are a last resort for you. With the amount I mess around with PCs, reinstalling Windows has become fairly commonplace for me, though I'm sure you want to avoid it.

As for hardware damage, I wouldn't worry. A few sources say that hard shutdowns will cause the hard drive's read-write head to stop on or crash into the platter, potentially causing irreversible damage. I don't know what kind of ancient PCs they're using, but modern hard drives automatically park the head after a power loss. From Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs 16th Edition: "On a drive with a voice coil actuator, you activate the parking mechanism by turning off the computer; you do not need to run a program to park or retract the heads, as was necessary with early hard disk designs. In the event of a power outage, the heads park themselves automatically."

The only way I've destroyed a hard disk is by dropping the thing. I am very clumsy. Don't be like me. And much more dangerous than power loss are power fluctuations, which can occur during a blackout or electrical storm or for other reasons, so be sure you're using a good surge protector. And also, try to figure out why your PC is freezing in the first place. It could be an existing hardware problem.

If you were hoping to be playing Broken Age's second half by the end of this year, prepare for disappointment. Producer Greg Rice has announced a new vague release window on the Double Fine forums: "early next year".

"The team has been steadily growing in size over the past month and progress is being made really rapidly now", Greg writes in the above post. "The key milestone being that just last week we hit Alpha on both Shay and Vella s halves of Act 2, leaving just the big finale section until we can say the entirety of Act 2 is at Alpha!"

Further on a bit in that same post: "The goal now is to get all the finale work done so we can hit Alpha on all of Act 2 by the end of the year. That means, as you may have guessed based on recent updates and documentary episodes, the Act 2 ship that will deliver the complete adventure is now looking like it will be early next year. The game is looking really good and the team is working super fast, but we just gotta give the game the time it needs to really deliver on everything we re hoping it will be."

Rice says that playtests of Act 2 "have ranged from 8-12 hours", suggesting that Broken Age's second part may be a bit longer than its first. Speaking of Act 1, Richard Cobbett rather liked it when he reviewed it back in January of this year.

Thanks, Polygon.

A reminder: Julian Gollop, of the Gollops what made X-Com, is currently creating a follow-up to his wizarding strategy game Chaos. It's called, somewhat inevitably, Chaos Reborn, and several months ago it narrowly hit its funding target on Kickstarter. Now, a new trailer has been released showing how far the colourful, turn-based, roleplaying magic-'em-up has come in the last couple of years. The video also reveals the date we can expect it to wash up on Steam Early Access—and it's probably sooner than you think. 'December 9th' is the date to etch onto the side of your wand (writing it in your diary would likely help as well).

The Chaos Reborn site has a wealth of information about the game, which mixes single-player tactical roleplaying with "multiplayer arena wizard battles", four words that look beautiful together. The above video certainly looks the part, boasting all sorts of fancy animations and visual effects that look quite striking next to the flat developer art we were looking at almost exactly two years ago.

I was hoping to have played White Hole Studios' i hate skool by this weekend, but the download link's been disabled, possibly to make me want it even more. Grrr. Not that this week's been lacking for interesting games. We have the lovely, soggy Petrichor, an Ape Escape game that isn't Ape Escape, a genuine bar-fight-'em up, all the retro and lots of chromatic aberration. Enjoy!

Ocean Highway Patrol by Barnaby RW, Alexander Webster, Dom Willmott, Reuben Covington

Well someone has to patrol the ocean highway. In this case it's you, working out of a heavily chromatically aberrated cop car in a psychedelic driving game made by lots of people. It's a game for two players, or one person with two hands: Lefty operates the vehicle, while Righty checks out passing station wagons with a speedometer, to see whether they're over the limit. If you want to be a bad cop you can be, which here means tagging innocent vehicles and then blowing them up. There's no overarching goal that I can detect; Ocean Highway Patrol is a game about being in the moment, about being an ocean highway cop and doing (very purple) ocean highway cop things.

Petrichor by Sundae Month

Oooh! Oooooooooh. Ooooh! Those are some of the noises I made while playing Sundae Month's Petrichor, an absurdly lovely puzzle game that is probably only free because it's quite short. It's certainly not because it lacks artistry, invention or polish. I won't spoil all of its ideas, but Petrichor puts you in the role of a girl with an umbrella, who unlocks abilities by finding soggy notes and reading them by the fire. The pixel art is beautiful, the music is equally cromulent, and the various abilities are pretty novel with it. Despite me writing the word 'puzzle' earlier, this is more a game of collecting, using and backtracking rather than solving things, and while that backtracking does get a little tedious, the enigmatic payoff is worth it. Highly recommended, when you have 10-15 minutes to spare.

ESC Ape by Janne Markkula

ESC Ape is a very old-fashioned shooter, which means super-fast movement, quick strafing, pixelated environments and baddies, and a load of unashamedly floating things to collect. Compared to something like Doom, it's enormously difficult: enemy bullets will make mincemeat of your health, and with no overt visual or aural feedback to alert you when this is happening, death will come swiftly and often. It's worth persisting. ESC Ape gets a lot else right, from the catchy soundtrack to the satisfying weaponry, to the hugely fun spritework and enemy designs.

Mighty Retro Zero by Kronbits

The mighty Mighty Retro Zero is a giant bag of game references, though amazingly not in an annoying memey way. Its tiny pixel art platforming levels encompass everything from Arkanoid to Angry Birds, or at least I think they do based on trailers and screenshots. I can't get past the ultra-hard, Arkanoid-based opening stage, but I enjoyed what little I witnessed of this adorable action game (the rest looks quite fun as well). Kronbits' game will be on Steam when it's a bit fuller and bigger or it will if it gets enough votes.

Paint the Town Red by Matthew Carr and Shane Carr

It's a bar brawling game! And the first of many, hopefully. Trapped in a pub with lots of blocky people out to get you, your only recourse is to hit them with strewn objects, including pool cues, bottles, chairs, knives, and those fisty things found at the very end of your arms. When your opponents are done in, they fall over or disassemble into piles of cubey body parts, accompanied by lots of blocky blood. It's all very silly and satisfying stuff, as you might expect from the team behind Probably Archery. Paint the Town Red is on Greenlight too, if you'd like to see an expanded version someday.

Between Black Friday and the Steam sale and all the games in your backlog, you might feel like you don't need any more interactive entertainment in your life, but I urge you to make some time for the beautiful, atmospheric Fallow, of which a demo appeared on itch.io this month. Particularly if you like the American Gothic of True Detective, Gabriel Knight, certain episodes of The X-Files, or, er, American Gothic itself. I've been exploring Josiah Tobin's game this afternoon, and it's one of the most elegant adventures I've played in ages.

Fallow puts you in the role of one Isabelline Fallo, a somnambulist in a strange, crumbling version of America that's a little different to the strange, crumbling America that exists for us. There are puzzles to solve, notes to find, and a story and mythology to unravel, in a game that, so far, appears to let you get on with things without intruding with advice, or stuffing collectibles or characters everywhere. Fallow is a game of exploration and investigation, and it's shaping up to be a damn fine one too.

You can download the demo here, vote for the game on Steam Greenlight here, or catch up with its development over on TIGSource. The Greenlight trailer is below.

Maia seems to be coming on leaps and bounds, or as leapy and boundy as a game that's been in Early Access for around a year can be. It's not quite cooked enough for me to take a bite yet, but I do like checking in on it now and again. If you're the same as me (or if you've actually bought the thing), you'll be pleased to hear that another biggish update has just been applied, adding a 3D printer for 3D printing little robots, a botany station for researching plants, bodybags (for there not being rotten bodies everywhere), and various bug fixes and tweaks.

The most sizeable addition appears to be the aforementioned botany stuff, which will let you send your little people and robots out into the wild to harvest plants. Plants can be researched to unlock new technologies—technologies such as the 'Caesar Salad'. Probably. Look, I'm no biologist, but I do know food.

There aren't nearly enough ugly molerat creatures in this latest update, but it sounds like there's going to be an even more monstrous addition to the game next time. Developer Simon Roth says that we can "expect colonists to show their emotions, write useful base reports and even look forward to a new terrifying creature to sabotage your base" in update 0.47. Great, thanks a lot Simon, cheers for that.

Roth details version 0.46 in the above video. (Ta, PCGamesN.)

This week saw Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar enter Early Access over on Steam (read Leif's first impressions of it here), which to my mind is the second best reason to talk about the Ultima series today. The first is that it's a day of the week ending in the letter 'y'. Ultima is a series very close to my heart, and for many reasons. It wasn't the first RPG series I played, but very few before or since have been as meaningful. When I think of 'my favourite RPG', Ultima VII: The Black Gate snaps instantly into my head, albeit with a couple of others like Planescape Torment hot on its heels. To put this in context, Ultima VII came out in 1992. There's not many games that can even be in contention for holding the crown twenty years after they came out. A couple of adventures spring to mind. That's about it. Oh, and Qix, of course; the game of kings.

There's many reasons that Ultima is special, from the pants-on-head insanity of the early games to the sandbox nature of the world, where there was technically a plot to follow in a specific order, but no real penalty for deciding balls to it, finding a magic carpet or jumping into a moon-gate and simply getting lost in both the stories and, later on, the ability to do things like bake bread. At one point, albeit patched out, doing so with the blood of a murdered man and feeding it to his grieving son. Or hire a prostitute for a talking mouse. Or find a hundred ways to break the game systems over your knee for fun and profit. Pretty much all of them are included in one of my favourite Lets Play series ever - the adventures of Steve the Druid.

What really defined Ultima IV-VIII though (let's not speak of the final game, Ascension) and depressingly few games since have picked up on is that each of them was an attempt to be about something. In Ultima IV: Quest Of The Avatar, Garriott moved away from stories about beating up the latest threat to his world (at the time, Sosaria, later renamed Britannia) in favour of a story about a land more or less at peace and in need of a symbol to represent the best that it can be - the Avatar, the only one capable of bending all eight virtues of Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Honour, Sacrifice, Spirituality and Humility. The goal was to set a good example for the world, albeit an inevitably primitive one that was limited to 1985-vintage technology. Each Virtue was basically 'do a thing', with Honour a simple matter of completing quests and remembering that Honour is spelled with a 'u', and others a bit gimmickey. Cheating blind merchants for instance, or stealing, was something of an Honesty no-no.

From there though, the series began getting more involved. Ultima V for instance, while adding in a trio of evil called the Shadowlords, was narratively based on the subversion of those virtues - that there's a difference between the spirit and the letter of the law, as shown in the form of Lord Blackthorne. He takes over Britannia and enforces the Virtues with an iron fist that turns them into tools of tyranny rather than merely aspects of the three cardinal principles of Truth, Love and Courage.

Ultima VI though was the first to really nail it. Dubbed The False Prophet, it sees the Avatar returning to Britannia and immediately being set upon by a demonic looking group of gargoyles who have been terrorising the realm. You're assigned to take care of them, as heroes do, and that works for a while. Midway through though, the whole thing is recast as an allegory for racism and xenophobia; the gargoyles both being far from evil and having a very good reason for what they're doing - that in finding enlightenment for Britannia, the Avatar accidentally (and inadvertently) doomed them. Dealing with the situation then becomes one of atonement and diplomacy, up to and including being willing to face justice for that, and building a bridge between the two sides to restore a sense of balance the 'good guys' don't really want.

What I find fascinating about the Avatar though isn't that he/she (it was a choice up until Ultima VIII, at which point he became canonically male and started wearing a bucket on his head) is able to accomplish that, but that you can argue that despite saving the world on at least four separate occasions, the Quest Of The Avatar was the single worst thing that ever happened to Britannia. This is never really gone into in the games, where he quickly becomes a mix of Superman and mythical god due to games that feature up to 200 year jumps between instalments, but looking back it's tough to argue that what it led to was worth the benefits.

In the first place, damn near everything that goes wrong is entirely, literally, the Avatar's fault. Never intentionally! There's no arguing that. Canonically at least, everything he does is righteous and it's not until Ultima VIII: Pagan that he's forced into doing horrible things for the greater good - that being the theme of the game, which takes place on a dark realm from which he has to escape with urgency.

It's true though. Initially, the Quest for the Avatar ends up with him simply taking a powerful artefact called the Codex Of Ultimate Wisdom, which turns out to destroy the gargoyle home and set up Ultima IV. It also however results in the creation of his nemesis, a godlike force of ultimate evil called The Guardian that conquers at least ten worlds while the Avatar is saving just the one, as well as creating no fewer than <em>two</em> evil religions as dark mirrors of his own. If we assume that the Avatar is also the Stranger From Another World who starred in Ultima I-III, Ultima V is also his fault, the Shadowlords and their brutal dictatorship having been spawned from shards left behind by his earlier monster hunting. Making things worse, by the time we get to Ultima IX, the Avatar ends up being responsible for not only the final destruction of the gargoyles' new home, the entire land of Pagan (to the point that in an early version of Ultima IX's story, the Guardian was able to torture Lord British just by showing him a clip-show of what his champion had gotten up to), and the ending is him nuking Britannia and leaving its surviving population as intergalactic refugees who survive the devastation at the cost of everything they love.

Looking back, there is literally one threat that the Avatar isn't directly responsible for, and it's Ultima VII: Part 2, Serpent Isle. Even then: Kinda. I'm willing to give it to him though, because while TECHNICALLY it only happened because Ultima III villain Exodus turned one of the three great serpents of reality into his personal doorman because the Avatar had killed his mommy and daddy, their crimes are on them. A Sosaria ruled by them would be no world at all. A Britannia without an Avatar however is arguably a far, far safer one in the long run. At the very least, its problems would be less likely to be 'rip the cosmos apart' level threats as faced in the series.

(I should add that a few of these things waver a bit in canon - the Avatar's nemesis in Ultima VII for instance, The Guardian, had a couple of suggested identities before being revealed as the Avatar's dark half. But since we've got the games as they are, let's treat them as such for simplicity. This column is long enough.)

None of this is intended as a criticism of Ultima, a series that I love deeply. It's just fascinating to me how the series that set out to hail the Avatar ultimately... not a pun, that word was inevitable at some point... became the case for the prosecution. But that's just the start. To see what a failure the Avatar truly was, you just need to look at the point of the whole enterprise in the first place.

Ultima is not a story about perfection. That's important. Lord British, despite being creator Richard Garriott's author avatar, is regularly wrong, often pig-headed, and at times, damn near blind. In Ultima VII for instance, you know from the very start that the world is under siege by the machinations of The Guardian, but the one time he even acknowledges his existence is if you cast a spell called Armageddon - and even then, only to muse (as one of the few people powerful enough to survive that spell) that at least now he might not want Britannia after all. The people of Ultima VII: Part 2: Serpent Isle call him "Beast British". If you know where to look... as an easter egg, admittedly... you can also find out that he's knocked up one of his maids.

The Avatar too is, canonically, just a guy. He's from Texas. He makes mistakes. Between adventures in Britannia he comes back home and he lives a regular life, to the point that one of the games ended with him getting back and realising a perfectly mundane burglar has stolen all his stuff while he was gone. The Quest For The Avatar isn't an attempt to find a magical chosen one or a demigod scion or anything like that, but a role-model. Anyone could in theory be an Avatar (if not of course complete the exact same quest, since that's done and dusted), and even if most won't have what it takes, they can at least aspire to it - to step up, to be better, to actively live the Virtues instead of simply paying lip-service to them.

Much like the very similar portrayal of heroism in Quest For Glory, that's a kind of heroism I can get behind. It's not about being the toughest, it's not about being chosen, it's about trying. And Britannia... never gets that. At all. Instead, the Avatar becomes their equivalent of Superman, a symbol deified in a world that otherwise goes out of its way to avoid religion. His depictions grow more saintly, his victories become legends. But when he's gone, and as said, he can be gone for centuries at a time, does anyone truly follow in his footsteps or rise to the challenge? No. They figure that if something goes badly wrong enough, he'll be back. And he always is, even if usually to clean up the mess that he started. Returning though, what he usually finds is a world of arrogance and hypocrisy; one where the people assume that living in a town devoted to Compassion means that they must of course be compassionate, and never mind whether or not they've just kicked out the poor and disenfranchised to a sewer town where even charity comes with a price.

This is of course sometimes part of the story - in the case of Ultima VII for instance, the population is being misled by an evil cult called the Fellowship and the psychic power of the Guardian, while in Ultima IX there are giant columns actively subverting the Virtues. But that doesn't cover all lapses, not by a long shot. The ultimate failure of the Avatar is that he is, and remains, The Avatar; and little but Britannia's crutch at that. (It's also notable that when Ultima Online came along... a world being sold to an audience of heroes who had strived to uphold the Eight Virtues for several games at that point... the world instantly became a Darwinian charnel house. Ouch.)

For obvious reasons, I'm really curious to see how all of this will continue to play out in Shroud of the Avatar, which combines MMO and solo content to try and tell both your story and that of the world. At least, it will. Right now, the Early Access version doesn't have much in the way of story or sense of the overall sweep, save that Garriott intends it to be rooted in both the virtues and sociology. (It's in pre-alpha; you can wander around, fight monsters, talk to a few people, listen to a piece of music that's blatantly Stones with the serial numbers filed off and a couple of other things, but definitely not get lost in a new adventure yet.)

In particular though, I'm curious to see how the past is acknowledged. Shroud doesn't pick up on Ultima as such, it's a new property that simply harks back to it as much as possible, but the Avatar concept is of course still baked in. While Ultima was running, there was never much real doubt that he was a hero, successfully questing for all the right things. It took a little distance, and the completion of the saga, to really hammer in the nails and start begging a few questions. In creating a new Avatar for a new age, will that be factored in? Will it be second time lucky? However it turns out, I'm certainly looking forward to finding out what the legacy of the Avatar truly is. 

Fingers crossed, it's to be the inspiration he was always meant to be.

Venture into some towns in Shroud of the Avatar, Richard "Lord British" Garriott's Kickstarter-funded attempt to revive the experience of the early Ultima games, and you'll find Tesla coils powering the high-voltage walls of quaint medieval villages. It's a little similar to what Garriott's trying to do with SotA: using new technology to refresh an outmoded format. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn't. As the warning that pops up when you play the Early Access version now available on Steam proclaims, it "still needs a LOT of work," but there's nevertheless the rough draft of something wonderful on display here.

It is rough, though. Combat is hilariously awful. My first battle past the brief tutorial sees me whipping out my sword and swatting at a deer with sounds that could have been someone's hand patting a flour bag. Never mind that the animations are disappointing by the standards of the last decade; that sound is the sound of madness, and it carries over to every other weapon I try. As for the deer herself? She merely bounds back and forth, letting me swat her with each pass until she plops over so I can loot her hide.

It gets better when you start encountering hostile creatures, although they're prone to standing around looking bored. (Also, in this world bears are apparently much easier to kill than wolves.) A dynamic "deck" system that switches out skills randomly on your bar helps avoid the drudgery of standard MMO rotation, but it's not explained clearly. I eventually defaulted to playing with a fixed skillbar so I'd still have some time to munch on some turkey this Thanksgiving.

What I did learn, I learned from other players. Garriott and his team bill SotA as "selectively multiplayer," which will eventually mean that you can play entirely alone, only with friends, or with other people in the manner of a traditional contemporary MMORPG. That's all in the future. The regular MMO mode's the strongest right now, although the single player and MMO modes available both benefit from the first sketch of a story penned by Tracy Hickman of Dragonlance fame. The veterans from the days before the Steam release are helpful folk, and I saw none of the hostility towards newbie questions that you find in some online worlds.

Let s talk about quests. Shroud of the Avatar isn't one of those games with NPCs balancing big exclamation marks over their heads; here, you have to chat up the local populace to dig for information. As in, you type out questions and carry out conversations.

I love it, even if you'll come across occasional oddities like the town crier who claims he doesn't know what's going on in the area despite the fact that it's his friggin' job. My first stab at chatting brings me into contact with a sour guy named Seamus (who has dozens of similarly bald and shabbily dressed twins all across the world), and he points me toward work even after my flippant "So how can I help around here, dude?" He tells me to chat up a local guard, who in turn tells me to chat up the local brewer and hunter. All the while, I use my memory of previous encounters and the scant clues in my journal to keep the conversation going.

It's fun mainly because it lets me speak to these people as I want to, and most of their responses yield clickable words for prompts if you want to minimize the guessing games. Sometimes, however, a tiny, teensy-weensy bit of hand-holding would be nice. Said hunter tells me to go out and kill the leader of a pack of wolves up north, and so I slaughter dozens, all the while looking for a beast named "Pack Leader" or some such. I see none. In frustration, I peek at my journal and saw I'd somehow already killed the beast among the rabble. On the bright side? I went back and got a shocking boost of six levels for turning in the quest.

But this focus on charting your path carries over to everything. Characters aren't bound by classes, so you can customize them with points as you level. I learned which zones I was too weak for not by looking at level requirements sealed on the screen, but by testing my steel against the foes there. Chats with NPCs may give you an idea of which towns and zones to travel to across the world map (which you walk across like Godzilla), but you're free to head in any direction that suits your fancy. Sometimes random encounters pop up, but I never saw anything more dangerous than killing six or so wolves. Players are also free to build their own houses, though it breaks the roleplaying vibe a bit when you see rows of the same castles in little country towns.

All respect due to Mr. Garriott, but I can't help but think this is what most of us imagined Elder Scrolls Online would be like in the early days following its announcement, at least in concept. You can play alone if you wish, but you can also experience the same world with friends. Sure, its combat may be awfully rough, the framerates are jittery even with beefy graphics cards, and the environments (though lovely in spots) still look years old. But right now SotA comes closer to the reality of a "Skyrim Online" than anything I've seen in recent months.

Like Lord British says, there's a LOT of work that needs to be done here. But in a year? Perhaps two? I hope I can come back and discover that he's created the MMO I've always wanted to play.