What is the best game of 2015? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games from throughout the year, and behind today’s door is…

Rocket League!

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Rocket League [official site] doesn’t even start its Christmas Event until December 14th, but developers Psyonix are already showering us with presents. Today brings those Portal-themed cosmetic goodies along with a new post-apocalyptic thundering dome to play carball in. On top of that, today also sees the release of the Chaos Run paid DLC, which has two new cars looking straight out of Mad Max> and plenty of rusty, dusty, mohawky cosmetic doodads to slap on your sportsride. All of this is wrapped up neatly with a bow in Patch 1.10.

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A free Portal-themed set of cosmetic items and flourishes will arrive in Rocket League [official site] tomorrow. There are gel trails for your nitro boosts, cake hats and decals, and heart-breaking Companion Cube antennae. There’s plenty more along those lines as well, and it’s all free, but I’m perhaps unfairly disappointed by the lack of actual portals. I hadn’t even considered how amazing it would be to attach a portal to the area above my own goalmouth, causing stray shots that enter to emerge right by the opponent’s goal. And if the cars could dash through portals as well? Beautiful chaos.

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It’s beginning to look at a lot like Christmas, and not just because tweets from Americans celebrating Thanksgiving today are a great preview of this year’s Crimble arguments. The Christmas market has set up here in Edinburgh, and wee wobbly cars are skidding around the ice-skating rink with mittens trailing behind them on strings. Rocket League [official site] is preparing to get in on the festive fun too, announcing a ‘Snow Day’ event with an icy pitch and a big old puck to push. You’ll also get to pick up Christmassy accessories for your sportcar, like antlers and hats.

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Rocket League [official site] is, of course, set in the brightest of utopias, when we have all transcended flesh to gambol and frolic as sentient cars. But what if it were a bad future, what if everything were all rusty and had sand and all that bad future stuff? You’ll see soon, as developers Psyonix today announced Chaos Run, a new DLC pack with grim, grimy new cards, decals, wheels, and other customisation bits. It’ll arrive this December alongside a free update adding a new footie arena for everyone, the dusty Wasteland – the game’s first ‘non-standard’ pitch. Have a look:

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Football with rocketcars, sure, that makes sense to me – it’s the natural evolution of ballsports, to come in our own future following an intermediate step of sports combining rollerskaters and motorbikers. But making the ball cubic? Making cars murder each other on contact? Now that is unlikely! But you can virtually indulge in this wild dream, as Rocket League [official site] developers Psyonix have added those and more as optional oddities through ‘mutators’ in an update last night.

These are small options that can change the game in silly ways, from low-gravity Moonball (which, again, seems inevitable) to carhockey (preposterous!).

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Car-wot-plays-football smash hit Rocket League [official site] is the gift that keeps on giving. And I don’t mean simply that the next downloadable content is free, but also that it continues to ramp up the game’s signature ridiculousness. Next month sees the addition of Mutators, a loving nod to the Unreal Tournament feature of the same name, with which you can remix RL matches into something a little stranger. Make the ball gigantic, for instance, or square. Make it into a giant ice hockey puck, or a low-gravity Moonball. Make it faster, make it explode. It’s the obvious add-on for Rocket League in a way, and it costs no-pennies.

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In 1981, the DeLorean Motor Company starting producing its first – and only – car, the DeLorean DMC-12. It was a flop, and the company shut down a few years later. The DMC-12 was expensive, heavy, and slow, so for a good long while many simply sat and rusted quietly in garages, car yards, and barns – too much work to fix up.

The car’s spaceship-y stainless steel panelling and gull-wing doors have found a few fans amongst collectors in recent years but, even so, this is a curious development: a DMC-12 arrived in Rocket League [official site] today as DLC.

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For a few years now, internauts have enjoyed editing stills from Back to the Future Part II> to pretend today’s the date young Marty McFly travels forward to – the time when we should all ride hoverboards and feed our cars garbage. Well, that date is really for really reals almost here – October 21st, 2015 – and it’s being marked in a fine way by Rocket League [official site].

Cry “Great Scott!” and (in excited confusion) “Wubba lubba dub-dub!” as Psyonix are only flipping putting Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine into their footie-with-cars game. It will not travel through time. It will cost you $2.

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Oh man, I’d be so good> at Rocket League [official site] by now, if only MGSV hadn’t been released and stolen all my time just after I started playing it in earnest. I can sprint-punch a donkey and fire it into the air in a heartbeat, but no way I could car-kick a ball into a goal on random servers now, I suspect. Graham, can I take a week off to practice? I need to so I can write about the excellently-named upcoming second DLC, Revenge of the Battle-Cars. Yes? Great, see you in a week.

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