Holy macaroni it's the final Five of the Best of the year! This is our weekly series where we sprinkle some love on the overlooked parts of games. We've talked about potions, caves, hands, shops, hubs, maps, mountains and many more. There's a Five of the Best archive if you fancy a butcher's.

Snow! I wonder about snow. Hardly any falls where I live so whenever it does, everyone gets very excited for it. The ugly grey concrete we see every day is hidden under a fluffy white blanket, as if to say, "Don't worry about all that stuff, unless of course you walk into it, but go out and do something else instead. Be with friends! Be with family! The trains don't bloody work anyway." So the country grinds to a halt and we all rush outside to slide down hills on sledges, baking trays, dustbin lids, plastic bags - anything we can find. There's no thought for safety as people plummet down, careering into people walking up - I once saw someone perform a whole impromptu somersault - and we all return home at the end of the day with bruises and a spot of hypothermia. It's a great day out.

So when I see snow in a video game, the same butterflies of excitement flutter around inside me. But I wonder, is it the same for those of you who live where it snows a lot? You must see so much you are sick of the sight of it. Do you like snow in games or does it give you nightmares? Do let me know!

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Fans of sports, the cold, and mostly going downward are in for a treat (as long as they own a PC); Ubisoft's enjoyable, open-world extreme winter sports extravaganza Steep is currently free to download and keep via Uplay.

Steep originally released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC in 2016, to what Wikipedia tells me was a "mixed to average" critical response. Clearly nobody asked Eurogamer's Christian Donlan or myself, because we both really quite enjoyed it.

Admittedly, my own positive feelings toward Steep have mostly been directed at the walls and ceiling until now, but Donlan awarded its sometimes uneven, but frequently exhilarating, blend of extreme sports and vast, freeing expanses, a Eurogamer Recommended back in the day.

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Ubisoft's enormously enjoyable open-world winter sports game Steep will be getting special challenge event seasons, with their own exclusive rewards, starting next month.

The new system, known as Live Activities Seasons, tasks players with besting a variety of temporary challenges in order to win an exclusive set of gear. Different challenges award different parts of the unique gear, with a new gear set and new challenges being introduced every three months.

Season 1 of Ubisoft's new initiative begins on April 1st and runs until June 29th, with a second and third season planned for July to September and October to December respectively.

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