Experienced players know the importance of fighting quietly in Counter-Strike. You're slower when you walk, but a single footstep or over-cautious reload can give away your position and intentions. I took a moment to talk over a quick eco round where I found success by taking advantage of my opponents' inability to hear over the sound of their own gunfire.

My Sister of the Bear is a massive woman. She wields a bearded axe that's just as big as she is, and right now she's only a turn away from smashing an idol with one health point. My opponent is outnumbered and blocked by numerous weaker minions—I have this. And then the worst happens. The enemy player lays down a scroll that makes a gale sweep throughout the board, damaging all minions equally, and he launches some kind of missile that smacks my hero down with the cold weight of technology. Suddenly, I'm the one who's afraid.

Cue flashback. I'm hunched over a chessboard on the brittle tables of my middle school cafeteria (nerd that I was), frantically trying to figure out how my best friend could have called out "checkmate" when I'd planned everything so well. Scrolls delivers many moments like this precisely because it feels a little like the game of kings; for more modern sensibilities, it's just as well to think of it as a mashup of Magic: The Gathering and Might & Magic.

In the menus and shop, Scrolls looks much like many of the other digital collectible and trading card games that have popped up over the last few months, but in matches, it benefits from a tactical element that has you play the minions represented by your cards (erm, scrolls ) on a hexagonally gridded field with five idols each with 10 hit points on both ends. Knock out three of the idols, and you win. It seems like such a small change, but the resulting need for careful thought elevates it in some regards above the Blizzard's ultra-popular Hearthstone.

Naturally, that means it's a tad tougher to pick up compared to Blizzard's beast. An extensive series of tutorials adequately eases you into the waters, but I readily admit that I spent hours battling the decent AI in skirmishes and trials ( puzzles ) before I felt comfortable jumping in with real people who might mock my placement of a barrier or a Brother of the Wolf. (Happily, the community's not anywhere near as bad as all that.) Scrolls isn't just about which card trumps another; it's also about moving avatars to new lanes after they've destroyed an idol on another. It's about blocking and rushing and buffing. The payoff is that every win feels like it's born of my mind and not my luck.

Scrolls does much to nurture this feeling. It avoids the bummer of running out of cards in a traditional card game by letting you sacrifice a scroll once per round to bump up your mana a tad or to trade it out for two different scrolls from your deck. (Or, you know, play it.) It only supports four decks—Growth, Order, Decay, and Energy—but they all cater to certain playstyles and aesthetic preferences. I tend to play as Growth, but that's mainly because I like the scruffy Viking look of its primitive representatives, each drawn on scrolls with imagery that captures the spirit (if not the detail) of Magic: The Gathering's artwork. If I'm in the right mood, I gravitate toward the Energy deck, full of steampunky "machine priests" and built around a heavy hitting philosophy. I enjoy them all, in fact, with the caveat that they don't play well together in mixed decks. Since each 50-card deck can only draw from its own resources, mixed decks bog down in an awkwardness that doesn't exist in decks of a single type.

That wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, if it didn't exacerbate a preexisting problem. Much like those chess matches in my middle school cafeteria (which I rarely finished before the bell rang), Scrolls suffers from plodding pacing that drags matches out for the better part of an hour. Much of this springs from the need to demolish the three idols, which grows challenging when you're up against a player that knows the slightest thing about slapping down barrier scrolls or tanky minions. Turns in multiplayer matches last for 90 seconds, and many players insist on savoring every last one before clicking the hourglass to end the turn. And sorry, Mojang: I don't think there's any way this tortoise is going to catch up with Blizzard's hare.

But here's the thing—there's little evidence that Mojang cares about the competition, and that's what makes Scrolls appealing in spite of its pacing problems. For months word circulated that it would cost 20 bucks, but now that it's here, it costs a fourth of that—just $5/ 3.

It gets better. The premium "shards" you buy with real cash only purchase customizable avatars, random daily cards, and preconstructed decks, but Mojang lets you buy all scrolls in the game with the gold from your winnings. In contrast to certain other games, the gold piles up quickly. Winning matches against the AI is usually enough to net you enough gold to buy at least one scroll, and buying full packs with scrolls from all four decks doesn't take much longer. All things considered, Scrolls is easily one of the most generous collectible card games on the market, and it even lets you freely buy and sell cards with other players with gold on the "black market."

So, where is everyone? Here's a game that bucks the trend everyone complains about and it's like Washington D.C. in Fallout 3. Matches pop up quickly enough, but once I even played against the same guy twice in a row. It makes for a community that feels like a group of close buddies who play cards together every night, but that means frightening things for Scrolls' future.

Perhaps that pacing really is enough to drive everyone away. Perhaps it's marketing. Whatever the reason, it shouldn't be enough to dissuade you from trying out Mojang's mildly cerebral CCG if you like some tactics in your cardplay. So head on over—the community will wait. At this point, they're used to it.

Electronic Arts says Battlefield Hardline is "the fastest Battlefield ever," and that may well be true. Even so, I don't think I'd necessarily recommend shooting at pursuing police cars from the back of a crotch rocket, especially when the occupants of said cars are packing submachine-guns and an apparent green light to use them at will.

I haven't been paying particularly close attention to Battlefield Hardline, so maybe this is old news to most of you, but what I find especially interesting about this trailer is the idea that the police can actually arrest criminals, rather than simply shooting them repeatedly. Mainly because of the obvious questions that follow: What happens to apprehended suspects—and, for that matter, the officers who arrest them?

Are they out of the game while they're taken down to booking? Do arresting officers have to go AFK while they fill out their R-155s and get them filed before end-of-day? And what's the non-lethal option for the criminals? I'm assuming there has to be one, because if not, wouldn't everyone want to play as a bad guy?

And then there's the part of me that thinks I'm reading too much into this. Perhaps Battlefield Hardline is less "Law and Order" and more B.A.D. Cats. Here, look it up.

Battlefield Hardline comes out on March 20.

Eidos Montreal has released a Deus Ex: Human Revolution prequel novella written by James Swallow, one of the writers on the game and its somewhat less-well-received follow-up, The Fall. Entitled Deus Ex: Fallen Angel, it tells the tale of Faridah Malik in her days before joining Sarif Industries as its chief pilot.

Malik was the VTOL jockey who hustled Adam Jensen all over the planet as he went about Sarif business, and who—spoiler alert, so stop reading here if you haven't played the game but have every intention of doing so over the holidays and don't want to ruin any surprises, because I'm about to do just that, and I'm not kidding around here—may or may not have met an unpleasant end at the hands of Belltower soldiers.

The story is set in Hengsha prior to the events of Human Revolution and, based on some quick poking about (I haven't read it yet), will fill in at least some of the blanks alluded to in the game. During their first trip to the city, Malik requests Jensen's aid in investigating what she believes is the murder of her friend, Evelyn Carmichael; Carmichael features prominently in the novella, although given the time frame I'd guess it has nothing to do with that particular mission.

Even if you're not a die-hard, must-have-it-all fan of Deus Ex, Fallen Angel is free, so why not? A little bit of holiday reading never hurt anyone. Grab it here.

We like cheap PC components and accessories. But you know what we like even more? Expensive PC components and accessories that are on sale! We ve partnered with the bargainmeisters at TechBargains to bring you a weekly list of the best component, accessory, and software sales for PC gamers.

Some highlights this week: The Steam Holiday Sale is a go and has too many deals to round up here! The Dell UltraSharp U2412 monitor is down to $320 on Dell's official site and comes with a $100 Dell giftcard. Separate from the Steam sale, GreenManGaming is having a huge amount of sales on a bunch of games, but a lot of them are short lived. And not one to be left out of the party, Amazon is also heavily discounting digital games, including our  Game of the Year, Alien: Isolation for only $25.

— Amazon is having a huge holiday digital games sale, including Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection for $5, Skyrim for $5, Grand Theft Auto 4 for $3, Dead space 3 for $4, Alien: Isolation for $25, and a lot more.

— GreenManGaming has a set of 24 hour deals including Fallout, the Valve Complete Pack, Tropico, and more for 75% off, and you can take another 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— GreenManGaming also has a bunch 48 hour deals including DMC, Dead Rising 3, Duke Nukem 3D, and more which you can also get an additional 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— GreenManGaming, not short on deals, is also having a Deals from the Deep sale on deadly games like Typing of the Dead, Left4Dead, Soul Reaver, Dishonored, and more which you can also get an additional 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— The entire Mass Effect Trilogy is on $13.50 on Amazon.

— And, lest we forget, the Steam Holiday Sale is in full force with more deals then we can possibly list here.

— The Lenovo Helix Convertible Laptop is down to $949.99 on Lenovo s site with the code USPHLX33U128

— The Corsair Carbide Series 500R ATX Mid Tower computer case is $79.99 on Newegg after a $20 rebate and with the code EMCWHWA35

— The Gigabyte GV-N75TOC-2GI GeForce GTX 750Ti graphics card is $114.99 on Newegg after a $30 rebate, and comes with $50 of in-game currency for Strife, War Thunder, and Infinite Crisis.

— The Corsair RM Series RM650 650W Full Modular Power Supply (80PLUS GOLD) is $79.99 on Newegg after a $20 rebate.

— The Dell UltraSharp U2412 24in 1920x1200 monitor is $319.99 on Dell s site and comes with a $100 Dell gift card. To see the deal, click "click here for pricing" then small business.

— The Dell S2715H 27in LED LCD Monitor is $299.99 on Dell s site and comes with a $100 Dell gift card. To see the deal, click "click here for pricing" then small business.

— The Crucial M550 512GB SSD is $209.99 on Newegg with the code EMCWHHH25

For more tech deals, visit techbargains.com.

A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to online stores. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which help support our work evaluating components and games.

I ve wanted to write a spoilery assessment (warning: you've been warned) of BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea all year, and now appears to be the perfect time. While I briefly considered nominating this for some kind of best expansion award, talking about this as a personal favourite of the year and being able to discuss the ins and outs of the story makes so much more sense—because if you muddled your way to BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Part 2, having completed the previous episode, BioShock Infinite, BioShock 2 and maybe Minerva s Den, this closing of the Irrational era of the series was a huge moment. It was not only a farewell to Rapture and Columbia, but a goodbye note from Irrational as the studio in its post-Infinite form ceased to exist.

I think Burial At Sea works a little too hard to pander to fans. In Part 1 of Burial At Sea, a Rapture-bound Booker DeWitt teams up with a noir-styled Elizabeth to find a lost child called Sally. After a wander in pre-fall Rapture, it veers into more familiar splicer-slaying territory. By the finale, Booker is killed as many of the same themes from Infinite s ending are reprised. Burial At Sea Pt 2, by contrast, puts players in Elizabeth s shoes for the first time. Elizabeth is reluctantly in league with BioShock antagonist Atlas, who leads a rebellion against Ryan that will throw Rapture out of balance. Elizabeth helps set in motion Jack s arrival in Rapture, in a story that is quite clearly intended to be canon for the original BioShock.

To quote my colleague Phil Savage when I discussed this with him, Burial At Sea fills in plot holes that did not need to be filled in. You don t need to know what Kurtz s morning was like before Willard arrived in Apocalypse Now (maybe he had a shower? In the dark, of course). And you really didn t need to know what the Space Jockey in Alien was up to, did you? It was much more fun as a question, not an answer. Clinically debunking the mythology around beloved fiction rarely serves the story.

In pleasing players who were so keen to see those two fictions of Columbia and Rapture collide and to close the loop on any potentially unanswered questions about the two cities, Irrational perhaps picked the safest of all the infinite outcomes to explore. Elizabeth s presence, it turns out, 100% solves the story of Jack s coming to Rapture. But did the story of two BioShocks need solving?

There was an opportunity for a far wilder and weirder turn for that fiction, I think. While it may be the most satisfying way to close out from a fan perspective, critically speaking, did this really serve the story as well as it could ve done? I d argue maybe not. The story of Jack, Andrew Ryan and Fontaine was complete.

However: I say all this knowing that I enjoyed every second of Burial At Sea as a fan. The critic in me knows all of the above but really doesn t mind that much. BioShock was the beginning of the next age of games for me back in 2007, a formative and influential title that challenged older notions of cutscene-driven storytelling (even if a lot of those principles had already been pioneered in System Shock 2, BioShock basically popularised them). To revisit that world was an indulgence, and god damn it, when fan service is made directly for you, there s no shame in loving it.

And I did love Burial At Sea. I got the briefest glimpse of Sander Cohen creating his twisted art, a villain who I hadn t seen in almost seven years but certainly never forgot. I was breathless in the final stretch as Elizabeth slowly maneuvered into certain betrayal at the hands of Atlas, who angrily slipped out of the Irish drawl and into the American twang of Frank Fontaine, his true and barely-hidden identity. I will never, ever forget  this anti-Ryan propaganda video by Atlas that you find later in the story. Burial At Sea was an extravagant finale for BioShock in its current form, filled with moments designed to get an emotional response from players who have the same background with the series that I do.

It s comparable, actually, to Mass Effect 3 s Citadel DLC from last year—a farewell to one era of a series players have lived with for nearly a decade. Irrational s closure makes it more poignant in retrospect. I sensed Ken Levine s love for comic books in the way these universes were thrown together. Elizabeth meeting Andrew Ryan for the first time is Levine s Superman meeting the Joker: it s not what we re used to, but how can you not want to see it?

I think Irrational put pleasing fans ahead of the story—and you know what, given that this is the last Irrational game we ll ever see, though certainly not the last time we ll see its influences or its philosophies, the Boston studio deserved to do that. Burial At Sea is a fond farewell to BioShock and Infinite, one that I almost consider a fourth BioShock game in its own right. 

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.

Well that didn't take long: The $70 million mega-mansion that Markus "Notch" Persson picked up last week has been recreated in Minecraft.

Built by Dan Bovey, the recreation of Notch's new digs is an impressive piece of work, its accuracy highlighted by a picture-in-picture comparison to the real-life promotional video showing off the property in its pre-purchase state. There's even a glimpse of the famous "Candy Room," although Notch's feet are nowhere to be seen.

Bovey said a downloadable version of the blocky Chez Notch is "coming soon" to his Planet Minecraft page. In the meantime, you can imagine what it's like to live in a billionaire's voxelized mansion with the video above.

The Thimbleweed Park Kickstarter hit its $375,000 goal just a week after it launched, but the final tally is much higher than that: Just north of $626,000, meaning that all stretch goals, including full voice acting and mobile versions, have been met.

Thimbleweed Park is a brand-new, old-fashioned videogame in the style of the great LucasArts adventures of the 80s and 90s. It's being developed by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, two of the main guys responsible for those games, who have billed it as a "true spiritual successor" to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island.

"The support for Thimbleweed Park has been completely and totally overwhelming," they wrote in the most recent Kickstarter update. "Would people want big pixel graphics? Would people want a true classic point & click adventure game? Do people want verbs? Do people want challenging puzzles? Will threatening to microwave a pretend hamster work? We had so many questions, but I think they all got answered."

With the Kickstarter done, a proper development blog will get underway on January 2 at thimbleweedpark.com, which for the moment is just a placeholder with a couple of images and a link enabling pre-purchases of the game.

Check out our game of the year awards 2014 page to find out how the awards were decided.

Tyler Wilde: I remember when I learned about dashing. I was at a party with ten-or-so people gathered around the TV, all paying far more attention to four little sprites hopping around than ought to be expected of a group of inebriated partygoers. It s all in that dash. Towerfall s primary weapons are homing arrows, and sometimes they re unavoidable, but if you dash into an arrow, you can snatch it from the air. When only two players in the simple, exceptionallydesigned deathmatch remain on the screen, that little dash becomes as exciting as a clutch Super in Ultra Street Fighter IV. We traded a single arrow back and forth again and again, the crowd oohing each time it was dash-grabbed quietly, like it was a tennis rally. Then there s an unexpected play: a decoy arrow followed by a series of hops to land on the losers head ala Mario. And then we re all hollering.

Towerfall is partly awarded best multiplayer to celebrate a trend this year. Counter-Strike: GO stayed strong, but no new multiplayer shooter really stuck with us. CoD: Advanced Warfare was better than Ghosts, but not all that different. Titanfall was good fun, but not that many people are playing it now. This really wasn t a great year for online multiplayer shooters, but it was a great year to get away from your desk for a bit and share a screen with friends, and Towerfall is absolutely the best thing you can share with them. The only game that comes close—and it is close—is Nidhogg.

Chris Thursten: I d say that Samurai Gunn was a contender too. We really have been through a renaissance in single screen multiplayer this year, perfectly timed to coincide with the (eventual) rise of the Steam Machine and living-room PCs. 

Towerfall stands out above the others for me because it s the most comprehensive offering. In addition to the arena deathmatch mode, which could sustain a game by itself, there s a campaign that serves as both a challenging singleplayer shooter and a co-op wave survival sim. Multiple difficulty levels reward investment and mastery, and then you can take all of those skills and use them to beat up your friends next time you have people around. Nidhogg is a fantastic game but it can sometimes feel like a proof-ofconcept: it s lean to the point of perfection, but perhaps also lean to the point of paucity. Towerfall feels like a full game, in the old-school sense: generous, expandable, with secrets to discover.

It s also very good at drawing your eye to the action, which is an important trick for a game of this type. Watching an arrow barely miss its mark is a buzz that doesn t get old, and one that increases exponentially with the crowd you re able to gather around the screen. I d say that Titanfall s titan drop moment was the single coolest moment in a multiplayer game this year, but to a great extent it s a canned thrill: it s something you get used to, while in Towerfall every jump, dash and shot has the potential to feel like the greatest play you ve ever made.

We should probably stress that this is a game that will make you hate all of your friends—at least for a while. For me, that s the hallmark of truly great multiplayer.

Read our full verdict in the PC Gamer Towerfall Ascension review.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.

By Ian Dransfield

The slow march towards Star Citizen becoming a full game continues, with one of its six modules - Arena Commander - hitting version 1.0 over the weekend.

In a post by Star Citizen's Grandmaster of Everything (I may have made that title up), Chris Roberts pointed out the whys and hows of the release. In short, Arena Commander 1.0 brings more ships and upgrades, a lobby system and enhancements to ship systems, like a thruster power system. Which is nice.

You can see everything in more detail - and buy some brand new ships, of course - through the above link.

Arena Commander is Star Citizen's test track (in space), allowing those who've backed the game to have a few fights, races or just float aimlessly in one of their pricey space-boats.

While it's now at version 1.0, this isn't the final version - nor is it the 'proper' one - of Arena Commander, as Roberts stated in the post:

"I would like to stress that today s release of Arena Commander 1.0 is a beginning, not an ending," he said, "This milestone does not denote the completion of Arena Commander, it kicks off an even more significant phase of its development.

"With this update, we ve added a significant number of ships, items, missiles, and systems which means more interconnected systems, more servers to stress and more bugs to squash. These future changes won t be limited to fixing technical glitches and balance issues."

We shouldn't expect to see Star Citizen in anything resembling a 'full' state until around 2016 though, according to Roberts. But it's alright, we've got his blessing to enjoy Elite: Dangerous in the meantime.

Though the wait for $64 million pets is going to be a tough one...