***** Tomorrow the RPS team will be going into their winter hibernation state. We will return on 4th January BUT, in the meantime, we didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten about you or the supporter program so we have hand-crafted a selection of the Bestest Best RPS Cracker Jokes. It’s also our way of giving you the “reveal” moment that we had to take out of this year’s advent calendar. We’ve made these posts open to all. Whether you celebrate or not we hope they raise a smile. Love, RPS xxx *****>

Q: What’s Santa Claus’s least favourite game engine?

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We’ve been drawing up our end of year list here at RPS and in trawling through 2015’s releases, I found a fair few that I hadn’t played and feel like I really should have done. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been catching up. Here are the games I missed. Until now.

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There’s no shortage of ‘best Star Wars games’ features across this nerdly old internet of ours, but the majority focus on console games which don’t often stray from the action/shooting category. On PC, we’ve had so much more variety over the years: sometimes for better, sometimes for very much worse. With the warm reception to the The Force Awakens meaning we no longer need to hate ourselves for retaining an innocent love of Long Time Ago, let’s mix nostalgia and contemporary game design values into a big, colourful ball and determine which PC titles are the least unwise ways to indulge that love.

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Even Batman wants to simply kick back at Wayne Manor over Christmas in his Batdressing gown and Batslippers (they’re just hollowed-out flying foxes, I hear), so Rocksteady Studios have wrapped up Batman: Arkham Knight [official site] with a few days to spare. The final load of DLC is out today – and I do mean load. The core of it all is the ‘Season of Infamy: Most Wanted’ gubbins, four new missions starring big ole Batvillains, but there are also new gobs of challenge maps and costumes from movies and comics and things. Merry Batchristmas!

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Steam’s autumn sale or Thanksgiving sale or whatever it was has barely just ended, but ’tis is the season to spend to spend wildly so hey: the Steam winter sale is now on. Head on over to Steam to see an awful lot of video games sold for cheaper than they were yesterday. Once the site recovers from the hordes flooding it, I mean.

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

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt!

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That Dragon, Cancer [official site] is a biographical game, the documentary of a brief life translated into a series of “poetic, imaginative” interactive sequences. It tells the story of Joel Green, who was diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor aged 12 months and died age five. Doctors had expected Joel to live around four months after the diagnosis and the game explores the experiences of his parents (father Ryan is the programmer of the game, mother Amy is the writer) as he undergoes treatment and lives his too-short life.

After years in development and a Kickstarter campaign, the game is ready for launch and will be available January 12th on Windows and Mac.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Torn Banner’s Chivalry is probably the funniest multiplayer game I’ve ever played. It shouldn’t be. The game’s depiction of feudal swordplay is ferociously violent, a montage of amputations, decapitations and eviscerations that would make Vlad the Impaler feel a bit peaky. Opponent’s shriek in agony when separated from their limbs and gurgle bloodily when a well-shot arrow thuds into their ribcage. There’s even an objective based map where the first task is to slaughter a village filled with peasants and burn all their homes. … [visit site to read more]

It’s not certain quite yet, but with the HTC/Valve Vive suffering a delay until Spring, it’s looking as though Facebook’s Oculus Rift might be first out of the gates for a consumer PC VR headset. Oculus have announced that “final Rift hardware” is now on its way to developers who are “imminently shipping.” “Imminently” is a very exciting word.

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Dying Light’s [official site] mega-expansion, The Following, takes the zombie-killing open world action out of the city and into the surrounding area. That means your parkour and urban scavenging skills might be slightly less useful than they had been while you were clambering across rooftops and digging through the trash. Enter the buggy – a customisable vehicle that has its own equivalent of the base game’s skill trees.

Those skills haven’t been left behind though. The expansion, and the free update for the base game, will introduce 250 new legendary levels, allowing you to become faster, stronger and smarter.

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