In Part 1 of this diary, I named a citizen Santa and set up a town around him, with the plan of trying to protect the jolly old elf from Cities: Skylines' Natural Disasters DLC. Also in Part 1, that town got wiped out by a meteor strike.

When I say wiped out, I mean it. It's almost entirely gone. Huge swaths of commercial and residential areas are now piles of rubble. My hulking Disaster Response Unit located just a block from Santa's house? It's been obliterated by the disaster. That means there's no one left alive to look for anyone left alive, and the people who are supposed to clean up the rubble are all buried under rubble. As mayor of Santa City, I can officially state that Christmas is cancelled.

But Santa did survive—somehow. His house sits on the very, very edge of the meteor's blast radius. I'm both happy and amazed that Santa's house is still standing, but there are two little problems. First, the house is on fire, and second, Santa is still inside. Despite the emergency shelter next door and the evacuation buses circling the block, Santa hasn't escaped to safety.

While I watch, waiting for fire trucks that never come, I notice Santa suddenly vanishes from the house. It's not elven magic or flying reindeer, he's simply moved out and into another house, on the other side of the city (I can keep tabs on him thanks to the handy Favorite Cims mod). Just in the St. Nick of time, too: his original house continues to burn a few moments longer, then collapses.

The aftermath of the meteor: 109 buildings destroyed, 449 citizens dead. What's left of the city is in major trouble. I have to clear ruined buildings and roads manually, and rebuild all my services, like police, fire, and schools. Not for the whole city, of course, just for the area surrounding Santa's new home. I also plop down a new Disaster Response Unit, right across the street from his new pad, which I name North Pole West.

While I'm slowly cleaning up, another meteor arrives. Thankfully, this one strikes the coast, where it only takes out some water lines and a wind turbine. Now I have two massive craters and a chasm from the earthquake. The map is covered with scars.

What's worse is that having rebuilt so many services to protect Santa, I'm now out of money, and I'm operating at a loss. I'm slashing budgets left and right, meaning that half my city is in a blackout from the disaster and the other half is in a blackout from a poorly funded power department. The problem is mostly utilities. All those water lines that aren't serving citizens anymore (because the citizens are dead) still require upkeep in the budget. To save the city I'm going to have to rip it apart, delete almost everything that costs me money, and start rebuilding slowly and efficiently. 

I bulldoze, well, just about everything except a small sliver of residences and industrial areas. Every unneeded inch of water pipe is removed. As I cut off citizens from power and services, things get bad. Toilets overflow. Trucks can't make deliveries. Crime goes through the roof. Some asshole even commits a crime at the snow dump, which is a dump for snow. It's literally just a big box of snow! I could understand someone committing crime at a garbage dump (and someone is committing crime at the garbage dump, now that I look) because even garbage has a little bit of value. But a snow dump? That's desperation. Yet, my box of snow has attracted snow crimes.

Santa abruptly moves from his current house (which has no electricity and is overflowing with sewage and garbage) into a new one in the very small section of town that's still functioning properly. I name his house North Pole: New Beginnings, adding a smiley face because I'm feeling the need for optimism. Santa is 83 now, by the way, and I fear not long for this world.

It seems like the game won't throw disasters at you if you have a low population, which is good. It'll give me some time to rebuild. And I'm going to need that time. My population has plummeted to 113 people, meaning the corpses of the meteor strike now outnumber the living.

Thankfully, there's a Christmas miracle. I'm offered a bailout after going bankrupt. A cool $50,000 to rebuild the smoking crater of death that is Santa City.  With this bit of cash, I slowly and carefully begin rebuilding. I'm not sure I can call it progress: the population remains at only a few hundred citizens, my budget is still shoestring, and the most activity I see on my chilly streets is a single donut truck making the rounds.

And, in sadder news, my original Santa has died at the age of 95. I watch as he's picked up and deposited in the cemetery, pour some eggnog on his grave, check to see his heir in is place, and get back to work.

Tomorrow, in Part 3: Can the town, and my new Santa, be saved?

 Three's the magic number. 2013 is remembered as a charmed year for Dota 2—a high watermark that each subsequent era in the game's life has been measured against. 2014 will always be the year of the eight-minute International grand final, and 2015 gave us both the $6m echo slam and the frustrating, community-fracturing relaunch of the game with the Reborn update.

With that in mind, I think 2016 might have them all beat. This was an absolutely phenomenal year for Dota 2, from the spectacle of the pro scene to the metagame to the surprises that come from Valve's 'sure let's add VR why not' attitude to ongoing development. Dota 2 has never been more dramatic, a more open field of competition, more busted (Shanghai) or more polished (Seattle). It's never been more balanced and it's never been weirder, and somewhere between those two extreme's you'll find the game's soul.

So, yeah: this might have been the single greatest year in the history of the greatest competitive videogame on the planet*. Good job, 2016.

[*Other valid options are available, and these other games will get their own 2016 roundups. But I'm the editor and it's Christmas and I'll say what I please.]

A shambles in Shanghai

There was a time when these team intros were almost the silliest thing at the Shanghai Major. It didn't last.

Just as the professional community ran out of disasters to report from late 2015's World Cyber Arena, The Shanghai Major became the first Dota 2 event to fall down and not be able to get back up.

It was a technical catastrophe, with a new production team parachuted in at the 11th hour to rescue the event at one of China's most prestigious venues. This was coupled with one of Valve's most bizarre community management snafus yet—the highly public firing of panel host James '2GD' Harding, by Gabe Newell, on Reddit.

I wrote about the controversy in greater detail at the time, but the short version is this: while Valve's disinterest in traditionally corporate, shareholder-appeasing PR management is frequently laudable, this was not the play. Valve moved against the community's wishes for good reason, but couched it in such personal language that many took it personally. It's a testament to how well they've handled almost everything else this year that Shanghai feels like such a distant memory.

It wasn't all bad. The tournament itself was great, all told, with a run of fantastic moments that demonstrated that the game itself was entering a vibrant new phase. But when managers are getting trapped in offices and Gabe's on Reddit calling someone an ass, it's easy to forget that.

Magnificence in Moscow and Manila

Things took a sharp upturn after Shanghai, however. Both Epicenter in Moscow and May and the Manila Major in June were great showings for the game from a production standpoint. The former had a dynamic stage themed after the Roshan pit and the latter had, among other things, Game of Thrones' Kristian 'Hodor' Nairn literally holding the door for OG.

Look, I never said that any of this was going to make sense.

OG's win at both events ensured that they were the team to beat going into the International 2016, and their journey from Frankfurt underdogs to the very centre of the Dota 2 establishment in only a few months is a story all to itself. There's loads more to say about this period, from the faltering rise of Korean Dota in the form of the much-loved, hyper-aggressive MVP Phoenix to Newbee's extraordinary 29-game winning streak, which was brought to a close by OG at Epicenter.

Rosterpocalypse now 

Despite the introduction of a formalised roster lock system, reshuffle drama was still a major factor in the life of Dota 2 in 2016. Earlier in the year headlines were dominated by EG and Secret, whose ongoing game of musical chairs saw Aui_2000 booted from EG for the second time in a year and w33ha and Misery rendered teamless only days before Manila.

Then there's the scene-wide carnage of the post-International reshuffle, a tradition since 2014 that this year completely overhauled vast swathes of the Dota 2 landscape, from OG to Secret to Alliance and so on.

Yet in some ways the politicking of the professional community—and the waning influence of the old esports orgs in favour of player-owned teams—has given the year most of its best stories. DC's triumphant rise at the International is a Cinderella story that begins with its captain and midlaner being kicked out of Secret in March. Wings and Ad Finem both demonstrated that while the game's established elite are firing Twitlongers at each other, new talent can and will rise up to overthrow the old order.

Virtual insanity

Oh right, yeah: this was also the year that Valve added virtual reality spectating to Dota. It's both spectacular and kind of useless in practical terms, but I'm profoundly glad that it exists. I spent a weird evening sitting on the floor of my office watching Na'Vi vs. TNC from the ground level: hiding behind trees during teamfights, jumping up and down to warn Dendi of danger, and so on. It's exactly the kind of weird shit that I'd have joked about Valve adding to the game on a slow Thursday afternoon last year (in fact I did) and now it's real. Wonderful.

An incredible International

As a previous member of the 'KeyArena is never going to give us an International as good as Benaroya Hall in 2013' society, I have to respectfully admit that I was wrong. This year's main event was the best Valve have run and arguably one of the best contests in the history of the game.

Let's start with production: Valve nailed it, from the tone of the panel—which we'll get to in a second—to the stream and the stunning projection effects in the arena. They used AR to project life-size heroes onto the stage on the screens and during the analysis sections. They opened the show with Lindsey Stirling and closed it with an orchestra, first revealing Underlord and then shocking the community with the announcement of the first Dota 2-exclusive hero, Monkey King, via martial arts dance performance. Somehow, they managed to make whatever infrastructure changes were necessary to ensure that 2015's DDOS drama did not repeat itself.

It's hard to know how to sum up the tournament itself: I wrote 20,000 words about it at the time, after all. I'll start with the highlights: EHOME vs. EG, above, is the best game of professional Dota ever played. Bar none. It is the story of defending champions holding on by their fingertips for 75 long minutes. I've never been more exhausted or more elated by a videogame in any context.

Then you've got EG vs. DC, one of the best series of the year both in terms of play and the narrative that it sustains. DC were seen as a team of rejects, casualties of last-minute roster politics and either a second tier NA team or a second tier EU team depending on whether you ask a NA or EU fan. When they beat EG, the defending champions and the conquerors of EHOME, it was a statement.

DC retained a remarkable sense of fun even as their journey took them further than anyone expected. In a tournament partly notable for its remarkable meta, where only six heroes remained unpicked going into the final day, DC decided to throw caution to the wind and pick Jakiro in the lower bracket finals of the goddamn International.

This is to say nothing of Wings, the true masters of the meta (or at least, the absence of one). Their willingness to draft whatever, whenever and make it sing made them worthy champions. Standout performances by iceice and shadow closed out a phenomenal first year for this young team: last August, Wings didn't exist. Now they're world champions.

I forgot to mention TNC. Or MVP Phoenix. Look, it was a great International, okay? There's a reason it took 20,000 words last time.

Silly season

One of the accusations leveled at Valve in the aftermath of Shanghai was that the studio lacked a sense of humour: that they were set on delivering Dota with the sobriety of a golf tournament. I didn't agree with that assessment of the time—there are many different ways to be funny, and censorship-baiting gags about porn represent only one—and TI6 managed to put the matter to rest for good. They replaced the entire panel with puppets. They replaced the AR tech with a nearby cosplayer. After noting that making Purge explain games with a big touchscreen made him look like a weatherman, they doubled down.

A real sense of fun set in at Valve events this year, and it doesn't detract from the quality of the competition or the drama of those big moments.

A better meta

Thanks again to John Roberts for that amazing gif.

Back when 6.87 launched in April, I warned against the temptation to call each new patch 'the biggest patch ever'.

This was a year of the biggest patches ever.

6.87 brought substantial changes to the way stats scale and thrust Axe into the competitively limelight, as is only correct. It gave Earthshaker his wonderful Aghanim's upgrade, which I will demonstrate here:

...and arguably more importantly, it set us on the road to 6.88, which reigned in 6.87's outliers and in doing so created the most open meta that Dota 2 has ever seen. 95% of heroes picked/banned at The International is an extraordinary number, far in excess of where other MOBAs end up, and an amazing statement about the health of the game. There were issues, particularly with illusions, but damn—it's a small price to pay to see that many heroes viable, that many ways to win available to the best teams.

 Give Pit Lord

They gave Pit Lord! He's now called Underlord. The final unported DotA hero arrived in Dota 2 after the International, 'finishing' Valve's port of the game after five years. In a way, I think the community was more excited about Underlord as a concept than as a hero—he's situational and rarely seen nowadays. Shouting for him was a way of shouting for any kind of update, and giving the slowing rate of Dota 2 updates that's not unreasonable.

Side note: this is actually the first year in the game's history where the rate of hero additions hasn't slowed. We got two heroes in 2015 and we got two in 2016. Whether that's enough is another debate: but at least the number is shrinking by half every year any more.

Boston makes me feel good

A refreshed assembly of freshly-reassembled Dota 2 squads headed to Boston for the year's final Major, and it was a wonderful sendoff. The rise of Greek underdogs Ad Finem is the story, here, despite the ultimate triumph of nu-OG. Like OG a year before at the Frankfurt Major, Ad Finem escaped the 'maybe' column (by way of the 'who?' column) to surprise everybody with an impressive run to the grand finals. OG were clearly the better team, in the end, but OG didn't make ODPixel make a noise like this:

(That game, the third in the grand final, is incredible, by the way. You should watch it. And it deserves the 'best game ever' declarations that it provoked. It's not the best game ever—it can't be, in a year that also included EG vs. EHOME—but the fact that crazy stuff like this just keeps happening is a testament to how healthy Dota is right now.)

Dota 3

Look, I'm going to level with you. It was very late at night when they unveiled that trailer and sometimes it just takes a montage of splash art and some version numbers to bring a single tear to a man's eye. It is a beautiful dumb journey we have all been on: a decade of Dotas whose number begins with a 6.This month, that all changed. Dota begins with a 7 now. And it might as well be Dota 3.

This was the big announcement that Valve have been sitting on, as they are wont to do: bigger than Reborn, bigger than 6.87, bigger than that time  they moved Roshan a little bit to the right. 7.00 is the real rebirth of this game: a substantially overhauled map, a new progression system, a new UI. Every player has finished the year relearning a game that they knew inside-out. It has, and will continue to have, extraordinary ramifications for the pro scene—that, I suspect, will be the story of the early months of 2017.

At the time, what struck me about the update was the fact that Monkey King is actually least interesting thing about it—and he can climb trees and morph into a banana! What strikes me now is the confidence that it represents, both on Icefrog's part and Valve's. Dota 2 was in an extremely good place. Like I keep saying, this was a phenomenal year for the game. Tweaks would probably have been fine. Reign in the few remaining outliers. Do something about illusions—that kind of thing. I think that's what other developers would have done.Instead we got a total upheaval, a new game. This shows a profound respect for the fact that Dota 2 is ultimately about chaos, not balance. It's not meant to become a solved problem. It's supposed to be a sandbox for strategic inventiveness, virtoso technical mastery, and—frankly—really weird shit happening when all of the game's moving parts collide. Dota 2 has to keep moving to survive, and arguably the worst thing that could happen would be for Valve to think '2016 worked: let's just do that again'.

Dota 2 7.00 suggests that isn't going to happen. We're not going to get another 2016. We're going to get 2017, and honestly? If this year's taught me anything, it's not to make predictions. I've got no idea what is going to happen. I imagine a team I've never heard of will win the International and the next hero will be a big purple man. There you go. Check back next year to find out how wrong I am.

Lothric is our favourite game setting of the year. GOTY gongs are chosen by PC Gamer staff through voting and debate. We'll be posting an award a day leading to Christmas, along with personal picks from the PCG team. Keep up with all the awards so far here.   

Andy Kelly: No one makes evocative fantasy worlds quite like From Software, and Lothric is one of its most haunting, beautiful creations yet. It's a bleak, broken place, like a faded memory of an idyllic fairytale world. Lothric Castle, which looms impressively in the distance, gives you a fleeting glimpse of the beauty and grandeur this world once had before it was overrun by demons, dragons, and the undead. From are also masters at telling stories through the worlds they build, and Lothric is rich with an arcane history that's revealed through its statues, architecture, and shrines. The evil-tainted Cathedral of the Deep, with its sinister sculptures of weeping women, is a highlight, and every step you take into it is more intimidating than the last. And the unforgettable introduction to the eerie, desolate Irithyll of the Boreal Valley is one of the best moments in the Souls series.

James Davenport: Irithyll’s introduction is unforgettable. One of the most gorgeous vistas in games, peaceful and shimmering under a soft moon. Then a giant ratdog chases you across a bridge. But if you survive, ghosts walk the streets, elegant warriors and witches from a bygone era lash out, and as you venture further into the city, the architecture begins to feel familiar. It should. Dark Souls has always done this, foregoing generic environmental design in favor of building out the history of entire civilizations in how a building looks and the posture and dress of statuary. Where most games fill out their world with light set decoration, it’s rare to encounter anything in Dark Souls 3’s world that doesn’t carry meaning.

Tim Clark: I finally popped my Souls cherry this year. Having spent a ridiculous amount of time reading about the games, I was already fascinated by From Software’s esoteric approach to world building, and diving into Dark Souls 3 didn’t disappoint. As James noted around release, all the talk of how hard the series is actually does it a disservice, but one welcome side-effect of the harshness is that it opens up your synapses to the decrepit beauty of the environments. If you’re expecting death by spectacular evisceration around every corner, then you inevitably start paying closer attention to what those corners look like. Lothric is a world that feels left behind. It’s the fantasy equivalent of a seaside tourist town out of season—faded grandeur, now abandoned by all but the mad and the bad. I don’t pretend to understand the lore and its implications, but you absorb the Dark Souls vibe by osmosis regardless. It was definitely the setting I most enjoyed inhabiting this year. If enjoyed is really the right word.

Wes Fenlon: We know what Dark Souls looks like now, after three games. There will be a sprawling city of the undead, an incredible, towering castle, a swamp of puke and pus. These are familiar sights, and Dark Souls 3 isn't as varied as its predecessor Dark Souls 2. But it feels so much more like a cohesive vision, and much of its familiarity is actually intentional, imbued with meaning connected back to the vague history of this place fans know from playing Dark Souls 1. There's an intentional cycle at play here, blurring sights new and old. You can almost feel the creator of this world saying this is the last time I will return to this place, with all the weight and passion that entails. There's some melancholy, but mostly a team liberated from the confines of old technology making a world as exactly as majestic—and disturbing and disgusting—as they've always wanted it to be.

For more Dark Souls 3 coverage, here's our review, and here are the reasons why this game pulled Andy Kelly into the series properly for the first time.

Day of Infamy, the Second World War-based standalone expansion to the 2014 FPS Insurgency, is now in "Early Access beta." That means new features including stats and rankings, the unit system, air support, new game modes, visual updates, a whole mess of bug fixes, and a fresh new trailer to mark the moment. 

It seems like something of an arbitrary step, since Day of Infamy was, and is, available for purchase as an Early Access release. Regardless of what it's called, this update is a big step forward: The introduction of rankings means that players will now earn cosmetic Unit items when they rank up, and character models will display the appropriate rank patches on their arms. All factions now have access to the "Carpet Bombing" option, while the US can call in Mustang strafing runs, and the Germans can deploy Stuka dive bomber attacks. 

Developer New World Interactive has also rolled out "First Wave" Units, one per faction, that will be available exclusively to Early Access players: The Gordon Highlanders for the Commonwealth, the 1st Ranger Battalion for the US, and the 1.Infanterie Division for Germany. Fallschirmjäger, 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions, and the 92nd "Buffalo Soldiers" Infantry Division are in development, and Canadian, Australian, and Indian regiments are also planned. 

Day of Infamy looked quite promising when we got our hands on it over the summer, and hopefully the move to beta will continue to carry it in the right direction. A full breakdown of changes and new content in the beta release is available here, although a few changes have been made since then in a hotfix that came out today. Day of Infamy is currently 25 percent off as part of the Steam Winter Sale, dropping it to $15/£11/€14 until January 2.

Blue Yeti, our pick as the best microphone, normally sells for $129. However, we spotted it on sale at Amazon for a low $89, and it comes with a download code for Watch Dogs 2 to boot.

We like the Blue Yeti for several reasons, not the least of which is that it offers excellent audio quality, even under less-than-ideal conditions. The foam padding on the bottom doesn't do much to deafen desk vibrations, but the shape makes it generally easy to find a place to plop it with little hassle.

One of the best aspects of the Blue Yeti is that it is great at picking up audio as you jostle around. Who wants to sit perfectly still while podcasting? Compared to other mics we tested, the Blue Yeti does a superior job at recording great sounding audio without having to speak directly into it.

The Blue Yeti isn't the best microphone out there, but for the price, it's an excellent choice. That's especially true now that it's on sale and comes with a free game.

Go here to grab the Blue Yeti microphone and Watch Dogs 2 bundle.

There's no place like home for the holidays, and if you've made a home on Ark: Survival Evolved's incredibly dangerous dinosaur-filled island, here's a present for you. Patch 253 has arrived, and with it some new dinosaurs, some new locations, and a new item: the camera. Plus, you might catch a glimpse of Raptor Claus as he flies above the island dropping presents for the next week as part of Ark's second annual Winter Wonderland event.

The patch, which is now live, adds two new underwater caves containing artifacts and challenges. You may find an additional peril in visiting them, however, due to some dangerous new sea creatures like the Cnidaria Omnimorph (a large glowing jellyfish) and the fearsome Tusoteuthis Vampyrus, a giant squid capable of grabbing you with its crushing tentacles and sucking the blood out of you.

There are a few new land-based dinos as well, such as a T-Rex-sized herbivore called Therizinosaurus Multiensis that promises to be useful for harvesting greens, and the Troodon Magnanimus, which may be a bit smaller than a raptor but is reportedly much smarter.

If you spot one of the new dinos (or Santa), you can now snap a photo. A camera has been added to Ark, allowing you to take pictures and apply the image to an in-game canvas, for a lovely keepsake of your adventures.

In less joyful news, Studio Wildcard has confirmed that the sci-fi themed TEK Tier update has been delayed until patch 254, which is currently planned for January. So those lasers you were planning to mount on your T-Rex's head? You're gonna have to wait a little longer for 'em.

For those who aren't playing but want to, though, there is good news in that Ark is currently part of the Steam Winter sale and can be had for $12.

When trying to come up with a game to play for a holiday feature, Cities: Skylines seemed a natural choice. With February's Snowfall DLC, my city can be blanketed with frost and dusted by blizzards. With a few custom assets, some of my city's houses will have Christmas lights. There's a player-created map called Christmas Island and a theme called The North Pole.

Best of all, since Skylines let you rename things, I can pick a citizen, rename him Santa, rename his house The North Pole, and rename his workplace Santa's Workshop. And, with the Natural Disasters DLC installed and cranked as high as it will go, I can see if I can protect my new Santa from dying as the result of earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and meteor strikes! It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, provided Christmas explodes a lot.

My rules are to only use a single square of map: it would be easy to mitigate disaster by buying additional map tiles and leaving them empty, increasing the chances of disasters hitting unpopulated areas. I'm not using any money cheats, and I'll play until my city reaches a population of 20,000 residents, otherwise known as a Capital City, or until Santa is killed in a natural disaster. (If Santa dies of natural causes, I'll replace him with an heir.) 

I begin my game. Before long, houses begin springing up, and before longer, I spot one of the modded homes with holiday decorations. Living within are a family of five, so I name one adult Santa Claus and one Mrs. Claus, before noticing both of the adults are men. So, I change Mrs. Claus to Mr. Claus.

My chosen Santa is 33, uneducated, and works at a factory called Garments Unlimited, which I quickly rename to Santa's Workshop. I watch him drive to and from work in a red sports car—I guess Santa is doing OK for himself—then set about my task: protecting him from natural disasters at all costs. I build an emergency shelter right next door to his house, and lay out an evacuation route that will ensure a bus will pick him and his family up (at the expense of everyone else in the city) and bring him to the nearby shelter when disaster strikes. 

Roughly fifteen seconds after I've got the shelter in place, the town's first disaster occurs. I'm notified that a sinkhole is "about to happen." It's alarming, really. I'd been thinking about fires and storms and earthquakes, but a sinkhole? That could swallow up Santa, his family, and his house in one gulp.

Thankfully, it only swallows up some commercial properties about eight blocks away. Three buildings succumb, and 22 people are killed. None of them are magical toy-delivering elves, however, just non-enchanted normals. Whew!

As I continue building my city, I check in on Santa periodically, at one point finding him sitting outside a convenience store looking at his phone. See, Santa is just like us.

Sadly, I've paid so much attention to Santa's happiness and preservation by building parks, a doctor's office, a fire station, and police station all within a block of him, that his home levels up. That means it no longer has Christmas lights all over it, which feels quite a bit less festive. On the plus side, I build the massive Disaster Response Unit right behind his house. I also make a tiny district just for Santa's home, so I can assign it—and thus him—rescue chopper priority. With all these protective services surrounding St. Nick, I feel confident that I'm poised to whisk him to safety when something goes wrong.

There's one thing I can't protect against, however: Santa is getting older due to the curse of time. Years have passed while I've been growing my city, and he's already 65 and retired from the Workshop. I choose Piper, his eldest child, to serve as Santa Jr.

Another disaster strikes. This time it's an earthquake. Again, it's a good distance away from Santa's house, but it causes several fires throughout the city, a few buildings collapse, and a great chasm scars the earth. A few minutes later, observant mayor that I am, I notice that every single house in town has raw sewage backing up into it: the quake broke the pipes leading to the river where I festively dump the town's collective poop water. It's a quick fix. The earthquake, by the way, destroyed 12 buildings and killed 35 people.

Just as I've got everyone's toilets working properly again, a house catches fire. It's right outside the Disaster Response Unit building, directly across the street from Santa's house. The fire department is still putting out fires from the earthquake, and I don't want to take chances, so I activate the emergency shelter. Santa himself is visiting a convenience store at the time so he misses the bus, but at least this gives me a chance to see how his children react in a crisis.

Piper, Santa's heir, reacts by moving completely out of town. I quickly assign Santa's son Charles as the new heir by changing his name to Santa Jr. 2, but I notice he stays home during the emergency, rather than walking thirty feet to the shelter. That won't do. I rename him Idiot Santa Failure Jr., and instead tap Santa's other son, 20-year-old Raymond, the duties of heir, since he is wise enough to head to the shelter. 

So far, I'm feeling pretty confident. Santa is aging, but safe, and I've got a backup with a good head on his shoulders. My town is steadily growing and I'm doing well with my buget. I feel like I've reached 'not a creature is stirring' levels of comfort in my city.

That's when the meteor hits.

Ho-ho-oh-no. Tomorrow, in Part 2, we'll dig through the rubble to see just how bad things suddenly got for Santa City.

It took almost ten years for D-Pad Studio to make Owlboy, "the retro-styled sidescroller you didn’t realize you needed." That's a hefty investment of time and effort by any measure. But D-Pad programmer Jo-Remi Madsen said in a recent AMA on Reddit that he doesn't mind too much if people pirate the game rather than pay for it, because sometimes that's the only way they can get their hands on it at all. 

"When it comes to piracy, we're certainly not cracking down on anything, we're very happy people get the chance to play the game. Through torrent, the game has a chance to become available to people who, say, live in countries where it isn't easy to even buy games (maybe Steam doesn't support their currency, or they just don't carry credit cards)," Madsen wrote. "I'd still wish for those to be able to experience Owlboy. Right now, pirating the game is the best alternative they have, as it's totally open to anyone with a sturdy internet connection. Since we're not a big company, it doesn't impact us in the way it would AAA." 

Steam is the undisputed king of digital platforms, he said in a separate post, but GOG's DRM-free approach has some upsides too. "I don't have any numbers when it comes to piracy, but I do know that some people who did pirate it, went on to become die-hard fans, spreading the word on the game, which leads to more sales," he wrote. "I've never pirated myself, but situations sure can vary from country to country during hard economic times. My only wish is for people to continue playing and enjoying the game, through whatever means necessary." 

D-Pad isn't an especially well-heeled studio: Madsen said that half of the team stayed as his parents' house, rent-free, for more than half of the game's lengthy development period. "We've had VERY few expenses, most businesses would not be able to run at a normal pace with the assets that we've maintained," he explained. "Most of our trips have been covered because we've held presentations, or we've simply applied for funding (my country, Norway, is awesome like that)." 

But now, with Owlboy successfully released—and quite good—the studio has "enough funding now to continue making games, and we owe it to no-one but ourselves, my folks and our fans." Piracy or not, you really can't ask for a better outcome than that.

Owlboy is currently on sale for $20/£15/€18 on Steam and GOG. 

Maybe you've heard of our tiny piece of Counter-Strike history: a map called de_dust_pcg. It was released back in 2005 as a collaboration between Dave Johnston, the creator of the original Dust, and PC Gamer—thus the title, right? As Johnston explains in this blog post, it was originally created as a tutorial for the mag, and so "it never quite got the attention and iteration that Dust and Dust 2 benefited from." But now it's getting a second chance, as 3kliksphilip has ported it from Counter-Strike: Source to CS:GO, and also put up a nice video overview of its history and the changes that were required to make the new version work.

"Retrospectively I’m surprised at some of the choices I made, and the choices the layout exposes to players," Johnston wrote. "The map clearly doesn’t have the same depth of gameplay as Dust 2, sitting closer to the original Dust in terms of size and complexity—perhaps it could be considered Dust 0.8 if these things were numbered in such a way. I’m still unsure if the dropped bomb spot was a good idea, but it was certainly fun to try it." 

As a tutorial in a magazine, the map didn't get the iteration that Dust and Dust 2 did, but it also reflects the different priorities of that era, when the focus was on lowering the barriers to entry rather than "the all-important metagames that help enshrine longevity." Gamers these days are more tolerant of complex map layouts, Johnston said, while modern game engines are better equipped to "recreate and then exploit properties of [the] real world to guide players around the virtual world." Because of that, he concluded, de_dust_pcg "will probably leave most CS:GO players wanting a little... well, more." 

Maybe so, but it's free, which is a big selling point, and an interesting piece of videogame history to boot. It's available via the Steam Workshop, and 3klikphilip's own site lists some servers running it. And if you want to play around with the original de_dust_pcg files in the Hammer editor, you can grab them up here. 

I came late to the Kentucky Route Zero party. So late, in fact, that I was only barely aware of it until the summer of 2014. My inauguration was a long time coming—I'd lost count of the number of glowing reviews I'd read for the first three of a proposed five acts, and while I reckoned it sounded like my cup of tea on a cursory level, I'd decided its narrative-leaning nature would echo that of Gone Home, Dear Esther, and The Stanley Parable. 

These were (and still are) some of my favourite games, therefore I can't really tell you why it take me quite so long to join Conrad, Blue and old-timer Joseph in the forecourt of the Equus Oils station, but that it just did. It turns out Kentucky Route Zero is nothing like Fullbright, The Chinese Room or Galactic Cafe's seminal works. Kentucky Route Zero is like no other game I've ever played. 

Which feels like a strange thing to say about a game whose story isn't finished. Of those five planned acts, developer Cardboard Computer released its first three between January 2013 and May 2014. It wasn't until July of this year that Act 4 landed, and its fifth and final chapter is without a due date entirely. This year has been a questionable one for a number of reasons, yet it's been a very good 12 months for videogames. Nevertheless, my favourite game of 2016 is Kentucky Route Zero's penultimate episode—a small portion of a game which on its own makes little sense, but against what's come before it is arguably the most important.

In a sense, KRZ's fourth act is the runt of its litter. It tells a similarly disparate tale which pays no less deference to storytelling, self-reflection, and the series' Americana lineage; but its structure, tone and outlook is distinctly less overwrought compared to its forerunners. It feels like the calm before the storm as it swaps the open road for life at sea—yet how it turns itself inward to better examine the quirks of its idiosyncratic cast is nothing short of wonderful.  

Choices again govern the direction of the story, yet, this time more than ever, outline its past. Every decision carries weight, and can vastly alter you and the character you've vouched for's outlook. Likewise, interlacing narratives is a series staple among its cast of interchangeable and equally playable characters, yet number four spends much of its time exploring these networks further still. This in turn prompts a shift in tone: one which eschews the familiar dread of previous installments to instead focus on the minutiae of each scenario—the personalities, the foibles, the less obvious imperfections of this broadly dysfunctional, or, at the very least, disjointed, crew. 

It's difficult to dwell on what Kentucky Route Zero does best because it's how you play it that matters. While each game will typically wind up with similar conclusions, how you get there is what makes it interesting—something which is interminably subject to change. Sidestepping the open road, the gospel churches, the bureaucracy of the Big City, and replacing it with the Mark Twain-esque story-focussed lazy Echo river is a masterstroke which sets the stage for the series' fifth and closing act. By dwelling on its specifics, its relatable vignettes, and its whimsical anecdotes and metaphors, Act 4 is perhaps the least developed of the lot as far as overarching narrative in concerned, but is nonetheless crucial to the story's progression.       

The indie renaissance, for want of a less hackneyed term, of the last several years has opened the door to games like Kentucky Route Zero—yet at the same time KRZ is a game which recaptures the text-heavy, parser-reliant classics of yesteryear. With a stunning, minimalist art style, Kentucky Route Zero is a story-heavy game whereby you're as much the author as you are the reader and the player. Act 4 not only serves to frame its curtain call, but also celebrates all that's come before it.