It’s a good week for aspiring mages. Yesterday I told you about the upcoming Wizard of Legend, and today I’m drawing your pupils to the new sorcery-sim from the Trine devs, Nine Parchments, which actually came out yesterday. You play as a student who must leave wizard school to chase after some stolen spells, and it looks almost as pretty as Trine did – which makes sense, because it takes place in the same world. You can see for yourself in the trailer below.

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Rainbow Six Siege s second year of updates has closed with Operation White Noise, the natural enemy of insomnia. It launched yesterday and introduces a new map, Mok Myeok Tower in South Korea, along with three new operators with diverse skills. One of them can even hack your phone to distract you. Stop reading messages from lonely singles in your area, there s a mission to finish (and a launch trailer to watch).

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Arma 3 s new single-player mission pack, Tac-Ops, popped into existence last week, introducing three presumably very serious missions to the straight-faced military sandbox. They re tricky, says developer Bohemia Interactive, and you ll need brush up on your shooting, tactical positioning and adaptability. You should also learn some army phrases, but mostly because they re fun to shout. Take a look at the trailer.

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I mean that the theme park is malfunctioning, not the expansion pack itself. You re not going to get killed by a bit of rogue DLC, ha ha. Oh no, wait, you are. The Surge is a hard game, wobbly in parts but redemptive in others. As an unabashed soulslike, it did exploring and shortcuts very well but combat less so. Most of the environments were unremarkable recreations of sci-fi factories or science labs but the Walk in the Park expansion is brightening things up with a colourful area full of rollercoasters and crazed robot mascots. It came out yesterday and you can see some of the baddies and bosses below. (more…)

Today, Firaxis has been shining a spotlight on Korea, one of the new civs coming to Civilization 6 with the launch of the Rise and Fall expansion, due out in February. Korea s led by Queen Seondeok, who by all accounts was a pretty great ruler, heralding a renaissance in the historical kingdom of Silla. She did have to contend with dumb blokes who were scared of women rulers, however. Take a look at the first look video below.

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Flashy ‘gaming’ monitors may be all the rage among the youth these days, but sometimes you just want a nice 27in monitor without all the bells, whistles and LED light shows that often accompany them. Fortunately, the catchily-named Philips 273V5LHAB is one such monitor, and it’s about as plain and straightforward as they come.

I mean that in the best possible way, of course, and while this 27in, 60Hz TN panel does come with a few caveats – its 1920×1080 resolution being its prime flaw – even I can’t argue with how much it costs. Priced at just 154, this is an absolute bargain of a big screen, and would suit most people just fine if size matters more than the number of pixels on show.

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The days are so short at this time of year that the light of the sun barely touches the mighty calendar. It’s particularly dark inside door number five…

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Up until this month, it was easy to get excited about the future of Star Control. After 20 years of false starts, we were getting not one but two successors to the classic space romp. The original designers, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche, were working on a direct sequel to Star Control 2, Ghosts of the Precursors, while Stardock was working on a prequel, Star Control: Origins, set in a different universe. Now the two games are lamentably part of an increasingly public dispute between Ford, Reiche and Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. It s getting ugly.

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EVE Online s Alpha Clone accounts have gotten a major upgrade today, bringing the sprawling space sandbox one step closer to free-to-play. Alpha accounts are essentially trial accounts, letting players experience EVE Online forever, but with some strict limitations in terms of ships, weapons and skills. The Arms Race update pulls back some of these limitations, letting free players finally flit about in higher tier ships and learn more skills.

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Seeing as Steam reviews are not entirely fairly arguing that the recent Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is too perfunctory a sequel, let’s look back to a time when that really did happen. The Old Blood, a game that straddled the line between sequel and expansion pack to the excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order, was the very model of going through the motions. Paradoxically, it was also an attempt to give fans exactly what they wanted. (more…)