The Link is dead, long live the Link! Valve’s official Steam Link hardware may now be discontinued, but its software heart lives on, and now free on the Raspberry Pi. Formerly released on Android (although not iOS due to Apple being grumpy gits), this new version is version 3B or 3B+ of everyone’s tiny PCB powerhouse system, favoured by tech-tinkerers worldwide. For those late to the party, Steam Link is a local streaming solution, letting you tunnel through your LAN or Wi-Fi to play games from your desktop via your TV in another room.

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Six years in the works (counting its time as an Arma 2 mod) and Bohemia Interactive’s zombie survival sandbox DayZ has left early access, flinging open its doors for a free launch weekend. Snag it here on Steam before December 17th and you too can enjoy hiking through the rain across the sprawling, bleak land of Chernarus. Maybe you’ll even find weaponry and shelter before zombies or other humans do you in. Having not played it since its early days as a mod (I feel very old, suddenly), I went for a jaunt around Chernarus last night. Thoughts and a launch trailer below.

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The 127-cell honeycomb below is a fancy form of wordsearch in which every cell is used, and words can curl and zigzag but never overlap. Each hive foxer has a theme (some previous ones: roses, walls, postage stamps, and The 39 Steps). Identifying this theme is a vital part of the defoxing process. Today s puzzle is made up of 23 answers.

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Aware that the perfect blizzard of misfortunes* currently battering the North Pole HQ of Mr S. Claus may mean some deserving boys and girls go without historical wargames this Christmas, Surrey philanthropists Slitherine have given me forty Steam activation codes to distribute as I see fit. Regular FP readers will know that I like to make folk work for their windfalls. Below you’ll find ten solo ‘foxers’ (word and picture puzzles) that fully or partially ‘defoxed’ (solved) have the power to win you some seriously substantial/knobbly strategy stocking-fillers.

* Striking elves, a bluetongue outbreak amongst the reindeer, and the boss’ double hernia.>

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It’s December 14th and it’ll be the last Christmas posting dates before you know it. Better open the door and hand your pressies over.

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It’s the RPS/Gamer Network annual day of chest-thumping/excessive consumption/enforced PowerPoint-watching, so we’ll all be offline when Capy’s much-anticipated rando-dungeon-runner Below launches this evening.

Hence, let’s say this now: Below’s out today! Somehow! After half a decade! Is that even a long time in games development any more? I don’t know I’ve been here 11 years so it feels like Below only got announced like, last summer! Anyway! It’s really happening! Happy days!

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Riot Games have punished chief operating officer Scot Gelb with two months’ unpaid suspension plus a little training, Kotaku report, for his highly visible role in the recent public revelations that Riot’s workplace culture is a trash fire. Gelb was the fella alleged to have slapped other men’s testicles, dry humped co-workers, and farted in faces. When the League Of Legends developers broadly acknowledged complaints about the workplace (without specifically addressing any charges of bro-ing out, discrimination, or sexual harassment), they vowed to remake their culture, saying “we’ve never backed down from a challenge before and we don’t plan to start now.” Their visible actions since then have suggested they still don’t really care.

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The first big Artifact update is out, slapping new decks on the table and letting people chat while they use them. There are no new cards in Valve’s CCG, but fans of the Call To Arms mode – where everyone dukes it out with pre-constructed cards – might be pleased to see two new decks. That’s not my jam, but the new Pauper tournaments where expensive cards are forbidden just might be. I’m most intrigued by the new chat wheel though, which lets me tease opponents using my unit’s voices.

We’ve also got bot gauntlets, leaderboards, colourblind support and more. None of that’s especially interesting to me, but hey – a “skill-based progression system” is coming next week!

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I had a fine time with Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden‘s post-apocalyptic, ducking good blend of real-time stealth and turn-based combat, but one concern dogged me throughout. Used repeatedly throughout the game are two beyond-familiar terms: ‘zone’ and ‘Stalker.’ Names scorched into the very soul of anyone who’s played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games/seen Tarkovsky’s Stalker/read Roadside Picnic.

How what why? I asked Mutant Year Zero’s developers to explain this anomaly. (And then I spent far too long researching the Swedish release dates of cult 1970s sci-fi).

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BioForge was a work of experimental fusion, the unfathomable prowess of the human brain fused with the constant vigilance of a mid-1990s desktop computer. Adventure game meets hand-to-hand combat, a feverish exploration of a cybernetic figure of unknown origin and capabilities. Your character (the cyborg) wakes up in a cell, and finds himself the newly-formed avatar of Promethean strength, nervously wearing all the muscles of his demi-human body on the outside of his skin. This is an important game. A noteworthy game. A game worth playing all the way through.

I never got out of the holding cell.

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