2020 was a strange year for us all but, speaking personally, I didn't have "start to appreciate rock climbing" on my bingo card. You'd have never caught me doing it; heights are not my friend and that's especially true outdoors. When that cold wind hits, consider me gone. Actually, that might explain this new fascination with climbing athletes, who wouldn't even blink at the sudden chill. With no means (or will) to try rock climbing directly, I took a different approach. I bought Crytek's The Climb.

Having gotten an Oculus Quest 2 last month, games were needed for my fancy new tech. Granted, a Quest port of a four-year-old Oculus Rift game is an odd choice, considering it didn't even launch with motion controls initially, but it set a high bar early for what VR could offer. Back in 2016, modern VR was finding its feet and VR games felt more like tech demos, not full experiences - a situation which has long since improved.

For game design, strength lies in simplicity and The Climb executes its concept well, utilising an extreme form of free solo climbing to advance. For the unaware, free soloing is a niche of its own in climbing circles, practised by very few athletes. Making their climb without protective equipment like ropes or harnesses, you can immediately see why. Despite being an incredibly dangerous approach, it translates well into a video game.

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Plague Inc: Evolved DLC The Cure is available on Steam for free from now "until COVID-19 is under control".

The previously-announced free DLC - which is out now and requires base game Plague Inc: Evolved - tasks players to "take control and stop a deadly global pandemic by any means necessary. Allocate resources to boost testing capacity, make facemasks compulsory, lock down countries or investigate experimental treatments in Plague Inc.'s biggest expansion ever!"

It's a switch from the game's base game that introduces several new game mechanics to help the player end the spread of disease, not aid it.

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Multiplayer horror party game, Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals, has teamed with Konami for a Silent Hill-themed DLC.

While the details of the additional content have yet to be fully disclosed, developer Glowstick Entertainment says all will be revealed soon in an upcoming showcase.

An accompanying video teaser (thanks, Gematsu) gives us the familiar crackle of radio static and includes the words "In my restless dreams, I see that town... Silent Hill", intimating the content might be from the fan-favourite second game in the series, Silent Hill 2.

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A new lawsuit has accused Valve of abusing Steam's market power to prevent price competition.

The Hollywood Reporter said that five gamers filed an antitrust class action in California that alleges Valve requires developers and publishers enter into a "Most Favoured Nation" clause.

A Most Favoured Nation clause is a retail parity clause in which a supplier agrees to treat a particular customer no worse than all other customers. MFNs are under increased scrutiny from authorities across the world, including the European Commission.

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Warner Bros is trying to patent Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor's critically-acclaimed Nemesis system, it has emerged.

The revelation came in the latest video by the superb YouTube series Game Maker's Toolkit, which analyses how the Nemesis system works.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system, developed by a number of staff at Kirkland, Washington-based studio Monolith Productions, tracks the player's in-game actions to create enemies who are seemingly capable of remembering your encounters, rising through the ranks and enacting revenge. As our Christian Donlan wrote of the villain generator back in 2017, "die to an orc and the orc that offed you will grow stronger and might get a promotion".

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Bungie has said it's currently discussing Destiny 2's "3-peeking" issue, but made no promises changes will be made.

3-peeking, or third-person peeking, is the act of forcing the normally first-person camera into third-person, giving PvP players an advantage because they can peek around corners safely.

3-peeking is a long-standing issue in first-person shooters that have some third-person elements, but it's particularly troublesome in Destiny 2's competitive multiplayer. Destiny 2 is a game full of legitimate mechanics that pull the camera back into third-person, including swords and emotes, and some players use this to gain an upper hand in the Crucible, Destiny's PvP arena.

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Call of Duty: Warzone's stim has for some months now caused havoc in the battle royale - and it seems the developers of the game are struggling to get on top of it.

The stim is a piece of equipment that restores health points to your character and refreshes super sprint. It's supposed to help players get out of tough situations, but it has also been used nefariously as part of a raft of troublesome glitches and exploits that just won't go away - despite multiple patches.

The most well-known of these is the infinite stim glitch, which first appeared in October 2020. This glitch lets players use infinite tactical items, thus making it possible to spam healing stims and hide away from other players from within the gas until the game is over.

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Left 4 Dead 2 is finally available uncut in Germany, Valve has announced.

Over a decade after Left 4 Dead 2 came out, Valve requested the German authorities re-evaluate the zombie shooter and as a result, the uncut international version is now available in the country.

The German and Australian ratings boards refused to classify Left 4 Dead 2 when it launched in November 2009 because of its violence and gore. Eventually, Valve released a censored version of the game that ditched the dismemberment, pulled blood splatter and made zombies disappear as soon as you kill them. You couldn't see fire on zombies, either.

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Robert Macfarlane does not write about video games. Not despite, but because of this, I didn't truly understand why Eric Chahi's puzzley exploration of nature, Paper Beast, initially launched as a VR exclusive until I read Macfarlane's book Underland: A Deep Time Journey. In order to explain how and why this happened, I'll need to begin by introducing you to this man and his truly remarkable, unforgettable work.

Not satisfied with being a fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Macfarlane is also an author, scriptwriter, and - in the true sense of the word - adventurer. His books are primarily concerned with the planet on which we live, and the complicated relationship that we have with it. Underland, as the title suggests, zeroes in on the world below ground that the majority of us will never see; although after reading this book, I feel as though I'm one of the lucky few who gets to experience it a little at least.

Underland is a remarkable thing. Macfarlane's writing has a luxurious texture which melts in the imagination, and coats the mind's eye with vivid imagery. This man has sat me at the bank of a river deep underground; he has held my hand as we navigated alien dunes of jet-black sand hundreds of feet below the human world; we have panicked together as we squeeze through tiny Underland gaps that were never meant to admit a human body; he has given me tours of man-made structures far below sea level designed to contain the most lethal side-effects of our species.

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Apex Legends' eighth season, Mayhem, is now mere days away from its Tuesday, 2nd February launch, and developer Respawn is continuing to feverishly crank the hype handle in anticipation, this time delivering a full run-down of the abilities employed by new hero Fuse.

Walter "Fuse" Fitzroy, a former mercenary and a "true connoisseur of explosives", is the 16th hero to join Apex Legends' ever-growing line-up, and, following on from his initial unveiling earlier this month, has now been given the full reveal treatment in a new video.

Fuse, who can rain-down destruction from an "exceptional range", comes equipped with the passive Grenadier ability. This enables him to stack one more grenade per inventory slot than any other hero, and throw them "farther, faster, and more accurately" using his mechanical arm.

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