Blizzard’s doing their part for charity this festive season by pledging the money you use to purchase a pet in World of Warcraft towards helping sick children live out their dreams if you buy one before the end of the year.

Mischief, the Fel kitty, is a release in line with WoW’s current expansion Legion which sees an awful lot of demons and the Fel-tainted popping up everywhere causing trouble. Mischief himself isn’t that bad, costing you only £9 or $10 to adopt and have ready to stand by the sides of all of your characters tied to your Battle.net account. And all of that money, 100% of it, will be given as part of the donation Blizzard will be making to the Make A Wish foundation.

If you’d rather have a softer, more physical version you can do that too. There’s a plushie of the Fel kitty available in the Gear store for $25. Not all of that goes to charity, but at $14 that’s still more than half of it going to good causes.

If you want to support Blizzard’s efforts, you have until December 31st to buy the pet in-game.

Overwatch gets special limited edition content released for big events or holidays, we know this now. First it was the Summer Games content for the Olympics, then we had Halloween’s Dr. Junkenstein’s Revenge. Christmas content is inevitable and some eager gamers have been sneaking a look through datamining.

What’s been found so far are references to new maps, something that could be the holiday’s potential special gamemode (ala Lucioball or Junkenstein’s Revenge), which characters are getting new festive skins and even the menu music.

On the subject of the maps and gamemode, the file references seem to suggest something like the Halloween gamemode with a specialised map for it. Some other maps might also get a little Christmas decoration too for the length of the seasonal event.

On the cosmetic side, every character will be getting a new spray, voice line and victory pose through the Christmas loot crates, but just as with Halloween only not all of them will be getting a skin, emote or highlight intro though the loot crates. Those characters getting at least ONE of the three will be Widowmaker, Reinhardt, Mercy, Symmetra, Reaper, Sombra, Roadhog, D.Va, Ana, Soldier: 76, and Lúcio. The ones getting TWO are Winston, McCree, Mei, Pharah, Zarya, Tracer, and Zenyatta; however Torbjorn will be getting all THREE from the loot. This hints that maybe his character will be put into an important role for the new gamemode possibly.

We should see when the event kicks off. December the 13th is the estimated date of release right now, which would take it through to January 3rd if it ran for the same three-week period of time as other events. However, keep your eyes on the official channels for more information as Blizzard release it.

It’s December at last, so finally Christmas is allowed to be absolutely everywhere. Including in video game launch trailers apparently.

As the tale “Twas the night before Christmas” is read, we get a load of footage of the sort of gameplay the Dead Rising series is famous for – slaughtering huge packs of zombies in the most creative and strange ways you can. And, as the trailer confirms, Dead Rising 4 will be out on December 6th, well in time to make it under many peoples’ Christmas trees. The Xbox team will be doing “something” in London on Monday to mark the game’s release as well, so keep your eyes and ears open for what that is.

DR4 is going to be revisiting the start of the series in this game, but will come with the new weapons to make and photos to take that you’d expect from a new entry into any game series.

Titanfall 2 has already had quite the price drop despite having only launched recently. Now, if you’re still not sure, it’s getting a limited trial so people can try out the multiplayer for a few days before Christmas.

The trial has been open to Origin Access members since the end of November, and now it’s being opened to all from the 2nd to the 4th. There’s no provision of any of the singleplayer elements to it, but the multiplayer is the part that Titanfall was originally built on. Even if the singleplayer is reviewing greatly to people playing it, there’s no value to EA letting players have the chance to potentially finish it for free unfortunately. At least you can get a feel for the game before you decide to buy it or not for that story.

The trial might only be open for a few days but the hours aren’t limited at all. You could play the full chunk of hours non-stop if you wanted to… and were able to handle it. The demo is available for download now at the Origin store.

What’s more, a new map is dropping for the game pretty soon during the trial period. Angel City is the first DLC drop from developers Respawn for the game and is a free piece of DLC to boot. People who pre-ordered have, again, had access since the end of November, but it’s nice to think that even people in the trial will be able to play it soon. Respawn have also said that all post-launch content (maps, weapons, gamemodes etc.) will be free too, so there’s even more to come if you do decide to stick around.

What’s more, any progress you make in the trial can then be transferred over to the full game should you buy it. So really, you might as well give it a go if you’re curious. It’s free, so what do you have to lose?

So after a few weeks of waiting, card reveals and information being handed out to us on the three crime families of the expansion, Hearthstone’s Mean Streets of Gadgetzan has finally made its entrance to the public servers.

The release was staggered out across the different regions of the world, in a bid from Blizzard to avoid repeats of past incidents that overloaded servers from the extra load and would lead games crashing and inaccessibility – which obviously lead to a lot of negative feedback from the players. That didn’t totally stop complaints though, as while NA kept the December 1st release date, other regions such as the EU servers (which are the ones the majority of the team here play on) did not get to see Gadgetzan’s release until the day after.

However, this did work out a little bit in the favour of those who had to wait, as Gadgetzan’s packs came with a strange bug that saw some of the tri-class cards (3 for each crime family) popping up multiple times in the same packs. I’ve even seen a screencap of someone getting a pack that was 4 Kabal Chemists and a Polymorph Potion…

Blizzard to their credit reacted very quickly to the reports of this bug, sending out messages publicly to people that recommended that they not open any Gadgetzan packs they had until the bug had been fixed. Any packs bought during the time the bug was active wouldn’t be affected as the content of a pack are determined upon opening, instead of upon generation like a Loot Box does in Overwatch. The bug was quickly fixed within a few hours, and for those players who had opened their packs and fallen victim to the multiple tri-class bug, Blizzard gave them 33% of the packs that they had as compensation.

Gadgetzan packs should now be available in the Shop for purchase with real money or Gold; and for those who were unable to afford the pre-order 50 packs, Gadgetzan offers at least three expansion-related Daily Quests that you can complete to earn 2 packs per Quest. They’re simple ones too, simply asking for you to get 3 wins with the family’s preferred class (that’s Hunter, Paladin, Warrior for the Grimy Goons; Rogue, Druid and Shaman for the Jade Lotus; and Warlock, Mage and Priest for the Kabal in case you need a refresher) to earn your free packs.

Gadgetzan had a pretty smooth launch in all, despite the duplicate bug and the slight delay in some regions. Some will probably say differently, but then I remember The Grand Tournament’s launch being much more trouble personally. The servers were a nightmare to access for a few days after it launched.

I look forward to seeing how Gadgetzan cards affect the Standard meta, and especially if our own tournament champ Agtheo’s thoughts on it will turn out true.