Halo Wars 2 has been released and while some people have leapt at the chance to try it, others aren’t so sure. Halo isn’t generally an RTS series and Halo Wars itself wasn’t loved much, so the sequel has some ground to cover. Also, RTS games and consoles aren’t generally a match seen a lot.

Now a demo has been released for Windows 10 on the Microsoft Store so you can try before you commit money. It comes with both the opening mission of the single-player campaign as well as Blitz mode which combines a card game with RTS elements. It’s strange but people who have bought the game seem to enjoy it.

Be warned though, if you decide to download the demo you’ll need to have a chunk of memory free for it – 17GB. Chunky for a demo sure, but the full game just received a 10GB patch so the game itself is fairly large as well.

So give it a try if you’re curious. Maybe you’ll discover to your surprise that a console-RTS works fairly well after all.

Times move on, economics change and so prices eventually go up. The same it seems applies to Hearthstone prices… but only in non-US markets it seems.

The price changes were announced by Blizzard and will be coming in from March 22nd, and will affect the prices of Hearthstone card packs, adventure wings and arena tickets. Right now, a lot of non-US players are not very happy, but nowhere is less happy than the UK which has seen rises of 20 to 50 percent more on prices compared the the EU’s flat 11 percent change. Of course, the UK is one of the few EU countries which kept its currency when the Euro came in, and last summer just over half the country voted to get the UK out of the UK aka Brexit. So this might be why.

Here are the EU and UK prices with the older price in brackets:

EU

• 2 Packs – €2.99 (€2.69)
• 7 Packs – €9.99 (€8.99)
• 15 Packs – €19.99 (€17.99)
• 40 Packs – €49.99 (€44.99)
• 60 Packs – €69.99 (€62.99)
• Adventure Wing – €6.99 (€5.99)
• Arena Ticket – €1.99 (€1.49)

UK

• 2 Packs – £2.99 (£1.99)
• 7 Packs – £8.99 (£6.99)
• 15 Packs – £16.99 (£13.99)
• 40 Packs – £44.99 (£34.99)
• 60 Packs – £59.99 (£47.99)
• Adventure Wing – £6.99 (£4.99)
• Arena Ticket – £1.99 (£1.49)

As you can see in this chart put together by redditor War_Master_WM, purchases now cost more in both markets than they do in the US, whereas previously they had been slightly cheaper. Right now the US market prices are NOT changing which has done little to calm down the European and other players.

“We regularly look at our pricing around the world, and from time to time we make changes such as these to align with local and regional market conditions,” Blizzard wrote on Battle.net. “The price of the Un’Goro prelaunch bundle offer will not be affected by this change and will remain the same until launch.”

Since the beginning of its lifetime, many of the players of the huge spacefaring game Elite: Dangerous have been wondering and asking where the series’ antagonistic alien race the Thargoids were. Back in January one player might have had first contact, with his ship being yanked out of jump only to be approached and scanned by a weird flower-shaped ship before it vanished. A few other players have had similar encounters now, but so far nothing much has happened although players had a feeling that this wasn’t going to be all they’d be doing.

Now Frontier have shown off a new, short trailer (the “Unknown Trailer” that features one of the strange alien vessels and the atmosphere is distinctly unsettling. The trailer shows a few human ships landing on a planet and exploring the surface before the alien ship comes up behind them and the ‘signal’ is lost. Of course, anything could have happened after that but the overall tone and ambient noise makes it seem that whatever happened, it wasn’t good for the human crews.

Interesting times ahead for Elite: Dangerous players ahead it seems. Hopefully Frontier will release more information or someone will have a much more interesting encounter with a flower ship soon in-game.