Valve gave an early Christmas gift to players in the form of three huge content updates, which have expanded the core of Dota 2 in numerous ways. The updates have added a slew of changes and three brand new heroes in the form of Legion Commander, Ember Spirit and Earth Spirit.

In a gaming landscape filled with gritty action, there's always room for a little light-hearted adventure. Enter Cube World and Trove, two games in alpha which revel in a voxel landscape of bright colors and cubes. Although Trove's recent reveal drew many visual comparisons to Cube World, the development style of these two titles couldn't be more different.

On the first day of gaming, Trion gave to me, a good friend questing for free!

As gaming progresses, we move further and further away from the intimate, tightly knit setting that once existed. Even on consoles, split screen is seldom included, and multiplayer games tend to be very impersonal. Until early this year I forgot how much a gaming experience can be improved if you share it with a good friend. 

I've known my friend Callum since we were 8 years old, and we've been gaming together for almost as long. In grade 3 or 4 we played Runescape together, and followed it up with Guild Wars, Warcraft, Battlefield and StarCraft II to name a few. However, over the past year or so our time has been so divided with school and work, that neither of us really had an opportunity to play games together. Despite our lack of time, when we both had an opening in our schedules just before summer, we decided to get together and play some games.

Callum has two computers in his den, and we were deciding what to install before we started. Neither of us had played RIFT seriously before it went free to play, and we decided to give it a shot. The experience I had playing it with him was fantastic. I find it easy to forget how much more fun you have when you are playing with someone you genuinely like. RIFT is a good game, which definitely helped, but even the collect quests and kill quests, which are so often tedious, become funny and entertaining. We played through until level 20, doing a few dungeons and taking our time with the crafting and leveling, stopping to enjoy the scenery and simply have fun.