Mark Stay is writer of the forthcoming film Robot Overlords and its tie-in book, which hits stands today. So we asked him to pick his 10 favourite movie novelisations...

The film tie-in novelisation is something of a lost art these days. Back in the ’80s, you would have to wait months, even years, before your favourite film appeared on TV or was available to rent on VHS, so the book-of-the-film was often then best way to re-immerse yourself in that world (with the poster on the wall and the soundtrack on your record player).

So, it’s fitting that our ‘80s-influenced movie Robot Overlords, should have a tie-in novel too. But I was lucky: as co-writer of the screenplay, I had all-areas access to the set, actors, edit suite and, perhaps most importantly, plenty of precious time to write the book. Most authors of novelisations are lucky to get the script (which often differs to the finished film), some concept art or photos, maybe a rough cut of the movie and just a few weeks in which to write the thing. So can a writer produce a great book from this chaos? Here are a few that did just that…

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Rise of The Tomb Raider promises to have you fighting more "realistic"  animals as you explore Siberia, but game director Brian Horton also hints that the game will still contain "supernatural elements."

Talking to GameInformer in a video interview, Horton revealed a plethora of new information about the game, announcing that it will feature dynamic time and day and an adaptive weather system, allowing different animals to appear at different times.

The upgrade system from 2013's Tomb Raider is set to make a return,  but will now allow players to upgrade multiple types of bows rather than the single bow from the previous game.

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The 'Gone Green' DLC for Tropico 5 releases today for PC, Mac, and SteamOS.

According to the press release, the add-on costs £2.49 / €2.99 / $3.99 and invites players to "protect the environment along with your Swiss bank account".

The DLC includes a new standalone scenario called "Catch the Toucan". There's also a new building: the windfarm, a new haircut for your dynasty avatar, a new sandbox map, and new music and voice recordings.

If you want to find out more about how to please the eco-crowd on El Presidente's island, you can visit the Tropico 5 website. Also, make sure to check out IGN's review of this "challenging and engaging city-builder".

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Sonic Boom is the worst-performing Sonic title to date, SEGA has revealed.

In the company’s latest holdings report, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal have sold-through just 490,000 copies to consumers worldwide.

To put this in perspective, in the year ending March 31, 2014, Sonic Lost World managed to shift some 710,000 copies. Before that, Sonic Generations sold 1,850 000, and in 2012, Sonic & All-Star Racing Transformed pulled off 1,360,000 copies worldwide.

It’s not all bad news, mind. SEGA also released the sales figures for Alien: Isolation, which at the end of 2014, had sold some 1,760,000 copies. Considering the company only just announced it'd passed the 1 million mark, it seems that was either a delayed message or sales have picked up.

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Good Old Games is celebrating adding Warner Bros. to its list of partners by offering discounts on a variety of Mortal Kombat and LEGO titles.

GOG is adding six new classic titles, five of which will be discounted for the first week they're available. The full list of titles are:

• Mortal Kombat 1-3 Bundle
• LEGO Batman (-50%)
• LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4 (-60%)
• LEGO Harry Potter Years 5-7 (-60%)
• F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon - The Complete Trilogy (-50%)
• Bastion (-60%)

"We are very happy to see another of the gaming's juggernauts venture into the DRM-free waters with us." says Oleg Klapovsky, GOG.com's VP of Business Development and Operations. "Together with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, we are planning on more exciting releases, so stay tuned."

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We have your first look at six toys from DC Collectibles that will be available in October 2015 -- action figures for Arrow’s Arsenal, Felicity, and Diggle and The Flash’s Captain Cold, and prop replicas of The Flash’s Reverse-Flash ring and Constantine’s Helmet of Doctor Fate.

Click through our slideshow gallery to take a look.

“2015 is going to be another groundbreaking year for DC Collectibles,” Geoff Johns, chief creative officer of DC Entertainment, told IGN over email. “#DCTV has exploded and so we’re following suit with figures and props."

The action figures will be $24.95 a piece. Reverse Flash’s ring will go for $34.95. And Doctor Fate’s helmet, complete with pyramid stand, will retail for $499.95 -- power of Nabu not included.

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Forge Animation has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the creation of a Windwalkers video game.

The campaign began on February 4 and will end on March 4. Windwalkers will be a PC RPG combining action, adventure, and survival gameplay.

According to the game's description, players will take on the role of a Windwalker, intent on finding the source of all winds. "The universe of Windwalkers is a dynamic world shaped by the wind, where tornadoes, erosion, and storms are not calamities, but a part of everyday life. The world is in constant movement and change, which both helps and hinders the player. Following the wind is the only path to reaching the ultimate goal - but while the wind is the player’s guide through this world, it is also the very thing that could destroy them."

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In his travelogue A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a stopover at an inn along the Danube, en route to Istanbul in the winter of 1933. He falls into conversation there about regional history, alluding to Attila and his Horde by exclaiming, "And suddenly, at last something happens. Everything starts changing place at full speed! Chaos!" The sudden flurry of activity is a welcome change of pace to Fermor, a 20th-century student with wanderlust. Paddy claims that there's no fun in watching civilizations "float about as lonely as clouds, expanding across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew." Clearly, he would see the Huns as a a welcome arrival to Total War's late antiquity. Finally, something to upend the dreary peace!

Total War: Attila is centered on its turn-based Grand Campaign, a broad representation of the military situation Europe found itself in around 400 A.D. The Roman Empire is in its death throes, bloated and harried even after being cleaved into Eastern and Western halves. To the north and northeast, perennial all-barbarian first-teamers the Vandals and Visigoths flee from the Huns' onslaught--straight into Roman territory. To the east, the comparatively recumbent Sassanians lie within striking distance of Constantinopolis. A litany of small but active tribes occupy the interstitial spaces, cannibalizing each other and nipping impishly at the heels of the larger factions. All eyes are drawn to the eastern steppes, however, when Attila enters the world stage, providing a not-so-subtle cue to start getting your affairs in order.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila's cutscenes and campaign descriptions regularly invoke the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But Death himself can be slow coming, depending on your chosen faction--Attila still has to grow up before the gears of the Hunnic war machine really start to turn, so it can be some time before he makes his presence known to those in the far corners of the map. In the meantime, Famine proves to be a more immediate concern, as does Disease, both of which need to be mitigated through the construction of relevant buildings in one's home cities. A waterworks system, for example, confers sanitation +2, public order +1, while a sheep pen does as much for statistics like food surplus and wealth.

War, for his part, is an old hand by now. The series' battle engine is set in its ways; save a few new wrinkles in the siege system or the way fire spreads, it's mostly content to demonstrate mastery of those skills it already possessed. As opposed to the turn-by-turn politicizing, battles take place in real time, across fields or along castle ramparts, between collected armies that are, if not a one-to-one representation of the thousands of soldiers present, close enough in abstraction to dissuade you from counting. Your units engage the enemy's automatically when the two collide, leaving you to concern yourself with formations.

If that sounds simplistic, it's because you haven't seen how many formations there are to choose from--to say nothing of the stances and abilities that can be toggled on each individual unit, or the passive qualities like morale or fatigue that themselves hinge on dozens of other factors. If there were any doubts, let it be known that Total War: Attila retains the series' depth of strategic offerings. But for the uninitiated and leery, it's entirely possible to play par golf on normal difficulty armed only with an understanding of the series' now-familiar unit rock-paper-scissors. Swords beat spears, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beat swords. And generally speaking, everyone hates having arrows lobbed at their heads. Once armies clash, you never concern yourself with any individual soldier. Instead, you command armies as the Sorcerer's Apprentice commanded waves and lighting, pointing out what you want done and watching a wave of spearmen break off in that direction like a tributary branching from a roaring river.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila regularly analogizes the Horde to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Most of the quirks of Total War's artificial intelligence have been ironed out by now: it properly diverts forces to prevent dead runs at the main capture point of its bases, and those old instances of units spinning aimlessly have yet to rear their heads. But Attila is not without its idiosyncrasies. Battles can occur at sea, but naval skirmishes remain a mess of sails and hulls, a paltry imitation of their counterparts on land. Back on terra firma, units occasionally show their displeasure with your commands by sprinting headlong in the wrong direction, particularly when you try to send them up a siege ladder. Then there's the curious case of the Vandal general at Ad Decimum, who will refuse to break his tidy formation to chase off a single unit of horse archers sent out to pester him.

You don't need a field manual to beat an enemy like that, but for what it's worth, Total War: Attila's tutorial prologue is comprehensive, and a good precursor to the Grand Campaign. It has its limitations, though--perhaps inevitable when you've got an interface that's as complex as Photoshop and half as intuitive. Information like, say, the cost of unit upkeep, is lost among the icons and numbers that are tucked into each of the screen's corners.

Speaking of too much information: every member of your chosen faction's royal family has a set of qualities that affect his or her statistics, and let's just note that “flaccid” is one of them and continue on. There are wives that affect stats, companions who affect stats, even random little trinkets like necklaces and scrolls that affect stats. Imagine, if the scales of rebellion truly tipped on some statesman getting a particularly shiny bracelet! Absent that hyperspecificity, the returning familial power system is welcome. Family members and statesmen accrue influence, which can be leveraged into political actions. Influence needs to be wielded to avoid losing control of your faction, so running low can mean ceding a percentage of your control every time the game springs a political event on you, like a power play from a rival or an inopportune marriage. Neglect your influence, and each time it'll be another -2% control, -2% control...death by thrown shade.

That granularity flows into all of Total War: Attila's historical representations--here, it's not Istanbul, it's Constantinopolis. This a game that's got its Latin roots in mind when it suggests that you might need to "decimate" your troops to deal with failing integrity. It certainly seems to put a tax on the in-game encyclopedia, which regularly fails to load properly (though it should be noted that the review copy's encyclopedia is online-only). The whole game regularly seems to struggle under the weight of its own persnickety attention to detail, stuttering when the map is panned even when graphical settings are tuned down. It's uncanny to watch the seabirds that float above the game world's coasts sputter out and stall whenever you click "end turn."

Each of those turns represents quite a bit of data: each one a season, each season a time to specify constructions or appointments, or expend a unit's action points towards movement, raids, or out-and-out battle. Scale translates well on the world map, generally speaking: forests allow concealment, and distinctive masses like the great Arabian Desert represent near-impassable natural barriers. Total War does stoop to representing armies on the world map with single avatars, a rare moment of generalization.

It's a beautiful map, really. Its deciduous trees have a lovely, fungal sort of grunginess to them, like anything viewed through an electron microscope (though they do turn a bit fractal when viewed from directly overhead). Sand looks like it was cascaded over real rock and dirt. Select a settlement, and it’s illuminated by god rays. Waves sound along the coast, sometimes pierced by a shout from a unit that's been set to raid a nearby trade route. This never fails to sound like a bunch of people pranked their fellow soldier with the old “let's tell Maximus that we're all going to yell “HRUAGGGH” at the count of three then totally not do anything” gag.

Raiding isn't considered an act of war, strangely enough. So you can sue for peace with a neighbor, then promptly start pillaging your way across their country. They're unable to retaliate lest they suffer the betrayal penalty for all other factions. There are a few other tics of note here, too. Sometimes messages need to be clicked twice to confirm them. The "show/hide deceased" toggle in the family tree menu doesn't appear to work. More egregiously, if you assign a statesman to a provincial governing slot, the decision appears to immediately and irrevocably transport him across the thousands of miles to his destination--try to recall him, and you'll be told that he needs to travel back. It's the one time when I wish the game would ask me to click twice to confirm.

On the world map, the opponent empire AI seems cautious by nature, rarely pressing an offensive. Enemies are not sleepwalking, though--if they catch you trying to send an ambush force deep into their empire they'll crush it with overpowering force. Other than that, though, they seem mostly content to maintain their border wherever it lies at the time. Newly introduced puppet states hold up their end of the bargain, though: on more than one occasion they've chased separatist fighters away from my besieged cities, and they regularly seem to harry enemy forces. They're a little too eager to use the new ability to raze cities, though, so it’s probably best to step in before they go and annihilate a city you'd been eying.

Unless you're playing as the Huns, that is. Then you'll probably want to do the razing yourself. They're fast, dangerous with bows, and packing a fear-inducing bonus against Christian factions. They--and the Vandals and Goths--eschew stationary living for slightly different pick-up-and-go versions of the same structures the other factions build. Don't expect to be the dominant force right out of the gate, however: the nomads and migrating tribes of Total War: Attila face the steepest initial difficulty. You might begin not with a city to rest in, but only with your nomadic units themselves, playing mouse to other factions' cats until you come to terms with the wandering life and learn to make a home wherever the heart and Horde are. These factions are fun to play as, highly mobile and free from some of the fussier portions of the game's political realm, carrying their culture in their saddlebags, driving the "civilized" world before them like a flock of sheep.

As the Huns, you upend the status quo, even if Total War: Attila itself doesn't represent a major disruption. Austere writing, along with campaigns that come to a close rather quickly compared to many games of this ilk, come as a surprise given battles of such enormous scale, and given systems that allow you to poke and prod at so many fine details. At least the production values fulfill the promise of historical grandiosity, including a militant musical score that brilliantly anchors the game's atmosphere. "Everything starts changing place at full speed!" it calls out. "Chaos!" it cries, echoing the mighty Huns as they raze the landscape. Attila is more of the same and a little bit extra, then, not as convincingly realized as the best Total Wars, but strong enough to keep you clicking until the inevitable patches and expansions trickle in.

In his travelogue A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a stopover at an inn along the Danube, en route to Istanbul in the winter of 1933. He falls into conversation there about regional history, alluding to Attila and his Horde by exclaiming, "And suddenly, at last something happens. Everything starts changing place at full speed! Chaos!" The sudden flurry of activity is a welcome change of pace to Fermor, a 20th-century student with wanderlust. Paddy claims that there's no fun in watching civilizations "float about as lonely as clouds, expanding across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew." Clearly, he would see the Huns as a a welcome arrival to Total War's late antiquity. Finally, something to upend the dreary peace!

Total War: Attila is centered on its turn-based Grand Campaign, a broad representation of the military situation Europe found itself in around 400 A.D. The Roman Empire is in its death throes, bloated and harried even after being cleaved into Eastern and Western halves. To the north and northeast, perennial all-barbarian first-teamers the Vandals and Visigoths flee from the Huns' onslaught--straight into Roman territory. To the east, the comparatively recumbent Sassanians lie within striking distance of Constantinopolis. A litany of small but active tribes occupy the interstitial spaces, cannibalizing each other and nipping impishly at the heels of the larger factions. All eyes are drawn to the eastern steppes, however, when Attila enters the world stage, providing a not-so-subtle cue to start getting your affairs in order.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila's cutscenes and campaign descriptions regularly invoke the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But Death himself can be slow coming, depending on your chosen faction--Attila still has to grow up before the gears of the Hunnic war machine really start to turn, so it can be some time before he makes his presence known to those in the far corners of the map. In the meantime, Famine proves to be a more immediate concern, as does Disease, both of which need to be mitigated through the construction of relevant buildings in one's home cities. A waterworks system, for example, confers sanitation +2, public order +1, while a sheep pen does as much for statistics like food surplus and wealth.

War, for his part, is an old hand by now. The series' battle engine is set in its ways; save a few new wrinkles in the siege system or the way fire spreads, it's mostly content to demonstrate mastery of those skills it already possessed. As opposed to the turn-by-turn politicizing, battles take place in real time, across fields or along castle ramparts, between collected armies that are, if not a one-to-one representation of the thousands of soldiers present, close enough in abstraction to dissuade you from counting. Your units engage the enemy's automatically when the two collide, leaving you to concern yourself with formations.

If that sounds simplistic, it's because you haven't seen how many formations there are to choose from--to say nothing of the stances and abilities that can be toggled on each individual unit, or the passive qualities like morale or fatigue that themselves hinge on dozens of other factors. If there were any doubts, let it be known that Total War: Attila retains the series' depth of strategic offerings. But for the uninitiated and leery, it's entirely possible to play par golf on normal difficulty armed only with an understanding of the series' now-familiar unit rock-paper-scissors. Swords beat spears, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beat swords. And generally speaking, everyone hates having arrows lobbed at their heads. Once armies clash, you never concern yourself with any individual soldier. Instead, you command armies as the Sorcerer's Apprentice commanded waves and lighting, pointing out what you want done and watching a wave of spearmen break off in that direction like a tributary branching from a roaring river.

Lest there be any confusion about the stakes, Total War: Attila regularly analogizes the Horde to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Most of the quirks of Total War's artificial intelligence have been ironed out by now: it properly diverts forces to prevent dead runs at the main capture point of its bases, and those old instances of units spinning aimlessly have yet to rear their heads. But Attila is not without its idiosyncrasies. Battles can occur at sea, but naval skirmishes remain a mess of sails and hulls, a paltry imitation of their counterparts on land. Back on terra firma, units occasionally show their displeasure with your commands by sprinting headlong in the wrong direction, particularly when you try to send them up a siege ladder. Then there's the curious case of the Vandal general at Ad Decimum, who will refuse to break his tidy formation to chase off a single unit of horse archers sent out to pester him.

You don't need a field manual to beat an enemy like that, but for what it's worth, Total War: Attila's tutorial prologue is comprehensive, and a good precursor to the Grand Campaign. It has its limitations, though--perhaps inevitable when you've got an interface that's as complex as Photoshop and half as intuitive. Information like, say, the cost of unit upkeep, is lost among the icons and numbers that are tucked into each of the screen's corners.

Speaking of too much information: every member of your chosen faction's royal family has a set of qualities that affect his or her statistics, and let's just note that “flaccid” is one of them and continue on. There are wives that affect stats, companions who affect stats, even random little trinkets like necklaces and scrolls that affect stats. Imagine, if the scales of rebellion truly tipped on some statesman getting a particularly shiny bracelet! Absent that hyperspecificity, the returning familial power system is welcome. Family members and statesmen accrue influence, which can be leveraged into political actions. Influence needs to be wielded to avoid losing control of your faction, so running low can mean ceding a percentage of your control every time the game springs a political event on you, like a power play from a rival or an inopportune marriage. Neglect your influence, and each time it'll be another -2% control, -2% control...death by thrown shade.

That granularity flows into all of Total War: Attila's historical representations--here, it's not Istanbul, it's Constantinopolis. This a game that's got its Latin roots in mind when it suggests that you might need to "decimate" your troops to deal with failing integrity. It certainly seems to put a tax on the in-game encyclopedia, which regularly fails to load properly (though it should be noted that the review copy's encyclopedia is online-only). The whole game regularly seems to struggle under the weight of its own persnickety attention to detail, stuttering when the map is panned even when graphical settings are tuned down. It's uncanny to watch the seabirds that float above the game world's coasts sputter out and stall whenever you click "end turn."

Each of those turns represents quite a bit of data: each one a season, each season a time to specify constructions or appointments, or expend a unit's action points towards movement, raids, or out-and-out battle. Scale translates well on the world map, generally speaking: forests allow concealment, and distinctive masses like the great Arabian Desert represent near-impassable natural barriers. Total War does stoop to representing armies on the world map with single avatars, a rare moment of generalization.

It's a beautiful map, really. Its deciduous trees have a lovely, fungal sort of grunginess to them, like anything viewed through an electron microscope (though they do turn a bit fractal when viewed from directly overhead). Sand looks like it was cascaded over real rock and dirt. Select a settlement, and it’s illuminated by god rays. Waves sound along the coast, sometimes pierced by a shout from a unit that's been set to raid a nearby trade route. This never fails to sound like a bunch of people pranked their fellow soldier with the old “let's tell Maximus that we're all going to yell “HRUAGGGH” at the count of three then totally not do anything” gag.

Raiding isn't considered an act of war, strangely enough. So you can sue for peace with a neighbor, then promptly start pillaging your way across their country. They're unable to retaliate lest they suffer the betrayal penalty for all other factions. There are a few other tics of note here, too. Sometimes messages need to be clicked twice to confirm them. The "show/hide deceased" toggle in the family tree menu doesn't appear to work. More egregiously, if you assign a statesman to a provincial governing slot, the decision appears to immediately and irrevocably transport him across the thousands of miles to his destination--try to recall him, and you'll be told that he needs to travel back. It's the one time when I wish the game would ask me to click twice to confirm.

On the world map, the opponent empire AI seems cautious by nature, rarely pressing an offensive. Enemies are not sleepwalking, though--if they catch you trying to send an ambush force deep into their empire they'll crush it with overpowering force. Other than that, though, they seem mostly content to maintain their border wherever it lies at the time. Newly introduced puppet states hold up their end of the bargain, though: on more than one occasion they've chased separatist fighters away from my besieged cities, and they regularly seem to harry enemy forces. They're a little too eager to use the new ability to raze cities, though, so it’s probably best to step in before they go and annihilate a city you'd been eying.

Unless you're playing as the Huns, that is. Then you'll probably want to do the razing yourself. They're fast, dangerous with bows, and packing a fear-inducing bonus against Christian factions. They--and the Vandals and Goths--eschew stationary living for slightly different pick-up-and-go versions of the same structures the other factions build. Don't expect to be the dominant force right out of the gate, however: the nomads and migrating tribes of Total War: Attila face the steepest initial difficulty. You might begin not with a city to rest in, but only with your nomadic units themselves, playing mouse to other factions' cats until you come to terms with the wandering life and learn to make a home wherever the heart and Horde are. These factions are fun to play as, highly mobile and free from some of the fussier portions of the game's political realm, carrying their culture in their saddlebags, driving the "civilized" world before them like a flock of sheep.

As the Huns, you upend the status quo, even if Total War: Attila itself doesn't represent a major disruption. Austere writing, along with campaigns that come to a close rather quickly compared to many games of this ilk, come as a surprise given battles of such enormous scale, and given systems that allow you to poke and prod at so many fine details. At least the production values fulfill the promise of historical grandiosity, including a militant musical score that brilliantly anchors the game's atmosphere. "Everything starts changing place at full speed!" it calls out. "Chaos!" it cries, echoing the mighty Huns as they raze the landscape. Attila is more of the same and a little bit extra, then, not as convincingly realized as the best Total Wars, but strong enough to keep you clicking until the inevitable patches and expansions trickle in.

Dying Light is getting a new hard mode via a free content update.

There’s no fixed release date as of yet, but Techland expects the mode to ship around the start of March or some time sooner.

New features coming with the mode include a ramped-up night-time difficulty, where the infected will become much more vicious. This heightens the need for stealth and complete silence, and supplies will be more limited. That’s as well as “plenty of other additions,” we’re told.

”A few gamers have already finished Dying Light and are asking for more. So we’re going to give our community a new challenge that will put everything they learnt in the game to the test. Hard Mode is exactly that,” says producer Tymon Smektała.

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