Gaming: Halo heading to PC; Elder Scrolls fires up dragon season; the art of Mario

Get ready to stop the Flood on your desktop for the first time. In a move that’s as much a symbolic nod to its cross-platform intentions as it is to its Halo bona fides, Microsoft is bringing its full Halo lineup to PC.

Microsoft announced Halo: The Master Chief Collection for PC alongside a small deluge of fresh Halo news, including the reveal that Halo: Reach is now a part of the Master Chief lineup. The collection now includes the full slate of Halo classics with the exception of Halo 5: Guardians (at least for the time being). That means PC gamers will soon be able to tour nearly all of the Halo series, including Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo 4, and Halo: Reach. 

Unlike its bundled counterpart on Xbox consoles, The Master Chief Collection won’t be released all at once for PC; rather, it’ll roll out each title one at a time. Halo: Reach will be the first to arrive, followed by the rest of the games according to their original release order, starting with Halo: Combat Evolved.

Developed in conjunction with current Halo makers 343 Industries, The Master Chief Collection first appeared in 2014 for Xbox One. Microsoft hasn’t set a specific date for Halo: Reach to, ahem, reach PC, but did say it’ll appear sometime this year. When it does, it’ll come equipped to run at 60 frames per second, with full 4K/HDR support, and it’ll be available at both the Microsoft Store and Steam.

Bethesda has been teasing that Skyrim’s dragons will soon start breathing fire onto the rest of Tamriel for a while now, and the first major step toward a year’s worth of dragon-themed content has just landed. 

The Elders Scrolls Online: Wrathstone is a new DLC pack that introduces ESO’s “Season of the Dragon” narrative for the coming year, as well as two new dungeons (“Frostvault” and “Depths of Malatar”) that protect the two halves of the mysterious Wrathstone tablet for players to track down in ESO's sprawling multiplayer universe.

“In Frostvault, you must work with the Redguard treasure hunter Tharayya to explore a lost Dwarven vault, embedded deep within Eastmarch’s frozen glaciers,” Bethesda teases. The Depths of Malatar map is a “lost Ayleid ruin” that still hides the mystery of what become of “an Imperial cohort that first discovered its entrance centuries ago.”

Wrathstone will be followed in June by Elsweyr, which will veer the dragon tale southward into the desert homeland of the cat-like Khajiiti race. The Wrathstone game pack is available now for The Elder Scrolls Online for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and macOS.

If you admired Super Mario Odyssey for Nintendo's painterly art style as much as for the awesome gameplay, you might be one of those players who’d frequently stop and just move the camera around to take it all in.

But thanks to The Art of Super Mario Odyssey, a 368-page art book headed to U.S. shores after first debuting in Japan, you won’t have to make Mario stop jumping just to appreciate his surroundings. Via Polygon, Dark Horse is bringing the hardcover book stateside, both at conventional book retailers and via Amazon and other online storefronts.

That means you’ll also be able to dive deeper into the game’s art than just what made it onto the screen. In addition to plenty of in-game moments, there’ll also be “concept art, preliminary sketches, and notes from the development team, plus insight into some early ideas that didn’t make it into the game itself,” according to the report. 

The Art of Super Mario Odyssey reportedly bounds our way starting Oct. 22, and will retail for $49.99 — a few coins less than the game itself.