We're back! What did we miss?

We've been away, but the news has kept piling up in our inbox - what caught Atomic's eye when we returned to non-festive sobriety?

Okay, we're back.

We've had to steal a small Guatemalan boy's liver to replace our own, and we're putting into place a tight exercise regime to tear off those XMas kilos. We're also catching up on an inbox crammed to bursting with email - a lot of it's cruft (cheesy Xmas greetings, spam, the newsletters that previous Atomic editors signed up and that we're too lazy to discontinue), but a few things caught our eye.

So here's our brief run-down of the last two weeks of interesting stuff - who knew news keeps happening while we're drunk in a gutter singing Auld Lang Syne?!

Black Ops DLC
The annoying trend of console games getting DLC packs well ahead of PC is continuing. This time the culprit's the hyper-popular Call of Duty Black Ops, which will get an add-on called 'First Strike' on February 1 - but only on Xbox.

First Strike will feature four new maps, and a new zombie map. Thankfully, the release is at least carefully worded, saying that this content is 'first' on Xbox. Hopefully that means it'll hit other platforms soon enough.

AMD Radeon 6970 pricing
Remember the mighty stoush between hardware retailers and AMD we uncovered last month, with AMD's announced RRP pricing being far in advance of what most retailers were offering? Well, it looks like things have normalised somewhat - PC Case Gear, for instance, is now stocking the 6970 for $429. 

It's still ten dollars above the announced RRP of $419, but a far sight better than the initial offerings of in excess of $600. What this means for those retailers who ordered stock at the initial price we're unsure of. We'll catch up on this as the New Year progresses.

More Dungeons & Dragons
Atari and Bedlam games has announced Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale, a new digital download only D&D game set in the vastly popular (yet oddly anaemic) Forgotten Realms world. Daggerdale "centers on the desperate struggle to defeat the evil Rezlus and his Zhentarim in their attempt to invade and conquer the Dalelands". 

In other words, classic fantasy stuff.

The game will be available on all platforms (yay!), and will feature solo and four-player co-op - which actually sounds pretty neat. Where's my D20 at?