Goddamn houses. Standing there, all intact and neat while all this Battlefield: Bad Company 2 mayhem goes on around them. They will not stand. They won't be standing for much longer, thanks to the incredibly smashable Frostbite engine. As well as looking spectacular, knocking down a structure is a neat way of clearing out a horrible enemy infestation without getting your knife dirty and putting your weak human flesh directly in front of a foe's weaponry.

I'm sixteen kilometres out. Panau, the completely explorable country Just Cause 2 takes place on, is so large that sometimes the journey to your objective is just impractical by normal means. My abnormal means include the Silverbolt, a fragile but staggeringly fast single-person jet plane I can have airlifted to my location. But it needs a clear runway, and up here in Panau's craggy snow-caps, there aren't many to choose from.

Today, while the following news was raging, PC Gamer played Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at lunch. Tom moaned constantly about not being able to see anyone, Craig kept beating Graham to the back seat of the quadbikes, and Rich 'spotted' a lot of tanks but didn't do much about them. Meanwhile, in the world of computermogames:

According to a statement we've just received from Ubisoft, the downtime some gamers experienced being unable to play Silent Hunter V and Assassin's Creed 2 was down to a denial of service attack their DRM servers suffered over the weekend. Ubi have offered their apologies. Full statement below.

From around 11.15 AM GMT on Sunday, both the Assassin's Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 forums began to fill with complaints from gamers unable to start the respective games. The servers that Ubisoft's new copy protection system relies on encountered 'technical difficulties' that left many games unable to play, and others with half-hour delays when starting the game. While Ubisoft Forum Managers offered sympathetic sad-face emoticons and assurances that staff were looking into it, it was over nine hours before a specific response was issued, and it offered no timescale for a fix.

Update: Ubi have now issued a statement saying this was a denial of service attack.

Supreme Commander 2 is out today! We're loving it here in the PC Gamer office, despite all the ways it's been scaled back. It just gets to the giant-robots-clashing part so much faster. But despite the simplifications, it's still not an immediately intuitive game to play. Here are our tips for grasping some fundamentals that can take a long time to learn by trial and error.

Finding a poster in a tube is not entirely surprising. But when you're unrolling it, at some point you expect to find the end. Here's a video to illustrate its sheer size, and what to do if you want it.

Ubisoft announced in January that all their games would be using a copy protection method that requires players to be online all the time they're playing. It would even reset you to your last checkpoint in Assassin's Creed 2, we discovered last month. Ubi have since issued a patch to change that: you can now resume from where you left off. But last night, illegal versions of their new game Silent Hunter V started cropping up on the torrent sites. Had the system been cracked already? Would Ubisoft continue to insist paying customers stay online if pirates can play how they please? We asked them; here's what they said.

On Monday I asked people to suggest things I should tie together with Just Cause 2's new grappling hook feature: you can latch on to just about anything, and fix it to anything else. Some were impossible or required enormous luck, but those that merely killed innocents, set me on fire or constituted acts of terrorism, I did. I'll get specific screenshots up if we get the OK from Square Enix to post them, because some of these were hilarious.

Valve and Blizzard give us a peek into what's coming up (or what's not coming up in Valve's case) in their games. Exciting links ahoy!