PC: 12 Games of Christmas

Crysis

Have some of that.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was, and maybe still is in a different way, a big chap. That is my rather complicated way of saying: if he was scared - and he was - of Predator, then I would likely have slipped and landed in my own pile of frightened-release long before I ever got close to jumping off a waterfall and disguising myself in mud. I would love to be as snazzy as Predator and this is where Crysis comes in - yes there is a point, see.

The rules have changed a little and you are far from an ugly alien beast-thing that listens to reggae, but the Crysis nanosuit gives you more or less the same powers: you can use it to regain health, wildly increase your strength, turn invisible, jump onto buildings or sprint faster than Ben Johnson on steroids. Bounding through beautiful foliage and dynamically assaulting pockets of enemy resistance like a robotic tiger is right up my alley, then.

Unsurprisingly there is much more to it than that. All at once it is outrageously handsome and instantly enjoyable (much like me), and coupled with typical excellent multiplayer option and a superb editor it has legs yet. Uninventive, perhaps, but a pure first-person shooter for its original audience.

Sob: Crysis sounds a bit like cry which is what your friend does when you stamp on his foot.

The Witcher

Geralt making a rather camp stand.

I like a good story; I often read books. I enjoy following the lives of my characters, watching their relationships and exploring their pasts - getting to know them. The Witcher is already written, influenced by Polish novels; you simply open the book on the first page and begin your story. You will find no lengthy character-creation screens to alter your nostril hair; you are Geralt, the mutant monster hunter.

However, role-players will find much to make them at home: there are levels to gain and increase the abilities of your character; there are items to collect and equip Geralt with; there is a wonderfully accomplished alchemy system to brew your own potions with. The Witcher was peddled by Atari as a grown-up game where you can collect naughty cards after you sleep with women, but that does it a disservice as there is much more under its busty appearance. Atmosphere leaks lovingly from grubby rural towns and combat is enjoyable and active. Statistic-lovers be warned, but those who prefer a story be recommended.

Club foot: Geralt is a mutant. Tom knows what that's like, because one of his toes points slightly the wrong way. Yes we've run out of facts sod off.

BioShock

Open wide. AHHH.

Hearing recommendations for BioShock again should make you feel a little sick by now. But when I drag my mind back to its leaky corridors I feel as if I am recalling being on holiday somewhere. Rapture was such a complete world I half-expect to see a postcard for it in a spinning rack on Brighton Beach - the creative force behind it was staggering.

It invents, too - just like you will when you get there, and decorates shooting things with elements from role-playing games like upgrading your abilities and modifying your weapons. It helps make the experience compelling, as if the story and direction needed any help. It is also not a terribly scary game. It is atmosphere by the bucket-load, but I've seen some people put-off by the rather chilling opening section you get to play in the demo. Do not be fooled.

BioShock is an experience to be remembered, then, and you should really look into it if you haven't already.

Big Daddy or chips: Just harvest them. It's not real.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Soldiers in the mist.

Call of Duty 4 has a chap in it with a fantastic moustache beard-thing. He looks like the sort of person who was waltzing around Brighton a few months ago for the facial hair competition. If Call of Duty 4 had a moustache it would be big and bushy, but well considered - as if it had been planned from start to finish.

You see, Infinity Ward has made Modern Warfare like a film, a cheesy phrase but an apt comparison. The action is superbly directed, diverse, loud and intense. Buildings fall apart as enemies pepper them with bullets that yes are quite destructive actually - you learn from the start that thin walls are no obstacle in your search for blood.

It feels as if the BBC has reached out and dragged you into Iraq or a middle-eastern conflict, then added Hollywood on top. Short but fulfilling for those of you with a single-player ambitions, but if you have a penchant for online battles then there is a world of extra content to keep you playing for months.

Modern Warfare: Modern Warfare Modern Warfare Warfare Warfare Warfare Warfare Warfare Warfare Combat Warfare Warfare no no stop it's gone wrong again!

World in Conflict

There are no resources to worry about in World in Conflict. None of this having enough harvesters to make enough money to fund enough tanks to do enough damage malarkey. Massive Entertainment wants you on the front line; giving you mere moments to decide how to confront a fast-approaching enemy convoy - hide tanks in shops or spread like butter for a multi-pronged and 'dairying' attack? The effect is exhilarating and lends itself more closely to an action game than RTS.

Massive hasn't reinvented the genre, just refined what to offer and dressed it up in really rather lavish production values. It is accessible and stuffed with monitor-rattling explosions and instantly satisfying entertainment. World in Conflict also has an extraordinary amount to offer as you play with friends, giving you control of individual units so you can co-operate in bringing about devilishly addictive destruction.

Fight! There hasn't been a day of world peace since the start of World War I. Or maybe World War II. I was told that at school, clearly wasn't listening, and assume it's still true.

The Orange Box

Portal lets you shoot portals into walls and use them to solve puzzles. It is mind-bending to watch but beautifully simple to play. At a glance the potential is amazing, but spend more time with it and you begin to see Portal is enough on its own. Rarely has something charmed me as much as it did, or made me bellow laughter so readily. Portal's underbelly is wonderful.

"A bug! Hold still, Fred."

Then there is Team Fortress 2, the cartoon-inspired multiplayer game with all the classes. It sounds straightforward, but when you spend as long delicately refining the strategical abilities of the characters and focusing considerable talent on the endlessly entertaining world of multiplayer - like Quake 3 - something fantastic pops out. And fantastic this is, make no mistake.

The Orange Box has both of these, as well as the entire acclaimed series of Half-Life 2, including fresh instalment Episode Two. Valve is renowned for pushing our expectations of what we expect from a game; Half-Life bowled us over and Half-Life 2 sucked us in like a gravity gun. The Orange Box does the same, both in its contents and what it offers as a package - where else have we been given five brilliant, standalone and new games for the price of one?

Faster! We've already told you that you can do the final bit of Portal in less than a minute (well, you can't, etc), but now you can do the whole game in less than twenty. Mentalism.

Unreal Tournament 3

Tom Cruise welcomes the aliens.

Mark Rein has made no bones about stressing the importance of PC users to Epic Games - its illustrious history owes lots to them after all. Fitting, then, that its flagship Unreal Tournament series should return (initially) to where it first began.

This is also the most ambitious version of the celebrated series to date. There are new baddies to fight, new vehicles, new strategical options to consider like pink jelly that slows things down - dump that in a corridor and watch the other team deal with it. Unreal Tournament 3 will give a fully-fledged single-player campaign, too, rather than mindless bots to shoot - it will even have cutscenes and a storyline. Imagine.

Visually Gears of War has prepared us for the feast at hand, although how it will stand up to 24-player battles remains to be seen. And see it we will, nothing but Marcus Fenix on a protein binge could stop us.

Multi-kill: Isn't this the fourth Unreal Tournament game? Yes it is. Seriously, that's all we've got. They're beating us! They're beating us! Call the podasl;dafkj'dsf

Hellgate: London

Wear a bad jumper and get shot.

Click, click, click I am wading my way through zombies polluting Covent Garden. It used to be a chore but - click - now I have a better sword and some stronger skills, not to mention higher statistics and - click - better protection. If I keep killing I will get stronger and finish these - click - quests I got from Covent Garden and then I can move - click - on to the next tube station.

Hellgate: London is made by the same brains behind Diablo, and it shows. You create a character, gain experience, develop abilities using a skill tree, spend points on statistics and collect increasingly better items. It was a fiendishly compelling formula back then, and unsurprisingly still is. Pop it in a 3D dressing-gown and march it around a wonderfully depicted - if randomly generated - London and you can see why we got a bit excited.

A little hollow, perhaps, maybe even a flawed gem - but with a subscription-based online mode to delve into and updates scheduled to improve it for a long time to come, one the action role-playing audience will appreciate.

Remember: This is why we live in Lovegate: Brighton.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Battlefield really started something with its enormous wars between two sides and lots of different vehicles, something so big it got both sequels and competition. Splash Damage and id Software believed the genre was popular enough to recreate its established Quake franchise, but with competition like Team Fortress 2 it was important to be different.

Initially that difference smacks as unfriendliness and will leave you feeling lost, but stick with it and persistence is rewarded. Your character will earn experience and new equipment will become available, and you will learn what on earth you are supposed to be doing rather than running off a bridge or shooting yourself in the foot. Venture further and the excellent level, vehicle, and game design will unravel before you. This is not Quake as you remember it, but it is a compelling alternative for online gamers to Team Fortress 2.

The Nerve! id's friends at Nerve Software are handling the Xbox 360 port, headed up by a man who designed The Longest Yard. Wicked.

Tabula Rasa

Here aliens are the baddies.

Richard Garriott lives in a haunted castle that he built, he recently went into space, and he has a ridiculous hairdo. He is also the reason I spent ridiculous hours of my life on World of Warcraft. Garriott created Ultima Online all those years ago, you see, which is credited with pioneering mainstream MMORPGs as we know them. And he is the reason anyone anywhere is excited about Tabula Rasa.

His role in it means I can believe he will pull off claims of blending shooter-style action with a persistent online role-playing world. I can also overlook the frankly unconvincing trailers and screenshots scattered around the Internet. I have this feeling that nothing can put me off until I see that score nestled at the bottom of our review - which I'm lead to believe will be quite high. In summary: I believe in a thing called Gariott.

Just listen to the rhythm of your: wallet.

Gears of War

Too many steroids. I did say.

It's already stolen Viva Piņata's thunder once, and now it threatens to do it again, or will do if PC gamers actually deign to care about either. Gears of War is the most brilliantly silly action game of the decade. Little more than a sequence of cover-and-fire action set-pieces, it nevertheless worms its way into your affections with its laughably gritty protagonists (all of whom have double-barrel chests, can't shave and talk as though they breathe through car exhausts), addictive mechanics and relentless blood-letting.

Violence in games is a touchy subject if you're boring, but Gears is quite the opposite of something like Saw or Hostel. There's more blood and more carving people in half here than in a Sam Raimi cheese dream, but it's more of a fight between Halloween costumes in a ketchup factory than a source of disturbance.

Add to that the fact it fills out the story a bit (with some actually fairly hard new bits, including a stupid giant turkey with a gun on its head), and that its multiplayer action is in many senses unique among PC shooters, and there's a good deal here to be excited about. The end of year plaudits will no doubt go to games like Crysis, BioShock and Orange Box, but make room for Gears of War and you might surprise yourself.

Quite an Achievement: Xbox 360 owners looking for an excuse to play it again that isn't "it has a few new levels in it" might want to pretend they don't care that it lets you unlock all the old achievements afresh to get more gamerpoints.

Viva Piņata

A Dogwafflestrapper, or something equally as ridiculous.

This arrived in the office this morning. We know it arrived in the office this morning because Tom came dancing up the stairs and then skipped through the hall singing about Flutterscotches. It's disappeared under the mountain of boxes and press releases on his desk, and he's now playing Need For Speed ProStreet like his life depends on it ("graphically, aurally and physically rubbish", apparently) so he can get back to patting down earth, sprinkling seeds and giving money to the beggar (it's worth it).

Viva Piņata, of course, is one of the buried treasures of the Xbox 360 line-up, and while its transition to PC has taken a year it's unlikely to have lost any of its magic. You take over a rundown garden, fix itup and start planting things, and then encourage visiting animals to stay and screw one another by serving them special fruit and building houses for them.

It's cute, quirky, brutally moreish and has one of the most lovely soundtracks ever. PC users with management game experience may find the first couple of hours a bit tedious, but it's worth sticking with, and makes a lovely change to all the violence and anger. Providing the PC port (handled by Climax) is up to scratch, this is well worth a bite of your Christmas bonus, and the best thing Rare's been involved in for ages.

Seriously: pay the beggar. And use fertiliser. And water Cocoadiles. And Quackberries are better than Juicygeese. And Zumbugs are rubbish. TOM GET OFF MY PC.