PC: 12 Games of Christmas

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.

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

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

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.