PC Previews

“Shepard! But... but you’re dead!” cries a baffled Asari crime lord having been backed into a corner by our hero. “I got better,” replies Shepard, as cool as a penguin’s bum. It’s not a dialogue choice, it’s right there in the cutscene; otherwise we’d have chosen the option along the lines of “I know, after that E3 trailer I’m just as confused as you about the whole thing."

Left 4 Dead 2, Valve’s cooperative zombie shooter, has had to overcome two skeptical parties: the portion of Left 4 Dead players concerned that promised free content for the original game had been replaced with a rushed, full-price sequel, and Valve co-founder Gabe Newell. “Gabe’s got a good amount of healthy skepticism about anything we do,” says Chet Faliszek.

We made no secret about our love for the original Assassin’s Creed. We scored it glowingly, took some flak from you guys, and stood proudly by our 10 like a Christ-like figure up against an inquisition of haters. Okay, perhaps that’s a bit much.

When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. And, according to Capcom, appear in TV shows.

Years after the first game’s critically acclaimed zombie invasion of the Willamette Mall, the whole of America is infected. In the casino town of Fortune City, Nevada, a deadly TV show plays out to millions of viewers across the nation.

Sam Fisher has gone from shadow warrior to wrecking ball. Splinter Cell fans may remember the series as somewhat sneaky – a matter of waiting for the right moment to knife someone in the back and plonk their body in a darkened stairwell. Conviction asks, why wait?

The Chaos Space Marines are doppelgangers. They’re the Venom to the Space Marines’ Spider-Man; the Sith to their Jedi. They’re best buds with the dark gods of an obscure dimension. They gussy up their power armor with gaping skulls. And among the varied-shades-of-villain factions of 40k fiction, they’re a great candidate for their own expansion to Dawn of War II.

Only once you’ve wandered into StarCraft II’s greased-metal cantina and engaged in conversation with embittered mercenaries, or spoken to Jim Raynor’s crew about armour upgrades and the like, do you begin to understand why, and how, the Terran, Protoss and Zerg campaigns will be split into three separate titles.

Say hello to the monk, the recently revealed Diablo III class who rather than sitting cross-legged in a hill-top monastery, is far more likely to slap you 100 times in a second before appearing behind you and kicking you in the arse. That’s his trick, and he sidles up to the three revealed classes – the Barbarian, Witch Doctor and Wizard – filling the fourth slot on the Diablo III character selection screen and shuffling

Good thing there was somebody in the room who knew a bit about submarines: a German games journalist, who’d ask about periscopes like a terminally ill patient asks about how long he has left to live, and who’d punch the air when he learned of the accurately rendered ship wakes, and the now separate damage readouts for hull integrity and flooding.

Some people, after reading our review of Empire: Total War, wanted to string us up and splice our main brace. We can’t help it if the bugs other people experienced didn’t happen to us. Still, it’s safe to say that there were some problems that perhaps could and should have been sorted out before release – specifically the AI’s total lack of ability to perform invasions over a stretch of water.