While Valve’s contribution is the star on top of the PC gaming Christmas tree, that tree has been steadily elevated above the ground throughout the course of this year with the huge number of shiny parcels stuffed underneath it. Staying with FPS, Crysis gave us a great reason to upgrade our graphics cards (again). Unspeakably beautiful and with a very player-minded approach, it provides a spectacular toy to play with in the shape of nanosuit-powered superhumanity. The replay factor is even bigger and more dense than the game’s none-more-lush jungle environs and the list of options for dismantling the enemy will make you feel like a god. A cackling, gun-toting god of explosions and pwnage.

And Unreal Tournament returned with a bang, several frags and a messy headshot. Harder, crazier, more destructive, UT3 is a hedonistic maelstrom of decadent FPS excess, and it unashamedly throws everything at you before blowing it up in your face and zipping off on a hoverboard, laughing to its big beautiful, Unreal Engine 3 rendered self.

WoW players the world over – and we hear there are quite a few – got The Burning Crusade expansion pack and girlfriends everywhere sobbed at their loss. Players got new dungeons to raid, new races to play and a new level cap to grind, and while that would be a big enough deal for our dedicated Azerothians, at Blizzcon they got confirmation of a second expansion, Wrath Of The Lich King.

The Burning Crusade sold 2.7 million copies on its first day, so we can only see the biggest online PC game in the world getting bigger and better from this point on. WoW is one of this year’s games to really break over into mainstream culture too, as following 2006’s ‘Make Love, Not Warcraft’ episode of South Park, the show’s Season 10 box set was sold with a free 14 day trial of the game. New addicts incoming en masse then…