Also, THE TOP 100 IS HERE. Yes, the sexiest list of the year has arrived, in which we deliver our infallible and entirely correct list of the 100 best PC games in the world right now. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll want to write a strongly worded letter of disagreement. You can argue the case for your favourite games in the top 100 discussion happening on our forums right now.

The issue hits shops today and subscribers should have had it for about a week. It’s also available online, through Zinio and through the Apple Newsstand. Read on to find out what else lies behind the beard.

In our previews section this month, Tom Francis takes to the lanes in Dota 2, Chris Thursten takes to the planes in X-Plane 10, then takes the reins in Warlock: Master of the Arcane. Tom takes the blame in Faster Than Light and Chris uses hammers to maim in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, winning the previews section by a score of 3 -2. Elsewhere, Will Porter takes a look at Mass Effect 3 and Henry Winchester checks out Sniper Elite V2.

The reviews section doesn’t rhyme quite as well as the previews section this month, but it’s full of exciting games. Reviewed inside: Star Wars: The Old Republic, Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand, Trine 2, APB Reloaded, Anno 2070, English Country Tune, Ignite, Sonic Generations, Serious Sam 3: BFE, Magicka: The Stars are Left, Rochard, InMomentum, Cave Story+, Fractal: Make Blooms not War, Grotesque Tactics 2: Dungeons and Donuts, Waves, Dead Island: Bloodbath Arena and For The Awesome.

In Extra Life we recount some of the funniest and strangest things that have happened to us in games recently. Rich McCormick becomes an accidental cannibal in Skyrim, Henry is way ahead of the criminals in LA Noire, Tom F dons a jetpack in Spelunky and Chris bribes all the space pirates he can throw money at in Sins of a Solar Empire.

Then there’s our top ten free downloads section, in which we gather together some great Shogun 2 mods and go slightly insane playing Worry of Newport. Tom Senior returns to Terraria to explore the huge 1.1 patch in Update, and Duncan Geere discovers how Bioshock was made in a four page feature we decided to call “The Making of Bioshock.”

There’s tons more inside, like Adam’s hardware report on a way to use SSDs to speed up your system, our round-up of the best heatsinks for your CPU and our special report on this year’s most promising racing sims. If you subscribe you’ll get each issue, cheaper, earlier, and clad in our cover-line free cover (as seen above). You can also buy it online, through Zinio, or Apple Newsstand. Enjoy the issue!

You can find it all and more on newstands now! Or, if your house is surrounded by small rabid beasts which have somehow made it clear that only your flesh can satiate their voracious appetites, you may want to stay inside and check us out on Coverleaf.com and Apple Newsstand.

As we ready ourselves for the Christmas feasts and New Year’s celebrations to come, we thought it would be the perfect time to look back and celebrate the very best of 2011 in our Game of the Year Awards. We also take a good look forwards at the most exciting games of 2012. The new issue contains a comprehensive run down of every game scheduled to come out on PC next year, so you can plan ahead, or simply reflect on how awesome PC gaming is going to be in the next 12 months.

There’s more inside, of course. Much, much more, including free access to Settlers Online, a free car in APB Reloaded, and our review of this little indie game you may have heard of called Minecraft. The issue will hit stores next Wednesday, andwill also be available to buy online, via Apple Newsstand and on Zinio. Read on, Padawan, and learn the secrets of Issue 235.

With every single game of 2012 successfully previewed, we switched our favourite review-bots from “dormant” to “judgemental” and let them loose on the latest releases. First, there’s the small matter of our six page review of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Tom Francis took care of that one. Then we left-clicked on Steve Hogarty to select and right-clicked on Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, used RICHARD COBBETT on LA NOIRE, para-dropped Graham onto Modern Warfare 3 and sent Jaz tunnelling deep into Minecraft’s bountiful crust.

This issue we also review Need for Speed: The Run, Sword of the Stars 2, DC Universe Online free to play, Jurassic Park: The Game, The Tiny Bang Story, Disciples 3: Resurrection, The Binding of Isaac, Fifa Manager 12 and Lord of the Rings: War in the North. Then, to top it all, Jon Blyth steps out of the shadows swirling a glass of cognac and offers another overview of this month’s eclectic selection of re-releases in They’re Back.

In this month’s Now Playing, Tom F can’t stop killing Orks in Space Marine, Chris Thursten can’t stop killing Orcs in Orcs Must Die! Tom H can’t stop killing cops in Payday, Rich can’t stop shooting men in Battlefield 3 (with his camera) and Henry Winchester can’t stop … licking boxes. With his cybernetic tongue. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution. After that, Chris pulls his axe out of an Orc and takes a nostalgic trip through Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Phil Savage takes a look at the latest Team Fortress 2 update.

There’s even more PC gaming goodness locked away between the covers this month. Discover the best in portable gaming in our rundown of the latest laptops in the Tech section, learn about Microsoft’s increasing support for Kinect on PC, and follow the adventures of Dragonbjorn in an exclusive excerpt from Stormcloak McCarthy’s bestselling new novel, Nord Country For Cold Men. If you’d rather receive each issue early, clad in our coverline-free subscriber covers (like the one above), then you can subscribe, and save a wad of cash in the process. Enjoy the issue!

It’s all on newsstands now! Or, if you’re under house arrest, we’re also available on Coverleaf.com and Apple Newsstand.

You can read it all in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK, which should be on shelves shortly and arriving with subscribers right now. It’s also available online, digitally through Zinio and Apple Newsstand, and it should already be with subscribers now.

Our second enormous feature this month is the Christmas gift guide, in which the PC Gamer staff dress up in their Christmas outfits and bring you the best novelties for your oversized stocking. There’s graphics cards and gaming lights, touch screen gloves and a Minecraft pickaxe, Tim even dares taste the infamous Baconaise. He was rushed to hospital shortly afterwards. He will never eat bacon again.

In our previews section this month, Chris Thursten tells the story of twenty hours as a straight laced Jedi Consular in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Meanwhile Rich saves the galaxy from the killer spaceship robots in Mass Effect 3′s new multiplayer mode and Graham learns how to kill a man humanely in Introversion’s darkly comic Prison Architect. You’ll also find previews of King Arthur 2, The Secret World, Crusader Kings 2 and Ghost Recon Online.

In reviews, Graham gives his definitive verdict on epic man shooter Battlefield 3, while Tom Senior discovers his inner pimp in Saints Row: The Third. Richard Cobbett straps on his spandex to check re-review the now free to play City of Heroes before quickly descending into villainy in Payday: The Heist. We also manage footballs in Football Manager 2012, defend dungeons in Dungeon Defenders and murder greenskins in Orcs Must Die! You’ll also find verdicts on Might and Magic Heroes 6, Stronghold 3, Take on Helicopters, Renegade Ops, Deus Ex: The Missing Link, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Airline Tycoon 2, Train Simulator and Dead Rising: Off the Record. Finally, Steve Hogarty reviews The Sims 3: Pets.

Elsewhere in the issue, Adam Oxford checks out the best gaming laptops, Dan Griliopoulos uncovers the secret history behind the making of Football Manager. We also take a look at the Witcher 2′s 2.0 patch, and reminisce about Croft Manor in Tomb Raider 2.

Want to know what the PC Gamer staff has been playing lately? Well it’s a good job we have the Now Playing section then isn’t it? In his last ever PC Gamer article, Craig Pearson builds himself and his girlfriend little place in the country in Minecraft before becoming one with the force. Graham shares the shame of how his addiction to Fifa 12 tore him from Supreme Commander’s embrace, Richard Cobbett cries his way through Limbo’s looming arachnids, Tom Francis gets stuck in an infinite loop replaying the Diablo 3 beta over and over again and Tom Hatfield makes a meal of attempting to cook soup in Project Zomboid.

Would you like to get an extra stylish subscribers cover next time your order PC Gamer? Perhaps you’d like to get it before it even hits the shelves? Well help is at hand, because you can subscribe now and save money. You can also get a digi-mag from Apple’s Newsstand app or Zinio if you’re some kind of futuristic science person.

It’s all on newsstands now! Or, if you can’t make it to the store, we’re available on Coverleaf.com and Apple Newsstand.

There are few things less subtle than a gatling gun with a laser site, but Max Payne is one of them. We catch up with the gravelliest hero in gaming on his new adventures in Max Payne 3, chat to Ken Levine about Bioshock Infinite, get rich quickly and horribly in Runescape, play Diablo 3, take a look at the new Syndicate and much, much more. We also give away a load of free stuff. This month our issues come with codes for six free games on Good Old Games, £20 worth of items in Runes of Magic and free money in any Sony MMO.

In our preview section this month, Tom Francis teaches wolves a lesson they’ll never forget by becoming a rabbit and then punching them repeatedly in the face in Overgrowth. We use BRAINS on CLUES to bring crooks to justice in LA Noire, see a man’s brain hacked in Syndicate and very carefully examine the Diablo 3 beta by playing it, and then playing it some more, and then forgetting about deadlines and playing it even more. You’ll also find previews of War of the Roses, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

In reviews this month, we summon spider-bots to our aid to raid Rage, kill zombies on the moon in Call of Duty: Black Ops Rezurrection, stab some backs in A Game of Thrones: Genesis, suffer Call of Juarez: The Cartel and pit PES against Fifa 12. We also review Red Orchestra 2, Hard Reset, Trackmania 2: Canyon, Total War: Shogun 2: Rise of the Samurai, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters, Sengoku, Universe Sandbox, Rock of Ages, Bus and Cable Car Simulator, Driver: San Francisco, Fallout: New Vegas – Lonesome Road, Demolition Inc, Hector: Badge of Carnage and, once we eventually stopped giggling at the fact that there’s a game called Ports: Pressure at the Port, we reviewed Ports: Pressure at the Port.

Elsewhere in this issue, Adam Oxford challenges himself to review all the latest wheels and flight sticks without going “nyeeeeoowm” out loud, we invent our perfect vision of Thief 4 (it’s not called Thi4f, for a start), examine a spectacular underdog victory in this month’s Battle report, go adventuring in Minecraft’s Adventure Update, discover how Ultima VII: The Black Gate was made, revisit one of the best co-op games ever in our update on Left 4 Dead 2 and blow up the world over and over again in Defcon.

And that’s before we start writing about what else we’ve been playing in Extra Life. Tom Senior risks certain zombification to rescue some orange juice in Dead Island, Owen tries to play Counter-Strike, Tim Stone swaps his rifle for a camera in hunting sim, The Hunter, Tom H looks for the key to Adam Jensen’s psyche by rifling through his underwear drawer in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Tom Francis wants more games to copy Bastion.

If you’d like to receive future editions of PC Gamer UK before it even hits shelves, clad in our lovely, cover-line free subscriber covers (shown above), then you can subscribe now and save money. If you’d like to read one of our futuro-editions, you can get hold of the mag digitally, through Apple’s new Newsstand app and Zinio.

Once you’ve read and reread the Skyrim feature, be sure to check out the 50 things you need to know about the free-to-play MMO shooter Firefall. We’ve also got a preview on Gearbox’s gorgeous-looking Borderlands 2, in-depth insight into PlanetSide 2, and the review of Relic’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Also, see which mouse tied the highest review score ever. This, fellow PC gamers, is sexy hardware at its best.

But what’s inside? The screaming warrior on our cover gives away our huge Skyrim preview, but there’s more. Much, much more. We turn the office into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. We talk to Gabe Newell about his Dota 2 obsession, delve into Firefall, take a look at Planetside 2, invent the perfect version of Left 4 Dead 3 and Tim strokes a Tribble. Read on to find out why.

This month's subscriber only Skyrim cover. DOVAKHIIN!

We have seen the future, and it is glorious. It involves a team of PC gamers clustered around PCs, pretending to pilot a starship without nuking themselves to death. The game is Artemis: Bridge Simulator. The mission: boldly pilot a ship around the place. Expect carnage, incompetence, and more than a few Star Trek gags in our eight page Artemis feature.

In other future news, our writers have flown all over the place to see some of the most exciting upcoming releases, including Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Mass Effect 3, Bordlerlands 2, Tribes Ascend, Anno 2070, Planetside 2, World of Warplanes. That’s all before our enormous ten page Skyrim preview, in which Tom Francis heads to the depths of Skyrim’s deepest dungeons to electrocute, and then punch anyone who tries to steal his mighty battleaxe. Then we present 50 reasons to be excited about the upcoming free-to-play jetpack shooter, Firefall.

In the huge reviews section this month, we turn our glowing mono-eye of judgement on *deep breath* Dead Island, F1 2011, Desktop Dungeons, Age of Empires Online, Space Marine, Supreme Ruler: Cold War, Call of Duty: Black Ops Annihilation, Bastion, The Baconing, Achron, War inc. Battlezone, Chantelise…

*gasp* …Storm: Frontline Nation, Traffic Manager 2011, Men of War: Vietnam, Pirates of the Black Cove, Serious Sam: Doubled, Cthulhu Saves the World, Dungeons of Dredmor, E.Y.E.: Divine Cybromancy and Tim Stone’s review of magnificent German Bus Simulator, OMSI.

It’s not just our reviews section that’s massive this month. Extra Life has grown, too. This month, Tom F dives into TF2 as a Scout and is accidentally really good at it, Chris Donlan prays to the crate gods in Super Crate Box, Phil Savage becomes Frozen Synapse’s equivalent of a Pool Hall shark, Tim goes back on the WoWcrack and Tom Hatfield mods Fallout 3 into something else entirely. That’s before Tom S gets Japan drunk to make more ninjas in Shogun 2, Rich gets to the chopper in ARMA 2 and Duncan Geere destroys the entire universe and bowls with stars in Universe Sandbox.

New to Extra Life this month, we introduce the Battle Report. Rich gives a blow by blow account of one of the finest matches in the Major League Gaming Anaheim tournament. In Update Tom Hatfield goes a bit tank mad in World of Tanks, Tim plays Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops and makes them fight, and Chris Livingston goes on safari to see explosions in the wild in Far Cry 2. We also take a good look at the making of Total War: Shogun 2.

There’s still the hardware section, this month’s competition, our special report on the million dollar Dota 2 tournament, the Face Off and even more to discover. It’s too many pages to fit into one web post. There’s only one solution, and that’s to pick it up and read it for yourself. We hope you enjoy it. For an insight into how it all came together, check out our series of video diaries on the making of issue 232. If you’re inclined to subscribe, you can do so now to get every issue delivered to your door, cheaper, faster, and clad in our exclusive subscriber covers.

“YOU GET A HAT.”
“YOU GET A HAT.”
“YOU GET A HAT.”
“EVERYBODY GETS A HAT.”

Cue music, dancing and the wild celebrations. And possibly ticker tape.

If you subscribe to PC Gamer UK via Zinio, you’ll be getting the exactly the same gifts that the print subscribers and news-stand subscribers are getting with issue 232. That means you’ll be getting our PCG reader only TF2 hat, the “Killer Exclusive” and a free trial to the game streaming service Onlive. We’ll be sending out the codes for both to the email account you registered your Zinio subscription to. Many Bothans suffered a slight inconvenience to get you this. So we made a press release. It’s below.

- Get free trial of Onlive and exclusive content for Team Fortress 2
- New issue is world’s biggest gaming magazine at 196 pages

PC Gamer 232 goes on sale 28 September priced at £5.99. To buy the digital edition visit www.zinio.com/pcgamer. For more information visit www/pcgamer.com.

Subscriber copies will be mailed out very soon, and the issue will hit store shelves on September 28. Within, you’ll find a code that can be entered into Steam to instantly add the hat to your Team Fortress 2 backpack. It’ll fit the head of every class, and we find it looks especially fetching on the Spy. His cloaking powers make him the ideal candidate for any press trip that’s likely to end in a gun battle for a control point (which frankly is most of them). Once you’ve redeemed your code, be sure to put it on and come kill us on the PC Gamer Team Fortress 2 server.

In other mega-news, our extensive Diablo III hands-on preview will tell you everything you need to know about the much-anticipated hack-’n'-slash ahead of the beta, and addresses your Auction House concerns. Meanwhile, we’ve the inside scoop on supernatural steampunk-style FPS thriller Dishonored and the verdict on the tropical zombie-bonanza that is Dead Island. Missing this issue is, in a word, inadvisable.

The Arctic Warfare Caitlyn skin in all its glory. This could be yours to show off to your friends!

If you’re here, reading our words about PC games in the internet, chances are you might be interested in reading more words about PC games in other exciting formats. The PC Gamer Reader is now available as a Kindle edition, offering a collection of the best PC games writing of the last decade or so.

And more? Of course! That’s not even close to being everything this month…

(Special subscriber bonus! Enjoy this great Wildstar artwork as well as the growly Guild Wars 2 version you’ll be seeing at your local newsagent! What’s Wildstar? Find out inside…)

In Previews, Tom Francis delves deep into Diablo 3 to try out every single class on his quest to decide which he’ll be taking to battle against the big red one. We also speak with Project Zomboid creators The Indie Stone about life as the world’s most cursed developer, and bring you the latest on Rage, Might and Magic Heroes VI, Payday: The Heist, and the big-D’s youngest rival, Torchlight II.

Over in Reviews, celebrate ten years of ArmA with our look at the Anniversary edition – the whole series in one box. We also check out Limbo, From Dust, Tropico 4, Fallout: New Vegas – Old World Blues, and the two biggest team-ups of the month – Gods and Heroes, and Space Pirates and Zombies. All of which obviously pales next to the hit game everyone’s talking about: Garbage Truck Simulator 2011. Could it be the greatest game you’ve never played? Anything’s possible! (Disclaimer: Except that.)

Recovering from the excitement there with a soothing bath in the ocean of relaxation that is Extra Life, most of team tries to get to grips with League of Legends while Tim falls prey to the Facebook charms of Empires and Allies. Tom Senior brings you the latest from EVE Online’s Incarna update, home of hyper-expensive monocles and also some other things, while another Tom entirely gives you the only guide you need to being the best Adam Jensen you can be in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Finally, Graham gets back in touch with an old love by the name of SimGolf. Sid Meier and Maxis in one game? “It’s like Pixar and Studio Ghibli making a film together,” he says. “But that’s not why I keep coming back.”

And even that is just the start of the wonder and whimsy in this month’s packed PC Gamer. Subscribers should have their copies now, with copies landing in the shops and in shiny digital form on August 31st. If you’d like to be special too, and get every issue delivered to your door before they hit stores, why not subscribe? You’ll save 28% by signing up for a year, or a whopping 35% for two. If you live outside of the UK, or prefer reading on a magic tablet from the future, check out our Zinio digital edition.

That’s not all, of course. There are 122 more pages to account for. Read on to find out what else lies within the golden covers of our latest issue.

Print subscribers get this extra special golden cover. You know you want it.

In this month’s preview section, Tim takes a look at Star Wars: The Old Republic’s endgame, Kim makes a horrible mess of the Emperor’s children in Space Marine, Rich takes a look at Tribes: Ascend and the becomes one with the night in Batman: Arkham City. We also take a look at Carrier Command: Gaea Mission and Tropico 4, and fire diseased badgers over high stone walls in Stronghold 3.

Then we sent Jon Blyth to the strange dystopia of Dishonored, a world devastated by a rat plague, powered by the oil of a race of tentacled whales. You’re a bodyguard-turned-assassin out to kill those who have wronged you using stealth, magic, weird gadgets and good old fashioned stabbing. It looks extraordinary.

Criag smeared warpaint all over his face and dived into Arma 3 to see how Bohemia Interactive plan to create the most realistic military sim ever. Once he’d returned giggling from his adventures we all put on party hats and took a look at some of the best PC games we’ve never played. Rich plays Morrowind, Owen becomes completely hooked on League of Legends, Tom Francis goes back to the first System Shock and Graham finally plays Deus Ex.

Our world exclusive Deus Ex: Human Revolution review fills our review section with its dark, golden radiance, but we’ve also turned our laser eye of judgement on the rest of the month’s releases. You’ll find reviews of FEAR 3, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Puzzle Agent 2, Solar 2, Global Agenda free-to-play, Proun, Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops and the mighty Street Sweeper Simulator. In the light of its recent move to free-to-play, we re-review Team Fortress 2 and Jon Blyth delivers fresh verdicts on Dungeon Keeper, Settlers 7, Privateer and more in They’re Back.

In this month’s now playing Tom Francis tells the tale of a robo-war of staggering scale. Six of us take on two malevolent AI opponents in an epic game of Supreme Commander. Rich faces up to his competitive side and beats it in a race in Trackmania United, Owen lures a bunny rabbit into his Terraria lair and Tom Hatfield gets shot to pieces in World of Tanks. Finally, Tom Senior, Tom Hatfield and Tom Francis fight to become the best Tom in Magicka PvP.th

There’s even more hiding in the latest issue. We return to Aion in Update, boot up Hidden & Dangerous in in Reinstall and round up the best new graphics card in our hardware section.

Subscribers should be receiving the latest issue right now, clad in a special black and gold cover shown above. The issue will hit stores next Wednesday. When that happens, the issue will also be available to buy online. If you’d like to get every issue delivered to your door before they hit stores, why not subscribe? If you sign up for a year, six of the 13 issues you receive will be free. You can also subscribe for two years at 45% off. If you live outside of the UK, or like to do your reading on a vast Minority Report style screen then check out our Zinio digital edition.

The new issue will be available to buy online this Wednesday July 6, and will be hitting store shelves soon. Subscribers should have their copies already. If you’d like future issues of PC Gamer UK delivered directly to your door for less money, you can subscribe here. If you’d like to save a few trees, we also have a shiny new Zinio digital edition.

Read on to find out what else we’ve managed to cram into the August issue of PC Gamer UK.

Leaping out of this issue like a sexually frustrated facehugger, you’ll find even more slithery, horrible aliens as we explore the new Zerg units in our feature on StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. Then we take a look at the best upcoming MMOs in our feature on The New Online Heroes.

Then there’s the small matter of how the PC stole E3 this year. Discover how with our previews on Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, XCOM, Brothers in Arms: Furious 4, Hitman Absolution, Dead Island, Sword of the Stars 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Metro: Last Light, Arma 3 and more.

Snapping ourselves back to the present, we take on all the latest releases in our review section. This issue you’ll get reviews on Duke Nukem Forever, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, Capsized, Beep, The Sims 3: Generations, Terraria, Frozen Synapse, Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den, Fallout: New Vegas – Honest Hearts, Lego Pirates of the Carribean, Vertex Dispenser, Mythos, Combat Mission: Battle for Normandy, Alice: Madness Returns, The Last Templar, Battleslots and Pride of Nations. Then we physically fight each other to review BUTTON.

Swiftly recovering from list exhaustion, we played yet more games and wrote about the funny things that happened in them in this month’s Extra Life. Richard Cobbett bloodies his sword in The Witcher 2, Tom Francis gets to grips with gravity in Capsized, Chris Donland becomes a dragon in Hoard, Owen absolutley will not learn how to play Brink properly, and Jon Blyth wonders if Bulletstorm is the new Duke Nukem. We also examine the highs and lows of Rift’s first world event in Update, and dive sideways firing golden pistols in Action Half Life 2 for this month’s edition of the Top Ten Free Downloads.

There’s more, of course. We haven’t mentioned Tom Francis’ return to the Fate of Atlantis, or this month’s Hard Stuff, in which our robo-reviewbot Adam Oxford tackles the latest innovations in PC hardware and reviews the latest motherboards. To find out what else lies in store, you’ll have to get hold of the issue yourself. Enjoy.

It’s not all about assassins, of course. This month we delve into Dwarf Fortress, chat to Bioware about writing The Old Republic, review all the latest releases and much, much more. Read on to discover the treasures hidden within the pages of our July issue.

Tom Francis skips between two alternative future universes in this month’s preview section, with words on Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Richard Cobbett fights for survival in ambitious zombie apocalypse sim, Project Zomboid and braves a wild island with Lara Croft to bring us a preview of the new Tomb Raider game.

But what about the rest of the team? Many of us died this month, actually, in many amusing ways. Steve Hogarty created stumpy facsimiles of the PC Gamer UK staff and sent us all to hell in Dwarf Fortress. Bones were broken, demons ran amock, and Graham tunnelled into the underworld (his natural inclination when bored). Tom managed to escape the madness and hunts down BioWare writing director to ask him how BioWare go about creating the largest universe they’ve ever made in our feature on Writing The Old Republic.

In our reviews section, we deliver judgement on The Witcher 2, Fable 3, Brink,, Dirt 3, Red Faction: Armageddon, Dungeon Siege 3, Mount and Blade: With Fire and sword and more. Then it’s over to our titanium tech expert, Adam Oxford for The Hard Stuff. There he reviews the latest gaming laptops, dual-wields graphics cards in this month’s special report, and takes an advanced look at Windows 8.

But that’s not all. Tom S descends into clone hell and becomes his own worst enemy in Dawn of War 2: Last Stand in this month’s Extra Life. Tim battles Owen in Portal 2, Rich saves a life while playing StarCraft 2 and Tom F uses his giant robotic tentacle to throw cars at policemen in Jack Claw. Then we dive into the Minecraft-like wargame, Ace of Spades, and round up some of the best Dragon Age 2 mods in Top Ten Downloads

That’s not all. There’s plenty more to discover in this month’s issue. You can order it online right now. If you’d like toget PC Gamer delivered to your door every month, clad in our glorious subscriber covers and released before the issue hits stores, you can subscribe, too, and save up to 35% on the cover price. If you live outside the UK, or would like to read PC Gamer on screen anywhere, anytime, check out our fancy new digital edition.

 
Our Monitor and Massive Attack sections kick things off, with Josh giving you in-depth looks at two gorgeous upcoming games, TERA and Prime World, that are so colorful they seem to jump off the page. It’s also got an extensive guide to the Hall of Monuments in Guild Wars, breaking down exactly which pieces of loot you’ll want to get, and how to get them. Dan gets the preview he’s been waiting to cover for years now—a look at a spiritual successor to the original X-COM, Xenonauts, where turn-based alien hunting is the only kind of alien-hunting.

You’ll also get tons of reviews, including Evan’s verdict on Operation Flashpoint, the skinny on indie all-star Anomaly: Warzone Earth, and what kind of score we give a game entitled Dino D-Day.

Extra Life takes you on a trip down memory lane as Andy Mahood waxes nostalgic about FreeSpace 2. We also showcase a Left 4 Dead map that recreates Metal Gear Solid, and provide Rob Zacny’s step-by-step guide to conquering feudal territories in Shogun 2.

If you’d rather not trek down to your local newsstand to grab a copy, you can simply order the July 2011 issue online. Like (or love) what you’re reading, and want to read more? We can’t blame you. Subscribing to PC Gamer is as easy as pie—and by pie, we mean clicking here.

Ultimately, whether or not you’re traumatized by changes to a beloved franchise depends upon how much you personally cared about those specific features that were most mutated. I actually love Fallout 3 as much as its predecessors, and wasn’t remotely turned off by Bethesda’s radical design changes, but other fans felt betrayed. Similarly, many RPG fans are enjoying Dragon Age 2, but for me, its release is very much a Pagan moment.

This is probably my most subjective point, but I really despise the graphical changes in DA2. I love the realistic, gritty artistic style of Dragon Age: Origins. It’s grounded, and doesn’t look like a cartoonish Final Fantasy game or an anime movie. It’s Tolkien, as opposed to World of Warcraft. Dragon Age 2 is the opposite: it’s characters are blindingly colorful, with absurdly disproportionate features, twirling fancifully-oversized and apparently weightless weapons that detonate their cartoonish enemies into fountains of gore. I find it embarrassing to play a game that looks so child-ish. The last thing Dragon Age needs is to look and feel more like God of War. Dragon Age 2’s environments are attractive, but even that’s offset by the fact that they’re also recycled more frequently than in any previous RPG I can name (maybe in any game since Halo), and they’re just as non-interactive and even more relentlessly linear than in Origins.

What annoys me most, though, are the changes to Dragon Age’s combat. The tactical, isometric perspective has been pointlessly removed, characters hop around the battlefield like spastic Spider-Men, and combat is so frenetically paced that it’s needlessly difficult to manage an entire party of characters. To compensate for the design (which seems primarily intended to allow gamers who don’t like messing with details to control a single character) the game has been made incredibly unchallenging. Friendly fire has essentially been removed, since it’s now relegated to an impractical option only available on the highest difficulty level—and it doesn’t even work there, since the game clearly wasn’t designed to accommodate it.

Also lost is Origins’ feeling that each battle is a carefully designed tactical set piece, with enemies sensibly placed to utilize terrain features or otherwise effectively organized. In the sequel, enemies are generally just jumbled together in meaningless masses, and each battle is indistinguishable from the last. Reinforcements haphazardly appear in virtually every fight, often behind your party, rendering tactical placement pointless. The lengthiest combat sequences are just arduous battles of attrition against enemies possessing massive hit point pools, rather than posing more tactical challenges.
At least Dragon Age 2, unlike Pagan, does have some significant strengths, particularly in its storytelling. Additionally, the UI is effectively streamlined, and the new skill trees are an interesting way to shape character development. The look and combat aren’t inherently poor, and would’ve been perfectly worthwhile in a sequel to BioWare’s other experimental action RPG, Jade Empire. As part of the Dragon Age saga, however, this is more like a spin-off than a sequel.

Desslock is grudgingly playing DA2, but also Drakensang: River of Time, Two Worlds II and the apparently obsolete masterpiece, Dragon Age: Origins. Email him at alternatelives@pcgamer.com.

That’s for Tom’s huge preview of the swords-and-Forcery MMORPG: he played the game for a ridiculous two days, as both the Bounty Hunter class and the Imperial Agent, and he has some opinions to tell you.

Elsewhere in previews, Rich has slain or at the very least slewn the forces of Chaos in Relic’s first blockbuster action game: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. And Tim’s had an extensive play of Guild Wars 2 and wants to tell you about how its ambitious dynamic world works in practice.

Meanwhile, our team of imaginary-battle-hardened critics review Crysis 2, Homefront, Shift 2: Unleashed, and the belated PC version of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Which is now free of the preposterous DRM Ubisoft put on the last one, by the way.

In Extra Life, we’ve got a guide to being better at Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer, reflections on the genius of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, a report on the furry additions to City of Heroes, and tales of what we’ve been up to in Bulletstorm and Shogun 2: Total War, amongst much else.

If you like games, buy this magazine about games. If you like this magazine about games, subscribe to this magazine about games – it’s pretty cheap. And if you hate paper, subscribe to the digital edition to get it cheaper still.

Meet the new neighborhood watch.

Darkfall and a few other MMOs have proven that persistent city-building can work, with guilds proudly constructing, protecting and showing off their self-built cities. And the trend looks like it’s growing: two new fantasy MMOs, War of Angels and Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, plan to expand city-building features even further this year.

But what good’s a city if you can’t fight over it? In War of Angels, guild towns can only be built on specific plots of land, which must be wrestled from other guilds’ control if you want one. And you do want one—whoever’s in control can decide what buildings are built (ranging from skill-boosting research huts to banks and armor-making blacksmiths), collect taxes from the NPC vendors that’ll sell to all players and hire NPC guards to keep the peace.

You'll have to start small--Rome wasn't built in a day.

But the developers at Heatwave (who took over development of the Roman mythology-themed Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising from the now-defunct Perpetual) plan to expand city building in a different direction with their player-built Estates—in an instanced valley, players will grow a small army camp into a thriving city. More than just a vendor hub, Estates will be a major source of gameplay, with resource management that’ll require you to complete quests out in the world to keep things running smoothly. Kill a big boss? Why not chop off its head, drag it back to town and build a statue in honor of your intense badassery? The peasants may even come by to admire you.

Watch your kingdom grow
In WoA, your city will start off humble. Wisely upgrading its buildings– such as the blacksmith, post office, skill research lab and inn, will reward you whole guild.

I occasionally toss in a few burrowing bugs or ice elementals to back up my chemically enhanced dragons when the mood hits me. With almost 500 cards to pick from, there’s plenty of tinkering to be done in my 20-card deck in BattleForge, one of our favorite online, card-based strategy games (read our full roundup of CCGs). There are a lot of good strategies out there—and you’ll no doubt invent your own in time—but here are a few surefire combos to get you started.

Don’t own it? No problem! BattleForge went free-to-play awhile back, so there’s nothing stopping you from logging in and starting the killin’!

Warstorm – Dominate PvE with a solid Nature deck

1. Breeding Grounds: You can’t rush the enemy in PvE—you need to whittle them down with wave after wave of soulless drones who are ready to march to their deaths in your name. Breeding Grounds lets you do that on the cheap by reducing the summoning cost for all units near it by 25 percent.

2. Regrowth: It’s fun to send armies to their deaths for no other reason than your own amusement, so why not let them amuse you a while longer? Regrowth will heal your troops and keep ‘em alive—giving you more time to watch them get picked up and flung around by that impossibly large Stone Giant.

3. Giant Wyrm: You’re going to have to end the match sometime, and there’s nothing quite like a wall of Giant Wyrms gassing an entire town with their AoE acid breath to rein in that W. This guy’s even more useful if you’re building a hybrid deck—it only requires one Nature orb.

Head-to-head – Hit ’em hard with a strong PvP Fire deck

1. Skyfire Drake: You can rush early in PvP with a swift unit like Scavengers, but the heavy hitting starts as soon as the second phase, so don’t dilly dally. The Skyfire Drakes are your key to victory, flying high and spitting splash damage below—the Mutalisks of BattleForge.

2. Ravage: Any healers you bring onto the battlefield might as well have a giant bullseye on their heads—players know to take out the healers first. That’s why you need unkillable healers like Ravage, an unintuitively-named heal-over-time spell that’ll keep your most important units alive.

3. Ice Barrier: This little popsicle isn’t going to do much on its own, but the craftiest PvPers can use it as a tool to thwart their rivals.This ice pillar is built fast and cheap, can be used to block large creatures from taking certain paths and allows you to use abilities that were designed for defense, like Home Soil (40 percent damage buff near buildings), while on the offense.

Blizzard, circa 1994

PCG: Here we are, its 2011 and you’re leaders of the most successful PC gaming company on the planet—

Frank Pearce, VP Product Development: One of the most successful.

Mike Morhaime, CEO: The most successful. (laughter)

PCG: What was it like twenty years ago?

MM: We started with three people.

Rob Pardo, Executive VP Game Design: And maybe 600 square feet of office space. Maybe as big as this office.

MM: Maybe. We had two friends who were still going to school at UCLA, so we hired them to do some contract work for us and when they graduated, we hired them on.

Frank Pearce doing his best Gene Simmons impression

PCG: Other than size, what’s changed since then?

RP: I think one of the biggest things is communication—everyone actually being a part of the creative process. That’s totally changed with the size of the games and the size of the studio. It used to be teams were small enough that everyone had a say in everything. As entertainment gets bigger, there’s a little more hierarchy.

FP: It’s an evolution of culture, too. The culture you can have when you’re small changes when you reach the size we’re at. And that culture is all based on the people and personality and ages of those people. I feel very old.

RP: You are very old. [laughter]

FP: I mean, I hope we still have a few years left in us. But it’s a good point. Do we have fewer years ahead of us, instead of behind us in this industry? Have we reached that point?

MM: What kind of interview is this?

FP: I don’t know, but the age of the people working here affects the culture and the interests we have in the things we do, and all the technology that’s evolving along the way impacts the way we see entertainment experiences.

RP: That’s true. I guess there’s a natural feeling of nostalgia when you’ve come a long ways and you remember the “good ol’ days.” I get excited with what’s next.

PCG: What were some of the challenges you faced in your early years?

MM: There were a lot.

FP: The biggest challenge we faced right out of the gate was, with the exception of Allen, [none of us] had ever worked on computer games before. We didn’t know what we were doing.

MM: For every project we wanted to do, we had to go out and learn how to do it. From a business standpoint, cash flow was always an issue for us. We were always, on paper, a few months away from getting into the black and catching up, but it never really happened. A lot of times, Allen and I had to go out and get cash advances on our Discover cards to make payroll.

Samwise Didier, lord of pandas and deadly weapons

PCG: Hundreds of developers have worked here over the years—who’s impacted Blizzard’s culture the most?

RP: There’s no shortage of stories we could tell you. Sammy, our senior art director on StarCraft and most of the Warcraft franchise has a similar obsession with pandas [to Logan’s love for squirrels]. He’s always drawing pandas, but always in samurai gear. He loves Japanese samurai culture and pandas, so why not combine the two and draw them all the time?
Of course, the irony with that is we actually ended up putting them in our game, which caused an outcry because at the time we didn’t know the Chinese had a problem with their sacred animal—

FP: Sacred animal of peace.

RP: Their sacred animal of peace wearing war gear from their ancient enemy.

MM: It turns out a lot of people who live in China—we never had a lot of communication from them before—they woke up and flooded our inboxes with their thoughts and opinions on how we were treating their panda. So we asked Sammy to redraw the Panda with Chinese armor and outfits, and the Chinese players were extremely happy.

RP: It just came out of him doing something as a goof for fun, certainly not a political statement in any way.

Allen Anderson, back when employees build their own desks

PCG: 40 years from now, when we’re all retired, what are you going to remember the most fondly about Blizzard?

MM: The events we’ve thrown where we get to interact with the players and see their reactions. We’ve had some really amazing events overseas, like the Worldwide Invitational event in Seoul, South Korea where we announced SC2. That was pretty awesome.

FP: The parties we host for our company, like the holiday and wrap parties. After we launch a product, we host a big bash. We might take the whole company to Vegas to celebrate the launch of a product. It might take five years to create, but, man, when we finish that game, we do a great job of celebrating it.

RP: The thing I’ll remember most is finalizing projects—those crunch moments when we really get close to the people on our team and work really hard with a group of really creative, talented people and become a part of something bigger than everyone individually…I can imagine looking back on it like sports players look back on championship teams they were a part of and what it was like in that playoff run when they won the Super Bowl.

It’s difficult to measure exactly what Blizzard’s effect on the gaming industry has been, but one glance at the monster-sized image below tells you it’s big. Go ahead, look around—every game here had at least one ex-Blizzard employee working on it. From casual adventures to hardcore shooters, they’re everywhere!

Click for the massive, high-res version where you can actually read things.

1. PC-Exclusive Primetime Commercials

You’ll find commercials for console games stuffed into just about every 30-second nook and cranny in primetime TV. After all, the audience is sitting in front of the TV for entertainment, and if you’re a console game developer or publisher, these are your people.
So when Blizzard announced that it would air an advertisement for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm during a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys vs. Minnesota Vikings game, it was unprecedented. WoW has become such a staggeringly big and widly accepted entertainment product that broadcasting the opening cinematic for Cataclysm to an audience traditionally more interested in lime-flavored beer and Madden games doesn’t sound crazy. In the PC gaming ecosystem, only Blizzard has the clout to pull that off.

2. The face of PC gaming

The genres and games you find in the constellation of PC gaming—from Bejeweled and Peggle to Minecraft and Train Sim­ulator—are unmatched by any other platform. Yet it’s ultimately Blizzard’s games—World of Warcraft in particular—that have become the de facto face of PC gaming around the world. Not just for their undeniable popularity, but for the imprint they’ve left on our societies, from Time Magazine and New Yorker profile stories to StarCraft II ads plastered on the side of a Korean Air Boeing 747.

3. Internet cafes

It’s not email and FarmVille that’s driving the popularity of internet cafes around the world, and throughout Asia and South America in particular. Instead, you’ll most likely find customers paying by the hour to play StarCraft, StarCraft II and WoW. If you’ve any doubt about the impact of these joints, consider that internet cafes employ over a million people in China alone.

4. Disease control

Long before The Shattering, 2005 saw a cataclysm of its own with WoW patch 1.7.0. When adventurers surfaced from Zul’Gurub, it wasn’t just fresh gear they were toting. A bug allowed hunter pets to carry the Corrupted Blood plague they had contracted from Hakkar the Soulflayer out into the main world, turning Ironforge into a boneyard. As the plague made corpses of those coming in proximity to the infected, disease researchers seized an opportunity to study the spread of a virus among millions of independently thinking individuals. Their findings have proven useful to scientists who research pandemics—not to mention overall zombie apocalypse preparedness.

5. Three-way asymmetric RTS design

Before StarCraft, most factions in RTS games played alike. They had different units and abilities, but they all gathered resources, constructed buildings and did war in similar ways. In 1998, StarCraft introduced a system where the three races operate with unique game mechanics. Protoss Probes summon structures into existence and walk away; Zerg Drones sacrifice themselves to mutate into a facility. Blizzard’s execution of these bits of balance aren’t insignificant—they fundamentally distinguish SC’s races, and they’re the foundation of the sports team-like fanaticism and intense, emotional connection players feel for their favorite faction.

6. Nerdification

Following North Korea’s artillery bombardment of the South in 2010, the South Korean Defense Minister told the public “the actual situation is not StarCraft” to explain why the real-world response was slightly slower than a Zerg rush. Blizzard games have so penetrated the cultural spheres external to gaming, the acronym WoW has been heard on the sidelines of soccer games, China’s banishment of gold farming warranted CNN and Fox News stories and “FTW,” “mobs,” and “fail” have bled from the forums onto the front page. It’s a fact: the language of Blizzard has coalesced with the language of life. GG.

7. The subscription model

By the time World of Warcraft was launched in 2004, there had been a few MMORPGs that helped make gamers more comfortable with monthly subscription fees. But it was WoW’s breakaway success that brought the subscription model well into the mainstream—making it easier for other virtual worlds to do the same while simultaneously neutralizing the problem of piracy. WoW’s success was no doubt also taken into account when services including Netflix and Xbox Live considered their own subscriptions models. It’s a system that continues to work well for Blizzard—even in the face of the burgeoning market of free-to-play games.

8. Laws

New digital economies beget new laws to regulate them. According to InformationWeek.com, the Chinese government recently passed a law prohibiting the use of in-game money or items to purchase real goods and services—perhaps out of concern that in-game money could supplant official currency and undermine economic stability. There’s a long way to go before that’s a possibility, but you can’t blame China for being prepared.

9. Guild meetups

Would you ever travel to meet a stranger you met on the internet? It isn’t necessarily the best of ideas—but WoW’s powerful social elements have spawned friendships strong enough to cross over into the real world. Its players have been known to traverse continents to come together for increasingly popular guild meetups, and there are even cases of romance being forged in the fires of WoW—where else can you find a gnome who fell in love with a goblin?

10. Professional PC gameplay

Apart from the occasional pinball wizard or world’s record holder for the high score in Donkey Kong, the concept of the professional gamer began to coalesce in the late 1990s around fledgling leagues and increasingly popular tournaments of games such as Quake III and Counter-Strike. But it was StarCraft’s uniquely balanced RTS gameplay, combined with Battle.net’s ladder ranking system, that gave professional competitive PC gameplay the foundation it needed for a boom. Not only that, but it spawned an entire side-community of commentators on whom spectators rely to provide insight to the professional games.