Top Five Games

5. Supreme Commander (Gas Powered Games-THQ: March 2007) Back when he worked at Cavedog, Chris Taylor lead the team that created Total Annihilation, a sci-fi RTS title that turned out to be one of the best PC games ever made. While a sequel to the game got tied up in Cavedog’s shutdown, Taylor formed Gas Powered Games and released the two Dungeon Siege action-RPG titles. Now Taylor and Gas Powered are finally bringing their “spiritual successor” to Total Annihilation early this year with Supreme Commander. With three playable sides in this sci-fi action game, a few units that are on the enormous side and even support for two desktop monitors, it’s looking like this game could be the RTS title to beat in 2007.

4. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (Splash Damage-id Software-Activision: First Half of 2007) First revealed back at E3 in May 2005, this continuation of id’s Quake series of shooters takes place before the events of Quake 2 with humans battling the Strogg invasion of Earth. This game, being developed primarily by Splash Damage (with some assistance from id) uses id’s new Mega-Texture technology for the Doom 3 engine that helps to create huge outdoor levels. The two playable sides (Human and Strogg) are also supposed to be completely different from each other and not just slightly changed versions of the same side. With id’s graphical basis combined with the experience that Splash Damage’s experience in creating the free team title Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory we think that the long wait for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be worth the wait.


3. World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (Blizzard: January 2007) The biggest selling PC game of 2007 might be released in the next couple of weeks. Blizzard’s mega selling MMORPG is still selling in the top five of all PC games over two years after its release. With over 7 million subscribers and reported revenues of over $1 billion a year, it’s the 800 pound gorilla of the PC game business at the moment. Now we finally get a proper expansion pack later this month in the form of Burning Crusade which adds two more playable classes, a rise of the level cap and generally more of the same gameplay that the growing audience of the original game has come to expect. How many copies will Burning Crusade sell in the first 24 hours of its release? We are betting a whole lot.


2. Spore (Maxis-EA: Second Half Of 2007) Will Wright made multi-million selling games on premises like being a city planner (Sim City) and controlling a bunch of faux-humans in ordinary lives (The Sims). Now Wright and his team at EA’s Maxis are working on a game where you get to be a kind of demi-god. Spore’s premise is that the player evolves a creature from a single cell organism to a space faring civilization. Once you get your creature into space you can explore a universe populated by thousands of other civilizations made by other Spore players. We still don’t know how the final game will come together (the live presentations have basically been tech demos) but it’s hard to bet against Wright. We will see sometime in 2007 whether Spore can live up to the considerable hype it already has.


And our number one most anticipated PC game of 2007 is….

1. Crysis: (Crytek-EA: Sometime in 2007) In the final analysis, picking the number one game on this list wasn’t much of a chore at all. Despite the number of great PC games scheduled for release in 2007, Crytek’s follow up game to their superb debut first person shooter title Far Cry is hands down the game we most want to put in our hard drive to see what makes it tick. Sure there is an interesting story involving an alien spaceship landing on a tropical island and the promise of features like new multiplayer modes, impressive AI and upgradable weapons. In the end, however, it’s the new Cryengine 2 that is the big attraction for us on this web site and we think for all of our readers. The videos and screenshots for this game, from the detailed character and weapons models to the lighting effects to the physical interactions to the sheer beauty of the environments, make Crysis as near to photo-realistic as you can get. While the game is supposed to also run on Windows XP and DirectX9, we and our readers really want to check out the version of Crysis on Windows Vista and DirectX10 where the visuals are already looking to be the next standard for PC games. It’s been a while since we have seen a quantum leap in PC game graphics that would make people want to invest in powerful hardware for their game rig and we think Crysis is going to be the game that will do it. If the game itself is as good as the visuals already appear to be, Crysis has the potential to be one of the best games released ever and that’s why it gets our vote as the most anticipated PC game of 2007.