PC gamers can be a hardcore bunch at times. Years of upgrading, tweaking, more upgrading, reinstalls, more upgrading and general maintenance has meant they are rather picky when it comes to games. Ask any veteran PC gamer about console games and you’ll probably be met with something about the lack of keyboard and mouse, and how consoles become outdated too quickly. Ports over from consoles often insult these guys, unhappy by the treatment their beloved gaming platform has received. So when Ghost Recon became a console franchise, the news wasn’t met with much love.

But PC gamers needn’t have worried too much. While Xbox 360 owners got a tactical but still fairly arcadey third-person shooter, Ubisoft and Grin Software developed the PC version separately, building it to the strengths of the platform. GRAW on the PC is an altogether more hardcore experience, where the difficulty is punishing, the view is first-person and that arcade feel is nowhere to be seen. Fans are in luck, as Grin has gone it alone once again with GRAW 2 for PC.

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Deep below the streets of Paris, in an underground hall at the famous Louvre museum, Matthew Ferland, Senior Producer of Splinter Cell: Conviction, sat down to answer some questions on the latest stealth game from the famous Tom Clancy brand of games.

Pro-G: Conviction clearly takes the Splinter Cell series of games in a new direction. Can you tell me a little about that?

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Pro-G recently sat down with Patrick Pligersdorffer, the Executive Producer of Loki, the fantasy action-RPG from French developer Cyanide Studios, to talk mythology, faith and slashing hordes of minions with a click of a mouse.

Pro-G: We’ve seen several different interpretations of the action-RPG recently. How did you approach mixing the various merits of the two genres?

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NCsoft will release the long in development Tabula Rasa later this year, so we caught up with the game’s producer Starr Long to get an update on the Sci-Fi MMO. Long is a bit of an industry legend, having worked with fellow luminary Richard Garriott on Ultimate Online, who he is collaborating with on Tabula Rasa.

Pro-G: How did the Tabula Rasa development team juggle both action and MMORPG elements? Can you enlighten us as to how the two were combined?

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Last year the legend returned, but now Lara Croft is going back to her roots. Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original game that made such a splash ten years ago, meaning Lara’s oldest and newest adventure is very different to the action-packed title more recent fans might be expecting. This is tomb raiding in its purest form, and clinging to perilous ledges has never been so much fun.

Anyone who’s played the original game obsessively might be wondering what a remake has to offer, but in truth this isn’t simply a case of adding a bit of spit and polish. If you imagine the 1996 game as a student film, this PS2 and PC modernisation is a big budget spectacular; it stays true to its origins but everything is bigger, more beautiful and more complicated. Whereas the 32-Bit classic struggled to convey the size of the tombs, Anniversary has no such problem, with rooms so large you’ll wonder where to start.

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The first thing the publishers of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword will want to tell you about their new expansion pack is that it offers far more than a typical add-on disk.

The great news is that they are right, and Beyond the Sword is shaping up to be a fantastic boon to anyone who has exhausted the century spanning world of Civilization IV over the last two years. Of course it includes the standard features you would expect any decent expansion pack to incorporate, such as numerous new units, buildings and technologies for the main ‘epic game’, with a focus on additional content for the gameplay set in the later time periods available.

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No game genre experienced as rapid a rise and fall as stealth. When Metal Gear Solid introduced it to the masses, it was dramatic, loaded with tension and oozed originality. But as quickly as it ignited the gaming world, the genre’s quality was extinguished by lazy clones. For a while every game with a third-person perspective seemed to include sneaking and strangling from behind, and even today it rears its ugly head in most action titles.

Once fresh and invigorating, sneakily moving past security guards quickly felt slow and painstaking, and even the mighty Metal Gear series began to falter. The only series that really made the sneak-’em-up worth exploring yet again was Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, starring the light footed Sam Fisher and his employers, the Third Echelon. But today even Sam couldn’t get away with yet another corridor shuffling romp, so something new was needed, and that comes in the form of ’social stealth’.

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Another ‘historically accurate’ WWII shooter is always going to meet groans from the video game press, backed up by accusations that it can offer nothing new to a genre already bled dry by identikit games.

Most gamers have even grown tired of dubious claims of originality by publishers desperate to convince people their product has something new to offer the military-based FPS. Recently we’ve had ‘alternate WWII realities’ and interchangeable characters with mixed abilities, but nothing has really done much in the genre’s favour.

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Back when the Amiga bridged the gap between PC and console, and god games like Populous and Sim City reaped the gains of mainstream success, The Settlers was a big hitter in its genre.

Though the quality of the series has fluctuated over the 14 years since the release of the masterful original, developer Blue Byte has never produced a substandard Settlers. The secret of the German-produced games has always been in the way they translate the intricacies of developing a city to the player.

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If any of the forthcoming Ubisoft games has the potential to generate hype anywhere near as readily as Halo 3, it is Assassin’s Creed, the medieval action game from Jade Raymond, a producer with a wealth of experience, and her team at Ubisoft’s Montreal studio.

The title’s trailer, featuring plenty of in-game footage that competes with much of the pre-rendered clips seen in other games, is undoubtedly fantastic, but the media frenzy surrounding the game is a little questionable based on what has been shown so far.

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Free Radical, the eccentric British development studio that broke away from Rare to create the brilliant Timesplitters games, is back with a new FPS, and though it means another entry in one of the busiest of gaming genres, a new release from such an irresistibly off-key dev team has to be worth a look.

Set in 2048, Haze depicts a corporate and highly privatised world both Tony Blair and Maggie Thatcher would have been delighted to have conceived. One huge company, Mantel, not only produces almost everything from the clothes you wear to the satellites orbiting earth, but also owns and runs hospitals, schools, and most importantly, their own private army, that effectively replaces bodies like the UN.

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Wild Earth Africa, despite its obvious ‘for kids’ feel and appearance, is one of the more interesting games I’ve reviewed in some time. What makes it so interesting is how it doesn’t fall foul of the usual mistakes made when developing a game for the younger end of the market. You won’t find clunky controls, nor will you have to put up with an awful movie license that dictates what can happen in the story. This is a first-person photography game that in many ways teaches kids a few things about the animals that roam Africa, and at the same time is good fun to play.

It’s simple stuff, so don’t expect to be too absorbed while sneaking a go while little Timmy is doing his homework, but kids will (I’ve tested) find this sedate wildlife adventure rather exciting. As a new wildlife photographer your task is to take snaps of certain animals and items in the environment that are needed for the next issue of a wildlife magazine. You have some basic camera controls, but nothing a ten-year-old couldn’t understand, making the hardest part of the job actually finding the animals in the first place.

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Before I get started on the fun that can be yours as you hack and slash your way through the halls of the dead, I should mention the land of the living. Those of you who have already fought your way to victory on Mount Olympus may think your mission is complete. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, Immortal Throne almost demands that you rid Greece of evil all over again!

But why? Why would you want to play levels you have already conquered, kill bad guys with more legs/heads/eyes/teeth than any self-respecting bad guy should have? The answer is that now, unbelievably, it’s even better! The improvements that Iron Lore have produced are an answer to every player’s prayers. Do you want to try out the new Dream Mastery in the glorious sunshine of Greece? Do you want to try any one of the eight new combinations of bad-guy-beating awesomeness that are yours to command? Well now you can. Why not try becoming a Templar? A combination of the Dream and Defence Masteries. Phantom Strike will get you up close and personal just before you use Colossus to turn yourself into a 20-foot-tall engine of destruction. Believe me, it’s a lot of fun. The possibilities for new combinations of skills, pets and abilities are almost endless.

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Heist is an easy game to be sceptical about. From the moment you see the first screens and character art from Codemasters’ new bank robbery romp it’s all too tempting to dismiss it as another Grand Theft Auto clone. And it’s not just that Heist concentrates its energies on providing a huge, free-roaming cityscape filled with criminals, back alleys and a heavily armed police force.

There’s also the posters and promotional art, presented in a style we’ve all seen before in too many Guy Ritchie films. There’s the characters that reek of cliché, the 60s themed soundtrack and the general feel of a violent game designed to get Daily Mail readers sharpening their pencils.

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Development maestro Peter Molyneux offered gamers one of the first chances to play the bad guy with the hilarious and thoroughly playable Dungeon Keeper, released on the PC in 1997. Since then the rise and rise of the crime game has let players experience the thrills of being bad in a different way, but Overlord’s take on playing it mean is certainly a novel one in the current gaming climate.

Overlord’s plot begins at the end of what could have made another soulless video game. After the defeat of the powerful evil-doer by seven do-gooding heroes, the curator of all things nasty and dark lays on the verge of death amongst the rubble of his once glorious tower.

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