About as good as GTA IV looks on most PCs right now...

Well, if you weren't already feeling a grand sense of meh about the stupidly late release of the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV then this news is sure to only compound that. From a quick look at the Steam GTA IV forum you'd be forgiven for thinking that at launch the game only ran on about 5% of the PCs in the world. The other 95% of PC owners are pulling their hair out trying to figure out why they can't get on with killing prostitutes and drink-driving like their console buddies.

The problems range from activation issues to missing textures to no SLI support. Something that's especially important considering the game barely runs on even the most top end PCs at launch. With threads titled such things as 'This game makes me hate my PC' it's clear that Rockstar is going to have to work pretty damn hard to get the PC gaming fraternity back on side.

If there's one thing that Warhammer: Age of Reckoning proved, its that large scale player versus player battles can be tremendously good fun. Admittedly they can get a bit laggy at times, but having a screen full of people to fight against makes up for that to some degree. Blizzard obviously agrees on this front too, having implemented large scale battles in Wintergrasp – one of the new zones to be found in Wrath of the Lich King. Destructible buildings, tanks to drive around and hit people with, and lots of lovely herbs and mining nodes to keep the gatherers happy.

Note that it is a zone, and not a traditional battleground that you queue up for – it's always there, and you can always get there (by flying if the teleport is down). This does mean that battles can be a bit one sided, or you can miss the opportunity to actually take the base (it's up every 2 hours or so). If you do own the base, you'll be rewarded with spawns that are guaranteed to drop the new motes (great for anyone farming Eternal Fire and Air). There are also 10- and 25-man dungeons to be had for those that do own the zone – and it's not that hard (even in a PUG), yet drops T7 and PvP gear.

Little did I realise this morning, that today I would be blessed with an artifact from the gods to appear in my humble packet of Mexican Chili McCoy's crisps. What could this gargantuan potato snack mean? Possibly that McCoy's use super mutant spuds grown in post nuclear Washington D.C.? No, I'd rather believe divine intervention was involved.  OMG I think it’s beginning to cry!

The 'crisp of fate' modeled by the beautiful Debbie McGee

Here's hoping that it does better on eBay than my previous failure that was the Blair Witch Twiglet!

Finally, the news all of us who love Fallout 3 have waited for is here. The content creation kit is going to be released free from next month. To be honest that's also the news that the ravening hordes of Fallout fanboys populating swathes of the No Mutants Allowed wasteland have been waiting for too - finally allowing them to create their own 'real' sequel to the Fallout games.

The Garden of Eden Creation Kit (the already familiar G.E.C.K) is the title of Bethesda's official editor and is due in the next couple of weeks sometime in December. It's the one thing we've been waiting on an announcement for since we first saw the game, and something that Pete Hines of Bethesda was remakably coy about when I chatted to him a couple of months before the game's release.

The G.E.C.K will allow you to expand the game in any way you see fit, from altering the landscape, creating towns to creating entirely new adventures with new characters, dialogue, weapons and creatures. In short, anything you want to create the Fallout game that you want to play.

“We’ve always seen the original world of Fallout 3 as a foundation for even more content. Some created by us, and a lot more created by users,” said Todd Howard, game director for Fallout 3. “It’s fun to create your own character, but it can be equally fun to create your own adventures. We can’t wait to see what the community does with the G.E.C.K.”

These tools sound incredibly powerful and you've got to wonder how long it will be before we see the first fan-made remakes of the original Fallout games in Bethesda's engine. I for one can't wait to see what the serious Fallout fanboys do with such a tool, but you can bet that they'll be well worth a play once the new adventures start hitting the net. Maybe I'll start on Fallout UK, and see what happened to our green and pleasant land when the bomb dropped...

We've also had the announcement of three content packs that are due to be released over the Games for Windows Live platform over the first three months of the new year. There's Operation: Anchorage liberating the Alaskan town from Chinese invaders due in January, The Pitt introducing the remains of Pittsburgh in February and a continuation of the main quest, Broken Steel following the Brotherhood ridding the world of the remnants of the Enclave in March.

Still, personally I'm more excited about what the community is going to do with the tools than the DLC. Fingers crossed you'll be able to create your own radio stations too. Cruising your wasteland to the synthesised imaginings of Jan Hammer would obviously be just awesome.

Though this is what'll happen when Mike gets his mitts on the G.E.C.K...

While hunting the intertubes for gaming titbits for the disc I happened upon this spendid Tetris variant. Based on the same Tetris shapes we are acustomed too, the task in 99 Bricks isn't to form lines for points, but to build a stable tower using 99 shapes (bricks). This browser game gets the coveted 'gimp head' approval!

Some rather clever soul over at Newgrounds has cleverly built a version of Doom that runs on Flash. Odd to think that some 13 years ago I was pumping floppy after floppy into my 386 just to get this to run, and here it is in a browser. It's only the shareware version (naturally), but it's still an impressive achievement. It's "R" to open doors, by the way.

BONUS CLIP: Here's Bill Gates in a rather embarrassing vid promoting Windows 95 as a gaming platform.

Before he jaunted off to jolly London, Mike was hugely excited about the prospect of Gearbox's forthcoming sci-fi shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines. But something seems a little off-kilter with the game's development - a rumour surfaced this morning that the game's funding had been pulled by Sega, and staff were to be laid off.

Amusingly-named Gearbox head honch Randy Pitchford attempted to quell the rumours, but ended up providing some baffling boss-speak:

"Our mission has always driven us to always want to strive to do better and better. Our experience has never been greater and we love applying our experience to the benefit of our games. Over the last six weeks, we’ve been adjusting our internal strategy to move from being about Opportunity, Ambition and Growth to a strategy that is oriented towards Quality, Focus and Performance. A number of recent tactical decisions here are a reflection of this new commitment and strategy. The timing of these tactical decisions relates more to natural maneuvering that all studios should only consider after they finish a big effort than anything else. I know there is a tendency in the press to get the maximum value out of a story, but unless we have a *lot* more fans that are *much* more rabid about what we are doing than I thought we did, I don’t imagine there to be much of an exciting story here after all.

"But, since we do seem to be getting some attention this evening and I am flattered by that and I may as well use the attention. While our commitment to focus and quality may slow the speed of our growth in numbers, we are, in fact, currently hiring. We have exciting, exciting things going on that offer tremendous opportunity for us and our interest is for the best talent in the world to join us and be a part of it. Borderlands is shaping up to be astonishingly fresh and I am very excited to reveal more about that soon, Aliens: Colonial Marines is very exciting and I look forward to the right moment we can more fully unveil our efforts there and we have other incredible unannounced projects in development and a lot of opportunity for the future – a future I am increasingly excited about."

I've read this six times now and I still have no idea what he's banging on about. Running this through the "Pitchford - English" option on Google translate reveals that Aliens: Colonial Marines will be released, but is unlikely to reach its target of 9th January 2009. It'll be a shame if it never sees the light of day - the thought of a game that combines Brothers in Arms' tactical shooting with Opposing Force's scary monster tunnels makes us weep with joy.

Today Google announced their new search engine add-on, SearchWiki. It adds Digg-style functionality to search results, allowing you to promote the results you like and demote ones you don't. It also includes a comments field, so you can leave notes to other users about the result. It doesn't affect Google's page ranking either, just your personal results - provided you're signed into the big G.

There's something slightly odd about it though. I can get the SearchWiki to work in one of my Google accounts, but not the other. I'm not entirely sure why this is; I've had my oldest Google account since 2004, maybe it's too old. Or maybe Google just hate me.

The other bit of Google weirdness I've noticed is their homepages - sign in to google.co.uk/ig and you'll see a different page layout to google.com/ig. For a company that's supposedly uniting every single person in the world through the universal language of search algorithms, Google don't entirely convince.

This month I've spent a bit of time rediscovering one of my favourite games - Thief: Deadly Shadows - for a retrospective piece. I was happily taffing along, then this happened:

I love it when games break like this. I think it's the combination of his ultra-serious expression and gormless levitation that makes it hilarious. If only more games had glitches like these, as opposed to ones that quit to Windows and destroy all your saves.

Chances are you all already have this, but just in case, it's worth popping onto Steam and grabbing the classic Half-Life for the ludicrous price of... wait for it... 98c, or roughly 66p in English pennies.

Bargain we tell ya, bargain. Apparently it's in order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the game (launched 10 years ago today no less). You can grab it here if you don't already have steam.