Rarely have so many high-profile, A-list, incredibly-hyped titles been crammed into such a small release window. For three months in the Fall of 2007, PC gamers were desperately scrambling to scrape together enough cash to throw at games ranging from Bill Roper’s 3D Diablo successor in Hellgate: London to the Mother of All Sequels in Team Fortress 2 (conveniently nestled within the Best Bargain of All Time: The Orange Box). Sometimes these big-budget extravaganzas vied for buyer’s gaming dollars on the same release date; others backhanded the competition by moving their debut forward twenty-four hours. When the dust settled, however, this three-month window remains the Best Three Months in PC Gaming History. Ever.

The First $50: World in Conflict (18 September 2007)

With more than a little inspiration from Eugen Systems’ overlooked Act of War, Massive Entertainment’s own groundbreaking Ground Control, and narrated by one of the most interesting men in Hollywood Alec Baldwin, World in Conflict took the real-time strategy genre by storm. The game effectively combined a good story with a tense, alternative-history Cold War backdrop and a narrowed focus of gameplay. For emphasis, the bread and butter of RTS games are the  construction of sprawling complexes to fuel the engines of war; World in Conflict stripped that premise from its core and instead focused completely on visceral action sequences.

While this convergence to performance encounters was hardly a revolutionary concept at the time, World in Conflict was among the first to dynamically combine its predecessors key points into a single excellent product.

Round Three: BioShock (21 August 2007)

Providing one of the most unique -yet hauntingly-familiar- destinations in the long and illustrious saga of video gaming, this title introduced players to the 1960s underwater city “Rapture,” populated by Alma-like female youth and their Ving Rhames-with-big-guns-style bodyguards. With little doubt, BioShock is the best-looking created universe many had ever witnessed, either in a game, film, or written text. From sprawling, luminescent habitat districts to spooky and highly-disturbing gangways between city areas, Rapture hummed with incredible depth.

A spiritual successor to the cult phenomenon System Shock 2 -a game which never sold as well as it was received, critically and by its players- BioShock has given birth to a 2K Games franchise which will reportedly spawn as many as five sequels and a high-budget studio film. If any big name game deserved the hype it received, it was BioShock.

Sequel of the Century: Team Fortress 2 and The Orange Box (10 October 2007)

Both a compilation pack and platform for two megahits to storm shelves simultaneously, The Orange Box is easily the smartest fifty dollars ever spent. Though the contained puzzle game had received a fair amount of press, no one had properly been able to experience the majesty of Portal on a personal level. Building on the gravity modification found in 2006’s Prey, the game required players to think in a sui generis fashion beyond normal levels of comprehension. No amount of adjectives are able to properly convey quite how impressive Portal was, both in its distinctive genre and the entire industry.

Besides the aforementioned hit, Half-Life 2 and its duo of mini-sequels, another, more-powerful game was lurking within The Orange Box. First announced in the Bronze Age of gaming (excuse me, 1998) and powered by Valve’s GoldSrc engine (a heavily-modified rendition of id’s Quake II engine – now known as id Tech 2), the game disappeared in the midst of 2000, only to re-emerge in 2006 featuring a cartoon-ish visual style and the feel of twitch-based, arcade-type gameplay. Since its release, Team Fortress 2 has seen a constant stream of updates and modifications to almost every facet of its being.

A Truly-Mature RPG for Truly-Mature Individuals: The Witcher (30 October 2007)

The game’s “pro”tagonist, Geralt of Rivia, is perhaps the most intriguing main character design to grace a mainstream game in some time. While his roots are drawn from a series of Polish novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, the game gives him a Gollum-style split magnetism; on one hand, it’s easy to enjoy walking in the boots of a professional monster slayer, but otherwise, the dark and neglectful relationships forged by Geralt make The Witcher an ominous and oftentimes-depressing affair. Most role-playing games flourish and build upon relationships with hundreds of charismatic characters placed strategically about the created world. Usually, the player is given the ability to opt for “bad” decisions, where the player character is cast into the role of an evildoer (Dungeons and Dragons’ alignment system is notorious for its range of relationship calibrations), or “good” choices, wherein the character is a paladin of heroic proportions: both are generally “saviors of the day.” The Witcher, however, consistently provided a bevy of volitions ranging from “bad” to “worse.” It’s constantly the cliche of “the lesser of two evils.”

Despite this different concept of darkness, The Witcher was an adult game throughout, which subsequently sparked cataclysmic debates on the merits of censorship: nudity and sexual content were always the hot topic. Regardless, The Witcher was a smash hit in financial terms, selling well over one million copies worldwide.

Bill Roper’s Door to Abaddon: Hellgate: London (31 October 2007)

This game suffered the premature death of its multiplayer component in North America and the European Union, resulting from a horrific series of launch-time server difficulties and a wide range of bugs. Nonetheless, its single-player game was a fantastic action-RPG from the mind of former Blizzard whiz kid Bill Roper (the notorious voice of WarCraft’s Orcs). Its origin as a spiritual successor to Diablo were evident from beginning to end, including a very good randomization of each area.

The entire game could also be played from a first- or third-person perspective; the ranged fighters were naturally geared for the point-of-view vantage point and melee classes were more comfortable in the typical action view. The game did garner decent marks from most press outlets, including an 89% from PC Gamer; consumers, unfortunately, didn’t agree with these ratings and the game refused to sell enough to keep Flagship Studios afloat. Bill Roper has moved on to greener pastures at Cryptic Studios for their much-ballyhooed superhero game Champions Online. Hellgate: London will forever live on in the fond memories of RPG addicts such as myself…and those willing to pony up six or seven bucks to procure a copy on Amazon.

A Seminal Shooter’s Modernization: Call of Duty 4 (6 November 2007)

Infinity Ward stamped a massive footprint on the world of video games in 2003 with its World War II shooter Call of Duty, which went on to receive a heaping of “Game of the Year” awards. The game is most remembered for its Soviet campaign, and more specifically, the opening sequences portraying the Battle of Stalingrad. At the time, no shooter had accurately modeled the feeling of a hopeless front line charge (sure, we had played Normandy through approximately seventy-two thousand iterations, but nothing quite like this). Its 2005 sequel gave gamers a superb presentation of the North African campaign delivered on a platter of fantastic graphics. Several platform-tastic titles later, Infinity Ward struck again -and this time with a generous application of modern assault rifles and scripted events above and beyond most other experiences.

Call of Duty 4 might best be actively remembered for its online gameplay, but its brief single-player campaign is a case study in scripting done correctly. Its opening mission places gamers on a sinking cargo ship as it lists from side to side and an intense storm lashes lightning in all directions. Levels in Pripyat, the Middle East, and a personal encounter with a nifty nuclear bomb supplement one of the most memorable -albeit laconic- single-player campaigns on the modern era.

Bloody Delight: Gears of War (6 November 2007)

Headlining this third-person shooter was the military-game cliche protagonist Marcus Fenix, a jailed soldier with a gruff, bass-heavy voice and more to say than anyone cares to hear. Brass had decided to release Fenix to combat a growing problem with extreme prejudice-stop me when you’ve heard this before….wait a minute….. Despite its difficulties in unoriginality, Gears of War for PC augmented one of the fastest-selling Xbox 360 shooters with more content and better visuals, making it the must-have version of the game.

Gears of War’s perspective was close-in, over-the-shoulder third-person, which became emblematic of its brutal and bloody gameplay. Fenix’s standard assault rifle was equipped with an adorable (really? yes) chainsaw, useful for close-proximity death ballets which highlighted an average suite of multiplayer options. The game itself, like Call of Duty 4, was over much to quickly; however, the ability to play the entire campaign cooperatively with a friend supplements its brevity.

The Monolith: Crysis (13 November 2007)

Open-ended gameplay, a super-strength suit of armor, aliens, and the best contemporary graphics: indeed, Crysis was -and remains- the must-play killer app for PC gamers worldwide. Little can be said about a game which millions have played and nearly every true gamer has witnessed in some fashion or another. No game more suitably concludes the Best Three Months in PC Gaming quite like Crysis.