If there's one thing you like more than playing games, it's looking forward to ones that aren't out yet. Go on, admit it. You might even be one of those uber-consumers who pre-orders everything months in advance for no reason other than to support your bizarre retail-dependent lifestyle. Ashamed? I'm offering no solution.

The first few months of every year are often laden with games that were intended for Christmas but just didn't quite manage it. In Europe we often get a lot of stuff that was released at Christmas elsewhere but wasn't localised in time for us. Not every publisher will delay their game and miss out on their favourite release period for the sake of a dodgy frame-rate or laughably incompetent networking (something which appears to have become the norm for online games for some inexplicable reason), so hopefully we'll see a few things that were deemed worthy of a bit of extra spit and polish.

In order of rowdyness...
Burnout Paradise - Criterion/EA - 25th January (also on PS3)
Crashing cars into other cars, only this time you can do it in an open city with supposedly seamless online integration, Test Drive Unlimited's influence is quite rightly becoming apparent. Try the demo.

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom - Phantagram/Microsoft - 1st February
An action RPG with less focus on strategy than the previous iterations on Xbox, and hopefully less emphasis on being rubbish than Ninety-Nine Nights - Phantagram's last game. There's also a demo for this, if you have a Korean account (which you may have made in order to get Hexic 2 for free).


Dark Sector - Digital Extremes/D3 Publisher - 8th February (also on PS3)
A third-person shooter from the co-developers of the Unreal Tournament games. It apparently has some Zelda-like puzzle solving among other attempts to liven things up.

The Club - Bizarre Creations/SEGA - 8th February (also on PS3, PC)
Another third-person shooter, but quite different. For a start you've got a proven developer and publisher. The Club throws a Kudos-like system into an otherwise fairly unremarkable shooter. Will it be enough?

Lost Odyssey - Feelplus/Mistwalker/Microsoft - February
A JRPG from that Final Fantasy man with the moustache and Feelplus - a studio made up of a lot of ex Shadow Hearts (Sacnoth) and Phantom Dust (Microsoft Game Studios Tokyo) creative staff.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot - Monotlith/SEGA - February (also on PS3)
I quite enjoyed the original Condemned, it was a mixture of quite a simple exploration game with some very in-your-face combat and a Hollywood horror flick plot and setting which unravelled at a good pace with a fantastic atmosphere. It was rushed to launch with the 360, so this could easily be something a bit more special. It's interesting that they've ditched the PC version in favour of the PS3 this time as well.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic Elements - Arcane/Ubisoft - Q1 (originally on PC)
An enhanced port of the PC game from a while ago. Arcane are a French developer descended from Looking Glass Studios and previously created Arx Fatalis, a spiritual successor to Looking Glass/Origin's Ultima Underworld series. DMM&M is a first-person action RPG that uses Source and physics. There's a demo of this; it looks quite dated, feels like you're steering hunchback pegleg and its physics elements don't stand out at all any more. But still.

Nitrobike - Left Field/Ubisoft - 18th January
This drew attention when it was announced, because it's made by the company that made Excitebike 64 with Nintendo. It then turned out that pretty much all the EB64 staff had buggered off and the only notable figure left was the bloke Nintendo sent to help Left Field make the game good, and ended up staying. Still motorbikes are fun, and most of us probably haven't touched a crosser game since Motorcross Madness.

Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure - In-house/Capcom - 18th January
Capcom's first original Wii game, an action adventure game with lots of motion control-based puzzles. Apparently it's good, and certainly appears different enough to keep an eye on.

Ferrari Challenge - In-house/System 3 - 25th January (also on PS3, DS)
Nintendo consoles have always lacked quality racing experiences, so I can imagine a few people confined to their Nintendos eyeing this up a bit. It's looking potentially promising, as are the DS and PS3 versions. There's too much competition on 360 for them to bother I suppose.

NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams - In-house/SEGA - 25th January
Impressions from the Japanese version are that although the gameplay is solid, the whole thing is smothered in particularly unpleasant cheese in the form of compulsory cut scenes and platforming section misery. Do you dare? I'm not sure I do.

Battalion Wars 2 - Kuju London/Nintendo - 15th February
This has been receiving poor early reviews, due to its apparent lack of scope and the gameplay starting to wear very thin and transparent. The lack of voice chat renders the online multiplayer a bit pointless, it's astounding that Nintendo didn't use the game to launch a headset with.

No More Heroes - Grasshopper Manufacture/Marvelous/Rising Star - 29th February
It'll take a great deal for this to live up to the gargantuan hype being generated by people pretending to be huge fans of all 'Suda 51's' work, ignoring the fact that aside from Killer7, Grasshopper have predominantly produced shit. It will definately be crude, but by god it looks mental, and mental games are the plat-du-jour for me at least.

SEGA Superstars Tennis - Sumo Digital/SEGA - Early 2008 (also on 360, PS3, PS2 and DS)
I know it's a laughably unoriginal concept, but this could very easily be a massive sleeper-hit. Sumo are the lovechild of people who still openly admit to being fans of SEGA, and if anyone can make a fun new tennis game, it's this lot.

Advance Wars: Dark Conflict - In-house/Nintendo - 25th January
"This turn-based strategy game featuring a dark, post-apocalyptic tale of revenge, betrayal and survival..." - sounds a bit cheap to me, pandering to the very worst corner of Nintendo fandom which ignorantly wanks itself to death over any poorly conceived attempt to be 'dark' in any established previously-smiley Nintendo game. But if it's good, it's good. Maybe the tutorial won't last three days and everything!

Assassin's Creed - In-house/Ubisoft - February
We're all curious aren't we?

Nanostray 2 - Shin'en/Majesco - Early 2008
I chuckled when I saw that Majesco were publishing this. You see, the original had horrible touch screen weapon changing which Shin'en later blamed on Majesco for forcing them to use the touch screen. Nanostray 2 didn't have a publisher until recently, there must have been some fun meetings in all of this. It's a shooter by the way, spanning all directions but not all at once. It looks lovely.

Sam and Max: Moai Better Blues - Telltale - 10th January
The second episode of the second series. I keep almost buying one of these on Steam, then remembering that my experiences with adventure games always end in failure. I played a significant amount of The Longest Journey for example, and never saw what all the fuss was about. People like them though, and you are people.

Insecticide - Crackpot/Gamecock - Early 2008 (also on DS)
It reminds me of Psychonauts and appears to be appealing to the same sensibilities. Another action-adventure, goodness knows what the DS version will be like.

Patapon - In-house/Sony - Early 2008
From the SCEJ team behind Loco-Roco, this appears to be a riff on Vib Ribbon. A surreal side-scroller with chanting and added weirdness.

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles - In-house/Konami - Early 2008
A remake of Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, along with the original version and Symphony of the Night. This is actually the first English release of the 1993 PC-Engine CD game, although I'm told the remade version is a bit grim.

Haze - Free Radical/Ubisoft - Early 2008
There are almost as few release dates for PS3 games as there are PS3 games, and forgive my cynicism, but there are probably more people waiting for the 360 version of this to be confirmed that there are people waiting to buy it on PS3.

Unreal Tournament 3 - Epic/Midway - Early 2008 (already available on PC, later on 360)
Nobody has bought it on PC, it will be interesting to see if it does any better on PS3. I used to like Unreal Tournament games, when the only other FPS I'd played significantly was Goldeneye...