It's with no great shame that we admit that Warehouse8 has a leaning towards consoles in sheer weight of content, in particular the 360. It happens to be the most ubiquitous current machine for people like us for various reasons. The PC, however, has just found its way back into my diet after years of non-committal dabbling.

Certain genres and sub genres just work better on PC, at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, a high resolution guaranteed and no proprietary platform interference. I've always had a fondness for some of these. I'm of the opinion that not enough effort is put into adapting these properly for consoles, and by that I mean not dumbing them down. But as things stand, there's not a lot that can be done about this other than simply not buying the crummy conversions.

Here are some of the potential PC highlights of the remaining 6 months of this year (excluding some of the painfully obvious ones as usual).

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
There's an undeniable upheaval going on in the PC game sector. Fewer high profile American and western-European studios are making games with the PC at the core of their design. In Russia and its eastern-European neighbours (and also Germany) however, the PC dominates. Russian players are often said to be 98% PC. While western publishers talk of the region as an 'emerging market', local developers and publishers with years of experience are starting to make steps outside, and Ukraine's GSC Game World have arguably made the largest splash.

Shadow of Chernobyl was one of the most interesting games last year, providing the perfect antidote to Bioshock in the Immersive Sim (as Mr Spectre himself chooses to call it) sub-genre. But GSC had developed it for 6 years alongside their engine with all manner of over-ambitious AI features which had to be cut. In this prequel, they claim to have reinstated some of the spontaneity of the original vision, which could turn this already enthralling experience into something remarkable.

Battlefield: Heroes
Another trend which commentators like to make sweeping statements about, is the growth of free-to-play games played from, or launching from web browsers. The two most high profile of these ad-supported 3D web games are Quake Zero and Battlefield Heroes. While the former is merely an adaptation of a nearly 10 year old and probably quite dated arena shooter, Heroes is a fresh looking offshoot of a sub-genre defining series which is still making waves today. It will be interesting to see how well it scales to lower-end systems, as the graphics look pretty swish.

Left 4 Dead
If there's one common aspect of PC game design that I loath, it's the twitchy, chaotic and mindless controls and pacing of the most popular online first-person shooters. Any hardcore PC gamer that accidentally stumbled in here will not get past this paragraph by the way, if they've even got this far. Games like Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament and even Team Fortress 2 (tragically) are built around this dated habitual framework of reflex pixel shooting and other assorted boring bullshit. I could literally write an essay on fps game mechanics that have outstayed my welcome. Left 4 Dead finally looks like an online Valve game that I might enjoy, since it's predominantly a player Vs AI (or PvE if you will) game. A small group of intensely co-operating players fighting off hoards of non-player zombies, with a few player controlled boss zombies for variety. It's incredible that this kind of gameplay scenario hasn't been done to death, but aside from little bits of Resi and some half-arsed mods, it really hasn't. Zombie holocaust attrition is still a bizarrely fresh sounding proposition.

ArmA 2
Bohemia's ArmA: Armed Assault, along with its expansion, is the spiritual unlicensed successor to Operation Flashpoint, which for those that aren't familiar, was more of a combat simulator than anything else, with a cult following. But it wasn't as dull as it sounds, this kind of realism and genuine tactical co-operation can be pretty absorbing and thrives in many areas that the Battlefield series washes over. ArmA was a bit ropey when it was released last year, but I'm informed that it is pretty much a flawless sandpit nowadays with an ambitious modding community. I'd be all over it if they hadn't already announced the sequel...

Mythos
An online Diablo-esque dungeon crawler from Flagship, one of the companies that splintered from Blizzard North (the developers of Diablo 1&2), but with brighter graphics. The closed beta is allegedly excellent, but has been going for rather a long time. They never seem to stop making significant additions and delaying the open beta/trial (the two words are pretty much synonymous these days).

Mount&Blade
Speaking of perpetual beta, this open world medieval (not fantasy!) RPG has been in development in Turkey (Turkey!) for a very long time, with snapshots released as shareware. It is due to be released proper fairly soon, with the help of Swedish PC developer Paradox Interactive. Mount&Blade focuses hugely on mounted combat, something which there really isn't enough of in games, and appears to be a very fresh experience, though with basic graphics.

Stalin Vs Martians
And finally, what better way to ease yourself back into RTS than with a concept as straight forward yet fantastic as Stalin Vs Martians. Its three co-developing Russian studios are looking to buck the trend of poker-faced eastern European output with this over-the-top alternate history (or is it?) which combines historically accurate armaments with an absurd alien invasion which only Stalin's anti-ET operation can prevent. Unmissable, even if it turns out to be just another C&C rip-off.