It's that time of year again. Yep, the big release season is upon us, which means we'll be buried in games faster than our wallets can refill themselves. Time to take advantage of those credit card offers we keep getting in the mail...

From Resistance 2 to LittleBigPlanet to SOCOM: Confrontation to MotorStorm: Pacific Rift to Fallout 3 and much, much more, there's a major release that will interest pretty much anyone with a pulse. But with so many games to choose from, what should you be keeping an eye out for?

That's where we come in. What you'll find here are the biggest of the big, the best of the best (from what we've seen at least) to hit stores shelves over the next few months.





2K MarinOctober 21stFirst-Person Shooter

What to Expect: What to expect? The same thing you've been expecting since skipping over the 360 and PC versions of the game after they won all those Game of the Year awards: an awesome, immersive, cinematic, creepy, thrilling, objectivist tale of dystopian woe. Now, granted, all that waiting will certainly pay off in the form of new, exclusive (at least for now) content burned onto that Blu-ray disc in addition to all the other content that won all those awards, but if you miss out on things this time... well, we don't know if we can be friends anymore.

Far more than just a simple first-person shooter, BioShock takes everything that made original developers Irrational Games' System Shock

September 23rdFirst-Person Shooter

What to Expect: The Brothers in Arms games have been giving us a different perspective on the normally tired World War II genre for a while now, first introducing us to Matt Baker in Road to Hill 30 and Joe Hartsock in Earned in Blood and then slowly expanding the theatre of war to include actual historical battles. In the case of Hell's Highway, that's painting a semi-accurate picture of the events of Operation Market Garden. Hell's Highway isn't just a next-gen version of the previous games, however; significant attention has been paid to making the gulf between the games and the Band of Brothers mini-series that much smaller, with a heavier cinematic presentation and even more story details.

For those keeping track, that makes the third proper Brothers in Arms game far more movie-like than previous efforts, and this extends to just about all parts of the game, right down to finally being able to draw a bead on someone and squeeze off a shot without just making them a little freaked out. Hooray for progress!

November 11thFirst-Person Shooter

What to Expect: Okay, enough about World War II games being tired (and yes, we're delightfully hypocritical considering we literally just complained about it while talking about that last game), poor Treyarch has heard it for years now, and they think they can do a different World War II game -- if only for the last time.

What's so different this time around? Plenty. For starters, the well-traveled battlefields of Europe are going to be taking something of a back seat to one of the less-told parts of The Big One: the Pacific Theatre. It's bigger than it sounds; ditching bombed-out burgs and toppled world capitals for the closer-to-home repercussions of Pearl Harbor means a change of scenery (at least partially -- you'll still be playing as the Russians), but it also means the venerable Quake 3 engine will keep on getting tweaked and enhanced. The very same core engine for Call of Duty 4 here returns for overseas duty, and with some tweaks to make it even fancier, a full online co-op campaign and offering new weapons like the flamethrower, World War II may still have a few more stories to tell just yet.