All WAR and no carjacking make Jack a dull sociopath, as the old saying goes. Actually, on reflection, additional carjacking doesn’t really help there, it just exacerbates the problem if anything. Old sayings, huh? What are they good for? Anyway, splendid as Warhammer is, and much as I’m still enjoying it, I’m not so mono-game-ous that my head isn’t turned by forthcoming releases swanking down the street in their brightly coloured zoot suits, snapping their fingers to the crazy jazz sounds coming from the coffee houses where love is frothy and milk is free.

The prospect of a Blogospheric outing to the Eurogamer Expo and recent Rock, Paper, Shotgun and PC Gamer podcasts have unleashed a veritable maelstrom of gaming possibility, so I’m going to peer into the far distant future starting with the time known as “the end of the month”, when flying cars and jetpacks will surely be commonplace, then going further still into what futurologists are calling “early 2009”, when surely there will be no more mistreatment of elephants (possibly because there will be no elephants). From these crazy distant times, a quick rundown of Games What I’m Looking Forward To In The Distant Future Approximately Ordered By Chronological Release Date That Coincidentally Happens To Be Order Of Sequel-osity Too, or GWILFTITDFAOBCRDTCHTBOOST as I’ll never refer to it in the future:

Kicking off with something wildly original, not at all sequel-y and apparently coming Soon, World of Goo. Despite Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s lukewarm reception of this, I might pick it up anyway. I haven’t tried any WiiWare yet, and this looks like rather a good place to start, though there’s a suggestion that the European Wii release will be as a retail box instead, I can’t seem to find any concrete details one way or the other.

Having enjoyed the original Far Cry (especially before the Trigens) and Crysis (especially before the aliens), I’m looking forward to trying Far Cry 2 at the Eurogamer Expo. Though if you start encountering robo-gazelles and cyborg hippos about halfway through, it might be slightly annoying. Or possibly brilliant.

Stepping up the sequel count, Fallout 3, due at the end of October and also displaying at the Expo. Now I may be about to commit heresy but… I never played Fallout, and couldn’t get into Fallout 2. After reading widespread adulation for the series, I picked up Fallout 2 cheap a few years after its release, got killed a lot in early combat, and gave up on it. As a result I don’t have a particular attachment to the setting, but I liked the Elder Scroll series (even if I’d run out of motivation for the main plots about halfway through), and I think the first person style could work well in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Up to the Fourquels, I’d missed that Grand Theft Auto IV has got an offical PC release date of November 21st, so huzzah! for that, though it does look like it might clash with the fourth Guitar Hero game, Guitar Hero World Tour (now with extra drums and vocals). Rockstar game vs rock star impersonation game, which to play first?

Finally, out to 2009: Empire: Total War, the fifth in the series. All the fun of the previous games, but more muskets, ships, rakes and gentlemen. What’s not to like? Though Medieval 2 was good, it did tend to bog down into an awful lot of sieges that weren’t really as fun as open battles, so a bit more gunpowder should help there. The 1700 – 1800 time period also just overlaps with the latter parts of Neal Stephenson’s peerless Baroque Cycle, a fine excuse to go back and re-read that (also reminds me that his latest, Anathem, is just out, must keep an eye out for the paperback release).

On top of all those, City of Heroes Issue 13 is due before too long, with Issue 14 hopefully in early 2009, and I’ve still got a bunch of games on the “must get around to sometime” list, headed up by Call of Duty 4, STALKER: Clear Skies (sounds like recent patches have fixed some pretty major bugs in that, so it’s not just MMOs that benefit from the three month rule) and the “Enhanced” edition of The Witcher. There’s just not enough hours in our day…