Video Games: The 12 Best Holiday Bets

The Scoop: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing; by: Mythic Entertainment; from: Electronic Arts; for: Windows; rating: Teen.

Info: "War is everywhere," warns this game, including on your computer, as Games Workshop's famous dark fantasy universe invades the MMO market and pits hundreds of thousands of players against each other in campaign-scale battles.

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Warhammer Online is all about something called "realm versus realm," a feature that Mythic cut its teeth pulling together and polishing in the Dark Age of Camelot. The idea's pretty simple. Dwarves battle orcs and goblins, human elites throw down with chaos-infected tribes, and high elves duke it out with dark elves. You pick which team to play for. Invading enemy lands and sacking cities impacts on the broader war, and can tip the balance in your realm's favor. It's a dark fantasy world wrapped in its source material's digitally grim "waagh-ness," with cannons, catapults, ballistas, rams, trebuchets, and Nurlge (the game's chaotic god of despair) only knows how much boiling oil.

Since the Lord of the Rings Online guys won't give subscriber numbers, it's tough to say who's second fiddle to Blizzard's gorilla-size World of Warcraft, but EA claims Warhammer Online's base was already a quarter of a million strong back in mid-October. Good news for anyone worried that Blizzard has the MMO market in an inverted facelock camel clutch with intent to sustain indefinitely.

Next: The Witcher