Her Interactive might as well give itself a pat on the back for none of the mainstream developers would have expected this to happen during their next-generation watch. One of the longest running PC game franchises in history has once again claimed top spot in its launch date, trumping the likes of EA's Spore Creature Creator and Blizzard's Diablo Battle Chest SKU. Get the top ten at the full story.

It's like even before Will Wright's Spore releases, Electronic Arts keeps shoveling more and more moolah into the vault. Someone definitely did something right by getting IKEA involved in the latest expansion to The Sims 2, because the brand-approved luxuries tucked away inside every twenty buck box managed to overtake every PC retail game offered in the US. The full top ten list follows at the full story.

Who said E3 was going to be anything but great for the PC? The 100 million-selling franchise of Electronic Arts and internal studio Maxis is brewing up for another return to the PC, and according to official news streams it should land on Windows by 2009. Now that's not to say Maxis hasn't given The Sims 3 a lot of tender loving care - have a look for yourself. The Sims 3 took your whole Sims 2 world and extended it to whole towns. Feature starts in the full story in 3, 2, 1...

Still coming off from that Day of Defeat: Source weekend bash, eh? Well, it's time to shake off the dirt, snow, and what-have-yous for an otherwise relaxing week, as the incoming games trumpet news for casual (and more or less addicted) gamers. Electronic Arts is making the cutesy, Anime-ish Sims adaptation on the Wii and DS available on the PC, and that could be a good or bad thing for households with just one gaming PC available. Hopefully, MySims is good news, for fun's sake. Details at the full story.

Well, whadda ya know? Electronic Arts' little bid to make some cash out of Spore actually worked. The superstar publisher is probably already swimming in money, but hear this: Spore Creature Creator is just a first taste of what's to come this September. The top ten best-selling PC games of the week is at the full story.

Prefacing the videogame's release less than two months before is the news that EA Maxis does have something special cooked up for avid game collectors and hardcore fanboys. Spore apparently has a Galactic Edition SKU, which like every form of Collector's, Limited, and Special Edition comes with similarly arranged bonus content. But perhaps past the hardcovers and the posters, we could appreciate one little gem in the rough: an exclusive NatGeo DVD that's designed especially for Spore.

If you live near or in San Francisco and have some free time on your hands tonight, you may want to head over to San Francisco's Apple Store to watch an hour-long demo of the full game of Spore (PC, Nintendo Wii, DS, Mac, and Mobile), as hosted by Will Wright. The full details after the jump!

There's still a majority of us who are still messing around with EA's recently released Spore Creature Creator demo, but we've never been able to go so far as to reel in Electronic Art's strict attention. That's what one Spore user (and PC Gamer staffer) managed to do, and now EA has unsheathed it's modstick for some warning swings against nudity or representations of nudity in Spore creatures. More at the full story.

This issue is another one of those weeks where you could selectively stave off from spending hard-earned cash, but then there are millions of gamers who need their gaming fix. Gladly enough, third-party publishers on the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii have addressed the casual gaming populace, and that pretty much sums up this week's retail release line up. On second thought, no - we still have an MMO, EA Maxis' pre-Spore sampler, a formerly retail, now PSN game, plus the release of Rock Band on the Nintendo Wii. Check the full story for details.

This month will be the launch of the Creature Creator for Will Wright's Spore, and the evolution simulator is set to touch two thirds of the PC population: Windows and Mac. What we have here are for gamers on both segments, though several Linux players might be interested as well. Are your Windows (emulation or non-emulation) and Mac rigs ready? The system requirements to run EA Maxis' masterpiece follows at the full story.