After years of hiding away in Shanghai and delivering beyond-terrible gaming with Bad Day L.A., the veteran behind Doom, Quake and Alice - American McGee - has emerged back into the land of the living with his uniquely twisted take on the already-twisted Grimm Brothers’ Tales. The first of 24 tales in the series, A Boy Learns What Fear Is, is out today on GameTap, with the others set to release consecutively with each passing week.

All the games will be free to play for the first 24 hours, after which players will be required to fork out $3.99 per episode. A Boy Learns What Fear Is, like all the other tales that are set to follow, should offer around an hour’s worth of play and is loosely based around a cruel, sadistic and blood-chilling version of Katamari Damacy’s gameplay style – according to the official website, a boy who wants to learn the true meaning of fear goes around “hanging gallows, a haunted house and even a wedding, but doesn’t truly encounter fear until Grimm decides to enter the story.” After all the terrifying nursery rhymes and the sheer violence and terror of having gone through the original stories once, I am most definitely staying away from these games. But then again, it’s not like I really have a choice – GameTap still refuses to serve gamers outside the United States. Thanks a lot, guys.

“Porridge today, Gromit!” Or rather, an omelette, we guess - one flying out of Wallace’s cranky contraption in all the wrong ways. After their great success with the truly episodic (and 100% brilliant) Sam & Max Seasons 01 and 02, the cartoon-3D geniuses at Telltale Games have announced that they are indeed hard at work on Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventure. Unveiling the game with a whole bunch of screenshots and a teaser video at Comic-Con 2008, Telltale has said that that while they are looking at multiple platforms for launching the game, the game is confirmed only for the PC, leaving Wii and Mac fans hoping for nirvana yet again.

According to the official press release, gamers will be able to play as both Wallace and Gromit, presumably alternating between the two at various stages of the game, as they get themselves in various predicaments and come up with outlandish contraptions to escape trouble. Although we’re not exactly sure if Peter Sallis will be returning to voice Wallace, we’re more than happy to see the naked dog as we wait for the dog-in-a-blue-suit to return to his possessed Desoto and his zany adventures early next year.

And if all that wasn’t enough for the fans, Wallace & Gromit will even be returning to television with an all-new short called “A Matter of Loaf and Death”, along with DVD compilations of the uniquely British duo’s shorts. Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures is expected to be out sometime later this year on PC via the Telltale Store and presumably, Steam.

For a series that was left practically dead after the horrifying Angel of Darkness, Tomb Raider has been revived so well by Crystal Dynamics that it’s now got people who’ve never played the games hopelessly falling in love with it. Having first taken the spunky, extremely well-endowed Lara out for a spin in 1997, and having gone back to where it all began with Anniversary, this deranged, maniacal, slack-jawed Tomb Raider nutcase has seen it all. Having made Legend and Anniversary the best damned games in the series, Crystal Dynamics looks set to pull out all the stops in the upcoming Tomb Raider: Underworld, which already has a quite a bit of fans going “Drake who?”

We sat and dug through the first preview on the PLAY magazine, and we’ve got all the dirt on Lara’s latest adventure. Directly continuing from her adventures in Legend, Tomb Raider: Underworld (as the name suggests) will see Lara explore vast labyrinthian areas around the world, in addition to doing all the monkey stuff that she does in one of the largest, lush areas seen this side of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. While it is not entirely sure how the story will tie in to Legend’s and all that is hinted at in Anniversary, fans might want to look closer into Lord Richard Croft’s words in Anniversary, and at the deeper connections between Jacqueline Natla and Amanda Evert (as in why do they look so much like each other and why Amanda’s operation in Bolivia has crates with Natla Technologies logos on them) to figure out where the story is heading in Underworld.

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Yves Guillemot and Jade Raymond couldn’t be happier. Why wouldn’t they be, considering a certain robed and hooded Santa, complete with a spring-loaded dagger for his ring finger has been stuffing Ubisoft socks with millions of dollars over the last three weeks? The first part in a trilogy involving all sorts of medieval (and futuristic) hijinks, Assassin’s Creed has crossed the 2.5 mn. units sold milestone - recording worldwide sales of 1.51 mn. units for the Xbox 360 and 0.95 mn. units for the PlayStation 3 - making Ubi so damn happy that they have revised their initial financial forecasts and sent them packing straight into orbit.

Announcing that Assassin’s Creed had earned the distinction of becoming the fastest selling new videogame IP in the US ever, Ubisoft now claims that it will sell a minimum of 5 mn. units of the game in 2007-08 instead of the previously estimated $3 mn., with sales targets being raised to €840 mn., an increase of €15 mn. from their previous target. So much for all those “crystal ball gazers” who jumped the gun and screamed from the rooftops about what a phenomenal failure the game was. Hope you got enough quarters for the suicide booth, fellas!

In more good news, if you were worrying about sprunging the house for enough money to buy Tom Clancy’s EndWar, Brothers in Arms 3: Hell’s Highway and Far Cry 2, don’t worry, you won’t have to. The bad news is, the games have now been delayed to the 2008-09 fiscal year, which means you can probably expect to see them sometime around next Christmas, if you’re lucky. We know we’re not, considering we’re still got our keisters parked waiting for Altair to show up around here.

Oh boy, Christmas sure came early this year. And what better way to celebrate the holiday cheer than by having our favorite canine and lagomorph duo deliver their unique brand of esoteric “justice” to dear ol’ Saint Nick? With Ice Station Zebra, I mean.. Ice Station Santa starting off the second season of the Sam & Max episodic adventures, the homicidal, psychopathic “freelance police” set out to stop Santa Claus, who seems to have become a flesh-and-blood version of the evil Robot Santa from Futurama, sending giant battle robots after our heroes and taking a tommy gun to everything in sight.

But obviously, things aren’t always what they seem and Dog Face and Hyperkinetic Rabbity Thing set out on yet another crazy adventure, filled with frenzied gameplay, hilarious gags and characters straight out of a psych ward.

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Azangara is a pretty neat arcade adventure game. You play the role of a sombrero wearing hombre, on the run to gather hidden treasure from castles in the long lost land of Azangara. The dark castles are littered with an assortment of monsters, puzzles and traps that make your life harder. Find keys to doors or force them open with crowbars to reach an exit while collecting as much as booty as you can on the way. The whole point of the game is to explore enough of the castle to gather all of the collectibles to get a high score.

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With Capcom dropping the goods on Dark Void, their upcoming sci-fi action adventure game, at the latest Gamer’s Day event, the first trailer for the game has silently made its way through to GT some time back. All set to make its appearance on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 sometime next year, this God of War-meets-Lost Planet-meets-Battlestar Galactica game promises a good round of third person shooting, GTA-esque hijacking and flying gyroscopic flying contraptions and jetpacking across treacherous floating platforms in space. Hmmm… I’m sold, I suppose.