The latest in the Total War series promises to deliver a strategy gaming experience drenched in detail.

We're big fans of Creative Assembly's Total War series. Like the original games, you have the option of playing through various campaigns, or jumping straight into the tactical game with historical scenarios or custom battles.

TimeGate Studios' original Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns caused a bit of a stir back in 2001 by defying a few of the realtime strategy genre's long established conventions.

The Total War series is undoubtedly one of the best wargame experiences of the past few years. Activision has built on the success of Shogun: Total War and gradually improved an already terrific engine with successive sequels.

Pyro Studios, the development team behind the Commandos series, has turned its hand to the hybrid RTS/ table-top strategy genre – a genre which consists primarily of Creative Assembly’s brilliant Total War games.

Dare we say the near-perfect strategy game? A royal treat for history addicts.

Specialist developer ProSim, which cemented its reputation with the impressive Armoured Task Force wargame engine, now takes things a little further with Raging Tiger: The Second Korean War.

No sane gamer is going to head out and buy this as their new console, but we'd advise 360 and Wii owners not to forget about Dre - there's some truly superb games still coming out for PS

RTS gaming for grown-ups.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was a huge hit a few years ago, boasting a D-Day landing most of us will never forget. Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault takes the war to the Japanese; across Pearl Harbour, Guadalcanal and the Makin and Tarawa Atolls.

Format war? What format war?

RTS is getting tired and repetitive, and Star Wars games have been famous for almost always being bad.

A much-hyped console epic comes to the PC, but unlike others that have made the move this deserves its press.

If you're buying a new 360, get an Elite - simple as that. If you've already got one, this is pretty much a cosmetic upgrade – but you might want to look into getting the separate 120GB hard drive when it comes out...

The processor struggle continues between AMD and Intel as the war rages on for the top ranking of the market share table. Interestingly enough, of the four machines this month under the $2,500 price tag, Scorpion Technology's Z-Box was the only unit to feature an AMD Althon XP processor. Also interesting was the marginal gains achieved by Intel given their obvious clock speed advantages over this unit.

Even with falling hardware prices, the expense and yet to be finalised format war rages on with DVD writing technology deterring many a consumer. DVD+R/RW appear to be making headway gradually with both format flexibility and hardware integration into next generation platforms.

The control is simple.

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.

If there is one camera that truly possessed a funky design, then the Ricoh RDC-7 is it. The camera is flat, in much the same vein as the late seventies style cameras, or what you might expect in a funky seventies Cold War spy flick.

What could have been the perfect RTS game is marred by poor performance.