Howdy folks,

Well, I’m over here in the United Kingdom for a couple weeks with the Future Gamer team, who’ve taken it on themselves to show me the charming, picturesque town of Bath through the bottom of a beer glass.

Who am I to be so lucky? My name’s Jason, I write for the PC section of IGN, which is sort of the US counterpart to Future Gamer (you can find us at The IGN Site). Before that I did some time with the US version of PC Gamer, which incidentally is headed up by a former editor of your own UK version of the mag. Small world.

Anyway, FG’s Andy Smith has asked me to write a piece about what’s hot in computer gaming over in the US right now, as well as what’s looming over the horizon, waiting to be played.

Last year it was hunting games that took the US market by storm. Deer Hunter, Big Game Hunter, Bird Hunter - you couldn’t look at a Top Ten chart of PC games without stumbling over the field-dressed carcasses of four or five hunting sims. Chalk it up to us Yanks’ deep appreciation for the vibrant beauty of the natural world and our innate need to shoot at it.

So what could possibly top the hunting game craze? Well GT Interactive hopes its new Bird Watcher game - I’m not making that up - will kick off a whole new trend. Can Butterfly Collector be far behind?

Seriously, what we’re seeing in the US is that as more and more families buy PCs, more and more games - if you want to call them that - are being aimed at the mass market, (the people who wouldn’t know Warcraft from Quake). So computer game versions of Scrabble, Monopoly, and Hot Wheels as well as an endless parade of Barbie things are stealing shelf space from such hardcore fare such as, say, The Operational Art of War, Volume 1 or Warlords III: Dark Lords Rising.