If you subscribe to PC Gamer without the disc (which is cool, although we think you’re missing out, but that’s another conversation), you can still participate in the Lord Of The Rings Online beta. Just click here for instructions on how to get the client, and then use the key in the magazine to get hooked up.

Want one of these little guys for your very own? On April 3, grab the May issue of PC Gamer!

By Chuck Osborn, Senior Executive Editor

Apparently, this is a big day for Xbox 360 owners. It’s the day that Guitar Hero 2 finally rocks the 360 like a hurricane and carries players’ broken wings up a stairway to heaven in a vat of cherry pie. Or something like that. Anyway, the game is out and everyone wants it…which makes me want a copy even though I’ve never played it before.

by Andy Salisbury, Intern
This past weekend I had many goals that I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to teach myself how to cook, take that jog that I’d been putting off since my recent trip to Texas and lastly, I wanted something to spend my time on other than WoW. What game was up to the challenge?

by Kristen Salvatore, Executive Editor

As I mentioned on one of our podcasts—ok, and to pretty much anyone else who’d tolerate me talking about it—that I was lucky enough to create a SPORE creature that EA kindly “printed” for me on one of their newfangled 3D printers.

By Dan Stapleton, Assistant Editor
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is finally out and on shelves! You’ve all read what PC Gamer thinks of it, now we want to hear from you. Post your thoughts in our forums! What’s your favorite faction? What’s the best superweapon? Got any good multiplayer strategies yet? Who’s your favorite actor in the live-action cutscenes? Oh, and feel free to post links to your profile and game replays for others to enjoy. I’ll be posting mine in another couple of weeks—why do they time these games to come out right when I’m going on vacation?

By Chuck Osborn, Senior Executive Editor

“The anus is unremarkable.”

To me, nothing in this world would be a lamer final testament to a life lived than the above sentence. And yet, that’s exactly what was revealed yesterday in the official autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith—she had an unremarkable anus. True, she lived a life that had more ups and downs than a methamphetamine shake with a Thorazine chaser, was a movie star (sorta), and even had her own TV show on the E! Network (one of my personal goals), but in the final analysis, she died while burdened with an unremarkable anus. Which got me thinking…would I die with the gaming equivalent of an unremarkable anus?

by Logan Decker, Senior Editor

I bought some boots at the boot store. Big, heavy butt-kickers. But I took them home and realized that my new boots made me look like a jackass, so I took them back. I saw another pair of boots that looked a little more mellow, so I bought those instead. The new boots were cheaper than the old boots—$75 cheaper! I was beside myself. I thought about all the cools things I could do with the money I’d saved, like buy shoelaces: endless and endless pairs of shoelaces.

Click here to download the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars preview missing from the April issue.

By Kristen Salvatore, Executive Editor
Unlike many of my contemporaries, my life as a gamer didn’t start on the Atari 2600. My hippie-dippy parents, who were committed to exposing their children only to wholesome stuff like no-sugar-added peanut butter and macramé, decreed that a videogame console was bad news, often while filling our Easter baskets with fruit leather and carob chips.

By Dan Stapleton, Assistant Editor

Last night EA held an event here in San Francisco to celebrate the impending launch of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. As PC Gamer’s resident C&C3 expert, I was sent to represent us in the first official multiplayer tournament.

By Norman Chan, Master Intern

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been playing through S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, the long awaited shooter set in the aftermath of theoretical second nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Long delayed after development woes and even considered by many gamers as vaporware, you’ll finally be able to enjoy the game this month when it hits store shelves. I’ll save the details of my experience with game for my upcoming review in the magazine, but here’re a couple of nuggets and impressions for you to digest in the meantime.

By Logan Decker, Senior Editor

My roommate’s girlfriend cannot use her hair dryer at the same time I’m playing Half Life 2: Episode One.

Yes, it’s come to that. My rig at home, with a quad-core processor and dual GeForce 8800 GTXs in SLI config inhales so much freakin’ power out of the outlet that if Marla fires up the blow dryer at the same time, all the lights go out and the sounds cuts off with an abrupt "dyooom!" noise and there I am sitting in the dark wondering if Gordon is still fighting the good fight somewhere out there in a parallel universe where houses are wired to deliver enough juice to power a high-end gaming rig, a blow dryer, a foot massager, and a small heating pad for the cat all at the same time without flipping the circuit breakers or bursting into a cloud of spark, smoke, and radiant light like an electric pickle.

This is not the universe I live in, I am sorry to say.

So this is something to think about the next time you move. Can your home’s internal wiring handle all the gaming-fu you can throw at it? And did you know people still use blow dryers?

By Dan Stapleton, Assistant Editor

The other day a copy of Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku landed on my desk. Not being British, I had no idea who that was, but hey, I like Sudoku. (Wikipedia reveals she’s a well-known TV host with a reported IQ of 150+, so I guess she’s qualified to teach me about Sudoku.) Plus, there’s a picture of a hottie on the box, which is scientifically proven to grab the attention of young, virile men like myself.

So I logged off of WoW for a bit and gave it a whirl. The interface screens treated me to more glamour shots of young Ms. Vorderman strutting her stuff, provocatively chewing her pen and openly flirting with the Sudoku board. Not bad, not bad at all.

After proving my chops in the medium level difficulty (despite the visual distraction) and then getting stumped at hard, I decided to turn to the advanced training videos, hosted by Carol herself, to see if I could improve on my skills. But when I started up the video, I was greeted by a much older woman who launched right into the lesson. “Oh, that’s strange,” I thought. “These videos are hosted by Carol’s mom. Maybe she’ll bring out her daughter in a bit.”

Then it dawned on me—I’d been had.

By Dan Stapleton, Assistant Editor

Of all the sights and sounds of GDC, the one thing that kept drawing me back was a familiar one: the Crysis demo running at the Intel booth, set up to demo a quad core CPU. EA and CryTek have been holding this one close to their chest, so this was the same demo everyone’s seen since CES last year, with some minor tweaks and updates (the ability to blow out car tires, for example, has been added). Even though I’d gone through it a couple of times before, I could still have played it all day (much to the dismay of the people waiting in line behind me). The booth staff got to know me pretty well during the past few days, because they just couldn’t get me to go away.

I have a confession to make: When I decided to make the Guild Wars Nightfall announcement PC Gamer’s November 2006 coverstory, I wasn’t sure how well it would sell. Of course, you never really know in advance how well an issue is going to do at newsstand; all you can do is make an educated guess based on what you think your readers will like in conjunction with what you know has sold well for you in the past. But in this case, man, I’m tellin’ ya I was really going out on a limb. Sure, at the time Guild Wars had sold two million copies (and has now sold more than three million), but up to that point, MMO covers had typically done less-than-stellar business for PCG. But something in my gut told me to go for it, and it became one of our best sellers of the year.