Christmas isn't here yet. For gamers everywhere, this is bad. Why? Because it means finding a stack of games wrapped in Christmas paper under the tree is still a while away, so in the meantime they're still the ones shelling out for new titles. With less than three months to go to the big day you'll want to be saving your pennies for the good stuff rather than throwing them away on some of those gaming atrocities out now. With that in mind, here are a few tips for games to watch for over the next few months, ten of them in fact, along with a few exclusive screenshots for some titles. If you're lucky some of the games might even get released around December so you can stick them on your list for Santa.

American McGee's Alice is being called the “third chapter” in the Alice series that started with the two books “Alice In Wonderland” and “Alice Through The Looking Glass.” In this spiritual and binary successor, things in Wonderland appear to have taken a turn for the worse. Wonderland, which, let's face it, has always been pretty screwed up, has now also been screwed over by the Red Queen. Once clear skies are now filled with dark clouds, and the land is now swarming with evil card guards of the Red Queen.

Wonderland is in dire straits indeed, but surely that nice, gentle, light-blue dress-wearing little Alice from the books isn't going to sort this all out? Not quite. Looking at the Alice in the game you'd guess that the nice young lass from the books is now not so young and certainly not so nice (the knife she's holding is a dead giveaway). Alice has gone through “the teenage thing” and come out wearing black eye liner, an altogether darker shade of blue dress and a look on her face that says “if this look doesn't kill you, I will.” Of course, she's quickly going to need more than a mere knife to carve up the evil hordes that have invaded Wonderland. In fitting with the overall theme of a children's fantasyland gone bad, Alice will get to wield such twisted items as a dangerous croquet mallet, razor sharp playing cards and even the odd explosive jack-in-the-box (I can imagine the packaging now - “Parental Warning: May Detonate When Used”). Continuation of this theme of Wonderland gone bad, Rogue have even employed the talents of ex-Nine Inch Nails drummer Chris Vrenna to produce the sound track. Some of the spooky soundtrack is played out on toy xylophones, pianos and other such instruments. Weird as it may seem, judging from recently released MP3 samples, using such odd instruments makes the music rather haunting and strange, just as was probably intended.