My latest gaming obsession is the new real-time strategy game, Company of Heroes. It's easily one of the best games of the year for the PC. And it's quite possibly one of the best real-time strategy games ever made. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, the game currently has a 95% review average on GameRankings with 13 reviews, which puts it squarely on track to be one of the top 10 best reviewed PC games of all time.

It's so good, in fact, that I was compelled to complete every optional objective in the campaign missions.

The Company of Heroes demo is a whopping 1.8 gigabytes in size, but it offers a significant chunk of the game: unlimited, unlocked skirmish mode against the CPU and two single player maps.

Sure, the World War II genre has been done to death. But this is a real-time strategy game with incredible graphical detail, dynamic, destructible levels, and unparalleled unit intelligence and tactics. It elevates the entire real-time strategy genre to the next level.

Company of Heroes is the first new game I installed after installing Vista RC1. Coincidentally, it's also one of the first games with Microsoft's "Games for Windows" certification, which means (among other things) that it integrates automatically into Vista's Games menu.

Needless to say, highly recommended. If you've ever played and enjoyed an RTS game of any type, buy this game immediately. For everyone else, get the demo and try it yourself. I think you'll be impressed.