Total PC Gaming magazine issue 14 goes on sale today! Get the lowdown on Diablo III with our exclusive first play, the dirt on Colin McRae DiRT 2 with our exclusive first look, we blow Call Of Duty: World At War open in our bombastic review and put four 24-inch monitors through their paces in our group test, plus more PC gaming goodness besides.

Get 132 pages rammed with reviews, previews, indies, retro, modding, MMO and gaming hardware, a free PC upgrading guidebook and a DVD packed with demos, video commentary and £40 worth of free software from the Imagine Publishing E-shop or any good newsagent.

In the tradition of Fallout 3 acronyms, it’s been called the G.E.C.K. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit), it’s the official editor for Fallout 3 and it’s being released on the PC some time in January. This comes less than a month after Bethesda frontman and Vice President of PR and Marketing, Pete Hines, claimed the editor and mods weren’t on the radar. The editor will be offered as a free download to Fallout 3 PC owners - just like the TES construction kit for Oblivion - while paid downloadable content including ‘Operation: Anchorage‘, ‘The Pit‘ and ‘Broken Steel‘ will be released in instalments for both the PC and 360 from January onwards.

Tabula Rasa is to end its live service on 28 February 2009. “Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn’t performed as expected,” came the statement from the TR team in an open letter to the community, “[Tabula Rasa] never achieved the player population we hoped for.” The move by publisher NCsoft comes as no real surprise as the MMO has been flagging since its release last November. This announcement comes shortly after luminary Richard Garriott made public his farewells to NCsoft on 11 November, stating “new interests” following his trip into space as his reason for leaving.

Before the shut down, servers will become free to play on 10 January 2009. Read NCsoft’s letter here and Garriott’s statement here.

Planet Fallout is in the process of mapping Fallout 3 using Google Maps. Currently, 65 users have contributed to the site that now has 418 markers detailing where quests, items, easter eggs etc can be found, with all the functionality provided by Google Maps, including a zoom in/out feature. Contributers are being rewarded with points according to the importance of their findings and a high-score table has been included on the site. Check it out here.

Llamasoft’s insane XBLA shooter, Space Giraffe, is coming to the PC. The original game divided opinion in the 360 community, prompting a hissy fit from designer Jeff Minter, who stated he would not make any more games. There’s no official release date yet, but developer Ivan Zorzin (aka Giles) revealed on the Llamasoft blog that some of the more psychedelic of the 100 new levels for the PC will be toned down: “Some of them could be a bit more ‘vanilla’.”

Ubisoft has acquired the Swedish developer of World In Conflict, Massive Entertainment. The studio was closed following the Activision-Blizzard merger, though there was never much doubt over the future of the successful development team. The rights to the World In Conflict franchise also pass to the publisher, and follows a trend of cuts and acquisitions by publishers including Atari picking the rights to Ghostbusters and THQ dropping several of its studios to focus on core titles.

Atari officially announced today that it will be publishing the forthcoming Ghostbusters game, formerly a Vivendi title dropped after the Activision-Blizzard merge. “Ghostbusters: The Video Game is a fantastic addition to Atari’s global line-up in 2009,” said Phil Harrison, president of Atari’s parent company, Infogrames Entertainment. This comes shortly after Hollywood actor and Ghostbusters writer, Dan Aykroyd, commented that the Alone In The Dark publisher had picked the title up and that it was about a year away from release.

Intriguingly, at the time of writing, the Ghostbusters game website (www.ghostbustersgame.com) still has the Sierra (a subsidiary of Vivendi) logo on it.

Market research firm DFC Intelligence has issued a new Online Game Market Forecast, which shows online game revenue passed $7 billion in 2007. That figure, which doesn’t include retail sales, is set to reach $19 billion by 2013. Those figures will, of course, depend on whether or not the entire planet gets sucked into a financial hole (wasn’t life much simpler when we temporarily worried about CERN creating a black hole?). But when you take into account that the PC Gaming Alliance estimates there are currently 263 million online PC gamers, you do have to wonder why people continue to say the PC market is dead or dying. From where we are sitting, it seems very much alive and kicking.

China has levied a 20 per cent personal income tax on all virtual currencies. It specifically targets all those that profit from the redistribution of virtual currencies, with officials being able to determine the value of the virtual currency if an individual fails to prove the original price. This will affect those that redistribute currencies for web portals and messaging services as well games.

The repercussions in the Western world will prove very interesting: China is the infamous host to a large majority of almost untouchable MMO gold farmers. This latest development can only come as good news to the likes of Activision-Blizzard, Codemasters Online and GOA, whose terms and conditions for their respective MMOs strictly forbid real-world trading of virtual currencies for cash. If our limited knowledge of economics are anything to go by, then no doubt we will see a uniform increase in the black market price of all MMO currencies even a small decline in trade.

At the time of writing, there’s a live interview on the subject of Fallout 3 with Pete Hines, vice president of PR and marketing at Bethesda Softworks, on Eurogamer. Conversation has covered a range of Fallout 3 topics, but most notable include those that involve forthcoming downloadable content, PC version patches and the current level cap:

On taking characters beyond Level 20:

Pete Hines: No plans to increase the level cap beyond 20. We think at that point you’re plenty tough enough.

On downloadable content:

Pete Hines: We’re working on stuff that adds multiple hours of gameplay; new quests, content, enemies, etc. Something along the lines of Knights Of The Nine for Oblivion in size and scope.

On PC patches:

Pete Hines: As far as fixes, there’s a PC update coming out later today that will address a few PC-specific things that have come up.

On drivable vehicles:

Pete Hines: Nope, no driveable vehicles. Sorry.

It’s shame about the level cap, though there are obviously balancing issues at stake here, but good news on the downloadable content: Knights Of The Nine was a pretty hefty series of quests and content in one expansion. Check the full interview out here.