Acclaim UK has released a playable demo of Kreed, offering a chance to try out this futuristic first-person shooter by Russian developer Burut. This demo contains an introduction cutscene, two single-player missions titled "Arc of Secret Light" and "Skirmish in Holy City," and a pair of deathmatch maps called "Dungeon" and "Aspero."

Security firm Secunia, has released a security advisory on the Unreal Engine used in Unreal Tournament 2004. It seems the Unreal Engine has a very dangerous security vulnerability in it that will allow malicious people to take over your computer. The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error within the processing of secure queries, which are used to verify that a queried server is a legit Unreal server. This can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow by sending an overly long challenge string to a vulnerable server. Read more..

Official launch date of August 3rd, 2004 confirmed?

The first official screenshots from Konami's new Metal Gear title for Sony's PSP.

PC-IGN reports that in an interview posted on Homelan Fed late Friday, Valve's Gabe Newell provided a delicious hint at the status of Half-Life 2. When asked how the title is coming along, he replied, "Good. It's in great shape. We anticipate delivering it to Vivendi in August

Ubi Soft Entertainment has released new patches for Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow to bring the North American, French Canadian, and European/Asian editions of their stealthy 3D action game to version 1.3. This release contains a new ranking management system, several networking improvements and fixes, and a few other changes as detailed in the release notes.

Here's a Unreal Tournament 2004 tweak guide! That's well worth checking out posted over at TweakGuides.

Now Epic Games, Digital Extremes and Atari have worked long and hard to introduce Unreal Tournament 2004. More than just an incremental upgrade from UT2003, it returns Unreal Tournament to its roots. The character models, guns, music and maps all look and play like UT. Bigger, better and with a great new gameplay mode called Onslaught, UT2004 is the real thing.

Just got word from the 'Reverend' aka Anthony Tan over at Beyond3D that their interview with Epic's Tim Sweeney on Unreal Engine 3 is out! Here's a byte.

Recently at the Game Developers Conference as well as at NVIDIA's launch of the GeForce 6/NV40, one of the highlights of both events was the demonstration of Epic Games' next-generation engine called UnrealEngine3 (UE3 for short). Although the engine is still about 2 years away from completion, its public showing in its current state left almost everyone in awe of the technologies showcased and as explained in snippets by Epic's co-founder Tim Sweeney.

Eidos has issued the first patch for Thief: Deadly Shadows, bringing the stealthy 3D action sequel by ION Storm to version 1.1. This release addresses the difficulty reset bug when loading saved games, and is save-game compatible with the original game.

Eidos - 3D Gamers

PC.IGN have thrown up their hands-on experience with Star Wars Battlefront for the PC!

Rather than actually go into work yesterday morning, I decided to drive up to San Rafael to play a little Star Wars Battlefront. The team's currently working to meet its September 21 ship date and offered us a chance to come and try the current PC build for ourselves. (Star Wars Battlefront is being designed by Pandemic Studios for the Xbox, PS2, and PC, and will ship simultaneously to all three systems in September.)

Bungie writes we've finally updated our concept, print and screenshot galleries to include hi-res versions of the assets featured in the Game Informer Halo 2 issue. But as a special bonus, we explore those levels just a little more closely.

Wargaming.Net announces the patch v. 1.2.209 for Massive Assault Network: This update contains all the fixes from the previous patches. It fixes some critical bugs with Air units, adds new enhancements to game's chat and firing effects. All this has greatly improved the already spectacular gameplay, making for an incredible turn-based experience.

3D Gamers reports that two months after the Russian demo, there is now an English playable demo of Silent Storm: Sentinels, renewing the opportunity to try out Nival Interactive's 3D turn-based strategy expansion in a language you may be more familiar with. This demo sees you taking the role of female American sniper Toby in three missions.

This upgrade features:

Improved the ghost car tracking system, to improve the visibility over LAN/Internet. Controller calibration is now smoother and less hard to control. The gear box testing sections are now better balanced. The game now report the ready state correctly in LAN/Internet multiplayer modes. Added code to display name, damage, tracks, etc when using GameSpy Arcade.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at Atari's forum.

Epic just made the latest version of the patch official and final version of the patch is 3236.

The Stargate BFM mod has been released for the public to enjoy. This mod promises to bring the Stargate world to the Battlefield with many new vehicles, weapons and more.

Wargaming.net today reveals the first 42 screenshots of its upcoming turn-based strategy game Massive Assault: Phantom Renaissance. The Screens can be viewed at: PhantomRenaissance.com

EuroGamer reports that the Half-Life 2 release date saga continued to rumble on this weekend, with an Autumn release date now mooted as the title's likely launch window despite development on the hugely-anticpated game reportedly being completed in a matter of a few weeks .

Reports emanating from Half Life Radio in the US state that Valve will deliver the game to publisher Vivendi in the next few weeks, in line with the Seattle-based developer's recent promises that work on the project would be finished this summer. In fact, Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi restated last week that the game was still "on target" for the summer.

GamesRadar have snagged the first trailer for Far Cry Instincts the Xbox incarnation.

Here's some of the latest games patches that are doing the rounds!

Painkiller Patch v1.2 Perimeter Patch v1.01 SÖLDNER - Secret Wars Patch v28446