Doom 3 has been billed as one of the biggest games of 2004. With a massive fan-base and a huge 4 year development time, John Carmack and the wizards at id software hope to have created something that will rock the gaming world. Indeed, even if Doom3 itself is not the success it hopes to be, the parts which make up the game should live long in the PC gaming world. A preview is up at gameSlave and offers some food for thought as we await this highly anticipated title.

Immerse yourself in the largest massively multiplayer online role-playing game in North America. For a limited time only, Sony Online Entertainment is offering EverQuest Classic plus two expansion packs, The Ruins of Kunark and The Scars of Velious, including up to 30 days of gameplay, as a FREE download to people with registered Station Accounts which do not currently and have not had an EverQuest account. Certain Restrictions Apply.

Half a year after the US edition, Atari has released a European edition of the XMP (Extended Multiplayer) add-on full install for owners of Unreal II - the Awaking, expanding Legend Studios' sci-fi first-person shooter. This release deploys the latest version (7710), and as before it's a standalone game that requires a Unreal II Play disc to install, and features eight maps, three vehicles, and three character classes.

IGN-PC reports that while it may not be a copy of Half-Life 2 in your hot hands, this is fun news nonetheless: Valve announced today that beta testing for the much-anticipated Counter-Strike: Source will commence later this summer. Players at CyberCafes hosting Valve software will be the first to have a chance at the beta, followed by owners of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. The beta will be distributed over Valve's Steam distribution client.

Open Mortal is a parody of the once popular coin-up fighting game, Mortal Kombat, for Windows and Linux. It is currently playable, has 16 playable characters, some more in the making. New characters can be added, so be a Open Mortal actor today!

DreamCatcher has now released a new patch for Painkiller, bringing the frantic first-person shooter to version 1.3. This release adds enhanced networking code, performance tweaks, support for All-Seeing Eye, gameplay improvements, bug fixes and more, and it's accompanied by a standalone Win32 server that allows server operators to host games without requiring to install the full game.

We have released a utility for those users who unfortunately lost their saved games and profiles after applying the 1.0.0.7 patch. The SaveFixxer utility will allow users to recover the lost save files by importing them into any profile created after the 1.0.0.7 patch has been applied. For those users who have lost their profiles as well as their saved games after installing the 1.0.0.7 patch, this utility can be used to recover the saved games from the deleted profiles as well.

Blizzard Entertainment invites you to be among the first to experience the World of Warcraft? in Europe. We?re looking for a few mighty heroes to help us beta test the game and tune the performance of our dedicated European server network. Official closed beta sign ups commence today, 5th July and will end after three weeks. A few thousand randomly selected applicants will then be emailed advance keys to enter the online, massively multiplayer World of Warcraft.

Laut der Prüfstelle Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK) besteht bei der englischen ungeschittenen Version vom kommenden Shooter Doom3 keine Jugendgefährdung. Das Spiel darf in Regalen der Läden stehen und ab 18 verkauft werden. Eine nachträgliche Indizierung durch die BPjM ist nun auch unmöglich. Quelle: GameStar

3D Gamers reports that GSC Game World has released a set of four new movie trailers for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, showing more from their futuristic first-person role-playing action game in development. These "Behind the Game" clips come in low and high resolutions, and they demonstrate the game's premise and many of its features in a combined 14 minutes of gameplay footage narrated by THQ global brand manager Darryl Williams.

Driverheaven have just published their latest article, which looks at the performance and IQ (or lack of it) when using FarCry patch 1.2.

In a few hours Ubisoft/Crytek will be releasing the much anticipated patch for Farcry which upgrades the game to version 1.2. As per most game updates there are various performance tweaks and bug fixes however in FarCry 1.2 we have the addition of Shader Model 3.0 features for Geforce 6800 series cards.

Amazon.co.uk are showing a release date of December 31st, 2004 for Activision's Quake IV! What do you think?

Planet Half-Life reports that Jabba The Hunt has built a program which generates a script allowing you to play a selection of mp3 files within any Half-Life game or mod.

Games Domain have posted a preview of Need for Speed Underground 2! Here's a snip.

Need for Speed: Underground proved to be one of 2003's best-selling games. This was no surprise considering it featured the flashiest visuals yet seen in the genre, purveyed a phenomenal sense of speed, and offered gear-heads plenty of customization options for their vehicle.

As the graphics wars between ATI and NVIDIA have escalated, one of the most favored weapons of both sides has been performance comparisons in big-name games. We've already seen performance previews of Doom III and Half-Life 2, made possible by graphics chip companies, despite the fact that neither game was anywhere near shipping at the time those previews were published.

Blizzard released v1.16 patch for one of the most popular RTS/RPG multiplay game around! grab it from blizzard's ftp site.

Plenty of brand new hi-res screens and renders straight from Bungie!

The highly anticapated total conversion mod for Medal Of Honor Allied Assault "Modern-Warfare" is scheduled to be released tomorow 07-02-04 at 6pm(est)

Modern-Warfare has been in development for 2 years, The download of the 120mb file will include 7 new maps, 15 new weapons, about 50 new skins and a flyable chopper with rockets and a minigun to keep you entertained. So dust off those old moh:aa discs, reinstall the game and download Modern-Warfare. Check out the Modern-warfare site for more Info!

Wargaming.Net announces "Twin Islands" planet and a new patch for Massive Assault Network

This planet is specially designed for massive naval battles: two equal continents are separated by sea. There are no small economy countries - only large and medium ones. That will ensure that the players will have enough resources for recruiting big numbers of expensive units including Battleships and Carriers. The war on this planet will be full of D-Day-style amphibious operations.

Patch 1.2 is in its final stage of production: a nasty scoreboard bug and a CDkey security issue remain to be fixed, but otherwise a huge list of improvement/fixes have been implemented and tested successfully.