Once again PC games are in the news and being blamed for a violent crime. Pressure is growing for a bloodthirsty video game to be banned after it was blamed for the horrific muder of a 14 years old boy by an older friend.

Ubi Soft have released new patches for Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, bringing the North American, French Canadian, and European/Asian editions of their third-person stealthy action sequel to version 1.31. This release addresses the "spy teleportation problem" and a Punkbuster installation issue.

Gamer's Hell - 3D Gamers

A new patch for Battlefield Vietman is available. The patch will update the
game to version 1.1 (135 MB)

PlanetDoom reports there have been rumours flying around lately that DOOM 3 would not be able to run on computers that have Windows 98 or Windows 98SE as their operating systems. Since we here at planetDOOM dislike rumours in all shapes and sizes, we went straight to the horses mouth so to speak and asked Activision themselves. The reply we got was that it is confirmed and indeed true that DOOM 3 will only run on Windows machines that have windows 2000 or XP and not lower. So there you have it, looks like some peoples upgrading woes just aren't quite over yet.

Robert Duffy has updated his .plan file with news of a "Ultra" quality setting for Doom 3 and 3DRealms Forum are hosting scans of Doom3 reviews from PC-ACtion , PCGamer and PCPP

The announcement of the 1.2 patch for Far Cry caused quite a commotion - Certainly far more of a stir than you would normally expect from a simple update for an already available game title. The reason for this was, of course, the fact that this was no ordinary patch. Rather than simply a rag-bag of bug fixes with the odd new map or little feature thrown in for good measure, the patch announcement had one big, show-stopping change - The addition of Shader Model 3.0 support.

3D Gamers reports Empire Interactive has released a playable demo for Mashed, offering a chance to try out the recent top-down 3D arcade action racing game by Supersonic Software. This demo contains the Tierra Piedra track, playable in time trial, quick battle, and multiplayer modes.

HL2World.com is delighted to confirm that a playable version of Haf-Life 2 and Counter Strike:Source will be on hand at this year's G-Phoria.

Valve's Doug Lombardi today confirmed with HL2World.com that both versions will be at the July 31st G-Phoria awards show aired on G4/Tech TV.

Ubisoft has taken the decision to withdraw this patch due to issues experienced by a number of users. An official statement follows:

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GGMania reports that Ally Russell sent me some links to the latest footage on DOOM 3 - the Icons footage from TechTV! We have a local mirror for the movie (110.8MB).

There are already two solutions available that may work on your FarCry installation. The first is about the ATI videocard issue and the second is about the Multiplayer issue (getting kicked out of gameservers). Also a short list about other issues discoverd is posted. Check it out! Other issues discoverd: Sounds, mice, aim etc..

GameSpy have thrown up their chat with id Software's Tim Willits, Todd Hollenshead and Marty Stratton as they talk about their highly anticipated return to Mars and what's next on the horizon.

GameSpy: When did you actually wrap up development?

The small-yet-epic Halo 2 theatrical trailer is now available to watch online.

Thanks to Mackey D for pointing me in the direction of this article posted over at Beta Connect!

Today Chris and I visited Valve's offices in Bellevue. We got some interesting pictures, and learned some new information.

This was posted over at HL2 World Forum by jb55 which tells us a bit about the status of Half-Life 2.

The super-intelligent over at hl2central are saying hl2 is being delayed once again. Please give me a quote of some kind so I can prove them wrong and get the news corrected.

Just give me a simple yes or no, is it delayed again? Thank you for your time.

HardOCP has a 5 page story about id releasing benchmarks for Doom 3 using the latest videocards from ATI and nVidia. The story also includes a introduction from John Carmack himself where he assures us that the results should be cheat-free since none of the videocard vendors were able to access the demo beforehand .

The folks at id Software have been kind enough to share with us benchmarks from the upcoming DOOM 3. We look at NVIDIA's and ATI's finest in a head to head comparison.

Ubi Soft Entertainment have released the eagerly anticipated new patch for Far Cry, bringing the tropical island first-person shooter by Crytek Studios to version 1.2. This release adds quicksave support, increases run speeds and sprint lengths, fixes some Punkbuster problems, addresses a large number of gameplay issues, applies various optimizations and weapon tweaks, and squashes more bugs.

Update: Here's the Changelog for Far Cry 1.2.

Doom3Center reports an enhanced version of the recent DooM³ movie is now available in a 320x240 resolution trailer and for those of you wondering about SDK? Click on the screenshot.

HomeLAN Fed posted 2 DOOM-related interviews today
The first interview is held with the creator of the upcoming Official DOOM Board Game. In the second interview HomeLAN Fed talks to the author of the "Making of DOOM3" book.

PlanetDoom reports cha0s dropped us a line and let us know that Tweaker's blog/music site, http://www.myspace.com/tweaker, has the full version of the DOOM 3 Theme song up on their site for your listening pleasure. There was a 20 second clip of it released on DOOM3.com last week but with this full 2 minute version, you can rock out all you want.