November 9th isn't all that far away. So with that in mind we're giving you plenty of notice on how best to prepare for Halo 2. Presenting Bungie's own Official Guide to Getting Ready for Halo Tuesday

Techland have released the multi-player demo for Xpand Rally, offering a chance to take this modern rally racing simulation online. This demo offers three tracks and two different cars, playable in arcade and simulation modes on a LAN or the Internet.

GameSpot have thrown up their new preview of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl.

With Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 dominating the landscape for PC first-person shooters this year, THQ and developer GSC GameWorld recently announced that they were pushing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl to early 2005. Part of the reason for this was to give GSC some more time to polish this ambitious and beautiful-looking first-person shooter, but it also didn't hurt that by delaying to 2005.

The chaps over at Quake.de have posted up a nifty little program that can be used to convert the maps from Quake 3 Arena to maps that can be used in DOOM 3.

The Firing Squad have thrown up a new article called GeForce FX and Half-Life 2: DirectX 8 only? It's well worth checking out!

Like most of today?s games, Valve?s Half-Life 2 automatically detects the hardware running inside your PC and configures itself to run with the appropriate settings for your hardware. On the CPU side, this includes looking for features such as MMX and SSE/SSE2, 3DNow!, while graphics hardware is checked for the presence of pixel/vertex shader-capable hardware, and if present, shading capability (i.e. DX8/DX8.1, DX9, etc).

Over the past week we've seen a deluge of Counter-Strike: Source performance articles. For the most part, coverage has focused on graphics cards, but there's more to the Counter-Strike: Source performance story than pixel-pushing power. In addition to higher polygon counts, bigger textures, and fancy shader effects, CS: Source also features a surround sound audio engine that wraps in-game audio around five speakers.

There is a playable demo of Obscure - Learn about Fear, offering an opportunity to try out this third-person survival horror adventure by Hydravision Entertainment. Details on the contents of this demo are scarce, but it starts you off in a basketball gym.

Codemasters has now released the single-player demo for Colin McRae Rally 2005, allowing you to take their upcoming modern rally racing simulation for a spin. The demo contains three tracks located in Germany, Sweden and the U.K. that are drivable in three different cars (Peugeot 206, Toyota Celica GT-four, Lancia Stratos).

An update to the Counter-Strike: Source beta has just been released. Steam will update itself automatically when you restart. Here is a list of the changes:

The eagerly anticipated playable demo for Rome: Total War is now available, allowing you to try out the upcoming 3D turn-based and real-time strategy sequel that is nearing completion at Creative Assembly. This demo contains a tutorial playable as the Roman Julii Family, and the historical Battle of Trebia map playable as the Carthaginians.

GGMania reports that GameFusion has released a sound pack (v1.0) for Counter-Strike: Source which replaces most of the weapon sounds within the game.

Joel Hruska from sudhian.com wrote an article about gaming today, and expresses his concerns about the possible future of gaming. While most of you guys will say "Joel who?", his views are interesting and the article is well worth a read:

Electronic Arts has now released the World War II mod for Battlefield Vietnam, expanding Digital Illusions' recent 3D multiplayer action game with three maps from their earlier game Battlefield 1942. Included in the hefty download are Invasion of the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Wake Island, complete with all the vehicles and weapons from the original game, all tweaked for the BFV engine and adding that game's flamethrowers into the mix.

Wargaming.net releases new Butterfly planet for its online strategy game Massive Assault Network, making total number of planets 11. This is a small planet shaped as butterfly. It has moderate resources and little natural obstacles. It has been designed for fast World Wars with massive armored strikes - the open ground does not favor defensive tactics.

Today VR-Zone Hardware brings you part two of their three part series on benchmarking using the Source Engine. Today we use Valve's Source Engine Stress Test to show how ATI and NVIDIA's high-end and mid-ranged cards will perform in Half-Life 2. Also included are benchmarks with NVIDIA's beta 65.62 drivers.

This is a AVI demo in 640x480 of the Half-Life 2 Stress test that has been loaded with the Counter-Strike: Source beta.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at 3DGPU.com

You may remember I had posted details last week that UltraShadow II wasn?t being utilized for Doom 3, like most of you had expected it would. John Carmack mentioned that it can be enabled, but it may require unreleased drivers.

Gamers Depot have posted their early benchmarks of the newly released Source Engine Benchmark tool in the Counter Strike Beta.

Steampowered: Counter-Strike: Source Beta Opens
The second phase of the Counter-Strike: Source beta has opened and the game is now playable for owners of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and the ATI/HL2 bundle. During this limited-time beta, issues can be reported using the in-game bug-reporting tool. In addition any crashes will automatically generate a report back to Valve's bug database.

Gabe Newell himself has posted a topic on Half Life 2 Fallout saying that HL2 will begin pre-loading tomorrow!