BoomTown reports a news post on THQ?s official site in Germany announces an open beta test of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?s multiplayer portion. 5000 gamers will get the chance to test the game?s multiplayer action well before the official release in Q1 2005.

Prepare for battle. LucasArts is excited to announce that the highly anticipated action/shooter, Star Wars Battlefront has officially GONE GOLD on PS2, Xbox and PC and is scheduled to blast its way onto store shelves on Tuesday, September 21, 2004 --- day and date with the Star Wars Trilogy, which marks the first time all three classic films will be available on DVD.

The Firing Squad have thrown up part 2 of their Counter-Strike: Source Beta performance test for mainstream cards.

With the high-end cards covered, it's now time to look at how the mainstream cards perform with Counter-Strike: Source beta. In this article, Brandon rounds up the latest $200 offerings from ATI and NVIDIA. Cards benchmarked include the RADEON 9800 PRO, 9600/9600 PRO/XT, 9500/9500 PRO and RADEON 8500 128MB, while the NVIDIA cards represented include the GeForce FX 5600/5600 Ultra, 5700/5700 Ultra, GeForce FX 5900 XT, GeForce4 Ti 4200/Ti 4600 and even GeForce3 64MB! See how all 15 cards stack up against each other in our latest article!

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:

For all you battlefield gamers out there, the merciless creators have released the LONG and I do mean LONG awaited update to merciless. It is now version 1.6 client side mod. This has some really great modifications to BF here is a download link.

GameGuru just informed us that the recently realeased D-Day game from Digital Jesters has reall big installation problems due to corrupted (obviously not tested) CD-ROM's.

The Firing Squad have thrown up a new article called GeForce FX and DirectX 9 Half-Life 2 Performance? It's well worth checking out!

Thanks to Valve Software we now have a new method for forcing the Source engine's DirectX 9 path on GeForce FX hardware. Today we present to you our first-ever GeForce FX DX9 Source engine benchmarks as well as the complete feature lists for every version of DirectX as well as instructions on how to enable DX9 on the GF FX in your CS: Source beta.

VU Games brings FilePlanet Subscribers the chance to participate in a closed beta for the extremely anticipated Tribes: Vengeance! The ultimate high-flying multiplayer FPS battle experience returns with deadlier weapons, enhanced jetpacks featuring faster and more versatile flight and in-depth strategic team action for up to 32 players.

Here's some of the latest Games movies for you to watch and a few games patches and demo's.

DOOM 3 MODS Pack #4 Brothers In Arms Preview Prince of Persia 2 fighting movie KOTOR II trailer: New location revealed Halo 2 Zanzibar Gameplay Hi-Res Movie

Half-Life 2 Fallout reports after a close scrutiny of Gabe Newell?s account history on the forums, we've come to the conclusion that the gold post is a fake. While we can't be 100% certain at this stage, all indicators point towards someone hacking the forum account. That said, all Gabe's previous posts on these forums are quite legitimate.

Half-Life 2 pre-loading begins to Steam account holders today. Over the coming days, those who have selected the pre-loading option will have encrypted Half-Life 2 files delivered to their PC. No purchase is required to pre-load HL2, but is required to activate the game. Purchase options will be released soon. Then, the moment the game is made available, those who have pre-loaded and purchased Half-Life 2 via Steam will be authenticated and ready to start playing. For more information, please visit www.steampowered.com.

Xbox-IGN reports Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict is now in the hands of Midway. This is a good thing. As the hot new trailer shows! you'll get a chance to get psyched yourself when an online-enabled demo is released in January. No details on how the demo will be distributed, so expect more details soon. We'll have more on Unreal 2 lickety-split.

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).