20 EverQuest 2 Beta accounts are up for grabs over at: eq2.epicplayer.com! Hurry up

Gamespot has confirmed that Half Life 2 has gone gold in their 'rumor control' labeling the rumor as not bogus.

"Ever since the release candidate for Half-Life 2 was submitted to VU Games in mid-September, a piñata has hung in the lobby of Valve's headquarters. The plan: to bust the sucker open when the game achieved gold status. Earlier today, GameSpot learned from an informed sourced that "the piñata has been broken" and the game has gone gold. Further evidence of the game's completion was a press release issued this afternoon touting the first review of "the entire game." Though nothing official has been announced yet, it appears the fat lady is at last clearing her throat."

Source: www.gamespot.com

Last night a pirated copy of Halo 2 was released onto the internet. Needless to say we think this really sucks. Aside from years of hard work being stolen from us, we've gone to great lengths to ensure that the details of the Halo 2 campaign remain a mystery for players to experience for themselves on November 9th. Microsoft is currently engaged in a full scale investigation and to those foolish enough to partake in this piracy, you will soon witness the firepower of this fully operational battle station.

The sixth phase of the Half-Life 2 preload begins to Steam account holders today. This will allow users to download the Half-Life 2 maps in encrypted form. No purchase is required to pre-load Half-Life 2, but is required to activate the game. The moment the game is made available, those who have pre-loaded and purchased the game via Steam will be ready to start playing.

While playing Leisure Suit Larry: Magna ***** Laude for making our review about it, we made another 30 in-game screenshots. We made some tasteful captures of all the nice girls Larry encountered during the game. Expect our in-house review of Leisure Suit Larry: Magna ***** Laude later today! Take a look yourself...

SWAT: Urban Justice wasn't what we expected from the game. Vivendi now announced the real sequel of SWAT. SWAT 4 promises to be everything a SWAT fan could wish for. Developer Irrational is involved with the game like they already did with an other Vivendi game sequel, Tribes: Vengeance. The Unreal engine is used to make SWAT 4 and there will be a huge number of missions waiting for you. You'll need good tactics to play the missions, but you can do this both singleplayer and co-op with one or more friends.

SimBin and 10tacel Studios have released the official playable demo for GTR, renewing the opportunity to try out their upcoming FIA GT racing simulation. This demo sports the Spa-Francorchamps circuit drivable in arcade and semi-professional modes with the Lister Storm (GT class) and Morgan Aero 8 (N-GT class) cars.

While this reporter was corresponding with Dany Lepage (Technical Director/Lead Programmer for Ubisoft Canada's Splinter Cell : Chaos Theory -- otherwise known as Splinter Cell 3 -- the highly anticipated latest title in the Splinter Cell franchise), Dany surprised us by providing an exclusive wide-screen (1280x720) PC screenshot of the game (Dany commented that "I think the best SC-CT experience will be with people that have a powerful PC hooked up to their HDTV, all that with 4xAA of course ;)

Amazon.co.uk have given a release date of 1 November 2004 to purchase the DVD version of Half Life 2.

IGN Gear have thrown up their Half-Life 2 Optimization Guide! Here's a snip.

Half-Life 2 finally looks like it's just around the corner. In anticipation of its release, gamers everywhere are pre-loading the game via Steam and clearing off hard drive space. But is the rest of your PC ready for Valve's next masterpiece?

It seems like Nintendo yesterday started a big media offensive, now that everyone knows all about the Nintendo DS storm it is now time for two other platforms, the GBA and the GameCube. For the last one Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is one of the most anticipated titles of the year. One of the biggest hits for the last game.

LucasArts has issued new patches for Star Wars Battlefront, empowering the English, German, French, Italian and Spanish editions of the sci-fi 3D multiplayer action game by Pandemic Studios to version 1.01. This release adds planet names to the Planet Loading screen, fixes an issue with connecting via GameSpy Arcade, and addresses an issue with losing connection to the host after Task-Switching.

Electronic Arts has released new patches for Battlefield Vietnam, bringing the 3D multiplayer action game by Digital Illusions to version 1.2. This massive release adds three new maps (titled Operation Cedar Falls, Saigon 1968, and Fall of Saigon), eight new vehicles, a new spectator mode, unique colors for individual buddies, mobile spawn points on the 3D map, balance tweaks, bug fixes, and more. Note that it's recommended to install the WWII Mod before the patch.

Valve responed to a question as to what happens with your old cd keys eg: hl1, cs:cz, etc...

You will lose your old keys if you use the same account to purchase hl2! (read more for more info and the only solution)

NGO posted new screenshots pack of the NEW maps (aztec,dust2,cbble,italy) in HL2/CS:S engine.

Counter-Strike: Source has now been unlocked for Steam users. A small update is required to unlock CS: Source.

Will cs:s be available this week?
Follow link to read directly from the steam forum: http://steampowered.com/forums

Quote:
When will I be able to play my games?
º Counter-Strike: Source will be unlocked this week. This means you can play the full version of CS:S within another week! (posted on 1st of october '04)

Gameconnect made a complete overview of the upcoming game Start Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2. There are story details, 24 screenshots, 20 concept arts, release date and character info.

Thanks to CDFreaks for the Heads up!

Womble used our news submit to inform us that the game "Knights of Honor" by Black Sea Studios/Sunflower contains a copy-protection that seems to remove the file deamon.dll from our harddisks. This file is part of the DAEMON Tools software, an application with which you can emulate certain copy-protections. Futuremore, the game requires a "burning software clean" system. So what does this mean for us? Is it legal to force customers to uninstall software? What will come next?

GameConnect received emails from all over the world with a lot of new ingame screenshots of HalfLife 2, we published them all in our local gallery.