Just spotted this @ HomeLan Fed

During Activision's third 2003 fiscal quarter conference call earlier today (you can listen to the conference call right here), execs at the company mentioned in passing that a sequel to last year's Quake III engine powered first person shooter Star Wars: Jedi Outcast was in the works to be released in their fiscal 2004 time frame (April 2003-March 2004).

This is the 4th game in the Sim City series. Sim City 4 is no kids game, but it will leave you with endless hours of gameplay

Epic's Steven Polge posted a quick update on the bonus pack to the official boards:

We are working hard on testing the bonus pack. All the content and code going into the bonus pack is complete, but we are still testing, finding bugs, and tweaking.

Do you miss the sniper rifle in UT??? Welcome back Sniper Arena to UT2003! This is a port of the Unreal Tournament Sniper Arena mutator.

Sniper Arena 108 For UT 2003

Ubi Soft Entertainment sends along the promised patch for the multiplayer demo of Rainbow Six: Raven Shield, bringing this squad-based tactical shooter to version 1.2. This release addresses the high capacity magazine and thermal scope cheats, and adds "more error messages for unsupported video card features."

Computer and Video Games reports that If insider speculation is to be believed, Microsoft has bought US publisher Vivendi, with an announcement to that effect due soon. Take a deep breath and reflect on the implications of that, if true.

Half-Life 2, Warcraft, Counter-Strike, Crash, Spyro, Lord of the Rings... Vivendi has an enormous portfolio boasting some of the biggest titles on all formats, and it would be an ultra-smart move on Microsoft's part to snap them up. Such a buyout, of course, would come at a terrifically high price, making the 365 million acquisition of Rare look like peanuts. But if anyone has the necessary funds, it's Microsoft.

Emulator holt Klassiker auf den Handheld ...

Brat Designs has released a partially new movie trailer of Breed, showing more from their 3D action game in development. The movie sports some three and a half minutes of action-packed gameplay footage in higher than average resolution, but some of the sequences are identical to the movie issued last month.

3Dgamers.com reports that NASCAR Racing 2003 Season is the imminent racing simulation sequel by Papyrus Racing Games. The game section for this title is now online, serving up the newly available playable demo (courtesy of Fragland) that offers the Michigan International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway tracks in testing session and single-race modes.

Planetunreal.com reports that version 1.3 of UT2k3Regcheck is available for download. This tool allows you to change or re-add your UT 2003 CD Key (great for when you format your primary partition).

I was just over @ Gamershell.com and I see they have a bucket load of games updates, movies, screenshots! Here's just some of what they have to offer...

Gameplay Movies: Mercedes-Benz World Racing Neverwinter Nights Shadows of Undrentide First Screenshots Action Half-Life v5.6 Update Star Wars Kotor screens #5 Urban Terror v2.6a Beta Patch Freedom Force v1.2 Patch Virtua Cop 3 Movie

Thanks to Geeknewz.com for the heads up...Another day, another beta patch. This time it's version 2181 which, as well as fixing some bugs that affected previous betas, contains general improvements such as a lack of stutters when you first load up the Instant Action menu.

Awhile ago, Valve announced they would be releasing Counter-Strike 1.6 via the Steam 2.0 beta. On Tuesday, they sent out the Steam 2.0 beta clients to certain members of the press to preview. As reported in our preview, we had some issues with Steam even under light usage conditions, and warned people to expect problems with the beta.
Read More...

Neowin.net reports that Flaws within Gaspy , a popular program that allows game clients to find and connect to game servers, might permit crackers to flood systems with useless packets and tie up processors through DDoS attacks. The vulnerability, which affects many games across Windows and *nix server platforms, is based upon spoofed UDP requests, as an advisory by security research outfit PivX Solutions (which made public its research yesterday) explains. Affected applications include Battlefield 1942 Server, Quake, Quake 2, Q3: Arena & Team Arena, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament 2003, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein... and more.

Just got word from Julio @ TechSpot.com that their America's Army tweak guide has been posted! Here's a snip....

Although first releases came with its hiccups, America's Army has mostly overcome its teething problems and is doing pretty well now. Based on the latest version of the Unreal Engine, this guide will take you through configuring the game for an optimum performance on your system, better network play and fixing other issues that might arise! Best of all, is free of charge for you to download

Gamers can now experience covert action IGI style with launch of the single-player demo of Codemasters? stunning stealth-based shooter.

Thanks to Onyx_00 for the Heads up....

New Features in DesertCombat Version 0.2

** This is not the complete or final list, this is only what is available for the public alpha and more will follow in the next alpha release.

As Counter-Strike 1.6 will be out tomorrow here's a Hands-on preview from Gamespot.....

Today GameSpot had a chance to play Counter-Strike version 1.6, which developer Valve says will be released via its Steam content delivery application on January 16. The free update to the popular multiplayer shooter includes two new weapons, a counter-terrorist tactical shield, a new map called de_airstrip, and revamped versions of two old maps, de_inferno and de_aztec.