Epic Games has released a new map pack for Unreal Tournament 2004, expanding their new futuristic first-person shooter with two new Onslaught maps. The maps are titled ONS-Ascendancy and ONS-Aridoom, but this pack requires WinXP to install.

3D Gamers reports that Ubi Soft has released a new patch for Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, bringing the European and North American edition of their new 3D stealthy action game to version 1.1. This multiplayer patch adds lobby and server browser improvements, variable firepower settings, Punkbuster support on LANs, enhanced save time options, and improved stability.

Compete with up to 8 players at once as you career round the rally stages from Australia, Spain, and Sweden, from behind the wheel of a Citroen Xsara.

Planet3dgames.de have snagged a Handycam movie of Epic's Unreal 3 Engine! from GDC 2004

NovaLogic has released a multiplayer beta demo of Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising, allowing you to try out their upcoming team-based 3D action game set in a near-future Indonesia. This demo contains the 'Twin Island' map playable on LAN and NovaWorld, five player classes (Rifleman, Gunner, Engineer, Sniper & Medic), 19 vehicles, and 27 different weapons.

Brat Designs and CDV have issued the first patch for Breed, updating all language editions of their sci-fi first-person shooter. This version-devoid release addresses half a dozen single-player issues, a wide variety of multiplayer problems, as well as adding some general improvements.

Wargaming.net reports Massive Assault Network beta test has been successfully completed. The final version is scheduled for release on April 12th, 2004.

We've got around one thousand active beta-testers and we are thankful to each of them - they have ensured stable performance of Massive Assault Network", said Victor Kislyi, Wargaming.net's president. "Also we've received dozens of smaller improvement requests and most of them will be implemented before the release.

Codemasters has released the playable demo for ToCA Race Driver 2: the Ultimate Racing Simulator, allowing you to take their upcoming hybrid racing simulation for a spin. This demo includes three Free Race tracks: Brands Hatch (Vintage Classic) with the Jaguar E-type Series II, Hockenheimring (DTM) with the AMG-Mercedes CLK, and Phillip Island (V8 Supercars) with the Holden Commodore VY.

Here's the Serious Sam 2 tech demo video, straight from the GDC. The file wieghs in at around 50MB.

Ubi Soft has now released the first patch for Far Cry, bringing the new first-person shooter by Crytek Studios to version 1.1. This release adds toggle modes for Aim and Crouch, adds All Seeing Eye and Punkbuster support, applies a series of multiplayer improvements, fixes numerous minor bugs, and more.

Although the promised patch for Far Cry doesn't seem to have materialised just yet, we do now have an official list of fixes and enhancements the update will contain.

Some interesting news from the graphical side of things, most notably the addition of 3.0 shader support, and (perhaps more importantly) large improvements to shader speed on GeForceFX boards.

ExtremeTech have thrown up a new article called GDC 2004: Multithreading in Games! Got a Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4? Wondered if it's any use at all when you play PC games?

Here's some of the latest movies and screenshots for the XBOX from GDC 2004!

Unreal Championships 2 Rallisport Challenge 2 Rise of Nations Thrones and Patriots

Ubi Soft has now released the eagerly-anticipated multiplayer demo of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, their newly available stealthy first- and third-person action game. This demo contains the Mount Hospital map playable in Neutralization mode with a selection of the weapons and gadgets from the full game.

PC.IGN have thrown up their impressions of Valve's Half-Life 2 Source Engine Demo from this years GDC!

The demonstration was split into several parts, highlighting the renderer, physics, AI, character expression/emotion, sound and multiplayer features of the Source engine, as well as highlighting some of the built-in world creation tools available to developers.

Fido over at The Inquirer reports that Valve Presidnet Gabe Newell has been talking about Half Life 3, apparently. A French site B4G News says he said that some chick called Alyx who appears in Half Life 2 will be "playable" in Half Life 3. And that's about it. The site doesn't mention the who, when and whyfores concerning this earth-shattering utterance. They say no launch date has yet been fixed. Maybe around 2030, we suggest.

HomeLan Fed have thrown up some info on Epic's upcoming UnrealEngine3! Here's a snip.

When we entered the Epic Games meeting room at GDC on Wednesday, we saw some pictures on the way that we thought were either some very detailed artwork or real 3D models of the characters and environments in Epic?s next game. Nope. According to what Epic folks told us, we were looking at actual in game screenshots from UnrealEngine3, the next generation game graphics engine from the Cary, NC based developer.

Unlike other free game modification utilities, the XSI EXP for Half-Life 2 gives full access to all the professional features available in SOFTIMAGEXSI. Everything you need to create Half-Life 2 characters, models, and environment elements is here.

FarCry Patch
Nun stehen Informationen zum (womöglich) 2. Patch für FarCry, dem Actionhit aus deutschen Landen, fest. Es soll eine Quicksave-Funktion eingebaut werden. In der Originalfassung speichert das Spiel selbstständig an vorgegebenen Stellen.
Nach dem 1. Patch, welcher in Kürze online stehen sollte soll der (womöglich) 2. Patch Mitte April erscheinen. Quelle: GameStar FarCry Sandbox Editor
Heute hat Crytek ein 180 Seiten starkes Manual zum Sandbox Editor zu dem Spiel FarCry rausgebracht. Der Download wiegt 7,6MB und liegt als PDF-Datei vor.
PS: Der Download auf der offiziellen Seite ist falsch verlinkt. Der richtige Link befindet sich eine Zeile tiefer. Download

Der Betatest zum kommenden MMORPG-Hit von Blizzard läuft auf vollen Touren.
Auf der GameStar-Seite wurden nun 192 Bilder aus dem Betatest veröffentlicht. Quelle: GameStar Screenshot-Gallerie