During the three weeks since it's been out of the cave, ParaWorld garnered some pretty decent reviews, though nothing ecstatic in particular. And despite the fact that SEK's prehistoric strategy game has already received a multiplayer demo version back in August, its American publisher Aspyr Media felt the need to release another one, this time for single-player only. The new ParaWorld demo includes a tutorial and a single mission from the game's campaign, in exchange for a whopping 1.3 GigaBytosaurus!

The download is available locally, and here's word on what to expect from it, if you haven't tried the full version yet:

"This demo provides an insight into the ParaWorld and contains the tutorial as well as the first mission of the campaign.

The tutorial provides information about all basic functions of the game, it explains bascis like the controls, camera or the base construction. But even for experienced RTS veterans the explanation of the armycontroller provides an incentive. In mission 1 you are introduced to the ParaWorld story, running ashore all alone in a very strange world."

Also with some delay, Aspyr announced that North American gamers are now eligible to compete in the official ParaWorld Ladder, which opened back on the old continent last month, simultaneously with the game's release. The ladder features a grand price of €60,000 (around $76,000), and can be joined by registering on the MySkulls.com community website. But only after you buy the full version of ParaWorld.

How can you have any dinosaur pudding, if you don't eat your retail meat?

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Signaling the nearing completion of their new Total War game, Creative Assembly and SEGA have released a total demo for Medieval II: Total War today, totalling nearly 500 MB. This version contains a tutorial based on the Battle of Hastings, along with two scenario maps: the Battle of Pavia and the Battle of Agincourt. It seems that the demo originally appeared on a PC Gamer magazine cover disk, so we're not entirely sure just how "official" this online release is. Not that we care, anyway.

In case you're wondering what all those graphical advancements are going to mean in terms of computing power, below you can find the system requirements accompanying this demo:

- AMD Athlon / XP / MP

- AMD Duron

- AMD Sempron (Socket A versions)

- Intel Pentium III / Xeon

- Intel Pentium II / Xeon

- Intel Celeron (Slot 1, Socket 370)

Oh-oh... My rusty piece of computational junk just got pwnd!

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The Czechs from Bohemia Interactive have finally signed a publishing deal for their upcoming Armed Assault military simulation game, which one could say will be the true sequel to their acclaimed Operation Flashpoint. Even though that license now belongs to Codemasters, Bohemia kept on doing what it does best, and so their new project is now nearing completion.

Originally called Armed Assault, the game has been signed by the flourishing UK-based videogames publisher 505 Games, who are planning to release it in the first quarter of 2007, under the new title ArmA: Armed Assault. The publishing agreement between the two companies primarily covers the European territories (excluding Germany and Eastern European countries), and will hopefully be followed by one that will secure a worldwide distribution for Bohemia's upcoming tactical shooter.

"The game offers players incredible realism, dense tactics and intense strategy. You will need to rely on keen eyesight, gut instincts and a sharp strategic mind if you are to survive on the expansive battlefields of ArmA. Every decision you make could mean the difference between death and glory for you and your troops.

ArmA also features extensive multiplayer modes and matches, which offer something for every online FPS gamer, whether they enjoy considered strategising or fast aggressive frag-fests."

Along with this annoucement, Bohemia and 505 have also released a new pack of ArmA screenshots, which you can view in our local gallery.

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With the new Settlers II: 10th Anniversary remake returning to what was arguably the best game in Blue Byte's flagship series, fans can only hope that future iterations will also follow in the footsteps of the classic Settlers II, and stray away from the less interesting path layed down by more recent additions to the series. And as we learn today, one such "future iteration" is already planned by Ubisoft for 2007, under the working title The Settlers VI.

No solid details about this sixth installment are available at the moment, just some early screenshots and artworks, and a bunch of promises. The devs are once again seeking to come up with "a perfect mix of favorite elements alongside new developments", and "the best graphics seen in a strategy game to date" - two claims I find rather hard to believe will come to fruition.

Not to mention that Odile Limpach (Managing Director of Ubisoft Germany and Austria) also promised this will be "the best The Settlers game of all time", all the while stating that "We want to appeal to fans of The Settlers series while ensuring the greatest possible accessibility to newcomers". Am I the only one who thinks these two claims are terribly conflicting with one another?

In any case, the project has been in development for quite a while, as Blue Byte began working on The Settlers VI in the Spring of 2005, with a team of experienced devs who contributed to The Settlers III, Heritage of Kings and The Settlers II: 10th Anniversary. Not exactly my Settlers of choice...

Funny thing is, I think the most promising Settlers project right now is the upcoming Nintendo DS version, which looks an awful lot like the first two Settlers games. And that's great!

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You can't really expect any constructive comments from a website called Destructive Incorporated, even more so when they are picking on EA's not-so-promising-after-all Battlefield 2 add-on sequel. And yet, their "Top 10 Worst Things About Battlefield 2142" contains a surprisingly high amount of sane ideas - the kind of ideas that the devs somehow failed to think about. A few days of playing the game's disappointing demo version were more than enough for the author to not only point out the bad things, but also come up with solutions for fixing (or at least improving) each issue.

In short, here are the top ten things that Destructive Inc. felt the need to complain about:

"Also weapons that get too hot just like those world war 2 weapons, you know 50 years back, or from 2142 it would be 200 years ago. Good to see you can only fire a limited number of rounds before your weapon gets too hot and you have to let it cool down, it's an awesome feature that the soldier of the 22nd century has come to rely on to save his life.

(...)

It's a good thing that the exterior of the [Titans] look completely different, or I'd get confused which one is the enemy and which one is friendly. But thank God they have the exact same interior design, because then I would get so confused, wait huh? The titans have the same exact interior layout? Wow that's convenient.

(...)

Yes, there is still friendly fire. Apparently 130 years of technological advancement hasn't figured out how to prevent army personal from shooting their own people."

If anyone can come up with a list of ten good things about Battlefield 2142, to combat all the negative press the game / demo has been getting these last few days, by all means, I'd love to see it!

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The official Quake Wars website plays host to a large-scale invasion of intel about the GDF and Strogg armies from Activision's upcoming multiplayer shooter. Almost 40 classes, vehicles and deployables are now detailed, complete with a 360 degrees rotational view of each unit (presumably in-game models). All these can be found in the newly opened Armies section from the Quake Wars website, and just so you get an idea about what you'll be dealing with, here's a listing of all the units revealed so far:

GDF army

- Classes: Soldier, Covert Ops, Medic, Field Ops, Engineer

- Vehicles: Trojan (APC), Titan (tank), Platypus (boat), Husky (quad), Bumblebee (air transport), Badger (recon), Ananasi (air attack), MPC (all-in-one command bunker, radar post and missile launcher)

- Deployables: Anti-Missile, Anti-Personnel, Anti-Vehicle, Artillery, Radar, Rocket Artillery, Hammer Missile

Strogg army

- Classes: Aggressor, Technician, Oppressor, Infiltrator, Constructor

- Vehicles: Desecrator (tank), Goliath (mech), Hog (recon), Hornet (air attack), Icarus (wearable anti-gravity backpack)

- Deployables: SSG (Strogg Strategic Strike gun), Shield Generator, Rail Howitzer, Psi-Radar, Plasma Mortar, Anti-Personnel, Anti-Vehicle

The Missions sections are still "classified", so we'll have to wait a bit longer to find out more about those.

Serving as the prequel to id Software's Quake II shooter, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars promises to be the ultimate online team and objective-based multiplayer experience. Set within the epic Quake universe in the year 2065, the game pits the Allied troops of the Global Defense Force (GDF) against a new Axis of Evil – the barbaric and technologically advanced Strogg - during their initial invasion of Earth.

Unlike its predecessor (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory), Quake Wars will pit against each other two teams that are fundamentally different, making it a lot harder for the devs to predict every possible strategy the players might come up with. This is one of the reasons why, even though the game has already entered closed beta testing this summer, it won't be out until early 2007 at best.

In the meanwhile, Battlefield 2142 is desperately trying to fill its place, although the demo version released by EA is already suffering from various bugs and connection problems. Not much of a substitute, by the looks of it.

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One demo, plenty of trailers and several delays later... Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is Gold! That's right, the time has finally come for the team at Arkane Studios to fire up Nero (or whatever it is they're using) and burn the gold master disc with their latest action game. Today's announcement from the Might and Magic website reveals that Ubisoft will be shipping Dark Messiah to stores across Europe from October 27, and in North America on October 24.

For fans of New World Computing's classic role-playing games, this will be the first Might and Magic title played from a first-person perspective since early 2002, when Might and Magic IX brought the long-running series to a halt, after 15 years of plentiful existence. It will be less of a RPG and more of an Action game, however, and it will also be playable in multiplayer. That part of the game was developed by Kuju Entertainment, while the single-player was taken care of by Arkane Studios (creators of Arx Fatalis).

The official gone-gold announcement predictably mentions Valve's Source engine as well, which had to be modified to some extent in order to accomodate Dark Messiah's pretentious features.

"Powered by an enhanced version of the award-winning Source Engine created by Valve to power its Half-Life 2 video game, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic allow players to immerse themselves in an environment that responds and envelops them like never before, thanks to the Source Engine's exceptional technological enhancements in areas such as character animation, advanced AI, real-world physics and shader-based rendering."

You can find out more about the game from our recent Dark Messiah hands-on preview.

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The fact that Electronic Arts has been owning around 20% of Ubisoft, for nearly two years now, does not seem to stop the French publisher from aiming for the top. And the way they're planning to get there is by making an early - and rather bold - investment in the Nintendo Wii system. As reported by Reuters over the weekend, Laurent Detoc, who leads Ubisoft's North America business, said in an interview that "[Ubisoft's] goal is not to sell to EA but to beat EA".

Detoc continued by predicting that "the Wii is unlikely not to succeed, the curiosity factor is going to help [Nintendo] and it's an impulse buy for most people". That's why Ubisoft placed their bet on the Wii from early on, when most of the industry was still reluctant about Nintendo's revolutionary console. Now, things look great not only for Wii's future, but also for Ubisoft's, as they are currently the leading third-party developer for this system.

"Ubisoft expects to have eight games available within a month of the Wii's mid-November launch, a move Detoc said will give the company a competitive advantage on the console that is predicted to be an immediate mass-market hit this holiday season."

But it's not going to be as easy as they make it seem, because winning the battle for one single platform is hardly going to be enough to win the entire next-gen war. And considering that the video games market is reportedly worth $30 billion, the stakes are higher than ever.

Also, the outcome of this war might have looked better for Ubisoft if they were ranked close behind Electronic Arts, when in fact the French company currently occupies a distant 4th place in the gaming industry. Nevertheless, they remain committed to staying independent, and so far they managed to keep the rest of their shares out of EA's reach. Though I wonder where Electronic Arts will strike next, now that DICE is practically out of the picture...

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Battlefield 2142 Demo And Dedicated Server Download

All hail the mighty demo version for EA's upcoming Battlefiled 2 futuristic MOD Battlefield 2142! Yes, it's huge (at over 1 GB). Yes, it's said to be rather boring. Yes, it has some connection problems and some nasty bugs. But hey, what else did you expect? After all, Electronic Arts have been turning the Battlefield series into another one of their milk-cows, even though Digital Illusions' original BF 1942 was a great game for its time, and the first Desert Combat MOD was also a highly appreciated piece of multiplayer goodness.

Still, if you enjoyed Battlefield 2, you will probably want to give this one a shot as well. The Battlefield 2142 demo weights in at over 1 GB and features a single multiplayer map, called the "Sidi Power Plant". Both the European Union and the Pan Asian Coalition factions are playable, and there are two game modes available: the classic Conquest for up to 64 players, and the new Titan mode, in which you try to penetrate the enemy Titan's defences and blow it out of the sky.

Also noteworthy is the release of a dedicated server for the Battlefield 2142 demo, containing everything needed to run standalone servers of the Sidi Power Plant map, in Titan and Conquest modes.

Both the 1.1 GB demo client and the 56 MB demo server are up for download locally. No LAN support is available for now, so you can only play it over the Internet. Oh, and a warning for the patiently-challenged among you: on the first load after changing the video settings,
you might have to wait around 10 minutes. "Optimizing Shaders" they say...

Look for the final version of Battlefield 2142 on October 17 in North America, and October 20 in Europe.

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This is just a wild guess here, because technically Fallout 3 has already been announced by Bethesda a long time ago - even though they never got into details about it so far. But a Game|Life story this week does hint at an upcoming game announcement from Bethesda, expected to take place on November 1. And the writer also drops a clue about what that game might be:

"At any rate, we're getting info on a game that'll be announced on November 1. So please look forward to that date, upon which you will be informed of everything. You'll find out, for example, how I got a thick layer of desert sand all over my white Old Navy shirt. Suspense!"

His report comes as a result of a Bethesda Softworks event he attended in Las Vegas, which could explain the "thick layer of desert sand" oh his... wait, why would anyone wear a white Old Navy shirt at such an event? And just how "Old" of a Navy shirt are we talking about? Old enough to have survived in a wearable state since the time of the great Vaults?

Did I just say Vaults? Sorry, but I can't help making the connection with the Fallout sequel that Bethesda bought the license for in July 2004. And two years does seem like a long time to work on a game and not have something to show for.

Of course, other titles are also a possibility - such as the Oblivion add-on that was last rumoured to be coming as soon as November 21. So hold your horses, we'll know for sure soon enough.

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