Cossacks - Napoleonic Wars returns one of the most successful strategy games of the past years to the real-time battlefield - with reinforcements: Meet Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France and probably the most ingenious strategist in European history! Enter the battle on the side of one of 10 great European nations and rewrite European history in six exciting campaigns.

Microsoft has issued a new patch for Gearbox/Bungie's first person shooter Halo: Combat Evolved. This upgrade brings your Halo retail to v1.06 and addresses a rare crash bug that could occur if a malicious individual (hacker) purposely imitates a game server and sends invalid data to clients who try to browse the server list (thanks Joe). Read more for details and download links ...

THQ today announced that it has acquired Blue Tongue Entertainment Limited. The Australia-based studio recently developed THQ's Polar Express for the PS2, PC and Gamecube, and is currently developing two cross-platform releases for late 2005.

id Software released an updated version of SDK for their sci-fi FPS DOOM 3, allowing the mod community out there to go to town and bring on the mods. This v1.1 SDK adds the promised vehicle support as well as a few bug fixes over the previous version (thanks 3DGamers). Read more for download links ...

Fire Department 2 (known in the US as Fire Captain: Bay Area Inferno) will feature a lot of improvements and new features such as multiplayer capabilities, better AI, control over a larger amount of units, improved graphics, five campaigns, and, of course, more realism. Pointsoft has released a demo featuring the 'Das Einkaufszentrum' mission from the first campaign (thanks Demonews.de). Read more for download links ...

Parkan II is a 3D space simulator combined with first person action planet side. In the game players will get an opportunity to explore a vast universe, visit different planets, their satellites, huge space stations and immense space destroyers.

Ubisoft has released an update patch for its adventure game Myst IV: Revelation bringing your retail game to v1.02 and addresses no bug fixes, only improvements in performance (thanks 3DGamers). Read more for download links ...

In Half-Life 2, the player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people people he cares about are counting on him. Beware of the spoilers...

The Inquirer is reporting that shortly after Valve's Half-Life 2 became available in most retail outlets people bringing home their boxed copy faced a majpor disappointment as Valve's Authentication Servers came crashing down and people could therefor not authenticate their purchased product. Vivendi's technical support said that fixing the problem could easily take up to three hours or longer.

Ignition has secured North American and European rights to publish Zoo Keeper, a puzzler from developer SUCCESS Corporation that will be one of the first Japanese launch titles for Nintendo's highly-anticipated new handheld video game system - the Nintendo DS.